 Good morning, and welcome to High Quality Equitable Early Childhood Assessments What's Next for California. My name is Kathy Yoon and I'm a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute where I work with others on research and policy issues related to early childhood as well as educator preparation. But for LPI I was an Associate Professor and Department Chair at Fresno State where I was on the Early Childhood and Teacher faculty and I see some of my former colleagues and friends are here and it's great to see everyone who's joined us today. Before we begin I'd like to thank our partners, the Association of California School Administrators and the California County Superintendent's Educational Services Association for their support with this webinar as well as LPI's communications team. I'm just going to start with some housekeeping and reminders. Everyone except presenters have been muted so we'll be taking questions through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. You can write in your questions at any time throughout today's presentation. Today's webinar is being broadcast through your telephone or computer speakers so please make sure you have your speakers turned on and up. If you have any technical difficulties please call this number on the screen, select option two and enter today's webinar ID. I'd also like to let the audience know that this webinar is being recorded. A video recording will be emailed to you in a few days and the slides are currently available at the link in the chat box. So today's webinar will include opening remarks by AXA's Edgar Sasse-Swedza followed by a research presentation and a moderated panel discussion. We'll have some time for Q&A and then we'll close. We hope that your major takeaways today will include the characteristics of high-quality early childhood assessment, ways in which data can inform instruction and help strengthen systems, and ways that districts and counties can support implementation. Now I'd like to invite Edgar Sasse-Swedza to provide some opening remarks. Edgar joined AXA in 2015 and currently serves as the Senior Director of Policy and Government Relations. In this role he oversees the advocacy efforts in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. on behalf of the largest umbrella administrator organization in the United States. Thanks for joining us Edgar. Good morning Kathy and thank you. Thank you for the introduction. It's always fun getting on these webinars and seeing the numbers grow as we jump on. So it looks like we have a nice crowd today so thank you for everybody for joining us. It goes without saying that this is a super important topic and at the Association of California School Administrators we're so happy to partner with LPI and our partners at Sasse-Swedza. Really a timely topic given everything that we're talking about and what's going to come online in the coming years. I think at the heart of it our educators, our school leaders, our teachers, folks at the school site have really bought in to the research and the one statistic that always sticks out is that the studies that show that about 90% of brain development happens before kindergarten and I think that is important for everybody that's working down the pipeline as going to serve students at any point in their educational endeavor. This is something that's really resonated and really forced us to focus our efforts on what can we do to really help students at those early stages. The topic today in terms of child assessment is even more important as we start to think about how we're going to roll out transitional kindergarten and making sure we get this right. Obviously there's some key studies out there that some folks who have been at the forefront are now trying to think about bringing this to scale making sure that we kind of learn from those best lessons. I think another thing that educators whether it be school site leaders, teachers are really bought into that at the end of the day the assessments whatever we develop need to be able to inform instruction that they need to be able to be utilized to help students day in day out in the classroom and I think that's at the focus of what we're going to talk about today and why this work becomes so important. I think from a personal know I worked at LA Unified when we were at the early stages of early transitional kindergarten and when we're thinking about expanding it more. So this is a conversation that's obviously been around for some years and it's exciting to see we're at now as a system to at least have the opportunity to have to think about this at a grander scale. I was also fortunate enough to join a group of educators and representatives from our broader education community that learn from other lessons on other states on how they're doing assessment, how they're utilizing data. I see that we have some of the panelists today coming from other states. I think it's always exciting to think about some of those lessons even from outside of our state. We need to make sure as stated that whatever assessments we come up with that we also learned some of the lessons from the past with other high stakes assessments that we make sure that we're sensitive to some of the cultural diverse needs of some of our students and make sure we don't have any unintended consequences as we move down the pathway of how we're going to assess students and that also be remissed and I you know it's actually good to be on a webinar that we're not talking about COVID but I also would be remissed to not at least acknowledge that the system has a big strain right now. You can't talk to education folks without talking about the human capital challenges that we're having and given that we're thinking about rolling out transition and transitional kindergarten I mean some of the conservative estimates that we're going to need 10,000 to 12,000 new teachers not to mention countless teacher assistants some expect up to 16,000 so this is another human capital issue that we need to think about as we're thinking about the rollout. So all that to say acts super excited to be partnering today we appreciate all the work that LPA does as when it comes to teacher retention and I think they're a natural partner here as we start thinking about assessment. So thank you for everybody's participation look forward to today's discussion. Thank you so much Edgar. I bet your remarks really hit home for a lot of folks. We're really excited to share our report on high quality early childhood assessments with you all today and I'd like to start with acknowledging my co-authors Hannah Melnick and Marjorie Wexler. So the purpose of our report was to synthesize what we know in the field about high quality early childhood assessment and