WELCOME TO
PROJECT HERO.
Get FREE access to a staff retention solution for your school.
The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) is partnering with PeopleBench on Project HERO (Helping Educator Resilience & Optimism). Together we’ll be testing an innovative software and professional learning solution to help leaders support and retain their staff.
What's involved?
What’s involved in Project HERO?
What’s involved in Project HERO? Rigorously testing a new approach to staff retention
We all experience the consequences of a chronic staff shortage in the K-12 sector, and in many parts of our country this is compounded by persistently high rates of staff turnover. It’s time to try new approaches to solve these problems. Project HERO is designed to do just that.
In Project HERO, we’ll be assessing whether a combination of new software tools, online professional learning, and peer-led professional learning (“the PeopleBench solution”) can effectively support leaders to make improvements in the resilience and retention of staff in their schools, and can lead to improved outcomes for students as a result.
In Project HERO, participating leaders will utilize the PeopleBench solution as part of a Professional Learning Community with the support of the PeopleBench team of education workforce experts, while the research team collects and analyzes staff data to understand the impact of the solution in each participating school.
The project includes two phases: a pilot phase in which 10 schools will utilize the solution for a year*; and a study in which 44 schools will utilize the solution for three years and another 44 will serve as a control group without access to the solution^.
*These schools will receive ongoing access to the solution for a further two years post-pilot.
^We intend to provide control schools with access to the solution at the completion of the project, pending funding availability.
Benefits for participating schools/districts
Benefits for participating schools/districts We’re gathering information on schools who would like to participate for free in this research trial.
If your application is successful, you will gain:
- Access to a team of thought partners to help create a better workplace for your staff, aiming to reduce staff turnover and improve student outcomes.
- Access to an innovative software solution for workforce planning for the duration of the project .
- Clear visibility of the strengths and risks in your school’s workforce, based on current, easy-to-use data. This covers staff resilience, organizational culture and other key metrics.
- Access to online professional learning opportunities for leaders and aspiring leaders, addressing under-explored areas such as strategic workforce planning, organizational development and data-informed HR decision-making.
- Opportunities to collaborate with other leaders and share practice and learnings as you progress.
Time investment
Time investment Our goal is to spend a little time engaged in the process of improving resilience and retention, so you can save maximum time in reducing the need to recruit, onboard, and train!
We anticipate participation will involve the following time commitments for your different stakeholders spread across each academic year:
District Leader
(e.g, Superintendent)
| Actions: | Setting/adjusting district strategic parameters for participating schools to work within |
| Time each year: | 3 hours |
District workforce data owner
(e.g. HR Manager)
| Actions: | Exporting a set of workforce data reports from your payroll/HR information system |
| Time each year: | 3 hours (only in the study phase, not the pilot) |
Principal + other building leaders
(you choose which and how many leaders to involve)
| Actions: |
|
| Time each year: |
~24 hours (+ 1-2 hours' evaluation) |
All staff
| Actions: | Completing an all staff resilience and culture survey twice yearly |
| Time each year: | 30 minutes |
About the Solution.
Simplifying evidence-informed staff retention
The PeopleBench solution has been used in over 300 schools across eight states in the US, and many more internationally.
It was designed to help district and school leaders deal with the urgent pain associated with teacher wellbeing, while creating evidence informed, long-term strategy to address the underlying fundamentals such as attraction, retention, organizational culture and capability development.
In an initial mixed method study in 2022-23, Penn GSE researchers evaluated the impact of the Resilience Tracker tool (just one part of the PeopleBench solution) among leaders in four Pennsylvania districts. The study showed substantial changes in how school leaders understood and approached resilience, resulting in shifts in leaders’ management capacity (Serapião, Rovine & Acton, 2024).
Subsequently in PeopleBench’s own preliminary research and collaboration with customers we’ve found that:
- Leaders who used their workforce strategy as an opportunity to listen to staff voice and engage staff in the planning process saw improvements in staff resilience throughout the process
- Higher levels of staff resilience were associated with lower rates of staff turnover
- More positive perceptions of school organizational culture were also associated with lower staff turnover.
Project HERO aims to further test the utility of this solution by drawing on the expertise of the Penn GSE research team and the collaboration of schools and districts like yours.
When developing a workforce strategy through the PeopleBench solution, a leader:
The process of developing a workforce strategy is made easier and simpler using smart technology. Enter your email to access a walk-through of the solution below.
Your invitation.
Your school is warmly invited to indicate your interest in this project.
To get started:
Register your interest
Enter your details in the form opposite if you’d like your school or district to be involved. Those who express interest may be part of either the pilot phase (2025-26 school year) or study phase (2026-29 school years)
Sample selection
The project team will contact you over the coming weeks to arrange all relevant consent agreements as we determine sampling for the two phases of the project.
We anticipate onboarding the schools participating in the pilot in May, 2025.
