As a K-12 administrator, you’re responsible for the success of your teaching staff, their students and the school or district you manage. Professional development (PD) programs can help support this success by keeping teachers’ skills sharp and their mandatory training up to date.
Teachers know better than anyone the benefits of high-quality PD. It can have profound effects on their professional and personal lives. It can help them foster meaningful connections with their peers and create a strong sense of community, staving off burnout to keep them burning brightly. Those who benefit the most when teachers engage in high-quality PD are, of course, their students.
So, what’s stopping them? And how can administrators help?
Asking teachers to add professional development to their already brimming plates is a challenge in itself. You’ve got to make it as enticing and convenient as possible. Beyond that, you’ve got to sweeten the deal by ensuring they can access PD whenever and wherever they are when an opportunity to do so presents itself.
As for you? You need a way to track and organize teacher progress. But if your school district has hundreds or even thousands of teaching staff, you’re going to need a system in place that makes the process efficient.
What if all of this—and more—could be made possible with one learning management system? Read on to learn how D2L Brightspace can meet these challenges.
Enrollment and Tracking: Top Challenges in Professional Development
Teachers know PD is good for them. But knowing something is beneficial isn’t always enough. If it were, people would fill their plates with vegetables and be regulars at the gym.
The key is to remove all obstacles from the equation. Yes, having little to no time is a real challenge, so you’ve got to make PD so enticing that teachers are willing to move mountains for it. You need to serve up a heaping, delicious buffet of targeted, personalized, irresistible PD options that enable academic excellence and support compliance. The more tempting the offerings, the more likely the enrollment.
A PD program designed to meet each participant’s unique needs and goals is an example of something that will garner enrollment. It’s hyper-focused and outcome-driven, helping prevent learning gaps and empowering teachers to excel in their careers. Yum.
But the icing on the cake is that enrollment be frictionless. It has to be easy. It can’t take time or energy, or you’ll lose your teachers right out of the gate. The programs and courses also need to be laid out in such a way that teachers can find exactly what they’re interested in or what they’re required to take.
Apart from serving up PD, you need to be able to track and monitor enrollment and progress across individuals districtwide. In some districts, this could be thousands of teaching staff at various stages of their careers and in numerous departments with various needs, requirements and interests.
Many PD solutions don’t offer the enrollment, personalization and tracking options that support ongoing success. Brightspace is designed to address these challenges with powerful solutions that simplify your approach to professional learning.
How does Brightspace make it all happen? We’re glad you asked.
Manage Professional Development Success With Brightspace
Brightspace is a unified learning management system (LMS) built to develop, manage and track professional development programs. It offers a set of powerful tools that make enrollment simple, enable customized learning paths and centralize participants’ data for easy tracking and reporting.
But as they say, don’t just take our word for it. Brightspace has been awarded two 2024 Software & Information Industry Association CODiE Awards, one for Best LMS and the other for Best Customer Education LMS.
Administrators can also appreciate how Brightspace simplifies the addition of standards in course creation.
Achievement Standards Network
The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is an open-access collection of over 700,000 learning objectives published by educational and government institutions. As you create professional development content, Brightspace enables you to import ASN standards directly into courses and map the curriculum to specific outcomes.
Such standards-based professional learning equips teachers to bring the latest educational tools into the classroom and guide students to greater academic success.
Brightspace allows you to keep tabs on all of it in one centralized location, or hub.
Manager Dashboard
Built for managers, learning directors and administrators, the Manager Dashboard gives you a detailed overview of teachers’ enrollment activity and course participation. With Manager Dashboard, you can:
- See the courses teachers are taking
- Manually assign teachers to required courses
- Track teachers’ progress
- Monitor course due dates
- Get alerts about overdue assignments
With all this information in one place, you can easily ensure that all participants complete the required training and identify those needing additional support to successfully advance through their courses.
Brightspace makes it easy for you to bring teachers together as you see fit.
Learning Groups and Attributes
The Learning Groups tool in Brightspace lets you group together teachers who can benefit from similar training and automatically assign them to relevant learning paths based on attributes like location, grade level or subject taught. The Learning Groups tool also provides the flexibility to manually assign courses to help teachers with specific needs, like new hires who may need a little extra help to succeed on the job.
The Durham District School Board (DDSB), located northeast of Toronto, Ontario, has seen great success after launching its Professional Learning Hub in Brightspace. With roughly 135 schools, 72,000 students and around 12,300 staff members, they required a system that could meet their needs and keep PD offerings, enrollment and tracking organized, simple and manageable.
