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Using Educa to Support Your PGC Process

Practical guidance for professional leaders on how to use Educa's Forms, portfolios, and mentoring features to support your centre's Professional Growth Cycle.

Written by Educa
Updated yesterday

Using Educa to Support Your PGC Process

The Professional Growth Cycle (PGC) is designed to support ongoing learning and reflection. With the 2026 Standards now in use for PGC, this can be a useful time to review how your centre records growth and supports professional conversations.

There is no single right way to run a PGC. The key is having a process that fits your setting and helps teachers build a meaningful record over time.

Here are some ideas on how Educa can help your centre when recording and documenting teacher development and PGC activities.

Use Teacher Portfolios to build the record over time

Each teacher has a private portfolio in Educa where they can record reflections, feedback, observations, professional learning, and other evidence of growth as it happens. This makes the portfolio a useful place to build a professional record across the year, rather than trying to gather everything later. Teachers can also choose to share portfolio posts with a mentor or peer when collaboration is helpful.

Portfolio posts can be linked to the 2026 teaching standards in Educa. This helps teachers connect everyday practice to the professional framework they are working within, and gives their portfolio a clearer structure and purpose.

What to encourage:

  • Adding a portfolio post after a meaningful observation, conversation, or professional development moment

  • Linking posts to the teaching standards framework

  • Keeping entries brief, a short reflection and a photo or linked story is enough

Use Forms to support formal PGC conversations

If your centre uses a more structured PGC conversation or review process, Educa’s Forms feature can support that too. The template Professional Growth Cycle - NZ - 2026 is already available in the Forms templates section.

The template is designed as a starting point. You can copy it and adapt it to suit your own process.

Forms can be used to capture discussion notes, agreed goals, next steps and supporting evidence in one place. Evidence can be attached to the form overall or to individual questions, helping keep the documentation organised and easy to refer back to later. Forms can also be downloaded as a PDF if your centre wants a printed copy for its records.

To access it:

  1. Go to Tools → Forms

  2. Select Templates

  3. Find Professional Growth Cycle - NZ - 2026

  4. Copy the template and adapt it to suit your centre's process

Supporting Mentoring in Educa

Educa can also support mentoring relationships as part of your PGC approach.

Mentors can contribute to a teacher’s portfolio through mentor stories or comments, and teachers can share relevant posts with a mentor or peer when they want feedback. This keeps reflections, feedback and evidence connected in one place, rather than spread across separate systems.

To assign a mentor: Go to the teacher's profile → Portfolio → Mentors & Peers.

A practical starting point

If your centre already has a PGC process in place, you do not need to start over. A good first step might simply be to review how the different parts connect:

  • where teachers capture professional growth across the year

  • how formal PGC conversations are recorded

  • how evidence is linked back to practice

  • whether your team is making use of the 2026 standards in Educa

Often, a small refresh is enough to make the process clearer and easier to maintain.

Need Support?

If you'd like help reviewing your setup or adapting the PGC template to suit your centre, reach out through the chat or reply to any Educa email. We're happy to help.

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