 Thank you for joining us today. You have joined today's webinar in listen-only mode. Please use the chat function located on the Zoom navigation menu to ask questions to our speakers and panelists and to engage in conversation related to today's webinar topic. If you have any technical issues, please probably message the host for assistance. Today's webinar will be recorded and available to registrants with the webinar slide deck and resources. At this time, please welcome LPI Senior Researcher Jennifer DePauley for welcoming and introductory remarks. Thank you, Nicole. And hello, everyone. It is so nice to be here with you all today. As Nicole said, my name is Jen DePauley and I am a Senior Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute. We appreciate you all taking the time to attend today's webinar. This webinar is presented in co-sponsorship with AASA, the Superintendent's Association, and the Soul Alliance, and is the sixth and final in our six-part series on transforming state education policy through a whole child approach. In our previous webinars, we dove into what the science of learning and development looks like when it's translated into both practice and policy. All of these webinars are available on our website and at the link in the chat. Today we'll be diving into how we can redesign curriculum instruction and assessment based on the science of learning and development and drawn from our whole child policy toolkit. You can find the toolkit at the link in the chat, which will be dropped shortly. And it is my great honor to introduce our presenter today, Dr. Carol Lee. Dr. Lee is the Edwina S. Tari Professor Emerata at the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy. For 56 years, Dr. Lee has worked as a classroom teacher in primary and high school at the community college level and as a university researcher. She's currently president of the National Academy of Education, and her primary research has focused on cultural supports for learning. Dr. Lee, thank you for being here with us today, and I will hand it over to you. Great. Thanks, Jen. So my presentation today focuses on the whole child focus that has been the work of LPI for these many years with a specific attention to what this means for curriculum instruction and assessment. So these two graphics are ones with which I'm sure you're already familiar, the guiding principles for equitable whole child design as a sort of broad framework for structures across the educational system that need to be in place to support whole child development and the one on the right in terms of specifics around instruction and sort of systems within schools and districts. What I want to do in this brief presentation today is to sort of dig down deep into the specifics of, excuse me, how these broad principles about science of human learning and development actually can translate into instruction. So big ideas that are emerging from the science of human learning and development first have to do with relations among physiological processes inherited from our evolution as a species and their adaptations through epigenetic processes and participation in cultural practices influencing goals and actions. I pay particular attention to this relationship between physiological processes that we inherit as a species as these are taken up in our participation in cultural practices, which suggest to me at least that these big ideas are really, really important if they have really an evolutionary basis. And I'll discuss briefly what some of those dispositions are. Dynamic relations among different levels of ecological systems that structure resource allocations, processes of interaction within an across ecological context from micro meso macro through cultural historical time. The idea here being that learning does not unfold in any single setting. Learning unfolds, excuse me, in people's participation within and across settings, within and across particular moments in broader cultural historical time, as well as where people are learners are in the life course. Excuse me, as people engage in activity, how thinking unfolds through relations among thinking, feeling and relationships and how these relationships shape the nature required, the nature of knowledge required. The idea here being that, again, thinking, we have a strong focus in education or sort of technograph, technocratic, purely cognitive aims of education. But what we know that thinking and feeling and perceptions are all intimately connected and if we're going to address whole child development in instructions, we need to be able to take into account kids' perceptions of what they're doing and their emotional attachment that they attribute to their experiences of learning and the complexity of the kinds of knowledge that young people need to develop, excuse me, then how development unfolds across and is influenced by different levels of time. So cultural historical time, the, for example, all of the discussions that are going on right now about learning in digital medium, particularly out of school, this is a particular cultural historical moment that was not an issue decades ago onto genetic where learners are in the life course and what's going on micro-genetically in terms of interactions in the particular settings in which learning is unfolding. And then finally, overall, seeking to understand how this cognitive development unfolds through diverse pathways at the level of individual variation, variation based on participation in and across multiple social communities that include the nuclear family, extended family, social networks, etc. This issue of diverse pathways, again, is a very central tenet to this science of human learning and development perspective and what it means to take into account both in the individual and the individual as members of a variety of groups, etc. One of the other takeaways from this work, again, is a scientific warrant, if you will, excuse me, to these big ideas is that what we now understand is that complex networks within the brain interact with one another in dialogical processes in which emotions, cognition, and perceptions interact to fuel our actions. The bottom line idea here is that there are regions of the brain that involve emotions and perceptions that interact with cognitive processes and they operate in the same way that our brains sort of detect physiological processes. Ron, I'm hungry. I'm having fever or pain in terms of our reactions to perceptions of salience, the perceptions of threat, and that these are the same interacting systems that manage all of our body systems. The point here simply being that emotions and perceptions as central contributors to human learning and development have to be a significant focus in the design of learning environments and even in assessments that we expect to give us actionable information. Excuse me. These two images come from the cultural nature of human development. I show them simply as clear empirical evidence of the diversity of pathways of development across the world. So on the right side, there's a e-way baby from Ghana who has a machete. Eleven months old is able to manipulate that in terms of getting food. If you saw this image, you know, with your neighbor, you call the Department of Children and Family Services because we presume this is not developmentally possible for children, but it certainly is. On the right side, the Mayan girl, who is a caretaker at six years old of her infant daughter, I'm an infant sibling. So the overarching takeaways from this work, we think, are one that thinking and emotions are deeply intertwined and interdependent, that perceptions of the self and others and tasks and settings matter and that humans are adaptive and multiple pathways of development are both normative and essential. So the question here becomes, what do these big ideas mean in terms of how we think about instruction, curriculum and assessment? The image you see here on the right is young man Ben Underwood. Underwood, unfortunately, I think, is now deceased, became blind at the age of three and on his own terms of individual variation, if you will, developed a mechanism for being able to get around without any support using the basic mechanism that whales do in terms of noise sort of reverberating, again, individual variation and the ingenuity that that that humans bring to to challenge. This particular slide is in reference to a study that I had been involved with some years ago, a young man that I've written about named Yatoo. And again, I'm trying to demonstrate here the way in which these big ideas about physiological processes, participation in human development in in cultural practices and where one is in the life course and individual variation come into play just to try to illustrate that these ideas seem deeply complex, but they're actually we see them every day. So in terms of human dispositions, we're disposed as humans to seek attachments with other human beings. We know that human babies when they're born pay more attention to human beings than to objects. So this is the importance of attachments and relationships is well established in the scientific literature for this young man. In terms of individual variation, he happens to be very introverted. And so he's this is a he's a freshman in high school at the time of the study. And so his sort of uptake of this need for attachment for him as an individual or complicated by his introversion in terms of physiological systems at play. He's in early adolescence, which means there are physiological changes that are taking place as he transitions into adulthood and that these physiological processes are very sensitive to any perceptions that he has of threat in terms of participation in cultural practices, cultural practices, in this case, mostly outside of school. The fact that he's a young African American young man living in a low income community, this happens to be in Chicago, where there's a great deal of violence. You know, this was years ago, the same holds true today. But in terms of his conceptions of his future possibilities as a man, again, very much deeply in intertwined and connected to cultural practices, in this case, outside of school, and then in terms of environmental stimuli that he's in a school where there's not high achieving is not high expectations in terms of academic work or development for him. But there's high rigor in the streets. And so what I've argued makes succeeding in school challenging for you to is one, the fact that he's at this transition point in terms of adolescents being a black young man in America, being a black male living in poverty, the sort of messages in the in the cultural representations that he gets that are different than expectations in school. He has a history of schooling that has been challenging for him being in high school, lots of different adults to sort of manage with. And I'm suggesting simply that in this example that if we're thinking about whole child development in the context of schooling, what this science of human learning development seems to me suggests is that we need to be attempting to all of these dimensions of challenge that he has. I'm also suggesting that in terms of the implications of this science of human learning development that suggests expanding our goals for learning beyond a simple technocratic cognitive outcomes only, but whole child development in terms of developing a healthy sense of the self as an individual, as a member of cultural multiple cultural communities, as a learner, perceptions about future possibilities, health, both mental, physical and emotional, learning to be resilient in the face of challenge and also preparation for citizenship and that part of this preparation for citizenship has to do with developing dispositions to weigh multiple sources of evidence, multiple perspectives to weigh competing evidence, excuse me, to value complexity to develop ethical dispositions to value others and complex kinds of knowledge. And again, this I think among the implications here are what then are the challenges for curriculum instruction at both the school, classroom, state, district levels for these expanding goals. The takeaway overall here is that features of robust learning environments, one position the learner as competent, anticipate sources of vulnerability, as I had suggested with a year to examine and scaffold or resources the learner brings, no matter what the conditions are, learners bring resources and we need to understand those to make public the social good and utility of what it is we're trying to help children learn, making problem solving explicit in public, providing supports as the learners are engaged in complex problem solving and providing expansive opportunities to remain adaptive over time. I want to sort of dig into them to what this sort of complex set of issues suggest about knowledge in the domain, the academic domains that we teach in the context of schooling. One is that very much I think what undergirds the thinking that we've all been engaged in is the importance of understanding what learners bring to academic learning, what is available in terms of their everyday knowledge if they accrue over time through participation in cultural practice is certainly outside of school. What are the implications for learning in the context of schooling? The kinds of knowledge that we want to look at are both conceptual knowledge, epistemological knowledge, revisiting what we think constitutes appropriate knowledge and disciplines and very often we're very constrained by very Eurocentric sort of views of what constitutes learning in the domains. I'm going to try to illustrate the complexity of learning in domains in this case with reading comprehension, which is my sort of area of research in practice. One is that reading is a relational skill. So even though we're getting in the public discussions now with NAEP scores and others post COVID, the kids are two years and three years behind, which is not actionable information. You can't do anything with it. It doesn't mean anything that I can give everyone of you in the audience who are expert readers, a text that will make that will be challenging for you. That is because progressions of difficulty across grades are not based on simple readability formulas that over the course of the K to 12 text change the task that we asked kids to engage in change, and particularly the way in which reading and discipline plays out post primary. So we need to be able to teach generic strategies, discipline, specific strategies, domain knowledge, as well as dispositions of inquiry that there are also socially emotional demands to learn how to become a competent reader across a variety of kinds of texts. One is wrestling with uncertainty and complexity and disposition to wrestle with that as opposed to retreat, wrestling with competing demands, particularly in middle and high school that the demands of what we ask kids to do in school are now the only things on their mind that they're wrestling with kids. Perceptions of themselves and others, their ability to to when they don't comprehend to know what to do, if you will, the perceptions. What are they? We think they think we're asking them to do their perceptions of their peers and their teachers. We have a big challenge in schooling where in many cases, particularly in schools serving low income young people that they are so used to the idea that what's expected is just something in the teacher's head and the game is to figure out what the teacher wants, but not what does it mean to deeply interrogate. Then the cognitive demands, again, of reading comprehension are complex. They involve constructing, testing and revising. So we're constantly trying to make sense as we read, rather than simply after we've read the need to be met a cognitive in terms of monitoring our understanding as we're reading and being able to repair people to integrate what we know with what the text is presenting to us and taking stances that we can actually be critical and don't simply have to accept. There's a strong body of research illustrating ways in which both assessments and curricular pedagogical practices can connect with kids every day knowledge. So Bill Tate, I was a math educator, had done some work with again, these were low income, large African American kids gave them a math problem where they had to decide whether it would be better to buy bus tickets day by day or weekly pass. The correct mathematical answer was to buy it daily. The kids said weekly because they could share the tickets with the passes with family and friends. Again, a different set of warrants if you didn't have a mechanism for trying to unearth and understand that you just assumed the kid couldn't solve that problem. Now, when Azir has done a lot of work with kids who play basketball and the ability to to understand the statistics in basketball, but not in classrooms at Taylor did work with these were, I think, either kindergarten or first grade kids low income who would shop at a grocery store after school and kinds of mathematical computation that they engaged with and developed assessments that matched on to that or Jeff Sacks work with kids, poor kids who didn't go to school who was selling candy on the street. And then Brian Brown's work studying baseball pitchers understanding of the physics of curve balls. I try to close out now with just some illustrations from my own work in what I call cultural modeling, trying to capture these dimensions of human learning development that I've discussed. One, this was a curriculum focused on the teaching of literary reasoning, but not simply for the purpose of the technocratic gains of analyzing literature, but for identity development. And so we've selected texts that were specifically aimed at supporting the African American adolescents with whom we were working in wrestling with identity challenges. Our instructional design was particularly aimed at addressing kids' perceptions about themselves and what they were doing, the cognitive work that was demanded, that was involved in being able to engage in this rich literary analysis and the emotional nature of the experiences they had trying to wrestle with these we found in doing this work where we started off positioning this work drawing on cultural funds of knowledge that these young African American English speakers had, that they were able to engage with canonical texts with deep literary reasoning. But I point this example out as the other side of the picture here is the professional development that's necessary for teachers to understand what sometimes our displays of understanding based in everyday practices that they may not perceive. I'm not going to go through the details of this, but simply to say that the discussions that these kids were having and the comments and questions they were raising were rooted in deep literary understanding, but the teacher couldn't hear them in the moment. And so the issue of what's necessary to provide teachers with the kinds of supports they need to do to do this kind of instruction. This was from a story called Orion by a Dambala by Johnny Edgar Weidman. Again, in the interest of time, I'm not going to go into the details, but simply to say that it was a very complex text around a the notion of this enslaved African as a kind of Messiah character in the story. The expert analysis we found very much mirrored what the kids saw and what they were able to extract in terms of talking about the symbolism in the text. But again, this was coming because of the complex way in which we tried to address the multiple dimensions of learning for kids from a whole child development perspective. Closing out here, because we knew that there was more to learning than just simple cognitive knowledge that we were attempting to support a strong epistemological orientation that you reading literature for a social meaning, making for yourself and bowing multiple readings of literary texts and found these were positively correlated with our assessments of their ability to interpret literature and write literary arguments. We assess their perceptions about their ability to cope with challenge. Again, positively correlated with our outcomes. We knew that perceptions were important, so we had measures of kids perceptions of their experiences of this learning environment. Again, these were positively correlated with outcomes, their ability, their belief in an effort over sort of fixed intelligence was again positively correlated and also measures of their racial identity and again, a positive sense of racial identity was positively correlated with these outcomes. Sort of evidence of the ability, even in large scale assessments for those of you who are working at the district and state levels, is a model from the piece of the international piece of assessment excuse me, that is organized with a huge database to not only deal with cognitive achievement, but also socio-emotional well-being and sort of attainment, sort of one of the long term consequences of this evidence of a standing assistant. Our close was saying that this idea of the need to build a strong infrastructure to support this kind of teaching and learning. The example here you see on the right is from work from Beth Warren and Anne Rosemary in a project called Turk out of Shayshae Cullen, out of Turk in Boston. And there's this teacher is teaching in I think it's a second and a third grade class about plant growth. One of the children who responds, who is Hispanic or Latina young girl, but her parents are university professors. She points to the graph that the teacher has talked in terms of sort of linear development. The other child who responds here, Elena, is first generation Latina immigrant. English is her second language, and she responds to the teacher's question about plant growth, talking about how her feet feel when the when her shoes are too tight and her feet are growing. And it teaches like, I have no idea what you're talking about. She then brings that problem of practice to a group in Turk in Shayshae Cullen that involves teachers and researchers working together and they work through to understand what are the underlying warrants that this that this child is presenting. Turns out it's a very powerful idea in the history of science called in terms of embodied cognition, imagining yourself inside of a phenomena that you don't thoroughly understand. So I'm just closing here just to say that these goals that I've tried to very briefly illustrate are deeply complex. And it's very important that we're able to build infrastructure to support teachers and districts in doing this work, both in terms of curriculum and and and and assessments. And this factory model that we have right now does not support being able to do that work. So with that, I will close because I think I'm a bit over time. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Lee. I know that I'm so happy that we'll have your slides available to folks because there's so much to dig in on. But that was a really nice encapsulation. And I know in a very short amount of time of what it actually means when we talk about whole child learning and development and how critical that is. So thank you. I we're now going to move over to our panel. I am happy to introduce my colleague, Anisha Bajranarian, who is the Director of State Performance Assessment at the Learning Policy Institute, where she leads projects related to state performance assessments. For the last decade, her work has focused on supporting states, districts and educators to develop and implement student-centered systems of assessment that support all learners. Anisha, passing it over to you. Thanks so much, Jen. Really excited to be here with you all today. And thank you so much, Dr. Lee, for that really thought provoking presentation on how important it is that we consider all aspects of students' lived experiences and identities when we're thinking about how we can best support them in our educational systems. I know it's given me a lot to think about. And I'm very excited to discuss the last point that Dr. Lee raised for us in terms of the infrastructure. How do we in districts and states really think about setting up systems that can enable this kind of teaching and learning in classrooms together? So I'm very excited to have with me today some illustrious state and district leaders to to discuss this point. We have with us Peter Leonard, who is the executive director of student assessment and MTSS for Chicago Public Schools. Peter and his team empower CPS stakeholders with high quality evidence of student learning to advance achievement, access and opportunity for all students by leading policy, strategy, implementation and support across all assessment and MTSS programs. Peter also represents CPS and various state level groups serving on the Illinois State Assessment Review Committee and the P-20 Council's Committee on Data Assessment and Accountability. Welcome, Peter. We also have with us Sharon, the case from who currently serves as the deputy assistant superintendent of academic content at the Louisiana Department of Education. Sharon ensures that teachers, school leaders and school system leaders have the tools, resources and knowledge necessary to make meaningful growth for every student every day by helping create and maintain a coherent academic structure of aligned standards and curriculum assessments and professional development. Welcome, Sharon. So excited to have you. And we have Sarah Young, who serves as the chief of staff at the Utah State Board of Education. In her work, Sarah works to bring next generation learning to Utah's public schools. Her projects have included the state's digital teaching and learning initiative and development of Utah's portrait of a graduate. Sarah ensures that these initiatives are centered in creating learning environments that foster 21st century skills for Utah students. Welcome, Sarah. We're so excited to have you here with us as well. So to to lead off on our discussion today, Dr. Lee's description of what meaningful teaching and learning looks like really has me thinking because when I think of traditional curriculum instruction and assessment systems, I have a really hard time not sort of immediately picturing the rows of students passively accepting information with someone at the front of the room who's really just sort of serving as a way to transmit disconnected ideas and facts that aren't really connected to student learning. But as Dr. Lee sort of raised for us, that is not the best scenario in which students learn and demonstrate their learning. We know that to unleash students potential, we need to provide learning opportunities that are authentic, that build metacognitive skills, that allow them access to deep content knowledge through connections to their own lives and to the information that is meaningful to them and that they need to be able to learn and apply their understanding in these like in these much more authentic and relevant in real world ways. And so I'm going to ask each of you to tell us a little bit about your work and how your state or district is working to create deeper, more authentic learning experiences for young people. And, Sarah, I'm going to start with you. If you don't mind telling us a little bit about how you're thinking about this in Utah. Of course, thank you for having us and for the opportunity to spotlight the State Board of Education's work in this area. So it was actually prior to the pandemic in 2017 and 18 that our State Board of Education had a really critical conversation with our community in terms of what is the expected outcome of being a graduate here in K-12 within the state of Utah and in doing a listening and design thinking process across the entire state with a variety of stakeholders, including our parents and our students. We ultimately arrived at an outcome that really did reflect a lot of the conversations from Dr. Lee related to the whole child and moving not just beyond academic mastery to be able to include things along the lines of skills, but also looking at some of those necessary dispositions that were really important to our community, like respect and service. And so that led us to create our state portrait of a graduate that really has served as the North Star for a lot of the future decision making and next steps that occurred not just during the pandemic, but also in terms of post pandemic to make sure that we are really orienting the system to be able to support a more holistic approach to education that ultimately leads to the outcomes that are articulated in our portrait of a graduate. Thanks, Sarah, that North Star idea. And I know that the idea of a portrait of a graduate has been so powerful in local communities and it's really it's really wonderful to hear think you're thinking about this at the state level as well. And the idea of a North Star is something that I find really compelling. Sharon, I know in Louisiana, you've also been thinking about sort of how to how to put forward a really meaningful North Star to guide your curriculum instruction and assessment efforts. Can you tell us a little bit about what that's looking like? And yeah, sure. And I know Louisiana reputation about it, but we really think through and decided classroom instruction is the most impacted by three components. Curriculum, assessment and teacher professional development. So our underlying theory of action at LDU is to make sure those three components are tightly aligned for maximum input and student learning. So we work every day to build strong coherence around curriculum, assessment and teacher professional development. So I know kind of most states think, oh, they review curriculum and they tell systems what to use. We don't, we're a local control state. School systems, schools choose the curriculum that they want, but we try to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. So we have a really robust curriculum review process and we engage in contracts with educators and train them or review them before ed reports and we put out a list of tier curriculum. And then we have another vendor list for professional learning providers that's specifically tied to the curriculum. We don't do curriculum agnostic, we want content pedagogy in the hands of teachers because then the results for the students are so much stronger. And we're doing that last little piece, that alignment of assessment as well. Really thinking through that traditional summative assessment at the end that Dr. Lee was talking about sometimes disconnected from students. I think the work that we push forward most on this is our innovative assessment around ELA. We review curricula, but in the space when the standards first change we also develop to ELA curriculum, ELA guidebooks. The majority of our state use it because we can be nimble, create units that are specific for locals like we have a Cajun folk tales units, it's Louisiana that you probably won't get in another state. And so we designed a through course assessment particularly aligned to that curriculum first where instead of waiting to the end of the year for a summative assessment after I finish my unit I take a through course assessment with a passage from the text that was in my unit. So, don't preference background knowledge everybody's on an equal playing field. We've moved forward to do that with other curricula and other subjects but really thinking through that alignment how can we get tightly aligned a curriculum assessment and professional learning for teachers so that the students experience is rounded and fulfilled in what it needs to be. Thanks Sharon. And that's, I mean, it's so interesting to hear sort of the state portrait of a graduate approach that approach to coherence you talking a little bit about curriculum and really sort of locally relevant curriculum as a potential point of coherence here. And so I'm really excited Peter like you work at a different level of the system Sarah and Sharon are thinking about this in terms of what's going to enable this work across the districts in their state you are working in a district. Can you tell us a little bit about what this looks like as you get closer and closer to the classroom to create work that is really authentic and meaningful for students? Absolutely Anisha and thank you for having me. I will caveat it with that Chicago is bigger than many states so depending how you wanna think about us and I saw many international folks joining so just to set some context for Chicago we are a district that serves over 300,000 students across over 600 schools where the fourth largest district in the United States with just under half of our students Hispanic or Latinx background and just over a third African-American. It was great to listen to Dr. Lee 10 years ago I was a student in her classroom so great to continue to get the chance to learn from her. Connecting to what Sarah said so in CPS we also have what we call the graduate profile but we've also been thinking a lot about the North Star closer to the classroom so our chief education officer has launched what we're calling our instructional core vision just saying we wanna get back to what does the interactions between students, teachers and content look like and to educate for equity our instructional core vision centers identity, community and relationships. So that we're empowering students to connect imagine an act as ethical critical actors in the world. And so that's organized an entire shift from setting the vision to what is that infrastructure to your point Anisha. And so one of our big focuses has been on that curriculum piece. So we saw that across Chicago more than half of teachers said that they didn't have a relevant curriculum in their content area. And so we launched back in 2019 an initiative that has resulted in what's called Skyline which is our curriculum equity initiative where we've worked with partners and over 300 teachers to adapt existing curricula to ensure that any teacher can have high quality culturally relevant Chicago connected curriculum that they can use within their classroom that so that students can both have that window into the world and a mirror reflecting their experience. We've really partnered that with curriculum embedded assessments our big push around assessment is how we can bring assessment closer to the learning because the change in learning acceleration outcomes come there. And so although it's adoptions voluntary currently our Skyline curriculum is used in at least one grade level and content area and over 80% of our schools and we're supporting schools through that curriculum audit the engagement on what the right curriculum is and the professional learning that allows them to focus on strong implementation and the instructional core experience for students. Thanks, Peter. One thing that I find really heartening is just all three of you live in different states you're working in different contexts but as you were talking a lot of the policies the language, the activities that you're engaging in sort of like on paper they would read as very coherent even just amongst the three of you here who are operating in really different contexts. So I find that heartening but also know that while many of these supports are intended within a given state within a given district within a given school are intended to enable and complement work at different levels of the system that this isn't always a perfect fit. And so Sharon and Sarah I'm gonna start with you both and I'm wondering how do you think about you've described coherence of the full system how do you specifically think about coherence with your local communities with your districts and your schools? And how do you think about like the support that you're providing and how it is interacting with enabling and at times maybe posing barriers for what's happening locally? Can you tell us a little bit about how you're thinking about that and Sharon I'll start with you this time. Sure, I will say after our initial push that I start with in curriculum formally in 2013 and I can't believe it's been 10 years. That's where we started like that's the meat of the work we've done this at the state level we've pushed that out, we're supporting systems and we've been doing now the work within school systems and making sure instructional leadership teams are aligned at the system level, the school level and then with the teacher level what teacher collaborations following up on that. So supporting those systems in selecting what's your high quality curriculum how does it meet your local needs where your professional learning partners who you're reaching out to making sure that's aligned and what does every day look like for teachers and planning on the curriculums for the needs of their students. Really helping them understand that the curriculum is a floor, not the ceiling it's to show that teachers aren't struggling to find something every day to teach but they're taking those materials and crafting them in the way that meet the needs of their students every day in their context building that understanding at different levels through our department pushouts for professional learning. We have a, we're getting ready to go next week 6,000 educators in New Orleans for our teacher leader summit where we kind of level set for the work for the next year and that's gonna be really structured in that IELT model from the system to the school downs teacher collaboration but that's the next part to make sure we're all aligned and I'm gonna kick it over to Sarah I'm sure she's got lots to add. No, I appreciate the question and it's actually one that we grappled with at the state because we are very fortunate to have very innovative districts and I'll call out one of our district Jewab School District who had a portrait of a graduate that predated and really helped inspire our work at the state level. So we were really conscious of, you know not wanting to supplant that local innovation but instead creating an arena where we signal to all of our schools that not only was it okay but it was supported and celebrated. And so with our portrait of a graduate we've been very clear with all of our individual districts and charter schools that we encourage them to engage in the exact same process with their community to go through and develop their own local portrait of a graduate. Many have done that and we've seen a lot of overlap and coherence between what was identified across the state as well as what they're seeing at the local level. To that end, what we've done as a state entity to try and balance between being able to provide supports and resources for coherence but also allowing for that local innovation is we partnered with the state to be able to create the K-12 competencies which we actually expanded to P-20 meaning that they start in preschool and go all the way through our higher education. So those competencies were really designed to be a jumping off point then for each of our districts to say so which of these elements really resonate with our local portrait of a graduate to more so serve as a model and a library as opposed to an edict or something that had to be done. In addition to that, we created model rubrics. Those rubrics are designed through a student assessment lens so asking our students to take on that agency to be able to say, where am I in progressing in these areas as opposed to that being an adult function? And again, really serving as a library for our local schools to be able to select from to honor that local control component. The last thing I'll say is that we actually went through all of our policies here at the state board with a couple of partners and we identified what we kind of call our flexibility guide and that's where we go through and say these are all the existing flexibilities that support the design related to moving towards the portrait of a graduate outcome so that we were really highlighting those opportunities to kind of give and signal and document and code that this is okay. And we really support you in moving that direction. That's so interesting. Like I love the listening to both of you highlight sort of like the ways to make sure everyone's on the same page and has a common understanding. And then also how do you enable and message that there's so much flexibility and you're not sort of trying to constrain work? I think it's a really interesting set of ideas for us to think about. Peter, how does this work for you in a district? Like I'm wondering how does this functionally play out for you when you're thinking about the supports that the state does provide or could provide and how they enable or potentially create inadvertent barriers for your work? Yeah, thanks, Anisha. It was fascinating listening to both of you reflect on your states. From a district experience, we deal with some of those similar issues right in our management of schools. So from the curricular side, we have local curricular autonomy and we're trying to align incentives, offering structures to provide the right level of flexibility to local control, but ensuring we get to that same outcome. In our engagement with the state, I also want to acknowledge that the kind of governance policy and political environment state by state are very different in the relationships between districts and states. In Illinois and for Chicago, for me when the state does the big things states are supposed to do excellently it opens up so many opportunities for districts. Things like setting the right standards that signal what students need to know and be able to do, developing things like the gradual profile, the adoption of updated Spanish language art standards in a state with many Spanish speakers that opens up the possibility to explore native language Spanish assessment in the future. Something as what may seem small for us but turning around our large scale assessment return from July to May now allows districts and teams to really do strong end of year analysis and summer planning. So when our state is really effective it's when they are really able to convene a broad array of stakeholders around the big decisions and then execute on those decisions really well and empower the people closest to the ground to pick that ball up and move it forward on behalf of students. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that reflection and I think this is giving us a really rich and sort of like a whole view of the different ways that our policies and practices at the systemic level can support this vision for curriculum instruction and assessment. Peter you just mentioned you sort of you brought up sort of like the ways that states can think about assessments and the assessment supports that are provided in service of positive instructional moves. And I'm wondering, Sharon you mentioned this a little bit too but I'm wondering if I can ask you all to reflect on this a little bit more. I think very often when we hear conversations about curriculum instruction and assessment at the systemic level there's a lot of excitement about some of the opportunities on the curriculum and instruction side and a little bit of hesitation or attention around the assessments piece of it and what exactly can we do with our assessment systems to position them to do more good than harm certainly and good in general as opposed to just sort of like not serving a positive and instructional use. And so Peter I wonder if I can toss this back to you since you just brought this up and if you have reflections on what would enable a state assessment or state to sort of put forward assessment systems that are more meaningful for the teaching and learning that you're trying to enact in Chicago. Thanks Anisha. We need to get more people excited about innovative assessment practices as one of my main takeaways here because I'm fired up. So I think a key part of that question is what is the role of the state in doing that? When is the state creating versus when is the state enabling? We think about a balanced assessment system within Chicago and a lot of those state assessments fit at the top of our pyramid in those large-scale assessments. But one of the powerful things about a large-scale assessment or any assessment is it makes what it means to have mastered or be proficient in a standard visible. We can all read a standard and have general ideas about what it looks like for a student to know and be able to do that thing. But we don't concretize it until we create a situation that elicits some level of performance from a student. And that's what an assessment does. So quality, large-scale assessments signals to an entire state the types of things a student needs to know and be able to do to be successful on that grade level. My argument would be that everything else belongs to the districts in terms of how to make that real, well in an assessment system that's connected to curriculum. A state can really effectively set the standard, help people understand the standard, connect that back to practice. But where the rubber hits the road, it's gonna be closer and closer to the classroom for that unpacking, to having a curriculum that sequences students towards that learning that provides for assessment experiences for a student that can move more towards the culturally responsive end where students are able to activate and tap into their cultural linguistic assets and histories to bring that to their assessment experiences. So for me, it's a great stake in the ground around quality and then the enabling system to be able to bring that assessment work closer to the learning. Thanks, Peter. Sarah or Sharon, do you wanna weigh in here? And to me, thanks Peter said excite me because some of the work we're doing and some of the work obviously we wanna do and our curriculum work, of course, doubling down on curriculum and that assessment I always think of it, people use assessments for very different things. Some can be in form instruction, even for that's our curriculum that assessments don't go out looking for something else that's gonna send you somewhere. What am I gonna do with my students next in the next unit less than based on those assessments? But how can we mirror more that towards what folks use assessments for? Otherwise, state scale assessments for accountability. You know, we live in the world we do. There are policies and laws around that. There's a lot of things that aren't gonna change but how can we innovate like Peter said to make sure we're getting close between the marriage of the information we're gathering here for this purpose can also be gathered there for that purpose. And I know I shared the link for the innovative assessment we kicked off at Guy Books experimenting with another vendor curriculum, Great Minds, Witten Wisdom in grade five because it's also widely used in Louisiana. And then, you know, Anishina really close with some of the science work, how can we ground that to learning in places and the experience of the whole child? I'm excited about that. I know folks use assessments for different things and we can have feelings and ideas about the accountability but if we can't get change things how can we at least mirror it? So it doesn't feel so much like an other because we're grounding this experience or curriculum within the needs of our students and that we doesn't feel like we're stepping out on the other to do another thing or assessing them on something different. How can we get closer to the information we're getting from those curriculum and other assessments as well? Thanks Sharon. Yeah, and I'll just add to it two-fold. So Utah has engaged in a process over the past year and a half related to accountability redesign specific to our portrait of a graduate and our PCBL components. And I'm gonna be bold on behalf of the panel to say that those elements that need to change at the federal level related to the codes and responsibilities that the wave is coming. If you're not hearing it here in terms of the fact that Louisiana, Illinois and Utah are already moving this direction we are not alone in terms of being states who are in this effort and part of this conversation and that the more states who bring this to the door of the US Department of Education to say this is the direction that we are going we would like you to come with us. I think just really helps to instigate the change. So we're interested in being a part of that coalition to move towards a more whole child policy related to the way that we're reflecting the successes and the areas of need of our schools. And I'm excited to be a part of the work with my fellow