Kaitlin Morgan
Deep in the Central Valley lies the city of Woodlake, California. Most students here are the children of Hispanic farm workers — some migratory and some not. Many are English Language Learners. While some have passed an English proficiently test, their primary language is still Spanish. In Woodlake, the median family income is $35,805 while the national average is $53,046, and $61,094 in California. For most of these students, they will not only be the first in their family to attend a college but the first to graduate from high school.
Due to a high poverty rate in-town and lack of potential employment, many students in Woodlake rely on their teachers as a way out of poverty. A handful of those kids are students of Ms. Morgan’s High School history class.
Ms. Morgan clearly has the needs of her ELLs in mind when she teaches — trying to make the material relatable and accessible. To do so, she uses Pear Deck on a regular basis. With Pear Deck, Ms. Morgan helps her students visualize material that might otherwise be esoteric and hard to remember. Instead of telling a student to define the Monroe Doctrine, she asks them to use the drawing feature to depict or symbolize the doctrine. Building understanding through visualization is not a new tactic, but the technology is new and Morgan’s students love interacting with the material in ways that help them learn. To Morgan, it’s important that her students can see each others’ work. The benefit of anonymous responses is that many times students see another’s response and are able to make a connection that they had not thought of before.
Ms. Morgan also likes Pear Deck because the kids are consistently engaged. “Even with a Pair-Share activity it is easy for kids to be off topic, and then I can still only call on a few students,” Morgan notes, “but with Pear Deck I know every single student had to engage with the material,” Morgan feels that “Pear Deck doesn’t make the material easier, but it does help my students learn.”
Together, Morgan and her students have created a classroom climate that is fun and safe! Using Pear Deck, students show their individuality and thinking to each other in a way they could not before. “I saw this in another classroom I observed this year, too. Students are taking pride in the work they put into Pear Deck, taking time to draw carefully, pay attention to word choice and punctuation so their responses, soon to be shown off to their peers, say or depict precisely what the student wants. The care that went into this work is more akin to the care kids put into social media posts than school work because it will be seen by their friends rather than just their teachers.”
At Morgan’s school, the teachers and students delight in seeing student responses. Running jokes emerge. Kids feel heard. Ms. Morgan describes what I (this author) saw in classrooms in New York City, that somehow Pear Deck made all classes more fun and created a closer and more engaged group of students.
Through Morgan’s success with using Pear Deck in her classroom, she has helped many other teachers encourage their students with interactive learning. And at Pear Deck, we’re so happy to share Morgan’s story. It’s through her own hard work that we see how she is positively affecting her students’ lives and deepening their degree of learning. Thank you, Ms. Morgan, for always sharing your class’s work in Pear Deck, we’re always ecstatic to hear how you’re using our program to engage your students and make classroom learning fun!
To see exactly how Ms. Morgan is using Pear Deck in her classroom, check out her Twitter Feed, or take a look at her presentation on Pear Deck.
