Case Study

Fontana Unified School District: Preparing for uncertainty with a strong foundation

Adele Thomas

Director of Professional Learning and Teacher Support, Fontana Unified School District

As COVID-19 began shuttering school districts across the country, Fontana Unified School District had just started rolling out its 1:1 technology program. The new tools have given the district’s 36 thousand students greater access than ever before to distance learning — but the district had to figure out how to handle the transition. They're doing just that with KickUp's Virtual Learning Essentials toolkit.

Coaching During COVID: 6 Key Takeaways from Jim Knight and Diane Lauer

Are you registered for April 17th's live Coaching During COVID conversation? We'll be talking district strategy, coach-teacher communication, and much more in a live Q&A with Jim Knight of the Instructional Coaching Group and Diane Lauer of St. Vrain Valley Schools. To tee up that conversation, we pulled some highlights from Jim Knight on adapting instructional coaching in a virtual context.

Case Study

Lubbock Independent School District

Anna Jackson

Executive Director of Leadership and Professional Development

It takes dedicated support to make professional learning not just inspirational but effective. West Texas’s Lubbock Independent School District pairs instructional coaching with content focus strands to close the knowing-doing gap.

The Future of Professional Learning: 8 takeaways on innovation in PD

ESSA’s emphasis on evidence-based professional learning has spurred too much new and potent thinking to ignore. The trick is understanding where innovation can inform and improve the best practices we already know work. We sat down with Diane Lauer, Assistant Superintendent of Priority Programs at St. Vrain Valley Schools, for a chat on where the next steps are and how they connect to what we've been doing all along.

Implementing Evidence-Based Programs with Fidelity [Part 2]

The story of the last decade of professional learning has been around the idea of “evidence for practice.” With ESSA’s definition of professional learning, it’s clear that programs have to be linked to research that shows impact on students. But choosing a research-backed framework is the easy part. Translating it into practice — also known as “implementing with fidelity” — is a taller order. Find out how two real-life practitioners optimize these drivers in a school district setting, track implementation success in real time, and understand what works and why.

Actionable data: Building momentum with consistent data checks

A good foundation is critical to your professional learning plan's success — but all the value alignment, calendar coordination and guiding philosophy in the world won’t guarantee a good outcome. Without clear intention for what the final product will actually do, the people it's serving won’t be able to make sense of the “why do we have this?,” let alone the “how do we use this?” Today: simplifying data presentations for accessibility, understanding and buy-in.

Implementing Evidence-Based Programs with Fidelity [Part 1]

The story of the last decade of professional learning has been around the idea of “evidence for practice.” With ESSA’s definition of professional learning, it’s clear that programs have to be linked to research that shows impact on students. But choosing a research-backed framework is the easy part. Translating it into practice — also known as “implementing with fidelity” — is a taller order. Find out how two real-life practitioners optimize these drivers in a school district setting, track implementation success in real time, and understand what works and why.

Actionable data: Helping your team understand and use data

A good foundation is critical to your professional learning plan's success — but all the value alignment, calendar coordination and guiding philosophy in the world won’t guarantee a good outcome. Without clear intention for what the final product will actually do, the people it's serving won’t be able to make sense of the “why do we have this?,” let alone the “how do we use this?” Today: simplifying data presentations for accessibility, understanding and buy-in.

Actionable data: How to clarify, consolidate, and centralize collection systems

The secret to maintaining any routine is making it easy for yourself. Want to squeeze in more early-morning workouts? Pack your gym clothes the night before. Trying to keep the mail from piling up? Keep a wastebin next to the mail table. And if you're trying to build a habit among a group of people — like consistently and thoroughly responding to feedback surveys, for example — the trick is to simplify and streamline wherever possible, for both the audience and yourself. Today in our Actionable Data series: running large-scale data projects while respecting your teachers' time — and your own.

Actionable data: Plotting robust but realistic timeframes for PD data collection

Short, intermediate and long-term change can look very different in both pace and types of indicator — not to mention the the complex task of balancing the existing demands of the school year with your program's data needs. Let’s explore how to build robust yet flexible calendars for data accountability: