Professional development can be a challenge at many schools. Educators are pulled in a million directions during the school week, and PD often becomes an afterthought among a pile of other responsibilities including grading homework, planning lessons and attending staff meetings. Nonetheless, it still needs to get done.

Taking a page from her own experience as an elementary school teacher, Stefanie Crawford, an instructional coach at Dunlap Community Unit School District 323 in Peoria, Ill., has developed an approach to PD that gamifies it. She shared tips from her program Tuesday at IDEAcon 2020 in a presentation titled “Ready. Set. Play.: A Beginner’s Guide to Gamifying PD.”