to provide some examples of how different states and districts have gone about choosing implementing and using early childhood assessments and in the report we honed in on kindergarten entry assessments because they are becoming quite common but the research and findings in the report are really applicable across all early childhood assessments. So we reviewed the literature did a 50 state scan and conducted interviews and we looked across multiple states and districts to help us answer some questions like what types of assessments are states and districts using what might administrators look for in a high quality assessment what training and supports are needed how are states and districts supporting continuous improvement and what strategies and cautions can we learn from their experiences. But right now we'd like to know from you and we're going to put a poll for you all what assessments does your school district or county use in TK and K in transitional kindergarten and kindergarten and you can select all that apply in your context and for some of you you can select not applicable I see we have a lot of preschool educators and directors and university faculty today and even some students in the audience. So I see the responses coming in we'll just give it another few seconds here yeah if you if you choose other it would be great if you could describe or name your assessment in the chat box and I see I see some responses coming into the chat already just give it maybe one more second all right let's take a look at those results okay so it looks like a lot of you are using DRDP currently some of you are using the ASQ ages and stages a few of you are using other assessments the Berganz the DRA a few of you are using the KSEP yeah and then in the chat I see there's a really a raw a broad range of assessments that people are using dibbles found us in Penel district district developed assessments so yeah so lots of very variability in the assessments that we're you're currently using so keep those current assessments in mind because now I'm going to share with you what the existing body of research says about what a high quality early childhood assessment looks like and as I'm sharing I encourage you to think about how many of these characteristics your current assessments have now I'm going to go through the main points really quickly but we lay out the details and citations in the report so you can look back over them when you have time and that link is in the chat and remember you'll also have access to today's slides so when we looked at the existing research on early childhood assessments we saw three major themes related to the components of quality so the first component when you're looking at assessment quality is content and when it comes to content high quality early childhood assessments include the essential domains social emotional cognitive language and literacy mathematical and scientific reasoning and physical development they also place children skills along a continuum or progression so that teachers can see developmentally where children skills fall high quality assessments aligned to standards and curriculum but only if those standards are developmentally appropriate and they should be part of ongoing formative assessment throughout the year across preschool to third grade content should be inclusive of all children regardless of background and early experiences and the content needs to be relevant and sufficiently detailed to inform instruction which is really a key purpose for assessment the second component of high quality assessments is that they have administration procedures that are fair for all children and practical for teachers so procedures should be appropriate for young children and assessment should take place in a natural and familiar setting so take observation for example where children teachers are documenting children's interactions during regular daily activities or performance tasks for example asking a child to respond to a prompt like you know can you write your name and they shouldn't require children to sit still and focus for long periods of time because we know that that's not developmentally appropriate and that includes you know being on the computer high quality assessments accommodate a range of abilities languages and cultures in how it's administered including allowing children to demonstrate what they know in different ways and in order to do this teachers need adequate professional development including professional development that addresses bias and we had several people submit questions about teacher subjectivity in observations professional development practice and coaching with specific attention to addressing bias are critical for any kind of assessment and teachers also need the resources to help them implement and use the assessment effectively to inform their instruction the third component is validity high quality assessments yield results that are authentic and accurate and valid for all the children being assessed including children with a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds and abilities and because assessment data are only really valid when used for what they were designed they need to be aligned with the intended purposes for the data so I'm going to give you two examples of assessment tools that look different but both have many of the high quality characteristics that we just went over in Illinois they use the kindergarten individual development survey or kids which is an observation tool and it's based on developmental progressions so it's appropriate to use with children with lots of different backgrounds and abilities and especially for dual language learners because the observations aren't dependent on a specific language kids is short it has 14 items but it includes the multiple domains and you can see here in this photo a teacher in Illinois using an iPad to collect documentation while observing and interacting with children in the dramatic play center districts in Georgia use a state developed tool in kindergarten called the Georgia kindergarten inventory of developing skills or G kids that starts at the beginning of the year with 20 items also across multiple domains these 20 items are a combination of teacher observation items and performance based direct assessment items so it includes for example an observation item that looks at children's ability to follow multi-step directions as well as direct assessment performance tasks where children are counting items or sorting shapes and then that initial assessment is tied to a year-long assessment that teachers use formatively throughout the kindergarten year and G kids uses a universal design for learning framework to help make it accessible to children