PD Bingo Boards: Professional Development Teachers Want to Finish

Trying to create engaging virtual professional development pushed me out of my comfort zone. Can you relate? In the fall of 2020, social distancing became our new normal and the new requirement in so many places, so I had to think of new ways that I could reach teachers and make my professional development more engaging. Just as I did in the classroom as a teacher, my in-person face to face professional development was all about collaboration. So, as the teachers I supported struggled to increase engagement with their students, I found myself in the same boat, struggling to increase my engagement with teachers.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I needed to convert some of the strategies I was encouraging my teachers to use with students and start to incorporate some into my weekly professional development sessions and coaching. I wanted to share what was working. When doing professional development online you must remember that there are so many different distractions like kids, pets, Instagram, lesson plans, and more! How do you increase engagement in virtual PD? My answer was bingo boards, and years later they are still the thing teachers ask me about first.

What are PD bingo boards?

A PD bingo board is a grid where every square holds a task connected to the professional learning you’re leading that week. Weekly PD can get boring and stale, so I turned mine into a competition using Professional Development Bingo. Teachers play during the session itself or across one or two weeks, and the facilitator chooses the tasks and places them in the squares. The board does for adults what a good game does for students: it gives them a reason to stay with the content after the slides end.

The squares are where the learning lives. Each box holds an answer or a task related to that week’s PD topic, and the tasks I lean on most look like this:

• A question from the session, answered in the square
• A strategy from the session to try in one lesson
• A sentence about how that strategy went with students
• A comment left on a colleague’s shared board
• One thing to change before the next session

The first fall I ran them, I set up two competitions. First, whoever completed all the tasks (well) first and shared their digital bingo board with me got a prize, and second, when teachers completed their BINGO board they had to share it with me and I put their names in a drawing to get the grand prize. We had virtual circle meetings and I added the names to the Classroom Screen Wheel and then let the wheel do its thing! It drew the name online with the entire staff. It was exciting. I gave away a $5 Gift Card to Starbucks.

Now I pair the boards with a flipped model for weekly PD. Teachers take in the new content on their own time, and the live session is where the board gets worked. They share their screens to show their boards, which lets me monitor participation without a sign-in sheet or a quiz. I wasn’t sure if this BINGO Board idea was going to really work, but when I got an email from a teacher asking for more information on a topic that I added to the BINGO board I felt like I had hit the jackpot!

Why bingo boards change what happens in professional development

Teacher engagement in PD is the same problem as student engagement in a classroom. Adults are tired, the content feels far away from tomorrow’s lesson, and nobody is checking. A bingo board changes three things at once. It gives teachers a visible finish line, because an unfinished board sits there asking to be completed. It gives them choice, because they decide which square to tackle first. And it makes participation visible to the facilitator, because a shared board shows me who has tried the strategy and who still has questions.

The competition and the small prize give teachers a reason to finish, and sharing boards gives them a reason to talk to one another, which is the collaboration I lost when PD moved online. That email from the teacher asking about a topic on the board told me the squares were doing more than filling time. They were creating curiosity, and curiosity is what carries a strategy from a PD session into a classroom.

How do you run a PD bingo board?

The first question I get is about money. Do I have to buy all the prizes? Yes and no! When I was in the classroom, I created a line item in my budget for classroom decorations, PD, and incentives for my students. When I became an instructional coach, I didn’t remove it. So yes, I spend a few dollars each month on things for my coaching room, and when I was working from home, I purchased small token gift cards to places like Target, Starbucks, Amazon, and even Teachers Pay Teachers. Usually, the gift cards are no more than $5. If you are looking for ways to get prizes for teachers you don’t have to pay for, you can get donations from parents, businesses in the community, or ask your administration. I am not afraid to ask for anything. What’s the worst that can happen besides the answer is NO. But if you never ask, you will never know! Prizes don’t have to be large, either. Teachers appreciate a free coffee, a pack of sticky notes, or good pens more than you would think. Once the prize question is settled, building the board itself takes one planning block. The steps below are the sequence I follow, and the download gives you the editable board and the task bank I pull from.

Fun is allowed

With all of the rules we work under, fun virtual PD can take some of the stress and hassle out of the week. It makes teachers appreciate the person leading the session a little more, and it makes the facilitator happier too. I know it did for me.