 Hi everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the Senior Director of Education, Partnerships and Learning Solutions at Northern Illinois University. And I'm part of the NIU Illinois CTE project team that is working closely with the ISB CTE and Innovation team. We're here today to talk to you about potential CTE standards. Marcy, would you like to introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Marcy Johnson. I'm the Director for CTE and Innovation at the Illinois State Board of Education. So today, we're really excited to have you watching this video. This is another important part of outreach on behalf of the Illinois State Board of Education to try and gather input from teachers and other CTE educators working in schools and districts about the idea of CTE standards and what would make those most useful in Illinois schools. And so that's what we're here to talk about today. And very importantly, after you've watched this video, we're going to ask you to click on the link below and take a short survey to give that feedback to us. So this is what we're going to cover in this short video. Marcy is going to talk about why CTE standards. And then I will walk you through these draft standards documents that are meant to be an exemplar so we can get feedback on what would or would not should or should not be included. And then again, we'll talk briefly about the survey that we'll ask you to take. So why CTE standards, we get calls on a regular basis from educators that say, I want to start a new course, or we get questions about how to start a whole new program. And then what the one thing that's always missing is we need standards, we need something that helps guide us on what we need. And we feel that CTE standards would help students and educators be able to address the needs of industry by having these guidance documents that will support career and technical education. So the ultimate goal of this presentation today is for us to have an answer of one of three things. One is, do we adopt just the competencies? Do we adopt the national standards? Or do we adopt the advanced CTE standards? And when I say national standards, I just want to be clear that that means that there are other organizations in the United States that have created national standards such as the National Health Science Education Standards have been developed just recently. SkillsUSA has standards. And so we're thinking that that might be a better way to adapt and also address the equity issue because then all educators will have the same standards and all students then will be learning the same information. So with that said, I'm going to toss it back to Jason. And Jason is going to give you a little more information about these individual standards and the direction on what we need you to do. Thank you. Thanks so much, Marcy. So again, we're going to break down these documents and I want to just stress again, at this point in this process, these documents were developed earlier this year to be exemplar documents so that we could get reactions about what should go in a standards document. These are not official Illinois state CTE standards at this point in time, but they're here so that you can react to them today. So with that said, we're going to walk you through the document itself so you'll understand what you're looking at. First, there are seven of these documents. They are organized by career pathway. So in Illinois, these are seven college and career pathways now. These were developed online with the career pathway endorsements that we now have in place as a result of the post-secondary careers readiness act. So within these seven career pathways, what still exists while these are preeminent are our career clusters. So there have been historically the 16 career clusters nationally. And you see those listed here as the bullet points underneath the headers that are the career pathways. In Illinois, we actually have 17 career clusters because we include energy as a career cluster. So these career clusters map to the different career pathways. And you'll notice right away that each of the career pathways definitely does not have the same number of career clusters. Some of the pathways like agriculture, food and natural resources or information technology align with one career cluster. Other career pathways like finance and business services or manufacturing engineering technology and trades have multiple career clusters that align with that career pathway. And one of the implications here that we just want to point out is when we use the advanced CTE standards in these documents that we've got linked below, the career clusters are how those advanced CTE standards have been written. And that means that our state-level career pathway standards documents vary widely in length. In other words, the career pathway areas with more career clusters become much longer documents. That may or may not be an issue. We just want to make you aware, especially if you're clicking through and looking at the different CTE standards documents for the different career pathways. So with that said, each of the documents, well, maybe different lengths has a number of things in common. They use the same structure. And there's three main content components of each of each document. First though, on top of all of those content components, there is a cover sheet. The cover sheet provides background information as to where this has come from and what the different elements are. And you'll also notice that throughout this cover sheet, there are hyperlinks. The bottom portion of the cover sheet is essentially a linked table of contents. If you click on those links, it will take you directly to the page where that appears. So while these documents can be printed, they are intended to be electronic documents to take advantage of the hyperlinks. On to page two, we get into the content. The content here is the cross sector essential employability competencies also referred to as the essential skills. These essential skills have been developed as part of the work around the career pathway endorsements. And these are critically important. So when we talk to teachers and school district administrators, when we talk to EFE directors, everybody throughout Illinois is hearing about the importance of these in local workforce conversations. Additionally, this past spring is be launched a CT industry feedback tour across the state with in person meetings in southern Illinois, central Illinois, northern Illinois and an online meeting. The participants from across a wide range of industries and consistently they talked about the need for students coming out of their early childhood through 12th grade education to be really strong and really sound with the essential skills. So these occupy page two they're identical in all seven of the competency areas. Page three is where we get to the technical competencies. And these are different for each career pathway. So each career pathway had a committee of educators and industry professionals that met and defined what were the critical competencies for students who earned an endorsement to be proficient in at the end of that career focused course sequence and the work based learning experiences. And so typically there's 10 competency statements here. And the communications and human and public service competencies are organized a little bit differently but but they're all essentially the same and in terms of in terms of structure with 10 items and then a descriptor definition explaining what that item is. And again this occupies page three. These are customized for each career pathway. So we get to page four and beyond. We get into the advanced CTE standards that Marcy mentioned a few minutes ago. The advanced CTE standards come from the work that advanced CTE did on the common career technical core. And this is by cluster that these were developed. And so what you have here is on on each of these. So number one and then towards the bottom number two statements that is your top level standard, and then you have your one dot one and one dot two and one dot three statements that are more specific. So, number one utilize mathematical concept skills and problem solving to obtain necessary information for decision making business, and then one dot one solve mathematical problems using numbers and operations. So those actual standards, we also included here from advanced CTE, these sample indicators, these are performance indicators, sometimes standards documents include performance indicators with the standards. Other times standards documents will just focus on having the standards. The benefit of having the performance indicators is they provide direction for us as teachers to develop our lessons and our assessments and know that students are hitting the desired targets. The drawback to having the performance indicators is they make the actual standards documents more complex, and those performance indicators could live in a supporting document. Which is better, we're going to ask you about that the follow up survey, so you can give us feedback on which you think is a more helpful approach for teachers to use and so that's why it's really important that we have feedback from lots of teachers. Again, this section will go on for as short as three or four additional pages, and for as long as more than 20 additional pages. So, as mentioned earlier we have created the seven standards documents by career pathway. Each of these is linked below. So you can open them and you can look at them in more detail, and hopefully this little video helped walk you through what you're looking at when you open those standards documents. In addition to the standards documents, again, all of which are linked below the video, then we have this survey. A couple of things about the survey. So the survey asks you in the in its opening question to define which career pathway, you are answering the survey and you are only going to answer the survey for one career pathway at a time. If you teach across multiple pathways you maybe teach a finance and business services class, and a manufacturing engineering technology and trades class, you can absolutely take the survey twice, once for each of those pathways. Likewise, if you're a department chair, for example, you might want to take the survey for three, four, even seven of the career pathways. What we ask you to do in those cases is to click the click the career pathway that you are taking the survey for, and then focus your answers on that. The reason is because in previous feedback gathering that we've been doing over the past six to nine months with educators throughout Illinois, we have started to see patterns of how different career pathways may have different needs with regards to the standards. And so we want to know that and be able to accommodate those needs. We ask you to take the survey after having watched this video you've now done that. So thank you so much. Please share the link to this web page with the video, the links to the standards and the survey with friends and colleagues who may be interested in this, and we really appreciate your feedback, which is going to help the State Board of Education set future direction. Thank you so much.