Brolly Best Practices
How to Leverage Data for Proactive Professional Development
Planning professional development is a top priority for administrators, especially those who have direct contact with teachers. Special education directors hold significant responsibility when it comes to making sure that teachers are constantly learning, improving, and making changes to teaching methods based on student needs. Sometimes this can feel like a burden, but it doesn’t have to.
Brolly can help you make data-driven decisions to quickly determine what professional development and training is best for your staff. Here’s how we can support proactive PD in special education:
Determine which subject areas to focus on during PD
With a quick look at the Brolly dashboard, you can see which subject students are struggling in most. If you notice many students failing to meet their IEP goals in math, then you can focus your efforts there during the next staff PD. We can’t plan the PD for you, but at least you have a start! From here you can draft up breakout groups based on grade level standards or IEP goals and determine learner targets around specific math skills.
Find out which skills students need the most support in
Are students rocking reading standards but having trouble tackling writing goals? With a look at the Brolly app, you can identify which IEP goals students are struggling with. Instead of simply determining that a student did not meet their English goal, you can understand whether students need help with phonics, reading, writing, or comprehension.
Once you know the skills the students need the most help with, you can determine teacher needs and how to best support them. Your professional development can help teachers practice new teaching methods that help students with skills they need to work on most.
Figure out the root cause of why students may or may not be meeting IEP goals
Aside from tracking academic goals, Brolly also tracks attendance. Sometimes, students are not meeting IEP goals not because the teacher is not using appropriate methods or strategies, but rather because the student has not been there to learn through those methods and strategies. Brolly can help you identify these students. From there, you can plan a professional development series where teachers work on interventions for these students with the highest needs. This may be a good opportunity to bring in your MTSS or RtI team as well, as they can lead sessions on how to combat student issues such as low attendance.
Track how well teachers are managing their caseloads
Sometimes, professional development is not all about teaching methods. Teachers also need professional development on executive functioning skills like keeping their logs organized, logging services in a timely manner, and accurately logging services and progress with enough detail that other stakeholders can decipher the notes. Brolly gives you a first-hand look at how all teachers and service providers are logging their services, which can open your eyes to the needs of teachers.
Professional development can help them not only learn how to use the app, but also organize their time and create systems for logging services, tracking progress, and keeping accurate notes regarding their students. Teachers will leave this professional development experience feeling less stressed and more confident, and you will be less worried about compliance.
Brolly can help you determine topics for your future professional development sessions. As administrators it is important to make sure that professional development for teachers is always relevant, meaningful, and actionable – using Brolly can help keep your sessions on track and teachers leave feeling accomplished.
