Case Study: Scaling Statewide Support
How ND RISE Uses Avanti to Support 400+ K-12 Educators in North Dakota
About ND RISE
ND RISE, which stands for Retaining, Inspiring, and Supporting Educators in North Dakota, is a statewide teacher mentoring program for new teachers. Their mission is to build the capacity of teacher leaders to develop a system of support for effective teachers in every school in the state.
The program serves ND teachers in their first or second year of teaching, those working toward an alternative licensure pathway, those changing grade level or content areas, or those returning from a break in teaching. ND RISE also offers a coaching program to support instructional coaches in their practice.
The challenge
ND RISE has worked to make their program, professional development, and training more flexible and accessible to meet teachers’ needs. This commitment deepened during the pandemic, which highlighted the importance of accessibility in their offerings.
The challenges they were up against included:
Time constraints for participants
Many mentors and new teachers that ND RISE serves take on extra roles—coaching, music and fine art performances, even bus driving—making it difficult to find time to meet live for professional development.
Differentiated strategies and equity
Because ND RISE supports teachers across the entire state of North Dakota, programs, standards, curricula, and demographics vary widely. Finding professional development that reflects and addresses each school’s needs is not easy.
ND RISE needed a solution that would provide meaningful, differentiated professional learning easily accessible to educators across the state, regardless of location or schedule.
The solution
ND RISE discovered Avanti while exploring ways to better meet their teachers’ professional development needs. Having used Solution Tree products on other projects, Avanti specifically met the needs of their new teachers and mentors.
What made Avanti the right fit was its ease of use. Teachers can quickly search for relevant videos, watch real teachers in real classrooms, and access follow-up resources and tools to support implementation. Avanti’s self-directed nature allows educators to focus on what matters most to their specific context.
Avanti is used for one of the professional development courses offered by ND RISE. The course (the Avanti Learning Course) is composed of four cycles. Each cycle consists of watching a strategy video of their choice in Avanti, working through the Avanti resources provided for that strategy, and implementing an aspect of the teaching strategy or idea they gleaned from the video and resources.
ND RISE encourages mentors and new teachers to use Avanti together during one-on-one conferencing or after classroom observations. When a teacher wants to learn more about a topic or strategy, they can search for videos that address their specific need, watch together, debrief, and plan for implementation. This allows mentors to learn alongside new teachers rather than feeling they need all the answers—and often, mentors implement the strategies as well.
While participation in the Avanti Learning Course is optional, over 400 educators have chosen to complete the Avanti Learning Course in three years.
The results
The flexible, collaborative approach has proven successful. ND RISE’s end-of-year surveys show that participants find the Avanti Learning Course and overall resources within Avanti meaningful in their mentoring conversations and classroom practice.
Teachers in the program particularly gravitate toward content on classroom management, procedures, and routines, appreciating the grade-level specificity and seeing real teachers demonstrate strategies in real classrooms. This makes implementation feel immediately achievable.
Most importantly, Avanti has enabled ND RISE to scale statewide support through meaningful, easily accessible resources, allowing them to meet educators where they are, regardless of location or schedule.
Bring flexible professional learning to your educators
Whether you’re supporting new teachers or providing ongoing PD across your school, district or state, Avanti makes high-quality learning accessible and actionable.