KickUp Foundations is getting AI-powered insights, notes, and response assistance for coaching and walkthroughs — plus a new way to surface themes across hundreds of open response submissions at once.
Here's what's coming, plus how three districts built walks and coaching practices worth borrowing as you plan for next year.
Every coach and principal knows the gap: you spend 30 minutes in the room with a teacher, capture everything you can — and then spend your evening turning raw notes into documentation, feedback, and follow-through. That's where details get lost, feedback goes generic, and a lot of people quietly decide to do it less often than they should.
If that sounds familiar, you're not alone — and what's coming to KickUp Foundations is going to make it significantly easier to build those habits back up.
Coaching conversations are rich in the moment — and most of that richness disappears between the classroom and the coaching log, which can start to feel like pure documentation without value. KickUp is changing that across the whole coaching workflow, not just the documentation at the end.
Before the session, coaches will see a summary of the full history of that coaching relationship — past submissions, recent commitments, focus areas, and cycle goals — so the context that used to live in scattered notes or memory is right there when you need it.
During or after, coaches take notes however works for them — with or without a framework, with or without timestamps — and a single click will turn those raw notes into a coherent, insight-rich summary.
Then, when it's time to fill out the form, suggested responses will be ready to insert. Not auto-filled — coaches review, adjust, and insert what fits. The result is documentation that's faster, more complete, and actually reflects the work that happened.
Notes happen in the room, not after it. If your district uses a framework — Get Better Faster, Danielson, homegrown look-fors, or anything in between — KickUp automatically organizes observations by component as they're entered, and tracks whether each note reflects a teacher action, student action, or neither. Walk out of the classroom and you already have a structured, evidence-rich record of the visit — tagged by framework, broken down by who was doing what, summarized into a coherent narrative, and translated into suggested form responses ready to review and insert. What used to take your evening to organize happens in the room, automatically, as you go.
But the bigger shift isn't time. Translating what you see into feedback that actually changes practice is one of the hardest parts of the job — and KickUp is now a partner for that work. The summary, the framework tagging, the suggested responses: they're not just saving steps, they're raising the floor on the specificity and quality of feedback every teacher receives, every visit.
And one of the most common questions principals ask — who hasn't been observed recently? — has a direct answer. A staff activity overview surfaces who's been visited, when, and who hasn't, directly in Foundations without exporting anything.
Coaching and walkthrough records are only as good as the process behind them — and that process only happens consistently when it's fast enough and valuable enough that people actually do it. When logging stops feeling like a second job, it happens more often, more completely, and the picture of instructional practice across your schools gets sharper.
And when you're sitting on hundreds of open response answers from coaching logs, walkthroughs, and feedback forms — and never quite have time to read through all of them — KickUp's AI will soon surface emergent themes across all of those responses and generate a narrative summary of what the data is actually saying. No manual review. The patterns are already identified, filterable, and ready to act on.
This is what it looks like when the tool works as hard as the people using it. The foundation is already built — and it's getting better.
Every district uses Foundations differently — but these three found practical ways to make it work for their specific needs. Take a look for inspiration.
Temple ISD was staring down a projected D rating from the state — and their walkthrough data revealed an uncomfortable truth: principals were marking "student engagement" as evident, but different administrators had entirely different definitions of what that meant. To close the gap, they built a consistent walk cadence across all 15 campuses — centralized forms, shared dashboards, and a monthly meeting rhythm where leaders came in with the same data in front of them. That shared view made it possible to stop celebrating effort and start interrogating results: drilling into specific campuses, specific teachers, and tracking whether the actions they committed to were actually happening. Nine out of 12 campuses improved their accountability rating.
Rockwood School District didn't overhaul their mentorship program — they gave it the structure it was missing. Coordinator Abby Smith built a mentorship cycle in KickUp mapped to the emotional arc of a first-year teacher: anticipation, survival, disillusionment, rejuvenation, reflection. Each stage has its own expectations for what mentors should be doing and what new teachers need — so support isn't generic, it's timed. And because everything is logged in KickUp, Smith can see in real time who's keeping pace and reach out before a mentor falls behind. She'll be joined by mentorship leaders from Clayton County and North Dakota to share what this looks like in practice — join us April 20.
Newark Central School District brought coaching, walkthroughs, and professional learning together in one system — and then did the change management work to make it stick. By working closely with their teachers' union to establish that coaching data would be used for support, not evaluation, they built the trust that made adoption real. Now instructional coaches log their interactions, administrators track walkthrough trends in real time, and leaders can see where support is being invested and whether it's showing up in classrooms.
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