Managers – add people to a cycle

Learn how to assign cycles and focus areas to your team and ensure everyone has the right access

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Written by Support
Updated over a week ago

This article includes information on the new premium Educator Portfolios platform.

In this guide:

Getting your team ready for Educator Portfolios

Educator Portfolios are making it easier for managers and their teams to see at a glance the information that is important to them about their day-to-day teaching practice. Every educator has their own homepage or dashboard where you can see their current and past cycles, their focus areas and their activity.

Ensuring you have the right access

Before continuing, you first need to make sure that you have been added as the manager for each member of your team. To do this, check out your team dashboard in the lefthand navigation drawer. If you tap on My teams' portfolios and you see Team dashboard, you have been added as a contributor. for somebody.

Tap on anyone listed, find their Contributors page and look at your contributor status there. If it doesn't say 'Manager' or 'Direct Manager' (network services) or admin contributor (independent services), you'll need to ask a network admin or another managing contributor to change your status for each member of your team.

Learn more about manager contributors here:

Ensure each team member has the correct cycle and focus areas

To get people set up, the relevant cycle must be assigned to each member of your team. Only a Manager can assign cycles. To do this, select a person and go to their home page. Click the New cycle button on the right side of the screen.

A window will open where you can see all available cycles.

A cycle consists of a list of focus areas that are collected together within groups – generally so that each role within your organisation can have a tailored set of focus areas specific to that role. So under each cycle, you may see a list of roles or you may just see a single option if the focus areas are the same for everyone.

Select the appropriate cycle/group from the list and tap the Assign cycle button.

Assign multiple cycles or changing roles

You can assign more than one cycle to each person, eg. an Induction and a Professional growth cycle, but you can’t add the same cycle more than once, even if it's for a different role. To switch a cycle to a different role, you will need to delete the existing cycle for that person. Be careful doing this though because if someone has already started working within a cycle and making links to each focus area, these links will disappear for them. Once a cycle is deleted and a new cycle is assigned, that person will then need to relink everything, as links do not carry over between cycles.

What access do I have to the portfolios of my direct reports?

Storypark recognises the need for a private space for people to do their own work and reflection. We also know how important it is for managers to be able to see the work that their people do, so that they can provide support or mentoring where needed. With this in mind, each educator portfolio has public and private areas:

  • Cycles and the focus areas widget is only visible to the individual and their managers.

  • Portfolio stories are private to the author by default, but the author can choose to share their stories with selected contributors.

  • Portfolio plans have flexible permissions and depending on the template settings, can be shared or kept private. Learn more about sharing in portfolio plans here.

  • The To Do, Manager Check-in and Recognition widget can be seen by managers also. Only check-in messages between the educator and manager themselves are visible keeping other check-in messages with other managers private between them

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