If you ask district leaders what the biggest topics in education are right now, you'll hear AI, Science of Reading, and maybe chronic absenteeism. Take a look at their PD calendar and you'll get a very different answer. We tracked 30 of education's biggest topics across 290,000 professional learning sessions over five years — here's what's actually making it into educators' training, and what isn't.
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AI in Education is the fastest-growing topic we tracked. It was effectively absent from district PD in 2020-21, began appearing in 2022-23, and has grown more than tenfold since. And yet it still appears in just over 1% of sessions. The conversation is everywhere. The training hasn't caught up.
Science of Reading more than doubled in district PD in 2021-22 and hasn't moved much since. Given that 44 states have now passed literacy legislation, the plateau makes sense — this is no longer an emerging priority. It's a standing one. The interesting question for AI is whether it follows the same arc: a surge driven by external pressure, followed by a new baseline.
The fastest-growing topics in the dataset aren't the ones generating the most headlines. Special Education and Inclusion has grown steadily for five straight years and is now the single most mentioned topic in the dataset — up 80% since 2020-21. Early Childhood and Pre-K has more than doubled. Differentiated Instruction has nearly tripled. These aren't the topics dominating education conferences, but their consistent upward trajectory suggests sustained, deliberate investment rather than trend-chasing.
Two defining PD topics of the pandemic years are in sharp decline. Restorative Practices has fallen nearly 90% since 2020-21. Trauma-Informed Practice is down more than half. Mental Health and Wellness, meanwhile, has held steady throughout — suggesting the priority hasn't gone away, but the vocabulary around it has.
Despite billions in federal investment in High-Dosage Tutoring and years of national alarm over Chronic Absenteeism, neither topic has made a meaningful appearance in district PD data. Districts may be addressing both through other means. But if professional learning is a primary lever for changing educator practice, these gaps are worth examining.
The gap between what education is talking about and what districts are training for is measurable. What would you find if you ran this analysis on your own district's data?
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RISING — Prevalence in 2024–25 is more than 50% higher than in 2020–21, or the topic grew from near-zero to meaningful usage.
PEAKED — Hit its highest point in 2021, then dropped by at least a third. These are likely pandemic-era topics that surged and then faded.
DECLINING — Dropped by at least a third from its peak, indicating a longer-term downward trend.
STABLE — Didn't meet any of the thresholds above. Prevalence has stayed relatively flat across the five years.
Methodology: Session-level attendance records from KickUp client districts across 22 states, covering school years 2020-21 through 2024-25 (290,391 unique sessions). Each session's name and description was scanned for 30 predefined terms using keyword matching. Prevalence is expressed as the percentage of unique sessions in a given year that mention each term.
The data in a district’s PD calendar — what topics appear, how often, and how that's changed over time — reflects something real about where educator development is headed. KickUp gives district leaders visibility into those patterns in their own systems, so that PD investment can be as intentional as possible. Let's talk about what your data shows.
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