It is that time of year again. The students (and teachers) are starting to get excited for summer break. The days are getting longer and the weather warmer. And, we are starting to plan for next school year.

Click here to view the current Professional Learning Plan for 2018/2019 school year! 

Before we start to plan for the future, it is sometimes nice to reflect on where we have been.  Recently, I gathered some data from the past five years of professional learning offered at Kent ISD to see how our organization has evolved to meet the ever changing needs of our local education agencies.

One of our values at Kent ISD is continuous improvement and we strive to be your first choice.  In an effort to reflect on our journey to lead learning, we have created a snapshot of the transformation of professional learning over the last five years.  

My initial noticing was that pulling data like this five years ago would have taken a lot more effort than it does today. Over the past five years, Kent ISD has improved our data collection systems. Now we can easily pull information for analysis. This makes it possible to provide districts with specific data quickly.

Online Learning Opportunities

In 2013, we were not offering online professional learning. And we were facing a substitute shortage, as well as, higher demands on teachers to be in the classroom. So, Kent ISD started to explore different ways that we could bring professional learning to the district.

In 2014, we decided to try a couple of online courses. We had 40 people that enrolled in our online courses and 25% of those participants earned SCECH credit. The feedback was positive, so the next school year we started to increase our online presence.

Today, we offer 20 online courses a year. We have enrolled 1544 participants in online courses to date and have awarded SCECH credit to over 1000 of those participants.

The feedback for our online courses has been great, for example: 90% of participants said they would be able to use the information they learned in their jobs; 98% said that they learned something new; 93% said that the presenter was very good/excellent; 90% rated the course as very good/excellent; and, 94% said they would recommend our online courses to their colleagues.

Click here to check out our current online course offerings. 

Course Offerings

In 2013, Kent ISD was offering almost 80% of our courses as a one day stand alone PD. The remaining 20% were multiple day courses offered onsite at Kent ISD.

Today, we now offer 65% of our courses as a one day PD. We have decreased our one day PD by 13%. We now offer 25% of our courses as multiple days. And 10% are offered completely online or in a blended model.

The reason we made this switch is because we are becoming more focused on the impact and we are continually trying to increase the impact of each professional learning.

Check out all our course offerings here! 

Accessing Services

In 2013, 146 districts from 21 counties accessed our professional learning services. Today, this has increased by 86% and 272 districts across the state of Michigan are taking advantage of our professional learning services. Not to mention a few from out of state. These districts come from 51 counties statewide. That is a 145% increase in county participation across the state.

Networking Revamped

In 2013, Kent ISD had five main networks that reached almost 500 educators. Today, we have revamped our networks. We are now recording sessions in some of our networks, so members that are unable to leave their classrooms/buildings can view these sessions either live or in an archive online.

We are currently networking with almost 800 educators!

SCECH Credits

In 2013, 1349 participants took Kent ISD professional learning for SCECH credit and earned just over 8500 credits. Today, the number of earned SCECH credits has more than doubled. The 1,823 participants attending courses in 2017/2018 will earn almost 19,000 SCECH credits. That is a 35% increase in participants earning SCECH credit and and a 123% increase in SCECH credits awarded in just five years.

You might wonder why the significant increase? In 2015, the Kent ISD SCECH Coordinator, Bri Conners, saw that there was a way to apply for credits that would allow participants to have more flexibility with earning credit for multiple day courses.  As a result, we were able to provide credit for more courses, as well as, options for more educators to earn different ranges of credits based on their schedule. It also helped that we were offering more courses online.

Click here to view all of our courses offered for SCECH credit.

Since your students success is the reason why we offer these professional learning opportunities, it is very important to us to hear your feedback. After every course we send out an evaluation. Approximately 45% of our evaluations are completed by participants, enabling Kent ISD to continuously improve services. Kent ISD’s Data Analyst , Sunil Joy, says he has read that one can expect about a 10-15% response rate for external surveys. So that means, our evaluations can provide an even greater insight into ways to improve our services than industry standards.

If you have any additional feedback you would like to provide, please send your comments to amandawalma@kentisd.org

Click here to view the current Professional Learning Plan for 2018/2019 school year!