 We will be kicking off momentarily for those of you who are just joining we are going to drop the sign in link in the chat one more time here. Before we kick off and then one of my teammates will probably drop it a couple more times as we get started with the content in the session today. So if you have not had a chance to do so please be sure that you sign in on the sign in for. All right, I'm going to go ahead and start the recording. Then we're we're already going recording. Yep. Thank you. All right, so I'm going to share my screen my name is Ben Owen, I'm a career and technical education educator on the NIU Illinois CTE project team. We're excited to have you here for our Illinois career pathways refresher where we're going to kind of review some of the content in that and jump in and discuss some of the components that are required for those pathway endorsements, as well as looking at giving you some tools that you can utilize to get started and kind of jump in with some of that work. So to begin I'd like to introduce myself again I've been on CTE educator and the NIU Illinois CTE project team. I'm going to be co leading this session today with a colleague Jason Klein and I'll ask him to introduce himself in just a moment. We're excited to have you all here and I'd like to introduce just a couple other people. We do have a couple other members of the NIU Illinois CTE project team here with us today and when we do introductions will ask them to drop their phones along with you guys as a way to get to know each other. And then Heather Lukin is from ISBE CTE and innovation team is also with us today via phone I believe. So just wanted to give recognition shout out to those individuals also before we kick off here. So this session will look like it's really focused around providing some background information to the level that's appropriate for those in attendance today but also to give you some tools that are going to be useful in helping you begin the work if you're ready to do so. So our agenda today we will begin looking at the legislation that centers or focuses around some of these things including House Bill 3296 and the PWR Act. We will transition into the career pathway endorsement framework the components and the requirements that are within that framework, and the connection to the technical competencies and the essential employability skills. And then we'll kind of conclude today by giving you guys an opportunity to reflect and get started with some hands on tools that you can take with you, make copies of and utilize to start the planning process if you haven't done so already, or if you don't have the work in the planning process to utilize these to kind of organize the work that you're doing and helping sure that you're moving in the right direction. So with that, I've introduced myself, I'm going to ask my colleague Dr Jason Klein to take just a second to introduce himself. While he is doing so, I would ask you guys if you could drop your names, your position and your district organization that you work with in the chat. And who's here and give you an opportunity to get to know each other a little bit via that chat before we kick off. Hi again everybody. Thanks so much for joining us we're really glad to have you with us today this is a really important topic as we'll talk about for a bunch of different reasons, including the fact that we are moving towards this being a requirement in Illinois which I will cover in the next moment, but my name is Jason Klein I'm Senior Director of Education partnerships and learning solutions here at Northern Illinois University. I'm very excited to be with you I am involved in helping facilitate the Illinois P 20 network, as well as working as part of our College of Education team. And I am pleased to be a member of this team working than the NIU Illinois CTE project alongside our partners at the Illinois State Board of Education's CT and innovation team and again I want to also just quickly give a shout out as well to Heather, Luke and Heather has been has been tied up at a conference last couple days so if not for that she'd likely be co presenting with us but Heather is not only a principal consultant on the CT and innovation team. Heather has really been a tremendous leader with regards to the career pathway endorsements over these first three years of their implementation and so much the feedback and the interaction that heathers had with and gotten from school districts is visible very visible in in ongoing changes in the evolution of this to improve these for school district administrators educators and most importantly for students so thanks again to Heather for for being with us today to listen in and I can assure you that our team at NIU and the ISB team will be taking back your questions and things we hear from you and discussing those further as we continue to look for new ways to try and help everybody with this implementation. So with that I'm going to kick it back to Ben to talk about a quick little survey, we're going to give and then I will take it from there Ben, I will launch the survey when you're ready but I wanted you to introduce this. I'm Jason. So, kicking off today, obviously this is a career path that pathway endorsement refresher. We wanted to kind of start by just giving you guys an opportunity to share with us. Kind of what your comfort level is with the career pathway endorsements that way so the next 75 minutes or so that we're going to be spending together we can kind of modify our approach to make sure that we're really meeting the needs of those in attendance today. So, it's a one question simple survey, again just asking you your comfort level, and Jason has just activated the survey so if you could just take a moment and submit that we would appreciate that. Give it another couple of minutes to hopefully get this is anonymous. So, if this is entirely new to you that's okay. But go ahead please and share where you're at. So, for those of you who have just joined us, since we kicked off here we will drop a sign off sign in link into the chat if you could take a moment to sign in, and we will kind of continue forward here with the content. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on that poll there. There the survey results you can see we've got people spread all across this and so hopefully we've got new and updated information for all of you as we go through it so we're going to kick off here today and I'm going to go a little bit out of order we'll talk in more detail in a moment about the post secondary and workforce readiness act. We probably should probably should actually be leading with that. So, Ben why don't I have you actually advance a few slides. So we can start at the beginning which is in 2016 with the post secondary and workforce readiness act a little bit further Ben. I'm sorry go back, I apologize to the. Okay, we apologize to everybody. Well with that said let me tell you about the post secondary and workforce readiness act that is really the key here, and that we, we had four main elements to that legislation which was passed unanimously in 2016 those four main elements were competency based education transitional instruction which today in Illinois we have both transitional math and transitional ELA transitional English language arts. The career pathway endorsements and the pace framework. This legislation which was passed through the general assembly HP 3296 this, this past spring was an update to the original post secondary and workforce readiness act. And so, this only addresses two of those four areas of the original post secondary and workforce readiness act, and those are the pace framework and the career pathway endorsements. What's important to understand here is the PWR act the post secondary and workforce readiness act was passed unanimously actually through the general assembly so members of both parties supported it back in 2016. It was signed into law by Governor Rauner, a Republican at that time and there are a number of reasons for this great support for it. Ultimately, though, it is critical to understand as educators in the field that it the majority of the elements of the act were not requirements they were. They weren't necessarily requirements for the Illinois State Board of Ed and other agencies like the Illinois Community College Board, and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission the Illinois Board of Higher Education to begin implementing, but they weren't necessarily requirements for local education agencies for school districts and community colleges to implement in in many of the cases of the portions of the act. Additionally, there was not necessarily additional funding to support