Helping NSW teachers realise their potential through better career development
NSW Department of Education
The performance and development plan supports teachers to demonstrate their commitment to developing their teaching practice – ultimately in service of bettering students’ lives.
Collaborating with principals, teachers, and support staff, we designed and launched the first digital PDP platform. The new, streamlined process supports teachers development to assist career growth.
The impact of investing in the development of teachers cannot be overstated. PDPs are a powerful tool to guide teachers towards realising their full potential. We identified the current paper-based system was hard to engage with, creating unnecessary administrative burdens that detracted from the purpose of focusing on development.
Our brief: leverage the power of digital to build a tool that solves these problems and enables the best educational outcomes for teachers and children alike.
Approach
The digital PDP tool is designed to empower teachers to create, manage, and track their professional development plans easily. As the designer on a core team consisting of a product manager and developer, I had to ensure my designs we set up for success in the development environment as the project moved from design, to testing and then Pilot.
Serving as the single source of truth across various stages of the PDP cycle, the digital PDP eliminates the need for disparate documents. Relevant resources are surfaced to provide guidance, while contextual assistance is provided to aid in completing PDP goals and uploading evidence. With a built-in notes feature, teachers can easily access their progress and maintain context throughout the year. This two-way platform enables both teachers and supervisors to better facilitate ongoing career development, ultimately leading to better educational outcomes for all.
Highlight
Working to a pilot release required some concentrated rounds of usability test. As we didn’t have a researcher on the team I developed the learning goals, testing scrip and facilitated 5x 1:1 testing sessions. Having the time and space to focus on the flow and interactions ensured the experience met users expectations and provided good evidence for justifying any changes to the underlying design system or where extra developer effort would be worth investing.
Impact
Since launch uptake has increased in teachers creating PDPs. Teachers are not mandated to use the tool, yet there has been over 16,000 PDPs created in NSW, surpassing initial goals set by the department and validating the tool's value.
For principals and support staff, it has reduced administrative burden freeing support staff to focus on what matters most - guiding teachers on their career progression. For the Department as a whole, the transition from paper to digital PDPs means that there is now access to powerful data that can be translated to insights that drive more effective policy outcomes across NSW.
