Hillsborough County Public Schools in Florida has long been known as a leader in teacher learning — one with a culture of continuous improvement. To that end, leadership in the district’s Office of Teaching and Learning joined the Learning Forward-led Redesign PD Community of Practice last year in part to develop protocols and procedures to better ensure coherence and alignment across the district.

What they created was an organizing document that could be used by learning leaders to make sure school plans are aligned with the district’s framework for effective teaching. But it is also being used by school leadership to differentiate support needs and by individual teachers to backward map during their goal-setting process.

The tool is called RADAR, which stands for the qualities that should be found in any resulting professional learning plan or action/needs list: relevant, aligned, data-driven, action-oriented, and results-driven.

RADAR was first created to help a district-level administrator work through conversations with school chiefs to guide her own planning, but it can be adapted using your system’s language, data, goals, and more. Shannon Bogle, an area supervisor in Hillsborough County’s Office of Teaching and Learning, is using it to create a “train the trainer” model, inviting teacher leaders to use it to give her feedback on her department.

It’s also being used by professional learning community facilitators within the district. “It’s proven a great tool to guide conversations and planning,” Bogle says, “but it’s also a living, breathing document. We hope it proves as useful for other systems as it has for ours.”