that now over time there was there were grants that were kind of startup funds for different elements that were awarded in in a number of different ways. But that was the design of the original PWR act and so where we sit today is we've had three years, for example the career pathway endorsements. And that third year was finishing obviously on May 27, 2022 when Governor Pritzker signed this legislation into law, and this legislation does now require the adoption of the pace framework it also makes some other changes the framework which I'll talk about in a moment, and that stands for post post secondary and career exploration framework pace, as well as now requiring the college and career pathway endorsements to be offered by school districts. It's important to note that on the college and career pathway endorsement requirement there is an opt out provision where local school boards can vote at a regular school board meeting to opt out of this. But, but without doing that without actively taking that step as a school district, you are required and we'll talk about this in a second to move forward with implementing the career pathway endorsements. One of the great things that's coming out of HP 3296 is now it is requiring the fact this is past requires some additional rulemaking, and this is a wonderful opportunity for the team at the Illinois State Board of Education along with input from educators throughout the state to take what we've learned from the first few years of implementation and further define certain elements make make things a little bit more clear to make implementation. Easier or or at least more clear moving forward, Ben you advance the next slide please. So on the pace framework element, the pace framework makes one significant change the previous base foundational pace framework that you would find on the Illinois Student Assistance Commission website is currently grades eight through 12. It certainly taps into middle school and remember those are things that, by the end of those grade levels students should have learned and experienced or students and families should have learned and experienced. So that that could even happen in the current framework before eighth grade, the new framework now is required to go down to sixth grade. So it fully encompasses middle school and high school. In addition to the change in grade levels. Again all school districts are required to either adopt the the state provided framework which is in the process of being updated needs is required to be updated by the state agencies by July 1 of 2023. And, and your, you will be required to post either that version or your own version that you may have have written locally to your website and those adoption timeframes are the CPS is required to do it by July 1 of 2024. They have one year after the state is required to put out the new framework, and all other school districts must adopt their framework and begin implementing activities by July 1 2025. Obviously, in places the many places in Illinois where we have separate elementary districts and secondary districts. Certainly, while each district is required to do this you don't have to adopt the same framework. But if you want to create that alignment, as we hope you would for students, it does mean these conversations around the pace framework probably need to be beginning now across districts. I mean typically in those situations, you have one high school district with multiple elementary districts. And so everybody's going to need to come together to work to develop the framework to have kind of an ideal model if you want to develop it locally, or even if you want to adopt the states one, then you can go on to the next slide. So in the career pathway endorsements, there is one endorsement that districts must offer to their graduating class of 2027 so that's, that's really important to know 2027 sounds like a long way away to many of us it's it's five years from now. And when you think about that that is for the students who are who are graduating is 12th graders at that point. There's not a lot of time to get moving on this so if your district, like most districts in the state has not begun to move forward on this. Okay, but now is the time to to definitely start taking steps towards that and we'll talk about at the end today, what those steps might be, you have to offer two career pathway endorsements and that's in two different career pathways by 2029 and most districts in the state will have to offer three by 2031 the districts that will will not be required to go beyond to our districts with an enrollment of 350 or fewer fewer than 350 students in grades nine through 12 so if you are in a school with a small high school, you may be exempt from being required to offer that third endorsement by 2031 doesn't mean you can't offer it either though. This is an example of the current state pace framework. Again, this is in the process of being updated over the course the next 11 months, 10 months for school districts and is required to be published as a the new version by July 1 of 2023. And this is a great place to start if your school district is kind of like hey, where do we start with this college and career readiness work. There are very few people politically that are going to argue, oh, we don't want students and families learning about career exploration and development post secondary education exploration preparation and selection or financial aid and financial literacy. These are the three circles in the three circle Venn diagram you see in the lower left corner that are our central to the pace framework. They are also represented in throughout the pace framework with the little color dots next to each listed item throughout the framework so pace framework is a great place to start we do offer a full, full day administrator Academy on the pace framework that we when we deliver it online we deliver it as a half day. The Illinois Student Assistance Commission, it does provide leadership for the pace framework from among the agencies and there are a host of resources on their website as well. And, you know what I'm realizing we have not yet shared the link in the chat, I don't think for the slides so I'm going to up there it is, there's the link to the slide so perfect thank you so much for that. So let's move on. So a little bit more here about the career college and career pathways specifically. So, in Illinois you may be familiar with the career clusters that have been around for decades now career clusters are actually national. There are 16 career clusters nationally in Illinois we have 17 because we consider energy a career cluster and I would just share some my personal Illinois pride that's another example of place where we've been out in front of other states and recognizing the need for that well. While we can map each of those career clusters to a specific college and career pathway. There are fewer career pathways there only seven of these near agriculture food and natural resources, arts and communications, finance and business services, health sciences and technology, human and public services that's the one that we work in as educators, information technology, and manufacturing engineering technology and trades. And so there's number of reasons why the pathways were developed. And some of them are the practical like thinking about the wide range of schools in Illinois I mean this this summer worked with a district that has 51 high school students. Yesterday I was in a school district that in their one high school building in their single school district has 3500 students. So that is the range of high schools in Illinois for example. And for all of them to be able to offer something, the pathways have to be fairly, fairly broad on the one hand. On the other hand, the research also demonstrates that we're not looking for students to necessarily develop a major. When they select a pathway. We want this to be developmentally appropriate for 1617 and 18 year olds. But we do want them to dive in and learn quite a bit about that pathway that then still allows them to make further decisions within the pathway, moving forward, grounding those decisions in both the classroom and work based learning experiences that they've had in the pathway so the broadness of the pathways has has both practical benefits for the range of school districts we have and and frankly instructional benefits for where our students are at at this point in their life as middle school and high school students working through the pathways. Next slide Ben, thank you for each of the seven pathways. There's a set of competencies that has been written and these competencies were written by joint committees of