with varying abilities and experiences so that was a lot of information again you can refer back to the report for more detail but now that we've gone over what a high-quality assessment looks like let's look at ways that states and districts use them for informing instruction and for other purposes so based on our background research and 50 state scan we selected eight states and two districts that use assessments that demonstrate many of those high-quality characteristics that we just went over and have been implementing their assessments for at least a few years and we looked across those states and districts to examine how are they using their assessments and data and we also we're looking for commonalities that we could learn from because assessment shouldn't just be a compliance exercise right if teachers are spending time administering assessments that data and information should be used in productive and intentional ways and we found three main elements of intentional implementation of early childhood assessments the first element of intentional early childhood assessment implement implementation is using it to inform and improve instruction so informing and improving instruction is a primary purpose of early childhood assessment and we found that some places like Illinois are going beyond that to using their assessments to drive pedagogical change to help shift teaching practices in kindergarten to be more developmentally appropriate more play-based and really using the observational nature of the assessment to drive improved practice and we'll hear from our panelists about what that looks like at a district level but across the different states and districts that we looked at there were some things that supported the use of assessments for informing and improving instruction and the first thing is adequate professional development in the places we studied this was critical to implementing an assessment well and that professional development needs to be ongoing a point in time training is not enough for teachers to develop expertise with an assessment tool they need ongoing pd and coaching and not just teachers but also site leaders principals and district leaders and in a little bit we'll talk with our panelists Jennifer and Katie about the different about the kinds of professional development that they provide in their districts something else that stakeholders talked about was the need for timely access to data teachers need a user friendly way to access data when they need it one state administrator that we interviewed said that a bad data portal for teachers can actually make or break an assessment and adequate time and resources teachers need things like release time planning time instructional aids and other supports to assist them with documenting evidence entering data and preparing reports the second element of intentional early childhood assessment implementation is using it to strengthen early learning systems we found in the places that we studied that good use of assessments can help make early childhood systems stronger and there are several ways to do that in the two districts represented on our panel today they use their assessments to help promote alignment in p3 for example in elgin u46 the district aligned their kindergarten assessment both down into pre k and up into first grade so they shifted to using an aligned assessment tool in pre k and then to align up from kinder the district extended professional development to first grade teachers so that they were learning alongside their kindergarten colleagues and the first grade teachers who participated actually ended up modifying their instruction and into larry city they use the same assessment tool in pre k with their threes and fours and in transitional kindergarten and kindergarten and they've also aligned that assessment to anchor standards in grades one and two so that teachers could really see the standards as a developmental continuum where each year builds on the previous high quality assessments can also be used to engage families as partners in children's development so for example elgin and other districts in illinois use their kindergarten assessment measures as their report cards and in washington state their kindergarten assessment process actually includes a formal family connection component data can also be aggregated to provide indicators of system level needs we saw some communities are using their data to launch and inform community level initiatives like in elgin and katie can speak more to this later during the panel discussion but they use the assessment data to fuel initiatives like the one you see here where they created park signage to encourage families to engage in activities that promote development and later we'll also hear from francine about how first five monoray county uses aggregated data to inform work at the county level but there need to be guardrails against misuses of assessments and data so for example they shouldn't be used to delay kindergarten entrance because and we'll probably hear francine say this again later but it's not children who need to be ready for kindergarten but schools need to be ready to meet children where they are it's also inappropriate to evaluate individual teachers or programs because children's development is affected by a multitude of factors that teachers programs and schools can't control like nutrition healthcare and housing and also because using data for high stakes purposes threatens the reliability and validity of data and it incentivizes programs to inflate scores so we really need to be careful about how we use the data and think about those potential pitfalls ahead of time finally the third element of intentional assessment implementation is to provide supports and create conditions to help make success as likely as possible first all the places we studied involved robust stakeholder engagement at every phase along the way including teachers union reps parents we found this to be really important for generating buy-in and getting teachers on board strategic communication it's critical to get all stakeholders on the same page about what the assessment is and isn't what the data means or doesn't and I think during the panel just Jennifer is going to touch on the importance of clear and consistent messaging all the systems we looked at started out with a gradual approach many pilot assessments for two to five years and then they continued to engage in ongoing evaluation of their assessments through implementation studies or collecting regular feedback from teachers and in fact Katie was just recently telling me about her work with a task force of pre-kak and first grade teachers in Elgin and she can tell us a little bit more about that later and