 So hi everybody we are recording today while we are recording you are welcome to use either the chat to ask questions or comments. Rodrigo and I will both be keeping our eyes open there, as well as unmute yourself and interrupt at any time. We're super excited to have Marcy Johnson joining us, the leader of the Illinois State Board of Education, CTE and Innovation Team. Marcy, if you have any comments you'd like to share to kick us off you're welcome to do so at this point. Welcome. Thank you all for joining. It's going to be interesting for you to see and hear all the different things that Jason's team has found from their research, and hopefully it'll give us another insight onto next steps for what we're going to do. So we're excited to have you here and how we can always increase that quality of education for career technical education so thank you. Awesome well thank you Marcy and thank you to Marcy and her whole team for all the behind the scenes work that they're doing for students throughout the state we did just drop into the chat. We have Google Form asking you to fill that out. So we, we do know who was here. That'll be great if there are follow-ups from today. There is one follow-up today that will be excited to share with you and that's the actual publication of this report we'll be posting that and sharing that out in a variety of, through a variety of ways over the next couple of weeks here. So you can look forward to actually getting your hands on the report itself and and reading it. So right here on the title slide. This is actually a screenshot of part of the cover of the report. High quality CTE what the literature says about standards curriculum instruction and partnerships. And so this is a really interesting process to go through and we first wanted to talk about the, the purpose of this and the purpose of this report was to provide background information really internally for the Illinois State Board of Education and Northern Illinois University teams to consider on evaluating curriculum and standards and instructional materials on planning professional learning to serve alongside the kinds of conversation we have with practitioners, the data collection from practitioners and the data collection that we do with student data and the analysis of that data to identify priorities. So that's all of those conversations and as we started approaching the end of this, this work, we, we realized there was a lot of stuff here and we knew there would be a small but significant group of CTE leaders and other curriculum and instruction around the state who might be interested in having this either right off the bat or at some point in the future based on the kind of work that might be taking place regionally or in their school district or school building itself that this would be a good resource. So we decided to shift it from being an internal document to something that we that we share and make that internal document available publicly. So today is is another piece of that the intention was just to publish the document we said well, people are busy people learn in different ways and at different times, why don't we also share via webinar as well and so that's what we're doing today is really just an overview of what is contained within the document itself. You may have questions that we don't have answers to you may have questions that are questions that we share, you may have comments, any of those are welcome today as part of the sharing process so what this document is is it's not original research and that we didn't go out to make teachers and students or administrators we didn't collect a new metric of data to create this document it wasn't a study like that per se instead. It was both a literature review and a landscape analysis nationally that took place of what different states for doing those two things occupy two different spaces but they came together, and that's how this document was created. So, again, it's a foundation for all of these things first and foremost for supporting high quality outcomes for all of our students across Illinois, we're an extraordinarily diverse state, we offer extraordinarily diverse CTE programs, and we know that the CTE team wants no state to do it better than it's done in Illinois and and we want that to be true in every corner of our state for all of our students and so this provides some of that coverage for how we will get there how we will continue that work that so many people are doing around the state have been doing for years and decades. It will also, as I mentioned these things specifically help us with our work around standards and curriculum our work around re examining existing instructional materials and developing new instructional materials. It will certainly help us focus our professional learning. You will see, we've already heard that one of the big things that emerged unsurprisingly to all of us in the CTE space is the importance of partnerships and some more specific focus around what what is key for those partnerships so we hope that this helps us support everybody in developing meaningful and relevant supportive partnerships that are two ways locally between community and business partners and schools and districts and community colleges and other institutions that they're partnering with. And then the other thing that that maybe we hadn't anticipated this first four, four points on this list for all things we, we intended the last two were things that emerged very clearly while doing the work and so there needs to be an ongoing research agenda, not just in Illinois, but nationally, though of course, we want to do some of that research as we do some of the implementation work that we're doing around the state. So, the first thing we did is we said, we need to define CT and advanced CT, there's a lot of ways you can define CT advanced CT has a great definition, certainly a different levels of government do define it the federal government state governments define CT, it's it is defined in many ways by the Perkins Act. But here's advanced CT is a portion of its definitions that CT provides students of all ages with the academic and technical skills skills knowledge and training necessary to succeed in future careers and to become lifelong learners, and there's two call outs from that that we wanted to point out. The second thing is that in the advanced CT definition it calls out all ages. The second is that calls out academic