teachers and educators excuse me and and business and business partners. So professionals in these fields Ben if you can go on to the next slide. And so again there are there are these competencies there are typically 10 competencies, some of them look a little different most of them are like this finance and business services competencies where it's just a list of the competencies. These competencies, some of them do look a little different again we saw in the human and public services education competencies that those had a different look to them. They were divided by the Danielson frameworks which of course, not all human and public services, utilize the Danielson frameworks. Certainly that's not the case, but the education is those those are written pretty specifically for education. And so, so that's, these are really important and I will explain why in just a second. Before I explain why these are the centerpiece though let's go on to the next slide and look at one other set of competencies. And these are the cross sector essential employability competencies these are also referred to for short as the essential skills. And so throughout in the regular world, people often refer to these as the soft skills. And one of the things we're going to do with all of you is challenge all of you to stop calling them the soft skills yourself, and to teach others, specifically other educators, in particular to stop calling them the soft skills, and to refer to them as the essential skills when we call them the soft skills. It has a little bit of an implication that they're kind of easy they're kind of less important. In fact, we know they are they are the most important skills to have to be successful, not only in any workplace, but also as a member of a community, particularly in a democracy. Additionally, they are not easy. These are the kind of skills that we annoy our colleagues when we're not good at them, or when we are good at them that our colleagues praise us up and down. And so they are they're essential they're critical, and they're very challenging to learn, and to learn them we should be discreetly taught them, we should have opportunities to practice them and get feedback on them. Ultimately, we should be assessed on them. So, all of the competencies are available at this link that I just shared and I apologize that I didn't give it a header there and you've also got it in your, in your slide deck so these right now will take you to Google Drive. There are eight competencies sets the cross sector essential employability competencies are the essential skills, and then the competencies for each of the seven career pathways. So, if you were one of the 449 12th graders in the class of 2022 in Illinois, who earned a career pathway endorsement. In turn hand that means you took a series of courses you completed to team based challenges you participate in a career development experience like an internship. And we're going to talk about all those things in just a moment, but more importantly what that endorsement is supposed to represent is that you have demonstrated proficiency. 10 technical competencies for that career pathway, as well as proficiency in the cross sector essential employability competencies, the essential skills. So really the endorsement is a recognition of your competency as a student across both these technical competencies and these essential skills. That is, this is this is absolutely central to everything else and we want everybody understanding that, first and foremost that when we award endorsements the question we need to be asking is, has the student, not only had the experiences that were required of them by the by the system but have they shown us that they can demonstrate all of these competencies. So, with this said, we haven't talked about the nuts and bolts of what goes into a career pathway endorsement yet and we will do that in the very next in the very next slide, but we have here. Jamboard and that is a Google tool if you have not used Jamboard previously. And on the Jamboard we do want to encourage you, not only right now, but throughout the rest of the session. If you have questions about the endorsement. Welcome to throw them in the chat we've got a fairly small group today that you can unmute yourself and and ask us, but we want you to grab a sticky. If you can have a question on the Jamboard and the left side there. I mean, then type in your question into into the sticky note and again we will we will get all of those questions answered either during this session and or after the session then. Thank you, Jason. So as Jason mentioned as we kind of continue through the various components today. If anything comes to mind feel free to use that Jamboard or the chat or just unmuting and asking questions because we want to make sure we give you an opportunity to get the things on your mind out so that we can get you answers to those. So, since Jason provided us with the brief overview of what the career pathway endorsements are in some of the legislation, centering around or requiring some of those things in college and career pathway endorsements. So let's go into the framework now which is as Jason said really the nuts and bolts of what's required to for a student to earn a career pathway endorsements, and it'll help you in your positions be able to plan to set up the things that are needed to make sure that we're offering those things to students. This next section of our time together we're really going to be focusing on answering this question. What is required for a student to earn a career pathway endorsements and the team at is beat has done a great job of providing some resources and some materials to help outline this process because as you're new to the process and new to the career pathway endorsements there's a lot of information and it can be hard to digest at times. So my first recommendation to all of you on the slide deck here is the information that I'm going to cover is all available on this is be career pathway endorsement page. I'll put the link in the presentation so you can access that later, but the majority of the nuts and bolts we're going to look at are really focused around what components are required. And what does a student need to do to be able to accomplish each of those components in a career pathway endorsement that's outlined under the framework section on this page. In addition to that there is a lot of other great resources like news and updates related to this. Office hours which we'll talk about a little bit later there for those of you who are further in the process and ready to apply. There's information on that. And then there's other great resources such as a crosswalk between those national level career clusters and the college pathway endorsements and those categories within the state of Illinois so lots of things are available for you here in the framework that we're going to be diving into here is directly from this, the resources and materials provided on the is the site. So, what is required in a career pathway endorsement. This illustration here provides you a simple visual of the different components that are required for students to complete to earn a career pathway endorsements. The first thing is each student must have an individual career plan, which kind of outlines their career goals helps prepare them to accomplish those goals and be ready for post secondary education that might be necessary for whatever their career goal is. And then in the middle here the other components are professional learning career focused instruction and academic readiness and we'll jump into those in a little bit more detail in the next slides because we have another way to show these to you. And if a student is able to go through and meet the requirements of all these areas when they receive their diploma, they would then be eligible to receive that career pathway endorsements. This, again, is outlining those four main areas that are required in the framework on the is the resource site that I shared with you. These are presented side by side because the first one is the visual representation of what is required. And then this is a great tool or material to reference back to because this allows you to look at the four different areas, and it indicates timing of when these things should be occurring throughout the students time in high school so you can see here for professional learning, for example, it outlines what the requirements are in a ninth and 10th grade we should be having career exploration activities, and an 11th and 12th grade we should be focusing on that internship or career development experience. So it gives you a little bit more of a timeline as you're