Webinar Highlights: LF Academy + KickUp on Sustained Professional Learning

And what we found through our work and research over the years is that we often have a common language. We know to use the words tier one. We know to use the acronym PLC. We know, you know, how to talk about student engagement. But, unfortunately, we never take time to actually unpack what the what our understanding of each one of those is. And so for tier one instruction in particular, when you get together with a group and you're going through cycles of inquiry with them, you're actually asking them what does tier one look like when you're going into classrooms and those kind of things. And you start to develop a common understanding among the group that you're working with, And that's one of the best things you can do for professional learning because until you actually have a shared understanding, you're just merely talking at each other using the same words, but you could have wildly different meanings behind those.

The hardest part isn't creating that alignment, but it's sustaining it because schools are so busy. We run out of time. New initiatives emerge throughout the year. Priorities start competing. And so without intentional progress monitoring, it's easy to drift. So that's why we rely heavily on the data throughout the year. We use monthly meeting times with our principals and coaches. We use walk through trends, coaching data, and professional learning participation to ask, are we still focusing on what we said we were gonna focus on and what matters the most? All of those conversations allow us to celebrate progress and identify where more support is needed to recalibrate if we need to to maintain that focus. So for us, alignment isn't just one time planning. It's ongoing leadership practice. It's reminding everybody all year long, and it's it's checking that accountability for it as well.

And this goes back to what Peter was saying with the shared understanding. We use Kasab as a framework of creating that shared understanding when we were rolling out our math curriculum for k through ninth grade in our district. And so we started at central office where we created a cassava of what does it look like for us to be supportive of this. Because oftentimes, like, we just go straight to skills and what is the knowledge that we have. But we don't really talk about our aspirations, our motivations, to really get that shift to be that internal desire and not just a compliant change. So we started at central office and then moved into our building leaders, our instructional coaches, our teachers, and our students. And that create a really clear picture of a successful math rollout and successful support for our students.

None of this holds up if your professional learning lives in a vacuum. And for that, I'm gonna go over to dashboards, which is our, reporting tool. And this is a dashboard I'm clicking into. And what I wanna highlight first is that you can pull every type of data into KickUp. I heard Hannah kinda talking about how they like to connect their walks and their coaching to the professional learning that's happening, and they're kind of evaluating all the things according to the same tags. Right? Well, all of that can be pulled into KickUp. I've got my evaluation goals here at the top. I've got my fall walks that happened. If I keep scrolling down, I've got my PD and coaching support all living side by side. Right? And that that means, I'm sorry. So the way that got in here, I think it's pretty easy to build. I I can just go into whatever data I'm trying to look at and just drag and drop. So I'm not having to stitch together, spreadsheets by hand or combine separate reports as most systems kinda make you do and live make these things live silo. But we know that educator development evidence does not work that way, or at least it should not work that way. So I wanna call out if you remember those tags we talked about at the beginning, institute day, those same ones live here. Right? So I can see I pulled in some total PD hours registered. I can see all my district priorities listed out, like, who has registered for the the most in in my different priority. Like, you can pair that. I can also split this data by any staff attribute, for example. This one here is grouped by school, so I can compare my schools. I could group this data by month or even any part of the framework. Right? So whatever question comes up this year, you're not starting from a massive blank spreadsheet. And I'll look at this one as an example. Right? So this is my, fall walks data about specifically domain three. And the question I might be asking myself as a leader is, where do we need to invest our PD and coaching resources? And right away, domain three c and three d kind of jump off the page as areas where teachers need more support. And if I do group that, data by school, for example, which is a click, I can see that Carver Heights needs a little bit more support, Adamsburg Elementary. And as Kamal does, maybe you could pull some, examples of people who have who are doing, great work in these standards to do some of the professional learning hosting. Because I can see that at Claymore Elementary, they're doing, good work along those lines already. Right? So the next question after kind of looking at what's happening in the district, according to these standards is, is our PD and coaching investment actually going towards that? And like I showed you before, I can drag and drop that data side by side with it. And I can see that my time spent coaching you know, we've invested a lot of time into three c, maybe not so much in in three d. Right? I can see how much, sorry, professional learning happened and when it happened. So that lets me then go back and do some of that progress monitoring over time and see, okay. Was what we did are are interventions effective? And splitting our, our observations, from formal observation one to two, I can see that we had massive improvements in areas that we targeted those professional learning, supports.