"I managed institute days for a district twice as big as my previous one. What used to require multiple staff members is now streamlined into a process I can handle solo."
Lincoln-Way serves 6,750 students across Illinois, with 395 dedicated teachers committed to continuous growth. But the district's three annual institute days, designed for meaningful professional development, were ready for transformation into more structured, choice-driven learning experiences.
When Dr. Tracey Miller arrived as Director of Assessment and Instruction, she was determined to transform these wasted opportunities into dynamic, choice-driven professional learning experiences. The challenge? Managing 450 staff members across multiple concurrent sessions with zero infrastructure for registration, scheduling, or feedback collection.
KickUp's comprehensive professional learning management system didn't just solve Lincoln-Way's logistical nightmare—it enabled a complete cultural shift from mandatory attendance to engaged, teacher-driven professional growth. The result: seamless institute days that teachers actually value and eagerly register for, and an administrator who reclaimed weeks of preparation time annually.
Lincoln-Way's institute days faced common challenges that many districts encounter with traditional professional development approaches. Miller's first attempt to modernize the process used Microsoft Forms, which meant manually placing all 450 staff members into sessions herself, in effect making 1,350 individual scheduling decisions across the three institute days each year. The days leading up to an institute day stretched into 15 and 16 hour workdays, and she was still correcting registration errors right up until sessions began. Teachers had no say in what they attended, and paper sign-in sheets meant there was no real feedback loop to learn from or build on for next time.
Lincoln-Way brought in KickUp's professional learning management system as the district's central hub for professional development, covering everything from year-round training to compliance tracking to out-of-district conference requests. For institute days specifically, it changed who did the work. Teachers now browse session descriptions and register themselves instead of waiting to be placed, while automatic seat limits and registration deadlines keep sessions balanced without anyone monitoring a spreadsheet.
Feedback comes in the moment a session ends, since teachers complete evaluations before they leave the room, and professional learning hours and certificates generate on their own, supporting license renewal without extra paperwork. Presenters get their own tools too, printing sign-in sheets or using digital check-in codes to keep the day-of experience simple.
The shift shows up most clearly in time. What once took more than 45 hours of prep per institute day now takes less than 5, adding up to more than 135 reclaimed hours a year. Using Edunomics Lab's cost methodology, Lincoln-Way now delivers 8,100 hours of choice-driven professional learning annually at $1.73 per hour, down from an estimated $4.03 per hour under the old manual process, a 57 percent reduction.
The cultural shift has mattered just as much as the time saved. Sessions that once had trouble filling now fill up fast enough that teachers compete for spots and ask for more of them: offerings like a chocolate tasting and an auto mechanics workshop led by the district's CTE department draw the kind of enthusiasm that would have been hard to imagine under the old system. And because Miller isn't buried in manual coordination anymore, she can spend that time on the content and strategy behind each institute day instead of the logistics behind it. Real-time feedback data means Miller can make adjustments before the next institute day rather than after, and automated transcripts and certificates mean state audit prep is already done by the time anyone asks for it.
Miller is now extending KickUp beyond institute days. The district is rolling out a structured process for out-of-district conference requests, replacing scattered email threads with a clear approval workflow, and integrating Title II tracking so federal compliance reporting draws from the same system as everything else.
Lincoln-Way's transformation shows what's possible when educators have the right tools to support meaningful professional growth. By eliminating the administrative chaos of institute day management, KickUp enabled Dr. Miller to focus on what matters: creating professional learning experiences that teachers actually want to attend.
For districts struggling with fragmented professional development systems, Lincoln-Way's story demonstrates how streamlined conference management can transform both educator experience and administrative efficiency. When teachers have agency over their learning and administrators have tools that actually work, everyone wins.
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