implementing your planning or ensuring that you have everything in place to make sure that you're able to offer students what's needed for the career pathway endorsements. We will discuss all the requirements in these in a little bit different view so I'm not going to go into a ton of detail here, but did want to share this with you because it is really beneficial and helpful to kind of see the timeframe that's recommended for each component of the career pathway endorsement. Right, so jumping in a little bit deeper. We are now going to look at each of those components of the framework and discuss a high level what it means. So we're not going to get down into the weeds too far but I do want to make sure that we provide everyone with an overview of each area. So that way you have an understanding of those components in the framework. So the first component carried over from that illustration is an individual plan. And as I mentioned previously the individual plan is specific to the student outlining what their career goals are the steps that they might need to take to be prepared for their post secondary goals and helping ensure that they are ready for the education at the secondary post secondary level. So this is a plan that's outlining their career goals and the education that they would have to follow post secondary to move in the direction of accomplishing those career goals. The next component here is our career focused instructional sequence which we will refer to as our course sequence. And here the key components that we need to call out is that you have to have two years of coursework related to the career pathway. And at least six hours of those must be early college credit. So typically that would be through dual credit but there are other ways which we'll discuss as we go through. But just ensuring that we have that course sequence in place focused on at least two years of coursework related to the career pathway with those early college credit courses available to students also. And in just a moment I'll show you a sample of what a couple of those course sequences might look like. So you have that visual support also for that. In addition to the career focused instructional sequence or the course sequence. We're going to make a recommendation that we start considering the team based challenges at that point. So team based challenges actually fall fall under a requirement of our professional learning which we'll transition to. But the team based challenges are situations in class where students must have authentic learning experiences where they are solving real problems in collaboration with some of their teammates or classmates. And this is something that is supervised by an outside adult mentor. So there's some interesting components there. This is where we start seeing some of our dependency on those business and compute community partnerships and the importance of building those early on to make sure we're supporting these things. But we would recommend as you are looking at your course sequence that you are considering where these team based challenges could fall within your course sequencing. And there's a couple different reasons for that. We'll discuss this again later but it makes it easier to track. It ensures accessibility to students. And in addition, a lot of times our CTE teachers or classwork already build these things in. So it's usually pretty easy to modify existing things to be able to successfully implement the team based challenges within and within the classwork. I just want to stop and add another very important, especially if your role is generally around instructional improvement if you've got a curriculum and instruction role if you're a building leader who's responsible for that. So the team based challenges represent that kind of hands on engaging instruction that that students just deeply fall in love with and that we frankly should be doing. Throughout the school day and throughout the school year and that's where the Ben's point our CTE classrooms our fine arts classrooms are examples of classrooms that stereotypically come closer to looking like this or do look like this on a regular basis. In this case and remember this course sequence is not necessarily CTE courses the career pathway endorsement is not a CTE specific initiative. The career pathway endorsement is a broad based curricular initiative and you may have courses in the course sequence that traditionally have sat in a science or social science department or math department or an ELA department and that's awesome. And so if your team based challenge exists in one of those courses, it's an example of this really hands on kind of learning what you get then is, you get this opportunity where the team based challenge can lead to the kind of whole school instructional that most of us are trying to and want to promote to begin with. So when, when I have a student to whom my buddy also has the previous period, and every day the student is all of a sudden coming and talking to you about the class before mine. And then I'm eventually going to say that colleague of mine hey, what are you doing with, you know, with your students the period before mine and they'll say ah, it, I'm doing this team based challenge it's, you know, the kids are like taking it and running with it and that's how that's how word spreads about about this kind of work in this kind of environment, and it's not only incredibly beneficial for students but we believe it's it's fundamentally beneficial for teachers. It can raise teacher efficacy level and job satisfaction levels, and really be pretty critical to all kinds of things not only improving learning but solving the teacher shortage positive school environments etc. Because having the team based challenges embedded in in courses in the course sequence has all of these benefits that that been articulated and I've just shared here now with that said, can you do a team based challenge for example through one of the CTSO is one of the career and student organizations. Yeah, many of the kinds of activities and those would count as a team based challenge not all of them, but many would but again now you're asking students to be in another activity you're creating some equity issues you're creating some, some time issues. And that would be the track of what challenges which students did separately from keeping track of their course enrollments and their grades that you're already doing. So you're, you absolutely can do that there's some awesome work happening in, in many if not all of the CTSOs, but it, it does create some extra complications, then thanks so much. Thanks Jason. Alright, so moving on to the next component of the framework. We look at professional learning and professional learning is really where students start to gain that awareness and have an opportunity to jump in and see what the career they're interested in is all about. So this, if you look back at the timeline is really typically divided into a couple different components with one being career awareness activities. And then in that junior senior year 11 12th grade, looking at that career development experience with or the 60 hour internship where students are actually out working in the workplace and seeing what that's about. The team based challenges categorized into professional learning as we just talked about. So in this area, we can see the importance of ensuring that we have established an impactful business and community partnerships because it's going to be essential to be able to offer our students with the professional learning requirements of the career pathway endorsements, whether it is having individuals come in as mentors in the team based challenge, whether it's helping with career exploration activities, or whether it's ensuring that we have those stronger business and community partnerships in place. So that way we are able to offer students the internships through some of those partnerships. Business and community partnerships are always important and beneficial to students when we utilize those in ways that are impactful in the classroom. But this is a prime example of an area that having those strong relationships in place is going to be essential to successful college career college pathway endorsements in your schools or districts. And then the final component we have in the framework here is the academic readiness component. And what academic readiness means is that the student receiving the career pathway endorsements is prepared to enter and complete college coursework at in English and math at a non remedial level. So when the students receiving the pathway, it's important that we're ensuring this and there's a variety of ways we can do this so typically one of the things that we lean to that's easiest for a lot of schools is utilizing transitional math or transitional English as a coursework that indicates those individuals are academically ready for that college level coursework in English and math. That doesn't mean that that's the only option and we would encourage you if there are other things such as AP courses or dual credit classes that might be occurring that when you apply for your career pathway endorsement through is be that you list all of those options that students have to show that academic readiness. One other thing is Jason mentioned earlier that there's some rulemaking that's going to be taking place in through that rulemaking process, there will be some clarification on other factors that could indicate academic readiness. Such as potentially placement testing or SAT scores or something of that nature those are things that have come into discussion, and there will be an opportunity for public comments as that is taking place so just kind of keep your eyes out there and know that right now. The understanding of academic readiness in is an indication that those students are prepared for that college level non remedial coursework in those areas. So I had mentioned a few moments ago that we would take a look at a couple core sequences here. And we have two different ones that we're going to look at they'll have a little bit different view but you can see that in both of these core sequences we're going to share this first one for manufacturing engineering technology and trades from Lake Zurich Community School District is really focused on an engineering path, and although there's only four classes here they're meeting the requirements of having the two years of core sequencing. In addition to having the early college credit opportunities built into the course sequence you can see here that these last two classes senior engineering in advanced engineering honors dual credit are both dual credit classes which would meet that requirements. They have the internship recognized here as a requirement to get that career pathway endorsement also. And then the next one we have here is from Township High School District 211. Again, it's a manufacturer engineering technology and trades. A little bit different look but you can see the progression that's required for the course sequencing, and they also have I want to call out that they also have built in the dual credit coursework to meet the early college credit requirements in the coursework that's going to take place prior to that internship. So, wanted to show you these examples to help with the visual representation of what that core sequencing might look like. By no means did I intend for you to say this is what it has to be or this is what it should be. I want you to just kind of look at the process and use utilize this to get your mind starting to grasp around what you offer and what would make sense for the programs within your schools. So, with that, talking about the prerequisites for career pathway endorsement success. This is really just a recap of a few of those things that either Jason or myself is called out as we've reviewed high level the career pathway endorsements, as well as the framework. First off, if you do not have dual credit in place that's an area that you would want to focus some efforts to ensure that we're able to offer those early college credit courses to students in the course sequence. If you do not have dual credit courses in place that's okay, it's recognizing that and understanding that that's an area to focus some efforts to start. And if you do have something in place, seeing how you could potentially expand that in a way that's beneficial to future career pathway endorsements. I mentioned business and community partnerships a few times, continuing to focus on what your partnerships are currently, how those are utilized and then how you're able to expand those business and community partnerships to involve those partners or individuals from the field into the activities and the team based challenges, as well as expanding internship and work based learning opportunities for students is key upfront because that's not something that's going to happen. Over the course of a week, it takes some time to establish and build those so ensuring that you're focusing on that upfront is a great starting point also. And then, as we just talked about academic readiness ensuring that you have courses in place that allow students to demonstrate academic readiness is important on a separate note here the team based challenges, thinking about how you might incorporate those in the sequence and what courses they might make the most sense in and how you can modify things to really have authentic team based challenges of high quality built into your career pathway endorsements. I'm going to jump in here and answer one of the questions that we have in the Jamboard and thank you for the questions you put in the Jamboard there are a number of really outstanding questions there already. So the question is how can team based challenges be conducted in classes where students are engaging in a variety of career pathways or their career clusters within classrooms. So Ben if we can go back a couple slides to let's go to the lake Zurich yep. There you go. So for example, in in Lake Zurich community unit school district 95 in engineering design course the second course in the sequence I 289 is their internal Lake Zurich course code number for it. They've done a team based challenge where they partner with Baxter on a on a product of medical device that that goes in that in hospitals it's one of those devices on carts that can be next to a hospital bed and hooked up to the patient and easily move from one room to another. And, and it's a device that they're they're constantly re looking at making improvements to based on feedback from the field from nurses and doctors from technicians for large hospital systems who are certified by Baxter to work on devices like that. And so that is a that's a team based challenge they they work with someone from Baxter directly on what the problem is that person gives them feedback on their their designs that they're implementing the students give each other feedback and then ultimately they have to. They've designed something in in under within the budget constraints within the manufacturing parameters to improve upon the product based on the feedback that's already come from the field. Again, then what's happening also with this is the students designs are taken back to Baxter. They're taken back to the actual engineers working on on the project or the other engineers working on the project as as part of that and the students designs may ultimately influence that that work or or may appear within that work in some final form. So the answer here is not all of the students in that engineering design class of course will complete this full course sequence. Certainly not all of them will engage in internships, but they're all doing that team based challenge as a regular part of the course. And so, could you have a student in that engineering design class who's also who's actually pursuing a career pathway in arts and communications. It's possible. Absolutely I mean we certainly know if you, if you own a smartphone you can see it because the background but if you own a smartphone, you know the overlap between design and and and the artistic side of it and so hopefully that answers the question is within a course, you're going to use a team based challenge oftentimes typically when I've worked on this with individual teams of teachers and specific school districts. Take, we've often taken an existing unit and and said well what are the authentic problems that students can solve around this. And so they're covering existing curriculum from that class in a new way, or in some cases in a slightly modified way again in many classrooms. They're just missing one key component like they haven't partnered with an outside community and business partner to work with on this project and that is a requirement to the team based challenge so hopefully that answers that question. As we did I will tell you the NIU Illinois CTE project team and Heather Lucan from the SB team we did meet last week and start the process of identifying exemplar team based challenges and we're moving forward with talking with those school districts about their exemplar team based challenges and so there will be more resources available throughout this fall to help school districts develop their own team based challenges, as well as specific trainings that we'll be doing over time to help people with team based