The hub connects with the school board’s human resources system and greets each employee with a curated landing page featuring specific learning modules and resources they need for their particular role or grouping. The results have been impressive.
Linda Ford-DeCunha, DDSB’s education officer, says, “This platform has been a highly effective tool for my curriculum team, providing an ‘easy to use and navigate’ communication tool with educators and leaders across the board.”
To learn more about how the DDSB is creating anytime/anywhere, personalized, on-demand PD for their staff, check out this article.
Apart from delivering PD, Brightspace is also helping build invaluable community and networking opportunities.
Discussions and Professional Learning Communities
Teachers have a lot to gain from engaging with fellow educators as they participate in professional development. Brightspace enables interaction through forums where teachers can share ideas, reflect on what they’ve learned and discuss how to implement their training for the benefit of students.
Professional learning communities go further to promote deeper engagement between teachers, faculty and administrators. In these communities, teachers and leaders discuss their professional experiences and collaborate on initiatives to improve educational practices across schools and districts.
These points of connection are crucial for schools like Orange Lutheran High School (OLu) that employ remote teachers. Dr. Joy Karavedas, senior director of research and new program development at OLu, used Brightspace to create an impactful community among her K-12 online teaching staff. Dr. Karavedas revealed that the platform helped “build community within our teachers, not just students. It’s been really helpful in creating that connection for our online teachers who are all over the country.”
Hear more about how Dr. Karavedas leveraged Brightspace to improve professional development and reduce teacher burnout on this episode of Teach and Learn: A podcast for curious educators.
Administrators also need to monitor precisely which classes are being taken and how teachers are progressing.
Class Progress and Learning Analytics
How can you be sure that teachers are enrolled in the right courses and doing their homework? Administrators need to ensure personalized learning and professional engagement are generating the best possible outcomes for teachers, and that requires keeping an eye on how they’re doing, what they’re doing and what they’re not doing. Class Progress solves the notoriously difficult problem of tracking results by enabling you to:
- View teachers’ course access and engagement
- Monitor advances across learning objectives, assignments and assessments
- Follow progress at the individual or course level
- Communicate with teachers through messaging and feedback
All data is available in the Brightspace environment, so you can get an overview of your teachers’ participation and generate progress reports from a single dashboard. To help you make the most of this data, D2L can develop a custom analytics strategy tailored to your district’s needs.
D2L Link: Seamless Professional Development Integration
Evan OBranovic, executive director of technology at Traverse City Area Public Schools (TCAPS) in Traverse City, Michigan, says, “Switching to [Brightspace] has removed many of the compatibility and user access headaches associated with a multi-vendor environment.” And the transition is much easier with D2L Link, a solution that simplifies Brightspace integration.
D2L works with you to create workflows, set up connections and automatically transfer data between Brightspace and your existing systems. As OBranovic discovered, these integrations allow teachers to “access lessons and other essential school resources from a centralized platform, enabling them to focus on learning rather than searching for materials or information.”
Brightspace Guided Training
To benefit from this improved focus, teachers need a fast onboarding path into the Brightspace ecosystem. Free Brightspace Guided Training offers unlimited access to self-guided content that makes the platform more accessible.
On-demand webinars and courses guide teachers, course builders and professional development facilitators through workflows and activities designed to familiarize them with Brightspace. New users can get started right away and jump into professional development courses without the headache of struggling to understand a complicated system.
Better Professional Learning Outcomes With Brightspace
By giving you one centralized space to deliver, analyze and report on professional development programs, Brightspace eliminates the confusion and frustration of managing a learning program across disconnected platforms.
Instead of spending hours sifting through siloed data, you can clearly see how teachers progress through their learning paths. You’re never in the dark as to whether your staff is up to date on compliance standards, and you can be confident that teachers are getting the tools they need to help students succeed according to current educational standards.
Teachers who once felt burdened by PD requirements can use the intuitive Brightspace platform for easy course access on their own schedules. They’re more likely to enroll and engage in professional learning, which improves their performance on the job and helps students achieve academic success.
Mark Pearmain, superintendent of schools and CEO at SD36 in Surrey, British Columbia, saw these results firsthand when he turned to D2L for help training new hires: “We can operate our mandatory staff training programs more efficiently than ever before, thanks to D2L Brightspace.”
Would you like to learn more or request a demo? Visit www.D2L.com/solutions/k-12/professional-learning/.
Written by:
Stay in the know
Educators and training pros get our insights, tips, and best practices delivered monthly