PANORAMA EDUCATION EMPOWERS EDUCATORS
WITH TOOLS TO SUPPORT THE WHOLE STUDENT
Panorama Education designs tools and technology to provide a panoramic view of student success, helping schools take action on data to support the whole student. With a best-in-class data analytics platform, Panorama empowers educators to identify trends and intervene effectively to improve students’ academic, behavioral, and social-emotional learning (SEL) outcomes.
The Panorama Student Success platform delivers insights across academics, behavior, attendance, and SEL to help educators take data-driven action when supporting students. By syncing daily with district data, Panorama Student Success enables a holistic picture of student progress so that administrators and educators can identify key patterns and concerns. In addition, the platform streamlines intervention management and progress monitoring for Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) and Response to Intervention (RtI) — allowing school staff to identify students in need of support, create tiered intervention plans, and progress monitor in one place.
Panorama also offers surveys and a reporting platform to help schools measure social-emotional learning, school climate, student engagement, and family engagement. Online and paper surveys help schools assess students’ lifelong skills such as grit, growth mindset, and social awareness, as well as student, family, and staff perceptions of engagement, school climate and safety, and classroom expectations. Panorama reports survey results in a comprehensive analytics platform so that administrators and educators can identify areas for growth at the district, school, and student levels.
Panorama has served more than 9 million students in more than 11,500 schools, and has benefited from partnering with innovative districts such as Ogden School District in Utah, Waltham Public Schools in Massachusetts, Washoe County Schools in Nevada, and Everett Public Schools in Washington. These experiences have provided opportunities to customize products to meet district needs, as well as to develop new tools and dashboards that facilitate student supports and teamwork within districts.
Panorama’s team of 140 engineers, designers, and former educators practices the reflective model of collaboration that it facilitates in schools. Internal teams of six to 10 people engage in weekly retrospectives on their current work goals, a practice that creates space for the company to address challenges head-on and to remain nimble despite its growth. Panorama goals include continuing to improve schools’ capacity to build effective MTSS/RTI programs, support social-emotional learning, and promote college-career readiness for students.
Focus of Organization's Work
Panorama Education works with schools and districts to support students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) skills and to use research-based indicators of students’ on-track or at-risk status in academics, behavior, and attendance.
In doing so, Panorama helps schools develop capacity in building students’ life-long skills and competencies—self-efficacy, growth mindset, social awareness, and more—and to take action before students slip off track to ensure they are prepared and on a pathway to adult success.
Personnel Required
Panorama Education is an organization of 140 former educators, designers, software engineers, and researchers that partners with K-12 school districts to help educators act on data to improve student outcomes. Those involved in the PAS work are led by Xan Tanner, co-founder and President.
Population Served
Panorama Education primarily serves students, educators, and administrators in K-12 public school districts.
Organization's Accomplishment
To date, Panorama Education is most proud of building a company of more than 140 employees dedicated to improving student outcomes nationwide.
The team reflects a wide variety of diverse experiences, talent, and perspectives that it hopes will make an impact on education in this country. Nearly 9 out of 10 educators who use Panorama today would recommend it to a colleague. The company is proud of creating products that educators value because the data and analytics help them serve and support their students more effectively.
Important Factors for Success
The most important factors for success for Panorama have been perseverance and opportunities to partner with several innovative districts.
Developing the team and the technology takes a great deal of effort and time. The team has been dedicated to using data analytics and technology to support schools for seven years, and its work is a testament to the team’s perseverance.
The work has also been closely aligned to the needs of innovative districts and school systems across the country. Panorama Ed has worked with the CORE Districts, Washoe County Schools, Ogden School District (UT), Everett Public Schools (WA), and many others that have pushed the team and technology to improve and meet higher goals to support their students.
Requirements for Success
The work has required substantial investments in time, funding, technology, and personnel to support the districts. The team has raised funding to support the organization’s growth and invest in personnel and technology research and development.
Timeline
Panorama’s work originally began in 2012 and has spanned the last seven years. It launched its feedback surveys first, followed by social-emotional learning (SEL) products in 2015 and the Student Success platform in 2017.
Overcoming Challenges
The team has put in place several practices that promote reflection when facing challenges. Product development and engineering teams use a weekly “retrospective” model to reflect on progress, challenges, and goals together. This routine is just one of several practices that create space for teammates to address challenges head-on, before they become bigger issues.
Lessons Learned
Countless lessons have been learned over the past seven years. One important one is the importance of humility when addressing system-wide challenges in education. This is hard work and it will take time; promoting pathways to adult success requires an all-in effort that Panorama believes starts with productive collaborations between practitioners, administrators, researchers, technologists, and other partners who are developing tools and programs to increase every student’s chances of realizing lifelong success.
Future Goals
The goal for the years ahead is to reach every district in the country to better support the whole child and prepare students for lifelong success. In the next year, that means developing and introducing new tools to facilitate the multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) process in schools, and to expand the use of research-based social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula and measurement in schools. In the next three years, Panorama hopes to see these innovations through by expanding their support as students move into college and careers. This calls for creating tools to help districts better prepare students with the skills and knowledge required for college-career readiness.
Major Takeaways
The top three takeaways are:
First, contribute back to the community. Panorama has released its survey instruments as open-source tools that educators and researchers can use. In doing so, it hopes to make these instruments that are best-in-class more widely available for all educators.
Next, look to bring together community members with diverse backgrounds. Panorama has increasingly focused on bolstering support for diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it will also lead to better outcomes in the tools and products developed for the country’s diverse student and educator populations.
Lastly, find joy in the work. Panorama is fortunate to work with innovative research partners and educators across the country in addressing truly important and impactful issues. The team holds frequent off-site events to build community and enjoy one another’s company.