finally all of this requires ongoing administrative and financial support so just to recap high quality early childhood assessments have appropriate content administration procedures and validity for children with diverse abilities special needs cultural backgrounds and home languages using assessment data to inform and improve instruction requires professional development access to data and resources aggregated assessment data can be used to strengthen early learning systems but we need guardrails against misuse and finally assessment implementation and continuous improvement require robust stakeholder engagement and ongoing resources so that was a ton of information in a really short time please reach out to me to us if you have any questions we'll put my email in the chat and everything we talked about and a lot more is in our report so you can reference that for more details and there's even a brief if you want a shorter read but now we're going to transition to the amazing panel that we have lined up for today to hear from their experience what this all actually looks like in real life and I'll start by introducing today's moderator Sarah Neville Morgan Sarah is a deputy superintendent of public instruction for the opportunities for all branch or OFAB at the california department of education and oversees a nearly 10 billion dollar budget and five divisions early education expanded learning multi-lingual support nutrition services and special education under sarah's leadership OFAB helps all of california's 6.2 million students from cradle to career have access to quality preschool and afterschool programs adequate access to nutritious meals and quality inclusive public education that enhances their well-being supports multi-lingual language development and improves their educational potential sarah welcome and I'll pass it to you to kick off our panel discussion and introduce our panelists thanks so much Kathy I want to thank lpi for this really timely and critical conversation and I always want to give a quick shout out to my team for the work they do to support children families schools and programs including the use of assessments such as drdp and our state preschool programs so in setting the context there's a why assessments and why now question along with the rest of the nation california is in the midst of unprecedented change edgar highlighted some of these and is welcome in the wake of the pandemic governor Gavin Newsom signed a historic budget with sweeping investments in education from cradle to career that provide an opportunity to transform california's educational landscape there are few critical investments that make this webinar and the related assessments report from lpi and its recommendations particularly timely so the first is the expansion of universal preschool in california the budget provides basin over five years to move our local education agencies from serving older four-year-old children to all four-year-olds by 2025-26 with this first year as a planning year this means that california could serve as many as 345,000 more children in transitional kindergarten than the approximately 90,000 we currently serve our budget also expanded our state preschool program so we can serve even more of those unserved children especially our three-year-olds in high-quality preschool the second is the updates to the preschool learning foundations our california standards for what preschool age children need to know and be supported to be able to do and some corresponding resources and assessment tools this will be accomplished by incorporating recent research in the field including best practices to support our multilingual learners and inclusion of children with disabilities oops and there goes my lights and more explicitly address cultural and linguistic responsibility as well as anti-bias and anti-racist practices in about the standards it also has to develop curriculum and educator resources to implement those standards and adapt the desired results developmental profile or drdp to reflect those updated standards it addresses preschool to second grade so we get the continuum and includes direct assessment of literacy and math at the same time the california department of education has launched a p3 initiative and recognition of the science that demonstrates quality early learning experiences can have meaningful and lasting impacts impacts on child outcomes but these are best supported and sustained if early elementary instructional practices are designed to build upon children's early developmental gains the convergence of these activities and these investments creates a unique opportunity to support whole child development across those early years from birth to age eight we want all educators to support and utilize observational and direct assessments to understand each child's progress in a range of domains such as literacy language math social emotional and executive functioning development and intentionally design learning opportunities to support this group pulling directly from lpi's high quality early child assessment report in it they say a state's choice of assessment is critical what is measured and how it is measured can drive the way children are taught and how their needs are understood so really to achieve this use of assessment means that we need to support transfer of assessment data from preschool into early grades we also know assessments alone won't create the learning opportunities we want to see the explicit linkage of assessments to curriculum as well as changes to our teacher preparation and professional development systems will be critical to ensuring the use of assessments translate into the outcomes we know are possible for children I'd now like to introduce and welcome our group of esteemed panelists who lead this work on the ground in their communities so we can hear firsthand from them what they've been doing to ensure this work happens in a developmentally informed way so I think I get to start with Francine rod who is someone I have known dearly for quite a few years she's been the executive director for first five Monterey County since January 2004 where she leads the organization in supporting children from the prenatal stage through age five and their families whether in Latin America the Caribbean Africa or California her career has focused on supporting communities that have been furthest from opportunity to advocate for changes in inequitable systems and to strengthen community members capacity for self-determination and social change Francine really leads equity in action next I'd like to introduce Jennifer Maraquin she has worked in the field of early childhood education for approximately 15 years in addition to having served as an elementary