and technical skills and certainly in Illinois this concept of academic and technical skills has been at the forefront of not just CT conversations but certainly conversations secondary and post secondary education over the last five to 10 years is focused on that the all ages though thing is one of the things we think is really important. One of the, one of the aspects that we were excited about in launching this partnership or being granted the opportunity to be a partner of the agency was that the CTE team it is be understood that this wasn't a high school only offering within our educational system and that it was much more expansive than that and that aligned extraordinarily well with the work of both NIU steam and the Illinois P 20 network and that's why we did want to call out this definition and we think it's it's particularly important and even maybe takes on a heightened importance with the passage of legislation that was signed into law multiple pieces of legislation signed into recent weeks following this last legislative session by Governor Pritzker certainly the pace framework specific call out in in the legislation, building that out further at the middle school level. And on the flip side, there was some post secondary legislation that was passed that ties together the system of career and technical education for all students and for all learners so the all ages important call out for our work here in Illinois. Oops, excuse me. So, most of you on this call know this but central to the definition in Illinois is the seven career pathways. And additionally, we know nationally the 16 career clusters remain important in Illinois, we have the 17 career clusters because we consider energy a career cluster and as we've dealt with a very hot week this week at the beginning of the summer of 2022. I know I was I experienced working through a power outage just last night for a few hours and so having energy as its own career cluster is increasingly important and again in a state with our diverse natural resources it's also very interesting topic that offers students and schools and academic institutions all levels a lot of opportunity, but both of these fit together as part of that broader definition of what CTE is. And we want to remember something like the career pathways that is not just the CTE structure that is also a structure that can define how schools are organized or be an important component of school organization beyond traditional academic subjects or departments and so in that way, it does call out the importance of CTE for all students, just like we know that having strong literacy skills and strong math skills are important for all students. So the Perkins five act is part of the definition also Perkins five funds over a billion dollars annually. And many of you that are here with us live today are very well aware of Perkins five and again Perkins five provides a lot of the structure in which the CTE work needs to take place. Further in Illinois we have the post secondary and workforce readiness act. It has four components for key components. It was passed into law in 2016. Two of those are up on screen the other two transitional instruction both transitional math and transitional English language arts, as well as moving towards a competency based approach to learning a sit alongside the career pathway endorsements and as I just mentioned a moment ago the pace framework. These two were most recently called on legislation signed into law just a couple weeks ago by Governor Pritzker to support and expand these offerings in schools throughout the state of Illinois. So the PWR act and the aforementioned Perkins five act there is alignment between these act acts and they provide a lot of the definition for where and how those Perkins funds ought to be spent for how we're closing equity gaps for our students and for what kinds of outcomes we're trying to achieve and of course broadly those outcomes are career opportunities for all students and the ability to succeed with whatever the necessary post secondary steps are in the short term and or the long term for those students to be successful in those careers. So, in doing this work, one of the big things that we stumbled upon that we spent a lot of time working through was that there's some real limits to what research is available in CT. There's no shortage of writing about CT of literature about CT but in terms of actual research and one of the ways we define that here is the federal what works clearing house which has been around for approximately 20 years now, and serves to really try and identify high quality educational research and elevate that within within the field, looking at some other important topics. You can see early childhood education drop out prevention English learners, dozens of studies sitting in the what works clearing over the last 20 years, CT there are two what works clearing house studies that are there so this is a topic that is right for additional work, anybody pursuing a doctorate. Certainly something that we've talked about at our institution with doctoral candidates everything from teacher recruitment and retention to instructional strategies both in and outside of the CT classroom. So, there's a lot of work that can be done in this space and we had we had hoped going into this to really highlight. Pretty high level, high level research and bring it together and make it really accessible for again initially for our teams internally at the Illinois State Board of Education at Northern Illinois University. And yet one of the first things we came to find is there's just not a lot of that research that's available, unfortunately. So, some of the additional limits of and there is literature about the limits of CTE research or about the lack of CT research and some of the work that has been done in the space has been narrow and scope meaning it's not about CT broadly. It's about a specific area within CT, for example, family and consumer science or autos. And so it's hard to generalize broadly from that about about CTE as a category of it in and of itself. The work that has been done has has often featured relatively small sample sizes, and unfortunately and I'm afraid that this will will ring true with with too many people who are either with us live or will watch this later on. The efforts in this space have been largely ignored by the educational research community and so that's something we want to change because again we know that CTE in many ways. I believe and the research would bear this out, I think, but that's why it needs to be done really defines what good instruction looks like what real learning looks like across curricular areas. And so again that idea of moving CTE to the middle of students experiences in school, moving CTE research to being a real critical part of research that can not only inform CTE instruction and educational policy decisions around CTE, but maybe can inform educational policy decisions more broadly instruction more broadly how schools are organized and improve more broadly, etc. Some additional limitations that typically is focused on workforce outcomes that there's no issue with it being focused on workforce outcomes that is in a way awesome and something all educational research should aspire to include as part of it. I think that there are other focuses areas of focus it could have as well. There's more sophistication that can be built out in terms of the relationship between the inputs and the effects so oftentimes most this work has not really been been structured to demonstrate causal relationships and so that would be of benefit to all of us as practitioners and say oh wait if we do this, then if we do it well and it's successful it's most likely will cause this outcome. And there's been limited research again on curriculum and instruction elements within CTE and so everything from instructional materials to resources to strategies. So obviously really important of the part of the work that we're partnering with the State Board of Ed on over the coming years and so having more research in that space would would benefit all of us. Since there isn't a lot of research there again we hope to follow Izby's lead that they've already taken in the area of career and technical education with really trying to collect data as we do that in ways that aren't onerous, but that are powerful and then use that data to reflect and make decisions moving forward. So, now let's talk about what we do knows this is the exciting part of this is is there are some things that we have identified outside of research but as consistent practices that really seem to be promising practices that seem to have a lot of value across states and so a lot that came from both the literature and that national landscape analysis. So first of all, one of the things that that was consistently hit on was high quality CTE has three these three elements in all cases that really authentic classroom instruction, so what's what's funny about using the phrase classroom instruction is that that kind of instruction oftentimes may not even remind us of classroom instruction. It certainly may not look like students sitting in desks and rows with a teacher standing in front of the room. Now it's it's much more likely to be students doing and moving around and talking and thinking and creating and sometimes breaking things in the process and so. And that's where personally I see a definition there that that is conserved to inform the entire school day. Work based learning is also an essential component of high quality CT and the full continuum of work based learning, everything from someone coming in and sharing their experiences to students having an opportunity to do a short term, maybe even just part of a day job shadow to some stuff that's much more involved. Like an actual internship or even an apprenticeship. And then the role of CTSO is both in their traditional extracurricular format, as well as in other formats that make them even more accessible to students, almost embedding them as as part of the curriculum or providing time during school day for students to benefit from from them so that again so that they are more available to as many students as possible. And so a lot of information in there about how CT CTSOs can really be an integral part of the CT experience overall. So, looking at classroom instruction, more specifically, these are some of the key components that learnings project based or problem based learning that is contextual and really relevant, and that there's labs and shops for students to work on. Obviously, we do have have challenges, even with Perkins funding with resources with equitable distribution of resources and so that's something we'll have to continue to work on, and to be really thoughtful about maximizing those resources so that they can be as useful as possible in shop or lab environments for students. And on the flip side when we have those resources there, ensuring that students are actually able to be hands on with them and use them and not be not be so worried about them that that we protect the resources to the point that we're not using them for instruction per se. Effective work based learning, again can include a range of things one of the ones I want to call out here is school based enterprise. And this is actually come up with a few school districts in which which we've worked this year and those conversations and this call out through this this work of school based enterprise being very important is one of the things that's contributing to a new new academy that we're working on putting together for educational leaders who are non CTE leaders. So school business officials, assistant superintendents for human resources, assistant superintendents for curriculum who who come from whatever their instructional background is but don't know a lot about CTE to really dig into what CTE is, and what they need to do in their roles to support CTE so for example, the picture here on the right is a spirit wear vending machine at a high school in Illinois. Everything is there is a student made it's to run it's a mix of graphic design. Business students all working together marketing accounting all working together to support this this spirit wear vending machine, and it is a school based enterprise and so in a school district that says, Yeah, now students aren't really involved with any kind of money management that's that's not going to work for us. Well we're taking away a significant opportunity at school based enterprise, obviously, you have to be very careful with money. Public school district as a public institution part of the government. That's critical, but there are ways to do it to put procedures in place to put rules in place to put systems in place to make it happen. Obviously, we have a cooperative education model that that we've returned the agency has returned work base, you know, work based learning model. But that is remains a critical piece and and can be a critical piece for students, regardless of what their long term career goals are so moving away from maybe decades of time, where we've said well it's really good if you want to be in these careers to expanding opportunities in that space, which also requires our schools to frankly be more flexible than than most high schools have traditionally been able to be. So some really interesting important calls there, in addition to the range of the work based learning continuum. And then finally career and technical student organizations. So competitive events are a feature of many of the CTSOs. But then some interesting concepts here the concept of professional development for for students that's that they are there in that profession when they are engaged in their CTE coursework and and in their CTSO leadership development. And that happens through a lot of extracurricular activities and it's awesome. It's also awesome that that happens through the CTSOs, and then service and social engagement again, thinking about how they can learn these workplace skills both technical competencies and and the essential skills the cross sector essential employability competencies and connect them to something even beyond the CTSO in the school, or the community more broadly. And it has their quality CTE program of study framework and it lists these 12 elements here on the left and again, you'll see overlap between what just came before and what will come after and we call this out in the document is again another resource, and it another resource that we will be considering in our in the work we're doing in different areas with everybody in the field and with the Illinois State Board of Education. Over the coming years. One thing I want to call out here's a couple I'm going to call out one thing I want to call it is access and equity is a critical element of the high quality CTE framework here. Another thing I want to call two of the specific items but together, student assessment and data and program improvement and again, we're seeing real examples of that. The Illinois State Board of Education this this past school year, the Perkins five dashboard was launched on the website and continuing to work through those issues, and get better data collection you better student assessment, and then get better at processing the information to fine tune our work together. So really exciting to see how comprehensive the ACCE framework is here for quality CTE programs. So now, go ahead with someone. Please. There's a question in the chat. Oh, great. Real quick. It's asking about the previous data if it came from advanced CTE. If we're, Dale, can I ask you to clarify which data. I apologize. Okay, I had to find the mute button. Yeah. Okay, so you on that screen, it said that the 12 that a CTE defines 12 elements of high quality CTE as those 12 items. And then you talked about the three elements classroom instruction work based learning and CTS so so where did that, who promotes those three elements or is it just so those came from. So one of the things that's a great question and and this is where in retrospect and we can certainly hold a follow up once we get the document in people's hands to having having the document in hand and being able to read through it you'll see where our citations are. A number of things are coming from specific groups a number of things are are I apologize what's the word I'm looking for. I will work our synthesis thank you excuse me for that, but our synthesis of information from multiple sources. And so, so those were. specific call outs that follow that pattern, but they were also a synthesis of themes that were emerging from from multiple places including states. And then we also do call out in a number of places either from professional organizations or from other states specific frameworks definitions. There are policies per se but maybe policy directions that they're going to offer those so that people can dive into those and one of the things that we, we've done is we very intentionally. For those of you who've either been in grad school recently or much longer ago, depending on your program and the faculty members you have and how tightly you need to adhere to a style for referencing and footnotes. We kind of made up our own style for this very intentionally because we knew we wanted to use footnotes. And, and then because we knew this would primarily be out there as a PDF those footnotes are linked. So you can get straight off to those resources as you see them in the in the documentation itself so I hope that answers that as best I can. Yes, thank you very much. You're welcome and Rodrigo thank you for your help calling that out. That's great. One of the things that many of you know and if if others are watching this and don't know we've been working on with the Illinois State Board of Education since the start of the 2022 calendar year is is the concept of CTE standards and what would those look like in what would be most effective for teachers in particular but also for other educators for administrators other leaders at the school district level the school level or the EFE level and so one of the things we obviously wanted to look at is is where other states are at with this so 46 states have something. So it sounds like oh man we're like whoa what's going on here. But it gets interesting when you really start to dive into what what the other states have. So 16 states have course level standards. 16 states have program level standards which can mean a few different things that can mean career clusters it can be a little bit more specific than that. It's not counting but not so specific that it's at the course level and there's seven states that have both course and program level but wait there's more. There's quite a bit of information out there that there is tends to be a significant mismatch between the content of the state CTE standards, regardless of which format they fall under and the common career the common career technical and so as we've tried to ground that work and really Marcy Johnson and the is b team has has done a great job kind of leading that directionally the the idea has been to align with with what's best out there nationally from from national organizations and and if if we're going to do something anything, make sure that first and foremost it's aligned with with that work that's been done and that has been informed by so many experts already. So that's really important. Now, one thing we do want to call out is Florida as an example of something that's really interesting and particularly when we think about Illinois again. We know that a group like the Illinois P 20 network exists in Illinois because we are such a complex state when it comes to educational organization structure we have 852 school districts, we have our 47 community colleges, we have four agencies at the state level that are directly responsible for education, and more than that when it comes to early childhood education, for example, so it is, it is a complex system we have in comparison to many other states. In Florida, their work has been to align CTE standards across three different systems. So secondary but really K 12 but secondary is the focus that and then two different perspectives on post secondary adult vocational credential earning, if you will, and post secondary should be degree or certificate earning. And what's interesting is, there's still three sets of standards, it is not a single set of standards across these, but it, it has, there's been conscientious efforts to develop them concurrently. And so there are people leading those committees who then were interacting across those committees, and, and probably I don't know this but probably even go back to their committee and saying we're going to make adjustments here because the other two are, are here so we need to get closer to that. And yeah, I'm sure there were people in those committees, we've all served on committees who are like, Oh, okay, well that's, but, but ultimately what they've gotten out of it is alignment, and the other pieces industry has been heavily involved business and community partners, been heavily involved in saying, Here's what we need. Here's what the CT standards ought to be trying to focus on, and then, and then educators have helped define those in terms that make sense for those different systems of educational organizations. There's really interesting call out in Florida here for how they've done that with a situation that's probably pretty relevant to us in Illinois with our very disparate structures to our systemic approach to education from P 20. So, we've got some more details curriculum. This one isn't going to come as a surprise to experience CTE people that CTE curriculum should provide for authentic opportunities for applied hands on learning skills development. Again, I'd love to see research that really dives into how CTE does with this and then connects it back to the, to the rest of the things and times and places and settings in which students learn. Because my understanding of research about learning is that, yeah, this is this is great. This is what we ought to be doing. And I think this is something that CTE classrooms are pretty far ahead and but certainly the literature really grounds what is happening in those great CTE classrooms as being what should be happening. Additionally, CT CT curriculum, and this includes the standards, for example that we just spoke about in the Florida example requires some ongoing engagement of community and business partners that's a little different than curriculum by and large across our school districts where state standards are dropped at the state level and then school districts put committees together which often involve just educators to develop a local curriculum based on those standards. Here when it comes to CTE curriculum, there's a pretty consistent call out that community and business partners should be a part of that process locally to be examining helping create local versions of those standards that are going to be applied to make sure curriculum aligns with their local needs and that the curriculum stays up to date. Yeah, we're not doing that stuff anymore, we have these tools now. And so knowing that is just not important anymore. You have to know this thing which is new and different but once you know that the tool does the rest of it as technology changes for example. The community partners became a huge focus for this. And so that first phrase is what exactly what we just talked about. You know, again, many people who are watching this now or will watch this are certainly bought into it, but it is, it is fundamental that these are really fundamental partnerships that these go both ways, that everybody gets benefits out of them everybody has asks of the other in these. There can be a range of involvement for business and community partners, ranging from again, we talked about these earlier to being a guest speaker, which today it's great if it can be in person very engaging for students, but the reality is for for busy people working in other spaces. One of the silver linings of the last few years is we can probably get them in over video chat, whether that zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or whatever the tool is pretty easy now to get someone to carve out a little bit of time to be available and talking to students, even if they, they can't carve out the time to get in the car or hop on the train and get to your school and be there in person. And then it ranges to everything from job shadow job shadowing to internships, the curriculum review process financial support and certainly I remember a time 25 years ago where when you approached a business or community partner, their assumption was that you were coming looking for money. You tried to create relationships for everything from teacher externships to student experiences. That was the first thing we had to dispel in those in those initial conversations was, we actually don't need any money. This is not about money we want to talk to you about time and expertise and contributing with those things to student learning and the building of student skills. So that's really important. Another thing is, there was a great example of school district shared about this couple of years ago that I remember. Sometimes the projects we do with students can actually come directly from business partners. I just heard an example of this in the last week or two. Again, where they say you know we really need this it's not something we have time to do or can do. Are they ready to do something like that. And you've got teachers and department chair saying oh yeah our students can do that, and boom they're going out and doing it for real authentic you want to talk about increasing student motivation. The key here is that these partnerships have clear communication that they're mutually defined goals and responsibilities so that everybody knows who's doing what. And if it's simple, hey we just want you to come in and get speak it's going to be on this time, or in this day from this time to this time, and that's it and so that's critical that communication piece to these being successful, and, and the bidirectional piece is absolutely essential so that everybody walks away. They're truly benefiting from it and that they're truly contributing to it. Some key curricular elements that were identified are these four. Again, you're going to start re hearing things now that are coming up consistently so that the students are working through problem based or project based learning that integrates skills and content from those traditional content areas that core curricular skills are integrated in CTE classes. I feel like over the course of the last six months of this school year that was something we increasingly heard people from around the state talking about is how can we do that how can we be building LA skills and how can we be doing math skills and it's not a new concept people been talking about it, but it seems to really be building. In terms of the conversation and that is those conversations are definitely aligned with these key curriculum elements we've identified having a wide range of career development experiences for students and again, the less intensive they are, the more of them they're likely to have which makes sense you're probably not going to do for internships, but you might listen to four different speakers or go to two different job shadowing experiences to get a feel for it. And then again, this idea of internally and with our community and business partners consistent and ongoing review of standards and curriculum to ensure that they're still relevant that they're still up to date. And that they're meaningful and important for our students. The instructional elements aligned with that you're going to see the word authentic once again authentic problems and, and projects, having tasks and tools that are aligned with the work of the workplace. We can't always align the tools right because of cost and time and resources, but we can try and align the tasks as closely as possible. CTE instruction should be academically challenging and should require higher level thinking skills just like anywhere else. Safety. I would say educators in the field are actually the best about this that one of the first things that I often hear when I'm when I'm visiting a school I haven't been to before and it's always it's always the teacher bringing it up as a critical point but it is a key instructional element and then engagement and the question there is our students really connected to the learning. Now obviously when they're creating something that's authentic whether it's for themselves or for someone else that is going to automatically, especially for adolescents in middle school and high school who are figuring out who they are in the world. That's going to really really contribute to a deep connection between themselves and what they're doing slash learning. Inclusion access and equity and there's a lot here I'm not going to read these all to you I am thrilled that there is a lot here again this is really an important space there's a lot of specific suggestions there's a couple I want to, I want to call out in particular some, I think our spaces that all of us are increasingly trying to work on and help each other with and that's making sure that curriculum instruction assessment are free from bias. And, you know, someday someday we'd like to work people focusing on work people out of jobs who are focused on non traditional careers, because, you know, careers are really accessible, hopefully at some point to all people and social or environmental factors that limit some of the choices that people tend to make right now we've we've been able to chip away at. Another one I want to bring up is the identity, identifying funding to support these initiatives. So some of these things cost money sometimes it's going to be necessary to have a person who champions these things or can do some of the work. It's cost money to do teacher professional development, whether it's, it's during the school year with substitutes or paying people to stay after school or during the summer to pay people or to have lunch while we work. But making sure there's funding to really support this work and so it's not an extra thing. It's core to what we do. And then my favorite of all of these something we should be doing even beyond the focus on inclusion access and equity and schools across Illinois, just keep getting better and better and so exciting, but including students in providing feedback on curriculum instruction instructional practices, not being afraid to really listen at what they say and step back and and think about what their thoughts are and then include them in helping us figure out how to solve them too. It's our responsibility to solve the things that are things but they may have ideas that get us there a lot faster and a lot more effectively so really important stuff on on in this part. For all of our districts to think about and we know what inclusion access and equity what issues are around those topics, very widely from district to district based on all kinds of factors, but they are critical aspects of any district I can think of in the state of Illinois. So we've got some key takeaways here to kind of wrap things up. So, we know there's a need, it is very clear for additional ongoing CTE research. So that's just something we want to put out there for before writing this we know our audience won't just be limited to Illinois, and we will be sharing that whenever and wherever we can with other people that are deeply engaged in research as a full time part of their work. We know having quality CTE curriculum in all school districts is a critical foundational element to success. We want to this next one high quality instructional strategies and resources. Some of that is is providing that some of that is just ongoing work we all need to be doing to get better and that requires ongoing professional learning. We're really excited about about what's already planned or in the process of being planned for this coming year, but then even more so about what will come from that as we all learn together. So I'm very intentional about inclusion access and equity and CTE again, a lot of great examples of this, a lot more work to do. So, you know, I think about, I think about female students who is in welding classes taking certification tests at the end of this school that I got to meet and those students and their teachers are both overcoming some obstacles that are very real in in their schools and they're still unfortunately there's still more obstacles to overcome and so we want to be really intentional about supporting that for everybody and then supporting this concept of sustainable business and community partnerships and one of the places we see that specifically is with the career pathway endorsements. So for example where we know our students who are going to earn an endorsement are going to have some pretty extensive work based learning experiences, and we know those take time and energy for school district staff to set up and when a district is new to career career pathway endorsements. Yeah, initially, student numbers tend to be small and the teachers and administrators involved in the courses and the course sequence. They can probably take it on, but that's also probably in most schools, certainly medium to large schools not going to be sustainable. And so that's that's an area that collectively we're all going to need to continue to look at. So with that, are there additional questions that that people have comments that you want to make this is what you think of. Please feel free to unmute yourself or throw something in the chat we really appreciate you being here and we're really excited to get this PDF in your hands and have you be able to be thinking about this alongside us. Jason, I'm just curious to what extent have you looked at what other states are doing. So, yeah, so in, in the document, it pretty extensively goes through other states let me actually just to give you a rough idea that let's give me just one second here to the reason why I asked is because I was fortunate to go to Utah for the ACT work based learning conference. And it's just amazing what some states are doing that I was not even aware of Utah, Georgia, Virginia, I mean just some of these states are just doing things that are just really outside the box. And it was great to see. Yeah, that's that is great and so hopefully you can see my screen now so this is this is the document itself and again I'm going to make this so you you can't read it not because I don't want you to read it but to give you some ideas. So, that's. So, again, there's there's a lot more data underlying this there are links to the data. This is this is the table that breaks out what the the alignment of the standards this was produced by a CTE is the one who studied how aligned the standards were the low the state standards to the standards but as we get down into the second half of the report, you'll see things like this, the Wisconsin Department of Education the California Department of Education the Massachusetts Department of Education. So, so Michael that that is exactly where that national landscape analysis came from. So let's just say there was a lot of digging of stuff that that didn't even end up in the final documents again here at the top of page 20 the CTE Technical Assistance Center of New York, and then right below at the southern region southern regional station board so it really draws from things all over the country and we would never claim that this. How many pages did this end up being 36 page document it's not exhaustive of what every state is doing either. It gives us a foothold and again, we tried identifying these themes that were emerging and then pulling out some of the the examples that we thought best demonstrated or clarified some of those themes so yeah that's the approach and certainly there's more to come and one of the in terms of the conversations that will have in the things that like in your example that you'll bring up in response like I read this about this state but here's what I saw in this state you didn't comment on it. One of the things that that we've left open in the conversations between is being and the NIU team is if we find ourselves digging and doing more we can publish more more white papers like this to or do other kinds of professional work or or of course bring people in from other places, you know, certainly today it's easier than ever for us to reasonably say, hey, can you hop on a zoom. It's, it's not five or seven years ago where we would be nervous maybe about someone's ability to have the tech work correctly on their end we know we can do that now. So hopefully that answers that question a little bit for you. So Gail in terms of copies the report, we will be publishing a blog post with a link to it. For the start of next week is is the plan timeframe. So for Tuesday with with Juneteenth being observed on Monday, that will also go out in our next P 20 network newsletter, a week from Friday so a week and a half from now. And then it may also be sent out may or may not be from the agency but it will be available there until it may appear in some other places and once it's out there. We will be referencing it, you know, actively and whenever we do. Well, hey, here's the link to this so you can look forward to that soon and again, we definitely would welcome feedback again once it's out there we're not changing this report but this is the beginning of, or the next step it's not in the beginning, but of an ongoing conversation if you will so that's to your point Gail to Michael's point. So, great question. Did I miss one above that. Yes. Always looking to seek ways to connect CT and dual credit. And so, colleague not a ton in here about dual credit, but there are parts of our project specifically focused on on dual credit and that along with teacher credential or teacher retention and recruitment. Those are slated to ramp up this fall and actually Rodrigo be leading the dual credit parts of that project I'll be leading the teacher recruitment and retention parts which which will have some overlap, as we know with with the dual credit so we will be excited to engage more in that. Last question. I recently read some information on it's called the college and high school alliance. Yeah, it was from some of your information, and I was wondering if any of that information's in here. So we, again, we actually did not use any significant information from the college and high school alliance. I can tell you, and Marcia apologize I'll speak on your behalf as well as Rodrigo and mine. We are all three of us personally, very, I guess connected with with that work and certainly that stuff we pass along regularly and are well aware of Rodrigo's been super involved in that work himself. So there's some other other work related to there's two or three organizations alongside the college and high school alliance that are kind of all occupying the same space and we're doing some additional work on the teacher credentialing side broadly more broadly than just CTE, but we also know that part of what we want to do the CT is a little bit unique in that work which is unique work in and of itself is to pull CTE into that work and again that's part of what that's actually what I was referencing for this fall is starting to ramp that up and see what we can do there. And on the agency side that might mean that we're also in involving Marcia's colleagues in Educator Effectiveness Department to as we talk about some of those issues will have to see. The last one I have is and it's a topic you kind of brought up was embedding, I'll call English and math courses into CTE. I know there's some programs in schools have that geometry and construction which goes hand in hand but if you look at a culinary hospitality, I mean they're using English when they're writing menus, their lessons and things like that and I mean there's definitely math in there and I know years ago when Marcia was over at the school when I was down in Curia, I know that was echoed by a lot of the students when she was there. And it was one of those things where she said students says I really want to come here I want to take a CT class. This is what I want to do, I don't want to go do this at my home high school, and in English class that really I can't connect that to a career pathway that I'm going into. And Michael the only thing I'll add to that is you know there is the law where 50%, right, and they just have to prove that it's a 50%. So, and then it gets again up to the district you know agriculture does this all the time for science. Right, exactly. Yep, let's do it with the other stuff. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to bring that up because you touched on it and I just, I think that's something important that we should look at even if we take one pathway and carve it out let's see how this works. And like Marcia said if they're doing it with agriculture why can't we do it something else. Well and that's where we think it's interesting that that emerged from this work. Because I'll be honest with you if you'd asked me in March, if that was going to emerge in the literature review I said no, no I'm I would have said I'm personally very excited that those conversations are happening in Illinois, but I don't think that well the fact that did emerge as a real promising practice does that's part of the purpose of this kind of document then is to ground that work and say, yes we should be doing this or where if we're doing something where it's like wait this is nowhere in here, maybe we're way out ahead, and we should still do that. It's not to say we shouldn't do it if it's not in there, but we should at least ask the question. Or is it something that others have tried and nobody was successful at and we're likely to end up in that space to and maybe there's something that. So it's just to ask cause us to ask those kinds of questions, and to help guide us. I just thought of one other thing and you touched on it a little bit was the dual credit piece. I mean, CTE has more dual credit classes at a community college than any other subject, even if you combine all of them. CTE just blows it out of the water. And I think that's something that we really need to echo and I applaud you and Marcy and the team for trying to have professional development over next summer to try to get more teachers qualified for dual credit so thank you both for that. Yep. No promises on how successful that road will be but I mean that is a it is a challenging road but we will we will keep working at that road and working in partnership with the community colleges is the goal there. Well and I think that the struggle that I see with community colleges and I know district for 214 has done a lot of it is, if they can't partner with the community college, they bump up and go to the four year universities and there's no threshold for dual credit for their adjunct professors so I mean if we can get that at least brought down and I mean I think of you know like this morning I had a conversation with it with the school district and this is a new gentleman coming on board and he's like, I have an I have a engineering teacher and I can't do dual credit because they only have an associate's degree but they've been working in the field for 20 years. And you know it's some of those struggles that you get into and say, you know this individual is probably giving the students more than it would by taking a adjunct person at the college level if they don't have industry experience so. Anyway, I just wanted to kind of point that out because I think that's a struggle for a lot of our districts, especially one, you know we have a big turnover of staff leaving a new staff coming on board. You know, our first or second year teachers in CTE, I mean, half the time they don't get paid what they should get paid, and then the other half of the time is they can't get dual credit to get that extra oomph in the end, and it's kind of like a double whammy form so. Thank you. Welcome, thank you. Well, we really appreciate everybody joining us this afternoon again we're excited to get the report in your hands and get feedback on that and continue to have these conversations and certainly we can, we can pivot up with additional times to chat with people from across the community that we needed and so with that we'll put a little plug in for the summer speaker series, which is starting next week with two of the three keynotes and hope you can join us for those those are linked on both the is be CTE site as well as the Illinois Family Network site and certainly more opportunities to share particularly with teachers that you work with for the CTE educator plan times to talk about what our future with standards should be in Illinois so those finance and business services and health sciences and technology are next week on Wednesday so some lots of opportunities coming up. Thank you again.