Frontline Professional Growth:
Frequently Asked Questions

Frontline Professional Growth isn’t about removing the human touch from professional learning and employee observations. Quite the opposite! By simplifying the professional learning process, compiling forms, goals and PD resources in one place and improving transparency throughout the whole evaluation process, Frontline Professional Growth helps you cultivate consistent, substantial professional learning for all your staff. It’s easy to track where each teacher is in their professional learning or evaluation process, and built-in reports make it easy to pull the data you need to inform decision-making.

Frontline Professional Growth can also help make your office paperless! Custom forms make it easy for educators to apply for and log learning activities like conferences, workshops, graduate courses, online courses — virtually any type of learning format there is — as well as enter salary movements, tuition reimbursements, mentoring plans, mentoring logs, Personal Goal Plans and more. Then, custom automatic workflows ensure that forms are automatically routed to the appropriate administrator. And by giving teachers direct access to their PD resources and evaluation data, teachers can revisit their goals regularly as they grow in their careers.

By streamlining the submission and approval of forms, Frontline Professional Growth makes your data more visible through our reporting tools. This enables you to get an in-depth view of the effectiveness of your professional learning processes. It also streamlines the evaluation process, with electronic evidence collection from multiple observers and customized scoring based on state requirements.

With fully automated processes, you’ll reduce the amount of clerical support you need, minimizing errors, speeding up reimbursement time and freeing up staff for more strategic work. And our Learning & Collaboration Resources make it easy — and cost-effective — to provide learning to address specific individual needs.

Currently more than 2,800 clients use Frontline Professional Growth.

It does indeed. Meet the Learning Loop — it lets you incorporate data from multiple measures, and with the full Frontline Professional Growth solution, recommend targeted, standards-aligned learning opportunities based on evaluation results. Plus, each educator can create individual PD plans, set goals and action steps, determine measures of success and reflect on their practice and application of new knowledge, while you monitor learning throughout each observation cycle with embedded PD reports.

Many districts use Frontline Professional Growth to provide professional learning for all employees — certified and non-certified staff alike. Using Frontline Professional Growth can help to ensure a common understanding across your school system of what great education looks like. It also enables you to give employees access to their own evaluation and transcript data and “voice and choice” in their professional learning, increasing buy-in and enabling teachers and staff to showcase their professional growth journey.

• For administrators, permission-based access helps you safeguard your data while making sure everyone has access to the information they need.

• Online collaboration tools enable teachers, mentors and coaches to share examples of practice and provide feedback.

• And whether your district uses rubrics like the Danielson Framework for Teaching or the Stronge Effectiveness Performance Evaluation System — or a custom rubric — you can ensure your teachers receive growth-focused feedback and access to relevant learning opportunities to become masters of their craft.

Our Professional Learning Management application allows you to manage any type of learning, including collaborative formats and blended learning. Users and professional learning communities can use our Team Rooms to participate in discussions afterward, share files and even log their time together. These Team Rooms are a great way for users to gather for book studies, mentoring and collegial circles, as well as share ideas, lesson plans or other work examples. Team Rooms can also be combined with face-to-face workshops for a more blended experience.

The Employee Evaluation Management application makes it easier to conduct evaluations as a collaborative process. It’s easy to provide employees with access to current and historical evaluation data, and the observation tools can be used to give formative feedback as well as summative scores. Two-way communication, document sharing and opportunities for self-reflection all work to involve teachers and staff in the process, with the shared goal of improving instruction — not finding “gotcha” moments.

Learning & Collaboration Resources helps to develop and spread great teaching by enabling educators to engage in discussions around exemplary instructional videos, share resources, give and receive feedback, and more within collaborative groups.

Frontline Professional Growth is all about flexibility! You can provide your current forms and rubrics, and our employee evaluation and professional learning management tools can be configured to the process you need.

When it comes to evaluations, you’ll be able to facilitate every part of the process, including self-reflection and goal setting, in-class observations, student learning objectives and growth data. That means you can focus on having meaningful discussions about instructional practice with educators.

The same is true for professional development opportunities. You can create forms to easily enroll, track and generate reports for courses offered by your district, third-parties, or Frontline Professional Growth.

By adding all your forms online in Frontline Professional Growth, end users and administrators alike can easily generate reports to get the data you need. This eliminates the need for spreadsheets to track things like licensure, salary movements, district-required hours and other requirements — and the reports can always be exported as a spreadsheet, if needed.

Give your staff voice and choice with Frontline Professional Growth’s Learning & Collaboration Resources.  Offer learning that addresses each teacher’s individual needs, to equip them to become masters of their craft. With 35 micro-credentials, collaborative groups, nearly 3,000 videos, and over 550 courses, you can say with confidence that your educators never stop growing!” to “With over 30 micro-credentials, collaborative groups, over 2,300 videos, over 800 courses, and more, you can say with confidence that your educators never stop growing. Check out the catalog here.

Frontline Professional Growth can accommodate any rubric your district is licensed to use! These might include the Danielson Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument, the Stronge Effectiveness Performance Evaluation System, Strategic Observation and Reflection (SOAR) Teaching Frames^®, UW CEL 5D and 5D+ Frameworks or custom rubrics.

Yes! Frontline Professional Growth’s configuration process is very flexible. Districts can determine their scoring philosophy, be it a Scoring Form Approach, Holistic Approach or a hybrid of these approaches. The solution also allows districts to use conversion charts.

Yes, teachers have direct access to their transcripts and evaluation data, enabling them to regularly assess their progress. Teachers can complete forms such as self-reflections and SLO/SGO forms and upload evaluation evidence via the artifact section — an electronic portfolio for teachers. Peers can collaborate through file sharing, team rooms, online video and more.

Yes, you can host all Student Learning Objective data in one system, managing single or multiple SLOs for each person.

Yes. Frontline Professional Growth integrates with other systems via an sFTP process. Frontline provides a list of current integrations here.

None! Frontline Professional Growth is a web-based solution — an Internet connection is all that’s required.

Frontline Professional Growth pricing is based on total employee count. A Frontline representative can discuss your specific needs and send you a proposal.

Learn more at FrontlineEducation.com/solutions/professional-growth.