school teacher as her district's early childhood education director she works to bridge the gap between preschool and transitional kindergarten and kindergarten through implementing a developmental approach to learning developmentally appropriate aligned assessments and quality staff development the work her district is doing in relation to p3 alignment has been sought out by district officials and research agencies throughout the state of California and lastly I'd like to introduce Katie Cox she has worked for over 20 years in early childhood education and administration Katie began her career working in rural community development in Arizona near the Mexico border from that experience she learned the value of moving communities through increasing early learning outcomes for children she is currently the director of early learning initiatives in school districts U 46 and Elgin Illinois which is a diverse suburb in northwest Chicago so welcome all we're going to move into some questions of the panelists and I'm going to start with one that is directed really for Jennifer and Katie so as we look at the individual child level data it's especially crucial now with COVID-19 what are some of the benefits of using an observational assessment tool well good morning I'm excited to be here and get to share what our district is currently doing and Tulare city school district is using the d rdp and we use that in preschool tk and kindergarten and one of the benefits that we have seen we've actually seen a lot of benefits to using a developmentally appropriate assessment tool and we've been using it for approximately six years now in all of these different grade levels but one of the main things is that we see that the developmental profile helps us to focus on the whole child we know that with our little list learners they are well more than just English language arts and math and so an assessment tool that focuses on the social emotional especially since Sarah talked about with COVID and the impacts that it has we have really embraced what the d rdp has offered for us as far as looking at that social emotional component another positive trait that we've seen is that it is an assessment that's conducted over time so it's just not a one and done assessment as we know we as adults are continually learning and through our experiences and our students experiences they're continually learning as well so looking at an assessment that is conducted over time is also beneficial um we had mentioned earlier Kathy had mentioned in her um her research in that the natural setting is so valuable especially for our youngest learners I can think of examples of I can see kids counting bananas in the dramatic play station I know then at that point that that child has the number since they have a grasp on number since if they can one to one count that those bananas so being able to use that as an assessment tool and use that to guide our instruction is also important with our tool and the way we use it in our district is it's an all hands on deck so it does not just fall solely on the teacher and so with this and the observations we incorporate our administration to collect evidence and take notes our curriculum coaches we train instructional aids so um you know we just look at that whole entire picture with our um with our district thanks so much Jennifer Katie do you want to share a little bit about yours sure we also use the d rdp for preschool and then the kids assessment which is aligned to d rdp and it's Illinois um version they took out some measures and prioritized them and so all of our kindergarten students are rated on that actually three times a year um what we have seen here in our program is the greatest part of it is similar to what Jennifer said is it's really happens in their natural environment over time it's not a one point in time assessment there's no anxiety and you're really able to get a feel for what the kids are actually capable of doing um the teachers have the freedom to observe our we don't have quite a robust amount of people doing the observations it's mostly classroom staff but boy would they love if I suggested that administrators help out with that that would be popular I could see so um we they can you know take observations of the kids outside I can think of an example they were doing a science prediction um unit with wind and the teacher had brought out onto the playground um some scarves and asked the kids what they thought would happen when she let go of and then everybody made a prediction about what was going to happen she wrote down everybody's predictions they let the scarves go and then um process the activities so um you know there's just so many opportunities you know during the day to find out you know where the kids are at with their thinking problem solving um and achievement um another example that I had thought of when Jennifer was speaking was we had a conversation around um kind of read aloud comprehension for kids for the students in this particular class and I asked the teacher have you ever the comprehension was really low and she said you know I don't think that's true for my kids I I feel like they could do better and I said have you ever um you know done the read aloud in a small group setting you know we have small groups as part of the day and she's like I had it I always do the read aloud with everyone you know and she's like because that's part of my favorite part of the day and I'm like well we might want to experiment and try with that and she did and when she got out of the kids and they're questioning and conversation and dialogue from that was so much richer and had so much more depth um so I think that you know the conversations that can come out of the assessment data are unbelievable and you're just able to see so much more about what the kids are capable of. Thanks so much Katie what you gave to me was a great visual and one of the things they think we've all missed with COVID-19 is being able to to be with the children and so that visual really helped me picture what's happening in the programs and in the classrooms so appreciate that. Jennifer I wanted to give you the opportunity to go a little bit deeper on how to observational assessments like the DRDP support developmentally appropriate instruction. You talked a little bit about that when um a few minutes ago but I wanted to know if there was anything you wanted to share more in that space. Yeah thank you um one thing I think that it has worked for our district and for our teachers is that the DRDP and to clarify I've seen a question in kindergarten we use the DRDPK so that is the assessment tool that we use. It serves as an instructional map for teachers it allows them to see it's that million dollar question what does developmentally appropriate instruction look like and so this assessment tool has helped teachers grasp what does it look like at the various different levels so they know how to differentiate instruction but also how to help each child where they're at and then make targeted goals and plans to help them be successful to achieve those next levels and so that is kind of where we have really seen is that not only is it a wonderful assessment tool for students but it's also a wonderful teaching tool for teachers and so to bridge those together um you know just really makes that alignment piece so much more effective because what we are working on in preschool we can align then with the DRDP for us in our district is it completely overlaps so where one grade level ends a teacher can pick up and begin working on follow-up skills in the next grade level so we're not having to start from square one each time a child enters into a new grade level so that's kind of where we have seen the benefits to helping us with that developmentally appropriate instruction. Thanks so much Jennifer that's so critical when we talk about initiatives like p3 and ensuring that continuum and the alignment is both in the practices and the assessments and also in that teacher professional learning that community that you create around that space I'm going to move us into some district level or systems level questions and I'm going to ask both Katie and Francine to address some of these so starting again with Katie how do you have observational assessment data how does that really inform your district level decisions? Sure I'm relatively new to this role here in U46 but I can explain a little bit about what I know historically they've used the data for and then what I'm really focusing on it with and that is community systems work so we have about well let me rewind first of all I should share that and I forget you're not all from the state of Illinois so in the state of Illinois we are all required across the entire state to give the kids assessment the first 40 days after children have been in kindergarten and so the exciting piece of that is the accountability piece because it draws attention in our state and into our communities about how we are preparing our children for school and how we use that data to help us create programs and curriculum and make educational decisions about how to meet the kids needs and so I can't tell you I think it was a year ago that Illinois put on our district report cards that are created by the state board of education and publicly available on our websites the percentage of kids in kindergarten that are participating in that assessment and by measuring that whatever we measure as a system is where the value is placed and so while traditionally you know our you know our high school ACT and SAT scores have been on there our freshmen on track all secondary measures of our success have been on those report cards and for the first time our kindergarten readiness is on there and so that was a huge step in our state and I would strongly hope that your state might consider something similar but it also helps the focus of how do we work and partner with our community organizations that are serving our early learners because in our district while we have about 1500 kids um in our preschool program we have 2500 in a given year in our kindergarten program so we're missing about a thousand kids every year they're still here in our community so my work as the director and then with our community organizations is to help support how can we increase their readiness or how can we you know maximize their development so it's a lot it helps us a lot with our communication and partnership with them um let's see I think that another piece that prior to this kindergarten assessment we were measuring our kids um kindergarten and readiness in their achievement in kindergarten all around letter identification it was a strategic goal that the school board had um our teachers are still it's like still measured on this it's like the thorn in my side um because as I said what gets measured gets accomplished so we can get kids that are five years old to know their letters but is that really indicative of their literacy success later in their educational career and it's not we have a district here that is running some action research on their students they're about five years in and they've been looking at their measures um on their kids assessment to figure out which ones are showing the greatest growth in their on their students map scores their nwa scores in third grade um and what they found is that reciprocal conversation is the greatest indicator of their success and literacy later on not letter identifications I think this is really critical this information and these assessments really can show where we need to put our focus and so I think there's just a lot of it's an exciting time to be an early childhood I think in using this data to inform not just what's happening in the classroom which is really important but also like what are we doing as a system to promote our children's growth and development thank you so much for that Katie so even though you're not in California there's a lot that California can learn from other states who have gone out in front of us in some of these practices or doing parallel pieces and I will also shout out that Illinois has some great bilingual program models for their preschool program so a lot happening there for us to definitely pay attention to and that research that you just cited will come in really handy as we drop back into our preschool learning foundations and DRDP and what pieces of literacy really do matter as we move forward so I'm going to move over to Francine and ask you Francine why is aggregated child level data from a common measure important at the county level in what ways have you used DRDP child level data to inform your work at first five Monterey in Monterey County and and bubbling that back up to people like me where you send emails to let me know what's going on thank you Sarah so similar to what Katie was saying we have actually used the data to support understanding more and better what is needed in the county so for example we have disaggregated the data by region by ethnicity by school performance and look and share that information with stakeholders and it's really catalyzed them towards action one of our commissioners has said everyone can rally and unify around a data story and especially one where we're all in this together we really emphasize and no finger pointing and that it's a common goal for unifying and improving the system of support for our children and our families our teachers and our administrators so some of the districts