Jennifer Allen, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction
After collecting feedback from teachers in the spring, Ladue School District is using KickUp to improve district-wide professional learning sessions and to monitor teacher growth during the 2017-18 school year.
Ladue School District is a suburban public school district in St. Louis, Missouri that serves 4,000 K-12 students and 300 teachers. The district has earned the prestigious “Distinction in Performance” Award from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) each year since 2001 and includes five Blue Ribbon Schools.
Before working with KickUp, Ladue’s PD Committee collected informal feedback from teachers but wanted to dig in to understand the strengths, needs, and struggles of its teachers as a whole. After implementing a new strategic plan in the summer of 2017, Ladue was looking to establish a formal mechanism to incorporate teacher feedback and assess the impact of their PD on diversity and social-emotional needs, two district priorities.
"We had really clear targets about what we wanted to see happening, but never had the time to actually sit and create a survey that we felt was valid and reliable."
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction
Ladue worked with KickUp to build a strategy for gathering data that would both inform their upcoming year’s PD planning and allow them to assess its impact formatively.
KickUp’s Client Success team brainstormed with Jennifer’s staff to create a needs assessment for teachers that aligned to district priorities and collected actionable feedback on past professional learning experiences. The data allowed the team to unpack roadblocks to teacher progress and identify clusters of teacher needs, making planning data-informed and reflective of teacher voice. The Professional Development Committee then used this data to inform their 2017-18 professional learning plan.
Heading into the new school year, KickUp worked with Ladue to identify priority areas of interest such as their new teacher program and enact a data collection plan that would give their district the information needed to make real-time adjustments during the year.
"It’s something we really appreciate about KickUp-- that we can sit down, brainstorm with the Client Success team, and create a plan that really ties all of our ideas together."
Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction
Ladue plans to share their KickUp reports with several stakeholders and internal teams so that everyone’s on the same page about teacher progress and lingering needs.
"KickUp gets at the heart of what we’re trying to understand: was it effective, can teachers use it, and what do they need next."
District Professional Development Committee Chair
Although Ladue has just begun collecting data for the 2017-18 school year, Ladue used spring teacher feedback to make changes in their annual PD programming and planning, including: