 Hello. Welcome to the webinar. I'm Deb Rogge, your hostess for today. I'm a professional here here at ESU Aid and my contact information is in the lower right hand corner of this opening slide. Today I want to share some thoughts and ideas to consider and possibly implement to close your this year's school improvement efforts and to encourage you to plan forward next year's school improvement efforts and of course beyond to your next peer review. In education, the term continuous improvement refers to school or instructional improvement process that unfolds progressively over sustained time. Now it's the general belief that the event is not something that works and stops, but it's something that requires an organizational or professional commitment ongoing process of learning, reflection, adaptation, and growth. You know for example, when I was continuously improving a variety of small incremental changes are occurring daily in ways that cumulatively over time affect multiple dimensions of a school or a school system. Now the concept of continuous improvement also reflects an understood recognition that improving the effectiveness of schools and teaching is not only highly complex but it entails unforeseen challenges, complications, and reversals as well as steep or prolonged learning curves that require a sustained commitment to ongoing improvements rather than the execution of rapidly implemented breakthrough changes that only deliver up the desired results in a very predictable and a very quick fashion but they're not sustainable. So in today's presentation I'm going to share with you a few thoughts about your school improvement process and where you are and where you need to close up for this year and where you need to prepare yourself for next year's offerings. One of the first things I want to encourage you to do is celebrate. I want you to celebrate your accomplishments for this year. I want you to have cake and say oh and recognize what you actually made improvements with. Did that second grade did the that group that was not reading at the second grade level did they have growth and move closer to actually being on grade level? Did those students on the NEESA that were having trouble with algebraic concepts did and you had a plan of action that you were going to implement for them in order to increase their knowledge and their skills with that? Did they actually achieve that? We need to celebrate those. We need to celebrate those incremental happenings that occurred that made school improvement worth it. You see the Superman cake. You need to have cake. You need to celebrate. You need to celebrate in some way not just as teachers but also as students and as a complete district. Think about what you did in the name of school improvement this year. Did the district provide professional development for the teachers? What pieces are parts of that development or developments have you noted or cited being implemented in the classroom well in the classrooms of the teachers or in the hallways of your school? Did the district or maybe you as a group of teachers or an individual examine student data in what days ways did the activity impact in student learning or impact teacher reflection? What did you do to truly make your continuous improvement efforts over the past move from the stop and go model to the continuous improvement model? What have you done? Celebrate what you've done. It's very important. Also, we want you to reflect. Reflect on that work that you've accomplished. What have you really accomplished? Have you managed your accomplishments in minutes and photos and other documents you created data collection and displays which then moved our students from here to here and your teachers learning and implementation of those strategies in order to move those students from here to here. Do you have a common website for the collection of those types of documents and documentations? You know, you should consider using maybe a community, maybe a Weebly, maybe a Wikis, what that is common that you as a district, your teachers, your staff, your support and your stakeholders, your community and such can all go and really reflect upon the work that you've done. Most of all, you need to make sure that all of those reflections that you captured that they're current. Do you need to make some time to catch up? You know that if you actually set aside that time to catch up, it'll pay off in the long run. You won't be running and scrambling and searching and saying or sitting down in groups and trying to brainstorm when you had your various meetings and the topics and the actions and the implementations that took place. Make sure you stay current. Then I want to encourage you to analyze. Did you analyze your data? Did you look at all of the data points you data? But what data you need to look at is the data that's driving school improvement plan, your continuous school improvement plan. Does the data that you collect doesn't make sense? Does it inform you as to where you're progressing through the plan? Are you moving forward? Did you train your staff to interpret data? Do you use strategy calls to aid in the analyzing of data? Did you look for the strengths and the challenges of the data that you examined? What implications did the challenges of your data present? Did you make sure you examined the four types of data? Did you look at data? Did you look at perceptual data? Did you look at student learning and academic data? Did you look at your processes and your programs that are implemented within your school? Do all of these data sources, do they intersect? How did they intersect? Were there two-way intersections, three-way intersections, four-way intersections? And then once you've identified those intersections, one of those intersections tell you about what's happening with the student learning. Is there growth? Is there achievement? Are you moving forward? Are you getting to what we're going to call got it on your action plan? Did you analyze the data to support your school improvement plan? Did that examination cause you to revise your plan? Now, revising, remember, is both adding and documenting actions to your plan, which the district achieved and now plans. So what did you get a document that? What do you need to add? What do you need to take and add? What do you need to take out and put into your events? That's how you need your data. Also, you want to make sure that you're reliable with your data, in regard to both the collection and the processes that you in order to examine that data. Did you collect the data necessary to examine the growth of your goals? Is it in a form and what examines it sees the same picture as you did as the creator of the graph or diagram? Is there a quality to the school improvement work this year? Can you reproduce those same results at a time at a time with your students? Is it reliable? In which in turn results in trust by your stakeholders and your students and everyone who's involved with the school, trust and building relationships are very important. Do you have a vision that you have been as a district and what comes next? Do you have a timeline planning, defining and setting what's happened this year and what's going to happen from this point forward to your next external peer review plan ahead? If you know where you're going, if you set the pathway, you're less likely to get drawn away or are distracted to be completed at this point in time. Identified and booked the professional development assistance that you will need, whether it be from a professional or whether it be from ESU personnel, they're more likely those two groups of people are to be available on their calendars rather than if you would come a few days prior to your next professional development session. So plan ahead, use that vision, then ensure that you count your successes of the work and in your progress. Did you give yourself on the bat? Did you celebrate when you or your students got to got it in the classroom when they really have got into understanding and doing and and being able to replicate that task or that that knowledge or that skill that you've been working with? Did you accomplish a goal or part of your action plan, moved those accomplishments into your experience? Were you able to solve that that learning that somehow eluded you? Bottom line, progress is not documented at all. In closing, I want to encourage you to make sure that you reflect on the work that you've accomplished. Analyze and make sense of that of the information that is that accumulates due to continuous school improvement. Be reliable in regard to the data collection and the process and processes that you use. Have a vision, determine what comes next, plan ahead, it will pay off in the end. Make sure you count your successes of your work and your progress because above all, you want to celebrate your accomplishments, your accomplishments of this year and the accomplishments over time of your school improvement efforts. I want to thank you for being with me for this webinar and listening very carefully to what I have to say. We want to make sure here from the professional development department that you have a great summer. We also want you to know that we're here to assist you with your continuous school improvement needs and we invite you to give us a call at any time. Make sure you book your school improvement needs early. Our calendars fill up and we'll see you next fall. Thank you for joining me. This is Deb Robby signing off.