for example when we've provided them with the the data have used it to look at vertical articulation and to see how the articulation has gone from preschool to tk to kinder now through p3 and they have seen there's been some real mental model shifts all through that articulation in terms of the teachers understanding the root causes or the situations that the children are in because our assessment includes not only the child assessment but we look at a teacher survey and a family survey to get a whole picture of what the system is like for our children and our families when they're coming into it we also when tk first started first five monitoring county which i know there are people on this call from different parts of the united states and some of you may not know what first five is but we were funded by tax on tobacco products and it first five supports whole child whole family approaches for children ages zero to five and their families and so obviously early childhood development is a piece of that and what we saw when tk started rather quickly was we believe that play as i know you all do is the way that young children learn and so we wanted to make sure that there were developmentally appropriate materials and learning and approaches in the classroom to receive those children so we provided small grants to classrooms to support the age appropriate materials and training to ensure that our teachers were also ready for play the other thing that we did was with the data was to also look at a grant to the county modern county office of education for their early learning network so that they could do a countywide preschool tk and kindergarten network to look at what the needs are within the county so those are just some of the things that we we have used that data for thanks so much for that francine i'm going to have you drop in a little bit more deeply because i know equity has been part of your work from the beginning so how does that child level data really inform your county's focus on race equity diversity and inclusion so in one very concrete way the school districts have been able to use the data that we've provided to them to to do their el caps because that's a big piece of the el caps is to really look at what is happening with our populations that have been put at risk the child level data when it's illuminated in the right way and we look to ways that we're not weaponizing data and that we're also putting the onus on the system and on those of us who've created the system really shows the injustices and disparities in a way that you can no longer ignore them so in our county we use the acronym ready r e d i and and that is a way to emphasize that our children are not going to be ready r e a d y unless our systems and supports are really authentically using and centering race equity diversity and inclusion of both special needs and parent voice so in addition to the child level data assessments as i mentioned we also include a teacher and parent survey and we also ask ethnicities of the teachers when we're doing those surveys and paint a holistic picture of the system that's supporting our children so there've also been some innovative recent work done by maco applique of the bright futures education partnership in developing school equity indicators they show not surprisingly that school districts with majority white students spend more per pupil than those with majority of students of color so again this ends up catalyzing different stakeholders to action including parents and funders so i think we have a link to that the guide that strived together and he's been very active michael applique has been very active in helping to identify those indicators can put that in the chat and no one is advocating for those that have higher resources to get less on the contrary we really recognize that nobody has enough resources to support our children and families but by shining a light on those inequities we can really support those districts who have less it's also about identifying the root causes and so that actually that data helped us to launch something called the bright beginnings initiative in our county and one of the initiative's main goals is to ensure that all children in monterey county succeed in school and life by closing the opportunity gaps that exist and that are predicted by race ethnicity income and zip code i think we're going to put a link to that in the chat as well so it's really important that future assessments take racial equity and root causes into consideration as we're moving forward with this thank you so much francy and that is so critical to really ground it in that and i liked how you put it as shining the light and then use some of those terms that are k-12 part of our system really uses around the root causes and making sure that that l-cap is part of the process and that you're helping partner and inform them in that space i'd like to move us now into the teacher side we all know that quality within programs and classrooms is always dependent on that teacher teachers are so critical so how do you ensure that teachers and administrators have the professional development that they need to use these assessments and data effectively and i want to also fold in there how are you ensuring that everything is play-based that you have joyful learning for the children as you move through some of that and we're going to start with jennifer so jennifer could you share a little bit about that absolutely i can speak to the two different types of professional development stakeholders that we work with um our teachers but also what is just as important is our administration because they are the ones that support our teachers so it's important that everyone has a well um versed knowledge in the assessment tool and so one of the things for administrators that we do in our district is that we work through a district learning data summits where we help administrators understand the data for many of us you know that have worked in education you know data from first grade to eighth grade or high school is looked at readily but no one really kind of knows what do you do with kindergarten data what do you do with tk data what do you do with preschool data and so with the use of our observational assessment tool we are able to look at the data make selected goals work towards it at a district level a classroom level and at an individualized student level and so based on that data teachers can take their information and through plc's each week they work together and we have coaching where they're looking at the data making informed decisions based on instruction one thing that was discussed earlier is the need for ongoing we cannot have the one and done because as adults we're constantly