Lesson Planning With Pear Deck

How can you lesson plan with Pear Deck? Lesson Planning is a unique, challenging, and creative process for every teacher. When you learn how to integrate Pear Deck into your daily teaching routine — the possibilities are endless. There’s no single way to use Pear Deck, but this overview will help you start using it more frequently to accomplish your instructional goals and create more powerful learning moments.

3 tips for lesson planning with Pear Deck

1. Ask yourself these prior to planning questions.

• What prior knowledge do students need to be successful in this lesson?
• What are the essential skills I want my students to take away?
• How will I measure student understanding?

Taking time to think about how to incorporate Pear Deck into your lesson allows you to be strategic with your student interactions. How can you use Pear Deck to increase opportunities for student engagement?

As you move through this pre-planning process, think about the questions you typically ask out loud to the class during your Bell Ringer, Exit Ticket, and other parts of your lesson. This will help you identify potential places to meaningfully use Pear Deck.

2. As you plan, explore how you can use Pear Deck in different parts of a lesson. For example:

• Objectives/Goals
• Direct Instruction
• Background Knowledge
• Independent Practice
• Bellringer/Do Now
• Guided Practice
• Closure
• Exit Ticket

‍Let’s put it into practice with a mini lesson.

First, we’ve created an overview slide that captures the instructions, lesson objective, homework, due date, and vocabulary. How you plan may look different than this, but probably encompasses the same elements. We have provided questions to help think about what each part of your lesson will entail.

Now let’s think about how we can pull in Pear Deck. This is the first day of the lesson, so we’re going to have students do some exploratory learning. You can see here where we’ve mapped out a Google Slides Deck for a Pear Deck Session, and within the Session will be a slide that students will complete for homework.

Here we see the second day for the Water Cycle Unit. On Thursday, students will be completing an exit ticket for this unit. In this case it is just one Drawing slide. You can provide students with this exit ticket link, or have them go to joinpd.com and type in the code. As students complete the task, you can go to the Teacher Dashboard to access and monitor student responses in real time.

Here’s an example of what that exit ticket might look like for this lesson.

Pear Deck can even be used as a whiteboard during your lesson. Just think — no more dried up dry erase markers and cloudy, scratched-up whiteboards! All your students’ work will be saved and available for you to reference at any time.

3. Use the Pear Deck Lesson Planning Template to build a lesson of your own.

This premade template will get your creative juices flowing as you plan an upcoming lesson for a specific standard in your classroom. Please keep in mind it’s okay to have some slides that are purely informational. In fact, we suggest making only a few slides interactive —  especially if you’re short on time.

Remember your planning style is both unique and valuable. Pear Deck is here to help you do what you do best. You can use these templates if you’d like, but we love seeing teachers develop their own Pear Deck styles.