Indicate your interest.
We’re helping make schools amazing places to work so they can be amazing places to learn.
By entering your details here you’re agreeing the project team can store your information in line with the PeopleBench Privacy Policy and can contact you regarding next steps. You can opt out at any time.
Welcome to Project HERO.
About the Project Team.
About PeopleBench
PeopleBench is the key solution provider to schools and districts in Project HERO.
The PeopleBench Platform scales the impact of evidence and best practice to help district and school leaders deal with the urgent needs associated with teacher wellbeing, while creating evidence informed, long-term strategy to address the underlying fundamentals such as attraction, retention, organizational culture and capability development.
Fleur Johnston
CEO
Mike Hennessy
Chief Research & Insights Officer
Katie Rediger
Chief Experience Officer
Hear from one of the innovative district leaders using our solution.
About Penn GSE
Penn GSE is the grantee and research provider for Project HERO.
The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) is one of the world’s leading schools in education research and is consistently ranked one of the best graduate schools of education in the country by U.S. News & World Report. The School drives innovation through research and initiatives that are aimed at preparing and sustaining the educator workforce and elevating education’s role within a democratic society. Penn GSE partners with schools, universities, and communities to expand educational access — especially for those underserved by society — and, through rigorous research and innovative programs, develops new knowledge and transformational teachers and leaders in pursuit of educational opportunity.
Dr Michael Golden
Vice Dean of Innovative Programs & Partnerships
Dr Wendy Chan
Assistant Professor, Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division
Dr Katrina Struloeff
Director of Growth & Impact
Dr Megan MacDonald
Associate Director of Innovative Programs
Cecilia Dye
Senior Program Manager
About Quantily
Quantily is the key evaluation partner on Project HERO.
Quantily, LLC specializes in conducting rigorous, high-quality research and evaluation to support data-driven decision-making. Our expertise lies in developing mixed-methods approaches to measure complex outcomes, ensuring our clients gain actionable insights that drive meaningful change.
We excel at transforming data into clear, practical guidance. While data can often feel overwhelming, Quantily provides clients with new perspectives that clarify complex issues and inform strategic decisions. By combining methodological rigor with practical insights, Quantily empowers organizations to make informed decisions and lasting program improvements.
Dr Christina Steiner
Founder & Senior Researcher
Claire McCloud
Education Researcher
Frequently Asked Questions
Who can help if I have questions about the project?
For questions about Project HERO in general, please contact Megan MacDonald from Penn GSE on mmacdo@upenn.edu. If you have questions about the PeopleBench solution specifically, please contact Katie Rediger from PeopleBench on katie@peoplebench.com.
What is PeopleBench?
PeopleBench is an education workforce management software platform. Our mission is to make schools amazing places to work so they can be amazing places to learn.
We are the leaders in school workforce benchmarking, enabling leaders to drive sustainable change in their schools through data-driven decision making.
Through the PeopleBench platform, we use data science and machine learning to help you benchmark your workforce and always have your ‘finger on the pulse’ of important metrics like turnover, as well as the culture and resilience of your team.
We enable you to:
- Understand and manage workforce risk
- Take advantage of workforce strengths and opportunities
- Make evidence-informed plans for the future
- Evaluate your impact and share this with your staff, district, board and other key stakeholders.
Why should my school or district participate in Project HERO?
Staffing a school sustainably is increasingly difficult across the United States: 1:10 or 314,000+ teaching positions nationwide are unfilled or filled by not fully certified teachers (Franco & Patrick, 2023). Pennsylvania schools are not immune from these and other workforce challenges for both teaching and non-teaching roles.
Project HERO gives schools and districts like yours the opportunity to access a new solution to these issues—cost-free—and contribute to the refinement of the solution so it can benefit schools in your community and elsewhere across the country.
This project aims to deliver three key benefits to participating schools:
Identify and train school leaders on best practices in workforce data literacy, workforce development, and management practice;
Support school leaders to develop and implement data-informed workforce strategy; and
Design, implement, and monitor sustainable workforce strategies.
What is workforce strategy and how could it help?
“Workforce strategy is the sum of actions taken to acquire, retain, develop, motivate and deploy human capital in the service of an organization’s mission” (HRM Online).
Put simply, workforce strategy is a process of synthesizing information about a school’s workforce so leaders can make evidence-informed decisions about the goals they want to prioritize and the actions they want to take in improving their workforce, as well as the metrics they’ll use to track their impact.
Most K-12 leaders are used to planning strategically and considering the needs of their school or district over a multi-year timeframe, but often they don’t have the chance to apply this kind of approach to their workforce specifically. We expect that doing this planning affords leaders the opportunity to organize their thinking and resources so they can be more effective, while also engaging staff in a process of positive change around shared goals.
