How do we know whether professional learning is actually working — which supports are making an impact on teachers and students, and which might we want to walk away from? In this podcast with Daniel Bauer, KickUp CEO Jeremy Rogoff explores the common challenges that school leaders face while making critical decisions about how to most effectively allocate their professional learning resources.  Jeremy discusses the power of using data to create a common language among stakeholders. Listen here or read the transcript below.

Transcript:

Dan: What kind of pain points have schools and school districts shared with you that maybe have been the most interesting or surprising, I guess, as you’ve unearthed them.

Jeremy: I think our entire business is built around this idea that school districts, while they might know in theory that professional development and training for teachers is so essential to change practice and improve student learning, it’s really hard to be able to do that on a daily basis, and they need to be able to know what’s working, what’s making an impact, what’s not. And its just like we have difficult decisions that we have to make about our product, schools and districts have difficult decisions about how they should be to allocating their own financial and time — resources, and so for us, the biggest surprise has been that they don’t necessarily have an effective way to do that on a regular basis.  And a lot of the decisions that we found schools make are frankly around either guess-work or the loudest people in the room.  And sometimes what needs to happen is that there just needs to be coherence around the data that they are looking at, around a framework for making decisions, and I think that is where we can play a pivotal role — is just giving them a common language to talk about how they are making decisions with how they allocate their professional learning resources, which will ultimately determine how their teachers improve and how their teachers helps their students learn on a daily basis.