challenges. Back to you Ben. Thanks Jason. Alright, so the last component that I'm going to kind of cover high level here before we toss it back to Jason to kind of give you guys an opportunity to look at the planning tools and start doing some reflection of where you might be at is just reinforcing what does an endorsement mean. So if a student receives a career pathway endorsement that indicates a couple things. The first thing is that that student has successfully completed all the requirements in the framework that was just outlined here so all the professional learning, all the career focus instruction, all the academic readiness requirements in addition to having their individual plan have they've successfully met the requirements of that as one component of receiving the career pathway endorsements. In addition to that, as Jason mentioned earlier on, if a student receives a career pathway endorsement it's indicating that those students have shown proficiency in those technical competencies competencies related to that specific pathway. In addition, it's also indicating that they've shown proficiency in those essential skills that were discussed earlier. So, a student who completes a career pathway endorsement to somebody in the workforce looking to hire an individual. What that means is that that that individual that student has successfully met all the requirements, but also shown proficiency in both their technical competencies specific to the pathway, as well as those essential skills. And that should be beneficial as they're looking to continue on and meet the goals that were outlined in their career plan. So with that being said, I'm going to toss it back over to Jason Jason to take the next part here. You did, I apologize about that being muted. Before we go into this section I want to call out another one of the questions here and that's how are colleges looking at this if at all for admissions. So you're going to hear a little bit about this I'm going to start by saying, I don't know of any colleges or universities in Illinois that are looking at the endorsements for admissions, but they are looking at the endorsements where at the beginning stages of colleges and universities, looking at the endorsements for other things, things like scholarships things like participation and activities. And so I that would be my answer that question. There's one other question I want to answer. Before we move on and that's within a nursing pathway within can and that's really a health sciences and technology is the pathway, but if it's got a focus specifically on nursing, and that's very common that's one of our two most commonly issued pathway endorsements through the first three years of this along with human and public services with a focus on education. The biology count as an introductory course or a level one course and so what happens here is you submit your course sequences as part of your application process to is be. And, and that's how that's how that gets answered and again, one of the things we're hoping to do is put out more examples of course sequences. Again, your course sequence has to have two years of coursework aligned with the career pathway at least I should say at least two years of coursework and included with that there has to be opportunities for at least six hours of early college credit which is typically two of the courses in the course sequence need to include early college courses. So, then if you bought back let's go again to that Lake Zurich example because it's a little bit lighter. And there we are. And so you can see there it's it's just noted on those last two courses in the sequence once in DC, and one says dual CR. Those are both dual credit courses. So those are both the early college credit courses the H and the H O N reflect that within Lake Zurich system those are also considered honors courses and so that that gives you an answer to that so if we are Ben excuse me if we can go back to where we are that would be great. Okay, so what is in it for students. Number one, this is the most important thing and a few years ago we weren't saying it quite like this but it's become really clear. We've now had over 500 students in the first three years are in the pathway endorsement. It's been a tenfold increase from year one to year two, and another tenfold increase from year two to year three. So there's significant uptick on this. And one of the things I want to point out is the school districts that have offered endorsements, literally range from the northern edge of the state to the southern edge of the state, and from from very large school districts to very small school districts. So this is something that is accessible to to school districts throughout Illinois, and the most important thing that students can take away from this that earning that endorsement supports them with is that they've mastered all of these competencies. So they've mastered the technical competencies which is awesome if they move straight into the workforce or if they continue their education a community college or a university in classes that will tend to tend to be focused on that career pathway they're going to be a step ahead of others, whether it's new employees or classmates. Additionally, the essential skills. Everybody needs to have mastered those and that is an area that we all continue to have a lot of work to do for our students that is very hard thing to teach is very hard thing to make super relevant to middle school and high school students, unless the work that they're doing is super relevant. And so in most schools and school districts, we're not there yet so number one most important thing is the mastery of these competencies and essential skills. Number two, you have a much greater likelihood of being the one that is identified through an interview or a job application process if you have those skills that that are listed in number one. And then you have a much greater likelihood of frankly being successful in in the workplace if you've got all of these competencies that you're really proficient at and so that's really critical. You can flip one more. Number three, as I mentioned with the question in the in the Jamboard, you do have increased post secondary opportunities so here in all of these cases there's actually financial benefits. In the Rock Valley Community College, for example, between Dixon sterling, they offer money to anybody who's earned an endorsement in any of the seven pathways, and then money can be used and spent on anything from tuition to books. So you could you could choose to use it to buy spirit wear school clothing at the bookstore if you want. Southern Illinois University's College of Education Chicago State University and Golden Apple all offer movement in their scholarship processes to students who have earned endorsements. For example, in all three of these cases you are automatically a finalist for scholarships. If you have earned in a human and public services career pathway endorsement with a focus on on teaching on education for example what that finalist looks like as it means you move to the interview process now as these numbers go up, might some of that change maybe on the other hand, as these numbers go up, might there be other policy supports that community colleges and universities can look towards to further incentivize and support students who've earned these endorsements. Additionally, you are going to have other kinds of post secondary opportunities. I've talked about if you have these competencies, when you walk in the door, that's going to put you ahead of your classmates, and it may make things more available to you much more quickly. And for example in a four year university setting, give you more opportunities more years of being able to do those things and higher levels of responsibility which will increase your learning and increase your job opportunities. So where do you start as a school district. Go ahead and move forward so first of all. The idea here is that you should start with with what the workforce requires in your community. And so you should start with workforce needs and labor market data. I'm sure you should start but what our recommendation is is that the pathway you should start with for your very first pathway is the one that's most efficient for you to implement. So that may mean it's one where you already have early college credit coursework, you might have dual credit courses in a particular pathway, and teachers who are potential to teach those courses, you might have partnerships already with community partners that you can leverage for internships in a particular pathway. Those kinds of things are going to be critical because there are a lot