Project HERO seeks to create opportunities for leaders to do this thinking and planning, because:
- Research shows organizational level improvement strategies that improve the professional environment and teachers’ personal resources concurrently positively impact the resilience, wellbeing, and retention of teachers and school leaders (Ainsworth & Oldfield, 2019; Flemming, 2024; Ainsworth, 2022).
- When teachers are supported by school leaders, they are less likely to be impacted by stress from job demands, and “developing intentional systems of care could help provide greater resources for coping and reduce attrition” (Kaiser, 2023).
- Working conditions, which include the nature and level of support provided by school leaders, significantly influence teachers’ decisions to remain in the profession, particularly for teachers of color (Marx et al., 2023).
- Developing school leader capability to enhance workforce resources addresses gaps in workforce management and human resources knowledge, skills, and practice in schools, reduces turnover, positively impacting student learning and achievement.
What do I need to do to launch the survey at my school?
The PeopleBench team will handle the set-up of the survey and will send you a draft email inviting staff to participate with the link to the survey and frequently asked questions to get them underway.
All you’ll need to do is:
Communicate with staff to inform them of your participation in the project; the reason for your participation and the benefits to the school
Optionally, you might choose to create an opportunity for staff to complete the survey during a staff meeting—schools who are able to do this typically achieve higher response rates
Send an email to all staff with the survey link and you’re good to go!
How do I provide my school’s workforce data?
Staff at the building level will not need to gather or provide any workforce data, beyond distributing the survey to their staff. For other workforce metrics (e.g. recruitment, tenure, retention and staff qualification data), the PeopleBench team will work with the district to collect the relevant information. This will usually be someone in the district HR or Finance teams. This person will simply need to export the most recent version of the standard HR reports the district usually runs (an .xls or .csv file); remove any sensitive personal identifying information (e.g. names, dates of birth, social security details); and upload it to PeopleBench’s file storage securely; the PeopleBench team will take care of processing and transforming the data into the right format.
Can I substitute a pre-existing survey for the PeopleBench survey in this project?
You’ll be required to use the PeopleBench survey (measuring Resilience + Culture in your workforce) as part of this project, but if you have other relevant sources of data we encourage you to consider them alongside our surveys when you’re making decisions about what to prioritize in your workforce strategy. Triangulation of data is a beautiful thing!
How else will my district be involved in the project?
In the study phase of the project (but not the pilot phase), district leaders will be involved in setting the parameters for what their participating schools can access in Workforce Strategy Builder. You can think of this as the district determining the strategic ‘pillars’ their schools align to when they choose their priorities, actions and success measures in their own workforce strategy. The PeopleBench team will meet with district leaders via videoconference early in the school year to a) present a summary of the data insights gathered from the surveys and workforce data; and b) discuss and set (or update) the District’s strategic workforce ‘pillars’.
What happens with our data?
Responses to the survey will be securely held in the PeopleBench database in US-hosted cloud storage (via Amazon Web Services). The data will be used: a) to populate dashboards for leaders to view in the PeopleBench platform; b) to analyze the impact of Project HERO on key staff outcomes such as wellbeing and retention; and c) anonymously feed into PeopleBench’s national benchmarks.
Your school’s specific data will only be visible to you via your own dashboards. No individual schools will be identifiable outside your district and no individual staff will be identifiable.
How is staff confidentiality protected in this project?
The survey does not collect sensitive personal identifying information; where demographic information is collected it is done so in categories, rather than specifics (e.g. nominating age using 10-year age bands). For the researchers’ analysis of staff outcomes it will be important to track staff across the various surveys they complete during the project; this will be done using unique identifiers rather than staff names.
In the PeopleBench dashboards, data will be presented at the aggregate level only, i.e. data will be averaged at the whole-of-school level or for groups of staff (e.g. different age bands). Where there are fewer than five staff in a group, that average will not be presented in order to preserve confidentiality.
When will the project take place?
The project has started and will conclude at the end of the 2028-29 school year. Other key dates to keep in mind:
For schools in the pilot phase:
- We anticipate onboarding schools involved in the pilot phase of the project during May, 2025, though work will not commence until the beginning of the 2025-26 school year
- We anticipate schools in the pilot will launch their first survey in September, 2025
For schools in the study phase:
- We anticipate onboarding schools involved in the study during May, 2026, though work will not commence until the beginning of the 2026-27 school year
- We anticipate schools in the study will launch their first survey in September, 2026.
What support will leaders in my school receive as part of this project?
- Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) where we convene all participating school leaders in each participating district via Zoom to engage in peer-directed learning relevant to their workforce strategy process
- A dedicated Project Manager from Penn GSE to coordinate your involvement on Project HERO and oversee research activity
- A dedicated Customer Experience Manager from PeopleBench to help you get the most out of the learning opportunities that come with this project, and support you to use the software solution in a way that works for you
- Opportunities for up to five leaders from your school to participate in the project and its learning opportunities.
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