"It's been a remarkable change. KickUp lets us align on priorities and action plans almost instantly, which leads to faster impact on student achievement."
Individualized PD for nearly 2,000 teachers is no small task — but the rewards are worth it. Read how Lubbock ISD boosted student achievement and campus ratings through real-time classroom practice improvement, ensuring that 75% of the district’s students attend an A- or B-rated school in just three years.
In 2019, Lubbock administrators set two ambitious goals:
Rapidly assessing and improving instructional practice would be critical to both of these goals. Lubbock already provided individualized coaching and PD pathways, but manually coordinating support for over 2,000 teachers — let alone understanding its impact — was too laborious and time-consuming to be truly effective.
“The problem was that people didn’t have access to the right information,” says Misty Rieber, Chief Academic Officer. “It took so many meetings to get everyone on the same page.”
Lubbock needed an automated way to speed up the process and make real-time strategic decisions. Using KickUp, the district is well ahead of where they thought they would be after just two years — and stand poised to not just meet their goal early, but exceed it.
Former Lubbock Director of Leadership and Professional Learning Anna Jackson discovered KickUp at Learning Forward 2018. “Right away it was like a lightbulb went off,” she says. “The ways we could use KickUp became clear almost immediately. Not just with informing the unique professional learning needs of each educator, but understanding how teachers are taking the professional development they receive back to the classroom.”
“KickUp takes the subjectivity and guesswork out of the data,” says Rieber. “Before, it might have taken six months to diagnose a problem, let alone solve it. Now it's a month.”
KickUp worked closely with Lubbock to build a feedback loop and coaching log system that’s simple enough for widespread use but provides powerful data crunching underneath:
Lubbock’s instructional coaches use KickUp to log their hours tagged with strategic content focus and type of activity aligned to the coaching model.
After PD sessions, participants fill out a role-based feedback form covering content (objectives, relevance, resources, expertise), process (organization, active engagement), and outcomes (whether objectives of learning were met, predicted use in the classroom). They can also give suggestions on what to do next and request specialized coaching support.
“We tried to be very specific about moving from the basic level of ‘How did you like the PD?’ to ‘How are you using the PD in your classroom, and what kind of supports do you need?’,” says Jackson.
After a feedback cycle, department coordinators use KickUp data to identify what’s resonating, diagnose problems, and develop solutions to address them immediately.
Using KickUp, Rieber and her team can deploy English-Language Learning coaching to second-grade teachers, PBIS supports for secondary math classes, or classroom management training to one individual campus — all in real time.
Most importantly, they can quickly visualize the impact PD is having on educator practice with real-time data dashboards.
Lubbock also uses KickUp for educator evaluation, pulling together PD history, walkthrough checkpoints, and yearly performance evaluations to capture a holistic picture of educator growth.
“When you’re doing training on such a large scale, it's tough to turn it around quickly,” Jackson says. “We’ve found that people in our district are building their confidence in our data and in our responsiveness to that data, which has been really critical.”
In just 3 years, Lubbock has increased the number of students learning at schools rated an A or B from 42% to 75%, and made major strides in improving teacher engagement and retention.
In 2019, 19 Lubbock campuses were rated A or B on the Texas Education Agency and served only 42% of the district's students.
As of 2022, 31 campuses are rated A or B. 75% of students are now served by an A or B campus.
"It's been a remarkable change. KickUp lets us align on priorities and action plans almost instantly, which leads to faster impact on student achievement," says Rieber.
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