of details and that first pathway, kind of get under your belt to make sure you're confident with. So that would be one of our recommendations from a school change perspective. In the long run, yes, you absolutely want to pay attention to things like labor market data and workforce needs and and devote your energy in those directions. And some of that energy is going to require for example getting teachers to be credentialed to be able to teach a dual credit dual credit course as an example in those areas that that might take a couple of years to do. And that's why starting this work now is really, really important so that you're prepared to hit those 2027 and 2029 targets. Next slide Ben. Any requisites I was just mentioning, do you have dual credit courses do you already have a relationship with your community college, if not, start there, that is a place to start now. Do you are you required to have dual credit courses, you are not required to have dual credit courses AP or IB courses can also count and some will work perfectly so like AP computer science totally fits within the it pathway the information technology career pathway, but there are many others that may or may not be as good a fit because they're more general education course work at the at the post secondary level. And then same thing again, do you have business and community partnerships have you started to plan for the logistics and details around internships. I think that that must be covered include everything from transportation to insurance students schedule during the day when are when are they going to their internship. Are they being paid for their internship if they're being paid where's the money coming from for that. Again, typically students always earn credit school credit for their internships, but they can be paid which is awesome. Because if there is money there to pay a student and some community and business partners are very interested in doing that because the internship is very authentic. So if that's possible that's great that takes away a barrier for some students. Now they don't have the choice between working at a job after school or doing the internship, because they'll get paid through the internship so these are some of the things that are part of the conversations that you can begin having at any time now that that don't directly relate to oh we have to build out the course sequence, but they're we're calling them prerequisites and the reason we're calling them this is because what we've seen is many of the most of the early adopting school districts with the career pathway endorsements, they had already been working with dual credit and had partnerships with their community college. They're doing internships and and we're growing their number of business and community partners and so if you don't have those things in place, you just need to spend some time getting those things in place as well. And we want to acknowledge those are complex things to undertake, even on their own. And then you can always focus on the team based challenges with professional development time it's never too soon to start looking at how you would support teachers with developing these really exciting authentic learning units and experiences and lessons into their classrooms we know so much of the the research around around instruction and learning centers on the exact same practices that are frankly deeply embedded in the team based challenge so start there and again we talked about this earlier Ben and I talked about these three things earlier today in addition Ben mentioned earlier that you know for many CTE teachers, the nature of what a team based challenge looks like in the classroom is typically not a big lift that most of the companies that many CTE teachers are doing in their in their cooking labs in their culinary classes in their autos labs in their entrepreneurship classes these things already have the hallmarks of team based challenges in most cases. Now things that typically when when I've been lucky enough to work with teachers and developing their own team based challenges, what have been the biggest things that we've tended to focus on in that work. One is what is who is that partner that they're working at and and specifically what's the authentic problem that the partners bring to them. What's the partners level of involvement I mean most partners for a for a two week unit can't come to fourth period every day for two weeks. So when and how is the partner involved in kicking off the team based challenge in giving students feedback as they're working through the team based challenge, and then in in seeing the final products are listening to final presentations and giving feedback on those. And the second area that that typically we've spent a ton of time on has been around assessing the competencies and so we have a question there about how have other districts taught practice and assess these competencies. I was in a I was lucky enough to be in a school district just yesterday working with high school teachers on the essential skills specifically and there are some real low lift things that are high powered things you can do to to teach and assess the essential skills. One is simply picking one or two essential skills for a particular unit that you're going to focus on. A second thing that you can do is really deeply engage in student self reflection on their progress towards that essential skill. Instead of rating that self reflection, give students feedback on that self reflection whether it's written, or whether it's through one on one conferences student teacher conferences. We actually had a request that I wasn't going to to share with Heather and the SB team until tomorrow morning but she'll hear it now. Specifically, we have one of those teachers already has the you can't see my posted from yesterday there it is one of those teachers already has the essential skills posted in their classroom, but they would like posters. And so I don't know if we'll be able to solve that quickly or easily for all 852 school districts in Illinois, but it's a great, it's a great question so those are examples. What I can't say is no one I've worked with is using a canned program. People are trying to tie it in directly into coursework and classrooms. There are of course many schools that have advisories that were also dabbling with with the essential skills in particular, but the key there is how our students, especially adolescents, especially middle school and high school students, how are they engaging with it in authentic ways. If it's like oh it's advisory time today we're going to talk about planning and organizing. All of you know as well as I do that the I roles are going to come out, even if the students have a great relationship with that teacher. It's like, here we go, you know, and so on the other hand when they have to learn to be good at planning and organizing to solve a problem they want to solve. So that's a really great opportunity to teach them how to plan to teach them how to organize to have them reflect on how well they're planning and organizing to give them some tips on what might be a better way to plan and organize. Then what they're currently doing in the course that project so again that's a great question. So we've got some planning tools and then I'll come back to some other questions here before we wrap up and go on to the next slide. Then. I'm going to go in here and then if you can drop the link in the chat to the to do list. We've got this is an example of a one page to do list that has been very popular with school districts as a starting point. One of the places it's great and we've got the question in here about how aware district leaders in Illinois of the new requirements and I would say it varies I mean there's district leaders who who know this backwards and district leaders who've never heard the words post-secondary and workforce readiness act and career pathway endorsements. I think that second group is getting significantly smaller as groups like IASA and IPA are also sharing information. I did a series last year for Midwest principal center that was very well attended on all four elements of the post-secondary and workforce readiness act. So there's a lot of efforts being made not only by us and by the State Board of Ed themselves but by other groups to get the word out. But this one page to do list has been very popular too because it's a great thing to print off if if I'm an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction and I'm sitting down with the high school principal and the superintendent here is like boom it is all in one page to say well this is what we need to do to offer the endorsements. And