we learn something new each time oftentimes it can be overwhelming your cup overflows you you're only able to take in so much so we want to continually revisit and refollow up with our teachers and our administrators and just like students we want to make sure that the instructional professional development that we provide is differentiated for teachers that we look to see what the individual teachers need to be better at their craft to be more efficient training on calibration i've seen that come through as well of what how do you how do you monitor observational assessment data it's through calibration training to ensure that we are all doing the same type of grading and so that's kind of what we look at and then the last thing i've seen a question come through about curriculum how does the curriculum align with what is taking place we go through at our district and we align we take our curriculum we take our intervention i've seen like dibbles is being used by some people a cadence 95 fluency we take those as a district and we aligned it to our developmentally appropriate assessment so if a child is performing at a certain level on this assessment it makes it easier for teachers to rate and be able to place on the continuum because we've made that correlation for them so we pull teachers in as part of that training process so that they are a part of it so there is that buy-in so that's kind of just an overarching how we are you know using that professional development within our district thanks so much jennifer and i think we've had such a rich conversation that i'm going to start running out of time and i want to go deeper and deeper into what everyone has said so far so i'm going to pull a question over from the audience actually around what strategies work well for teachers to implement and document and respond so knowing that assessments take time how are we how are you all building that in and using those ongoing observational assessments so katie i know you were set up to talk a little bit around a sort of a boot camp but i also want you to be able to cover how do you support the teachers and using these in the moment or carving out time for them sure so in my previous role i was a director in another district i spent a lot of time with teachers trying to work through how they could create systems in the classrooms to stay on top of the demand of observational assessment because it is so challenging especially if you're doing a full you know tool with 47 measures or however many many measures that you have adopted so really what we did was spend time chunking when the teachers were going to focus on what measures so kind of dividing them up across a semester or trimester and looking at how to set up systems in their classrooms so that they were looking at all of the development kind of on a loop you know like through the kids work and how they were setting up their classrooms so they used a lot of checklists electronic portfolios help them a lot and you could see that in the one picture one of the teachers standing there with an ipad you know there's multiple different platforms that your districts can purchase to help teach your sort and we found out that through using technology really helped them and giving them the tools they needed just made it so much easier the teachers previously had been using paper portfolios and post-it notes and they found that to just be overwhelming but by spending some time and investing and really listening to them about what they needed and getting it for them it made a monumental difference and then once things were organized for them electronically they were able to really look at the observation and the student work that they had captured electronically and see how it actually tied to multiple measures and maybe even multiple students and so it really helped them meet the demand and we also looked at kind of you know what Jennifer had mentioned having you know their classroom peer professionals support with taking some data and having our you know gym teacher playground people who are interacting with the kids share on some of that responsibility thanks so much katie truly this conversation has fun enriching and i wish we had more time to go more deeply into it in about 30 seconds does do any of you want to tackle how you ensure that through the use of assessment we're still focused on play and joyful learning i think the developmental assessment tool really ties into that because it was mentioned earlier what we teach is what we assess so if we are assessing a developmentally appropriate and looking at how we get those things then we are going to set up our classroom environments to ensure that we are meeting the needs of kids and what we have seen is that these our children are so young they need these developmental this is how they learn they learn through play and they need to have hands-on learning and honestly this is this goes well beyond even kindergarten and tk our first and second and third graders we need to do what's developmentally appropriate you know for the age level that we're working with and so you know ensuring that our classroom environments where we put our money to purchase the manipulatives and the toys and the tools and the things and training teachers on how to use it i think that's where it becomes essential in ensuring that it becomes play based thanks so much jennifer i think that will wrap up our part of this conversation and what about our place to land on developmentally appropriate play and how that's infused throughout all of this work i do want to make a quick notion or note that as cde works through our preschool learning foundations process we will over the next year actually be doing a lot of focus groups and conversations to hear both about how you're using the tool and how to make it more accessible to teachers as we look at assessments and this conversation here really helped me think about additional pieces to make sure that the teachers are best supported and the administrators to use these tools so kathy i'm going to hand it over to you thank you so much sarah and thank you to today's presenters and audience for your participation so what does this mean for you for your district early childhood learning setting your your county your community especially in the midst of a pandemic and with the expansion of transitional kindergarten we hope that you're taking away some ideas or questions that will help you think about the tools that you're using now or that you may be thinking about adopting and we want to thank axa c sessa and lpi again for bringing us together thank you for all who attended and we'd like to mention that a survey will appear in your window and we'd appreciate your feedback thank you so much