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Professional learning insights, from the field

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    Client Spotlight: Pleasanton Unified School District

    By Julie Lenard

    Ken Rocha, Director of Secondary Education at Pleasanton Unified School District in California, needed to select a new ELA curriculum that reflected 21st-century learning and district-wide priorities. In addition to making the right decision, he also needed to make sure the process was transparent and resulted in a group decision that reflected student, teacher, parent and community voices. 
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    How to include data in your everyday decision-making

    By Carlye Norton

    While many administrators know they want to promote a data-informed culture, it’s hard to know how to put this into practice beyond scheduled data meetings. That's why we’ve compiled a number of tips and tricks for incorporating professional development data into planning, decision-making, and implementation.
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    Meet our two newest team members

    By Jamie Fisher

    Earlier this month, KickUp welcomed two new members to our team: Sasha Kapur and Mar y Sol Esparza. Sasha and Mar y Sol will join our Client Success team, where their work will allow us to build out more capacity for serving new and current clients.

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    Announcing KickUp Reports 2.0

    By Carlye Norton

    Our reports have undergone some major changes! Our Client Success Team now has the ability to create highly customized reports from your KickUp data. These new tools allow your client success manager to tailor reports to your specific needs: arranging the data visualizations in different configurations, restricting what data shows up where, and adding content and context for what the data means. That means we can help you tell your story to your audience in a way that’s clear and compelling
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    Client Spotlight: Ready Aim Teach

    By Julie Lenard

    Amy Kines, founder of Ready Aim Teach, wasn't satisfied with simply knowing that attendees liked her professional learning workshops; she wanted to know what came after. Were teachers implementing their new practices? With KickUp's help, she set out to determine what impact her interventions had weeks after the workshop.
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    5 Tips for Creating an Effective Professional Learning Plan

    By Carlye Norton

    Drafting a professional learning plan is a critical step for districts who want to set their teachers up for success. We've gathered resources for making sure your plan is coherent and actionable, including tips from two Missouri district leaders. 
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    Purposeful practice: the importance of feedback in training

    The expression "practice makes perfect" depends on the value of that practice. Tom Arnett, Research Fellow at the Christensen Institute, argues that good practice must be feedback-informed. In an exclusive interview, Tom dives into "purposeful practice" and gives an example of a program that's doing it right.
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    Making Space for Uncertainty in Professional Development

    Guest contributor, James Noonan, Ed.D., emphasizes the importance of making space for uncertainty in schools. He discusses how having an intellectually safe community of practice where teachers could experiment with their ideas and be frank about their dilemmas, as well as having facilitators who modeled learning through their leadership, are important elements that contribute to a teacher's learning experience.
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    Shifting Mindsets About PD

    In an exclusive interview, Tom Arnett discusses the need to adopt an outcomes-driven mindset and measure change in teacher practice.
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    Personalized PD, Formative Feedback, and Deliberate Practice

    Tom Arnett, Research Fellow at the Christensen Institute speaks about the evolution of professional development.  He discusses how districts are beginning to personalize professional development, moving away from the “1.0 version of PD” that tries to be one-size-fits-all and lacks relevancy to all teachers.