so this is a great starting point and we would encourage this to also be a conversation starter who are the people in your district if it's a big district. That's one kind of question who are the department chairs who need to know about this who in the counseling department at the beginning needs to know about this eventually all the counselors and probably all the teachers will need to know about it but that may not be necessary. And day one if you're in a smaller district. There's not as many people to pass it around and so who's who's going to take the lead on it and and get to really know it and understand it and so this document this one page document is a great starting place there. We can go on to the next slide. So, we also have a longer document that is linked in the header of this slide. And this is meant to be a document that if you're one of the people actually leading the work, you make a copy of this document, and you start moving stuff around or you add additional to do is, and you write notes like we need to connect and so at the community college or we need to go to the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary meeting and just present to them on this new state initiative. And, and so this is the kind of document that would be great for an efe director to bring in, do a little workshop around, letting all the districts really just come in, and, and kind of work through this document with a planning team. The questions here, as you look at this document are these questions that we're going to ask you to reflect on for a moment, which prerequisites are in place already in your district. Who needs to be involved in your district organization I'll add to that, who needs to be involved in other organizations as well. Which tasks will be easier for your organization, and which tasks will be more difficult for your organization. Take a moment just to think about that and certainly feel free to drop items into the Jamboard or into the chat as well. We want to transition back to the Jamboard and before we, before we do this and there, there are as Bill pointed out earlier there are two more slides in the Jamboard itself there's the arrows on the top in the middle of the, of the Jamboard says one of four, and you can click the arrow to go to two, which is what takeaways or learnings have you gained from this situation. Three, what questions. Do you still have about the career pathway endorsements and we're going to answer some questions here in just a moment, and then for us just a blank slide someone accidentally added so you can ignore that. I do have an edit rights on this for the moment will will turn that off either this evening or tomorrow so that we can capture this and ensure there's no mistakes but go ahead and and throw things on here and while you do that I am going to answer. A few of the other a few of the other questions. One question is our students aware of them and to what level that would be completely dependent on whether or not your school district is making students aware of them so yes there are school districts with students are absolutely aware of them and currently there are school districts where this starts getting talked about with eighth graders and their families as hey here are things you can do and it's talked about on a regular basis through eighth and ninth and into 10th grade and students are making choices and ninth and 10th grade to participate but that is that's very dependent on on the school district. I'll answer these questions on on Jamboard page three to on the third board in there. Is there a form or template for schools to follow for proposing a pathway. There is and that's on the is b website. Ben had that actually up on screen in slide number. Let me look in slide number I don't know why I'm not finding it right now is fairly early on. Jason I also just dropped the link in the chat to that page that I was referencing earlier. Wonderful so on the is b web page. Here it is the pathway endorsement page thank you so much. The this is the page that has the links and the information about the application process. There is also this is the page that lists office hours and again, we want to give a shout out to Heather for the work she's done, adding the office hours as a common feature for the agency in the area of the endorsements and I cannot tell you if I had a dollar for everybody who told me that the office hours were extremely helpful for them. I'd buy all of you dinner tonight because it is that is said to me all the time so take advantage of that. Like our school districts are state agencies are not overstaffed, my opinion. And, and so this is a way that Heather really is trying to extend there we go thank you so much to provide that support with office hours and that can help you with the application process that is also detailed on the page, which is also linked at the bottom of that the slide that the Ben has on screen. So, again, there's question here for the, for the course sequence is it only acceptable to have dual credit. So no, I can be any kind of early college credit which can include advanced placement. International baccalaureate dual enrollment can also work. And can there be certifications the certifications. Absolutely, there can be industry credentials that are earned, but that's separate from the early college credit so I just want to make that distinction. So, there are definitely lots of places well, one of our two biggest categories is again I mentioned this earlier health sciences and technology. And in that category, most students that are in the endorsement are also earning their certified nursing assistant certification. And so those students are coming out their CNA their endorsement, their early college credit. So they're coming out with multiple things work experience through the internship. So you can see how it's, it's very, very beneficial and load students up with a lot of supports. And in addition to I again I would argue most importantly proficiency with the competencies. So we do want to encourage you to throw some throw items into the Jamboard if you have things you want to share questions you still have. Otherwise, I'm going to turn it over to to Ben to help wrap us up and in just a minute, I will be dropping a little bit more very important link in the chat but I will call out if you have not signed in. Please make sure you go ahead and sign in by clicking the link up above for sign in. All right, well, on behalf of the nio CTE team as well as the is the CTE and innovation team want to thank you again for being here today, spending your early evening with us kind of diving into this a little bit more. So we're able to continue to progress the work that's being done. Just a couple quick call outs is we would ask you guys complete the evaluation that Jason just dropped the link in the chat to. So please take a few minutes to do that we would ask that you are able or we're going to allow some time in here today for you to be able to do that before the time ends we will stay present. If you have any questions coming out of that we're happy to answer some of those questions. The other thing that I want to highlight is, we talked to high level today a lot about a lot of the different components of the framework in the career pathway endorsements. So I'm going to drop in the chat the professional learning calendar that outlines all the different is BCTE professional learning. That's already we dropped it in already you're good. But just encourage you to take a look at that to see what's being offered. It is a comprehensive list it is a growing in live document so you can always access back to this to see when there's additional professional learning opportunities being added. And you'll see on there as you kind of look through that there is more content or focus topics where we do a little bit deeper dive on some of those things that were touched at a high level today as requirements of the framework. The final note that I have is just to let you guys know that we will be sending out the professional development our evidence sheets tomorrow to everyone who signed in so if you did not sign in please make sure that you sign in, and that was in attendance for the session today. And then we're happy to stay on and we'll we'll stay on until after you complete that evaluation in case there's any questions otherwise I would ask you to click on that evaluation link that Jason shared provide some feedback with us our goal is to ensure that we're continuing to grow in these professional development sessions and then it's impactful to those people who are attending. So thank you again for attending and I'll hang out. If there's any questions or anything.