panelists and others who are I'm sure excited to lead the way. Thank you so much, Sarah. For our penultimate question of this panel I wanna pivot a little bit to more recent experiences specifically during the pandemic related disruptions to teaching, learning and assessment processes. Sarah, you mentioned this a little bit in your opening remarks, but we know COVID has of course presented many challenges for schools but it's also opened up some opportunities around curriculum instruction and assessment both in terms of opportunities that the disruption itself may have created as well as federal responses to that disruption in terms of funding availability and things like that. And so I'm wondering if Sarah, Sharon or Peter if something in particular comes to mind in terms of how the pandemic has allowed you to be more innovative in your curriculum, instruction and assessment work. Yeah, I'll jump in. So one of the things that was so just tangible for us was the importance of having a portrait of a graduate with those articulated skills and dispositions when we shifted to an online format for learning which kudos to every single educator who made that shift it was definitely a solution of triage. It wasn't one that was at least in our state planned out in terms of support and implementation. One of the things that we quickly realized is the aspects that we were missing where everything beyond content content was what we could continue to deliver. And yet that did not meet the expectations of our families and our students in terms of what a school mean. And so for us that just reinforced the importance of the portrait of a graduate because those things were happening in our schools when our kids were in face-to-face learning. In addition to that from a policy perspective I'll just say that we had to do kind of emergency waivers of a lot of traditional rules. One of the rules in Utah was specific to using a 180, 990 model of how we allocate funding and all of a sudden in a digital setting that just didn't work in the same way that it had when we had primarily face-to-face instruction. And that flexibility continues to stand in Utah. So our state board of education has continued to allow for additional flexibilities which for us has really opened the door to what types of personalized and competency-based learning models can be implemented in our schools to better meet the needs of students without necessarily holding our schools to a loss of funding account since it may not translate to the exact same number of hours in person. So it would just be an example I'd share but we actually really appreciated the opportunity to add in those flexibilities and appreciate that our board's been incredibly thoughtful about not just revoking them the moment that the pandemic started to wane in terms of our application and changes of the system. Thank you so much, Sarah. We are just about up on time with our panel today. So I wanna give you all one, your sort of final word today. And I wanna ask you, what advice would you give another state or district leader who wants to move toward richer and more authentic learning experiences for students? And Peter, because I think I just cut you off because you were gonna offer something awesome about what COVID opened up for you. I'm gonna start with you. It was probably the right move to coming off. I would have talked for 10 minutes. It would have been bad for everybody's time. I think I have five things here. It's to start by anchoring yourself in the learning sciences, right? To talk about what Carol said, not a technocratic approach, it's a student learning first. Refocus on the instructional core. What are the daily learning experiences look like for students? Ensure that you're bringing that equity lens to the work and you're seeing what that experience looks, sounds, and feels like for every kid. Or is ask and listen to students. We're really passionate in Chicago about elevating student voice and integrating into that to how we do continuous improvement at every layer. And the fifth one is be ambitious. I think Sarah's got everyone inspired with her stump speech a little bit ago. And when I lean into that, be ambitious for what we're asking for on behalf of kids. Thanks, Peter. Sharon? I would say if you're working at the state level and I think Peter gave a nod to this of what state levels can do, try to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do. Envision what you want the outcome to be and think through at the different levels at the school system level as the funding level that Sarah pointed out. At the school level at the teach like, what are the blockers for them doing the right thing that you want to do? Obviously a local decision about the, the inquisities, but what at the state level can you do? Like our more process ends up with a state level contract with folks so that school systems don't have to do competitive bidding on their own. What blockers can you move at the state level to take care of it, to make the right thing to do, the easy thing to do for systems and schools and teachers? Thanks, Sharon. And Sarah, last board? Yeah, I'm gonna echo something Peter said, which is the involvement of students. So different student groups that consulted and gave input to our portrait of a graduate included not just like our traditional CTE and student council leaders. We went to our freshmen who were in our Utah universities and colleges to be able to get their input about what the needs were. And most importantly, we visited with our youth in custody specific to making sure that their voices about where the systems didn't work for them were heard and recognized in terms of what's the value out of school? Ultimately, my biggest piece of advice that I'll give is for anyone who's a parent, you should look at this through the lens of what do you want for your kid? And it's like, and if you want it for your kid, you should have a conversation about then how are we allowing that to happen for all children and use that as your kind of guiding effort and what motivates you to be able to make it happen so that all of our kids have these opportunities in their schools to improve their outcomes for the future. Thank you so much, Sarah. Jen, I'm gonna pass it back to you. Thank you, Anisha. I am feeling inspired. I hope everybody else is. That was fantastic. And just wanna say thank you to Anisha and Peter and Sarah and Sharon and Dr. Lee and our co-sponsors AASA and the Soul Alliance. Today's the last webinar of our six-part series. We hope you've enjoyed it. This webinar and the PowerPoint slides will be made available shortly. We ask that you do a quick survey. If you have the time, that will be dropped in the chat. And we just wanna say thank you for everyone who has supported this webinar series. We hope you've enjoyed it. And please stay tuned for future opportunities to learn more about full child policy from LPI and all of our wonderful partners. Thank you.