PDQP Progress Report

PDQP Progress Report Assignment 3

Damon Garner
National University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

TED 690 Capstone Course
Dr. Pengilly

1
PDQP Progress Report

Abstract
The week three assignment looks over the progress and struggles with developing a Professional

Development Quest Portfolio (PDQP). I look over the ways in which the process of creating a

PDQP has helped me as an educator grow and recognize my strengths and areas for growth.

2
PDQP Progress Report

My teaching career began roughly in 2002, when I started the credential and Masters

program at National University. I immediately got a job substitute teaching at Fowler Unified

School District. For two years I worked as a substitute and long term substitute while I worked

through the credential program and student teaching. I learned many things about myself as a

teacher and the style that I teach with. I was given the opportunity to teach a summer school full

time classroom in 2004 and was also hired later that summer at a charter school in Fresno. As a

brand new, full time teacher, I was fairly overwhelmed with all of the classes I had to teach and

prepare for. Unfortunately I had to put my last class on hold. One year later my daughter was

born and my wife was in a bad car accident. This car accident led her to go back to college to

pursue her dream of becoming a full time registered nurse. I continued to hold off on pursuing

my masters class throughout the years as we had two more children in that time frame. Over

those years I gained in teaching experience and in new education strategies. I moved down to

teach in Capistrano Unified School District 2010. This experience led to some anxiety as I was

continually pink slipped each year, until about 2015 (Budget issues). I was ready to switch

careers should I have been let go permanently. So here we are thirteen years later and Im finally

finishing up my Masters degree in education. The silver lining is I have plenty of teaching

experiences and a decent amount of artifacts collected over the years.

Ive been teaching for fifteen years now (thirteen full time). I feel that with the classroom

experience, great professional development and continuing courses I have taken over the years,

has better prepared me for this class. Rather than jumping straight into the masters program

without any substantial experience I have had the benefit of many classroom experiences over

the years to better meet the TPE standards. Without the knowledge and experience Ive gained in

the classroom, I dont feel I would have done nearly as well in this class as I have. It has

3
PDQP Progress Report

definitely been a long and difficult challenge over the years. My wife and I both work full time

and we have three kids all in school. Finishing this class has always nagged at the back of my

mind. I hate leaving things undone. With my limbo like situation at work its only been feasible

the last couple of years to finish this course. I am very relieved and proud to finish this major

milestone in my career.

As veteran teachers we can often feel like there is little to nothing new we need to learn.

However, this is a grave mistake in thinking. Over the past month I have reflected upon and

learned so many new strategies and skills to bring back to the classroom for this upcoming

school year. I have reflected on my achievements over the years and found some teaching

strategies, projects, lessons and ideas that I have forgotten I had! Specifically focusing on the

TPEs has helped me to focus on exactly what each one entails for the classroom. As long time

teachers we are the bridge from the academic knowledge and content to the students level of

knowledge and content. Because of the daily struggle of lesson planning and working with

individual students sometimes there is a tendency for a teachers skill to atrophy. By taking this

course I have had the ability to read through a vast collection of new teacher best practices and

training material that has been very beneficial and useful for me. Robert J. Marzanos The New

Art and Science of Teaching has been a tremendous help in applying strategies to the

classroom. His ideas on changing up assessments to meet the current Common Core standards

have been very enlightening.

Some of the challenges to this course have been trying to figure out exactly what was

expected of me. Sometimes the examples I was seeing in the course resources or online were not

matching up to what was being asked on the assignment page. I later figured out, sometimes

what was on a persons online PDQP did not include everything that was intended for the course.

4
PDQP Progress Report

Emailing my professor and doing some more research online helped me to figure out exactly

what was being asked of me. I honestly figured I would be writing some thirty plus page

Masters thesis. However, Im pretty sure Ive written at least that with the different assignments

weve had. The textbook for the course was also very useful. Patricia M. Constantino and Marie

N. De Lorenzo mixed just the right amount of advice and knowhow with examples to make the

book an invaluable tool in the process. Constantino states, (2009) Determining the purpose of

your portfolio; considering a set of performances standards; and collecting, selecting and

creating documents. (p. 43) Finding and sifting through all of my artifacts over the years was a

huge challenge and undertaking. Fitting the artifacts into the standards wasnt too bad with all of

the examples available.

Another challenge is that I have been out of the student side of academia for a while

(Although I have taken four salary advancement credit courses at UC San Diego recently which

helped a bit). Obviously when you have a family it is a difficult endeavor to spend so much time

working on such an intensive course, but they have all been very supportive of me. Ive found

that if I work a few hours every day, I dont run into the problem of trying to work eight to ten

hours over the course of a few days. Honestly having been exposed to so much good professional

development and trainings over the years has helped prepare me to be successful in this course.

One of our first assignments for this course was to put together an online PDQP. This

was a little intimidating as I had no previous experience with setting up a webpage of any kind. I

use google classroom and my online grading software, but that is already set up and ready to go.

I decided to go with Google Sites because of the familiarity I had with using Google Classroom.

My comfort zone was definitely in using Powerpoint, but that became unwieldy with so many

artifacts that didnt jive well with the individual slides. I would definitely recommend to future

5
PDQP Progress Report

students to use a program like Google Sites to display their PDQP. The site is free and you can

imbed all of your artifacts and assignments into your created pages. The pages have great tabs

that are easy to see and navigate for guests.

My school year starts in a few more weeks. This course has prepared me with new tools

to engage and inspire my students. Ultimately we all teach the best we can for our love of the

profession and the students. It is very important to keep learning and growing as a professional.

This course has enabled me to step back and assess my strengths and areas that I can improve

upon. This course will help me achieve a life-long goal of achieving my masters and make me a

better teacher in the process.

6
PDQP Progress Report

Reference

Constantino, P. & De Lorenzo, M. (2006). Developing a professional teaching

Portfolio: A guide for success (2 ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

nd