One of the roles we at the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) take the most pride in is helping our fellow educators with exciting professional development opportunities that enhance their abilities in the classroom and ultimately provide a better atmosphere for our students to learn.

Robbie Fletcher

Kentucky Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher

This is a tall task, with more than 43,000 teachers spread across 171 districts. The work involves a massive network of professionals, all coming together to strive for the same goal of improving outcomes for our students.

One of the premier events KDE hosts each year to further this effort is the Continuous Improvement Summit each September. The summit allows attendees to invest in their growth as a leader and a teacher and offers strategies to make a difference in their work and in their students’ experiences. Many school leaders are honored at the end of the conference for best practices they’ve championed in their districts; efforts the entire state can look at and emulate.

A lot of the individual sessions include talks on local accountability, one of the top priorities at KDE. This encompasses school districts and their communities working together on things like creating a local portrait of a learner – which outlines the essential skills, knowledge and dispositions every student needs to thrive in the world – and how vibrant learning experiences take place in their classrooms.

The team in Fleming County, led by Superintendent Brian Creasman, shared their journey with local accountability and how they reformed their academics by creating a holistic focus on each  student and making sure they have the skills to thrive, rather than looking solely at standardized test scores.

This work mirrors what is being done in districts across the Commonwealth to incorporate innovation and collaboration to help students learn more about their communities, the world around them and what opportunities they may have once they graduate through immersive and vibrant learning experiences. The work also has informed KDE and the Kentucky United We Learn Council as we have worked on a new assessment and accountability framework that has culminated in the Model Framework we are advocating for statewide. The Continuous Improvement Summit featured several discussions on local accountability with leaders from several districts.

Learning from local leaders who are doing this work is critical to helping other districts determine what makes the most sense for their communities, and not just in the assessment and accountability space. Many of our district partners shared strategies on what they’re doing on a variety of different topics –such as how to integrate high-quality instructional resources into mathematics and literacy instruction; what they’re doing to enhance nontraditional instruction; how they’re improving outcomes for multilingual students; and how they’re energizing students to learn.

The Continuous Improvement Summit also provided KDE with the opportunity to share our insights with more than 1,000 educators who attended this year on topics ranging from mathematics, literacy, special education, multi-tiered systems of support and continuous improvement. Our partners with Cognia held several sessions as well, many of which focused on how to use student data to inform decisions and how to get the most out of professional learning and accreditation opportunities.

This is only scratching the surface of all the topics that were highlighted during the Continuous Improvement Summit, and while the subjects may vary from year to year, it always provides the opportunity for educators to share the great work they are already doing.

There are always great things going on in our districts and opportunities like the Continuous Improvement Summit allow everyone to not only share what’s working in their districts but also to affirm what our educators are doing here at KDE and in our schools.