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It’s been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic altered our everyday lives, forcing students, families, and educators to pivot to distance learning. In addition to rethinking curriculum instruction, many districts across the country are examining their approaches to social-emotional learning, family engagement, and student voice. The Coppell Independent School District (Coppell ISD) is one such district.
Coppell ISD is a community of 13,000 learners in Coppell, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Coppell ISD has been a Panorama partner since 2019, using feedback surveys and Student Success to gather and analyze data to inform their practice and drive community-based accountability.
We heard from Dr. Angie Brooks Applegate, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and Brooke Sims, director of professional learning, about Coppell ISD’s journey towards a more holistic, community-based form of accountability. They shared their district’s work on implementing social-emotional learning, using data-driven strategies for campus improvement, and partnering with Panorama to create a customized professional development program for a district-wide roll-out of Student Success.
"Our collaboration and partnership with the Panorama team has been exceptional! Their willingness to listen to our specific needs and brainstorm solutions allowed us to personalize training within our district learning management system. The high level of service and attention from the Panorama staff led to a smooth implementation of Student Success and surveys across our district and the intentional use of our SEL and academic data connections."
–Dr. Angie Brooks Applegate, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction
What led you to make SEL an important part of your district’s work?
Dr. Angie Brooks Applegate: We are a part of a consortium called TPAC, which stands for “Texas Public Accountability Consortium,” a group of over 50 districts across the state working to develop a more community-based accountability system.
Pictured Above: TPAC core values for a community-based accountability system
A part of this more holistic approach is ensuring our community is involved in the process. We’re working with Panorama to make sure that we're getting feedback from all of our families, staff members, and students, and learning what they want from their school.
An important piece of this is redefining “success” in our district. We have exceptionally high expectations and have done very well for years through an academic lens. What we noticed, especially within the last few years, is that our kids are experiencing more and more pressure and stress. Sometimes we may have students that are doing very well academically, but that social-emotional piece is just not where it needs to be. In thinking about the pandemic and the impact that it's had not only on our kids but also on our staff members, we felt it was a great opportunity to start digging in, looking at the data, and setting specific expectations and goals around helping everyone within the educational system.
How are you taking action on data from Panorama to drive campus improvement and accountability?
ABA: We've tried to embed our work with Panorama into the work that we are doing with our strategic design around campus and district improvement plans. When we began our partnership with Panorama in 2019, we administered surveys on social-emotional learning and school climate. We were seeking feedback from our families and stakeholders around what types of data they wanted to receive from their child’s school. We took advantage of gathering data from a more qualitative perspective, using open-ended questions from Panorama surveys. The responses helped us to pinpoint some specifics that we weren’t showcasing through our accountability system, and we wanted a way to provide our stakeholders with a more holistic picture of who we are as a district.
Pictured Above: Coppell ISD free-response data from stakeholders in the Panorama platform
ABA: We were so pleased with the partnership of Panorama and the support that we've had that we expanded our partnership with Panorama and began using Student Success this last year. Student Success is a data collection tool that brings together data across attendance, behavior, coursework, and social-emotional learning. We finally have a platform that we can put into our educators' hands that pulls data into one location. It’s been very eye-opening for our educators. The SEL piece has added a different lens to help educators have conversations about the data.
Panorama showed us how to use Success, how educators can group learners in the platform, and how to be intentional with the data that we have available, like student demographics. Something that makes our district unique is that we have a very diverse population: our student community is approximately 51 percent Asian, 30 percent Caucasian, 12 percent Hispanic, and about 6 percent African-American. A lot of our families are moving into the area from other countries. Panorama lets us look at our learners by demographic groups, which informs our strategies.
Pictured Above: Panorama Student Success demo data
Brooke Sims: This past spring, our Panorama survey was personalized to gather information about our students' experience with virtual learning. In addition, our educators learned how to navigate Student Success and get information about how their learners felt about virtual learning. They were then able to take that data and make important decisions about their instructional design and how to start the new school year in a hybrid model.
"I feel like we really got the best of both worlds: we were able to personalize our training with Panorama and put it into a familiar space for our educators and staff members. The training set them up for continued success as we implement our new partnership with Panorama."
–Brooke Sims, Director of Professional Learning
You partnered with Panorama to introduce a new platform, Student Success, to educators across your district through virtual professional learning. How were you able to do this?
BS: Due to the pandemic, we've had to design creative ways to implement and roll-out training virtually and on a large scale. We've been utilizing self-paced asynchronous learning for many years in Coppell ISD, but what's been unique since last March is needing to rely completely on this type of training. From day one, the Panorama Teaching and Learning team was committed to individualizing and personalizing our plan. I had the opportunity to work with Panorama to co-design a tiered training with multiple modules, and we were able to chunk the learning into digestible pieces for our educators.
Pictured Above: Example of virtual professional learning on Panorama Student Success developed for Coppell ISD educators
BS: In our initial meeting with Panorama’s Teaching and Learning team, we considered our district's collective understanding and comfort with online learning, data analysis protocols, and professional learning communities. Together, we designed objectives and created a space for lingering questions from our educators and our staff members, and I was able to send those questions over to our Panorama teammates, who helped us answer those questions. Staff members could go through the content at their own pace, learning how to get started with Panorama surveys, dive in and do data digs, and take action with the data from the survey and within Student Success.
I feel like we really got the best of both worlds: we were able to personalize our training with Panorama and put it into a familiar space for our educators and staff members. The training set them up for continued success as we implement our new partnership with Panorama.
