 Hi there and welcome to the eighth of eight webinars being hosted by the National Pre-K through third grade working group. I'm Kristi Cowards with the University of Washington and I will be moderating today's webinar. And we're very pleased to have yet again a fantastic group of presenters. We are recording this webinar and it will be available on the Pre-K through third grade National Working Group's website. We will provide that web address for you in just a few moments. There are a few ways that you as the audience that you can engage in this webinar. If you have questions for any of the speakers or a general question that you would like all of the speakers to address, you can pose that through the question box which is on the right hand side of your screen in the control panel. We will be monitoring those questions and answering as many of them as we can throughout the webinar. The webinar is also being tweeted by Lisa Guernsey at the New America Foundation so you can follow us on Twitter at hashtag Pre-K third. And then at the end of this webinar we have a series of polling questions that we hope you will stick around to answer, mostly because as I mentioned this is the last of our webinar series and we are trying to figure out what we do next in terms of providing good information on Pre-K through third to the field. So at the end of this webinar you will have a chance to be a polling question to chime in on what you would like to see come out of the Pre-K through third grade National Work Group. As I mentioned, this is the last webinar, part of an eight part series. There is the web address. We will provide it again at the end of the webinar where you can find the full series, both recordings and the slide decks. Today's focus, though, is on strategies to achieve scale and sustainability of these Pre-K through third grade approaches. So with so much good work happening in districts, communities, and states how can we ensure that what we are doing today will still be here tomorrow and next year and further into the future? So we have structured this webinar for you to provide you information and to have you think about three sort of broad categories of issues. First is to set some context for how to even think about scale and sustainability. We use those words often, but what is it really that we are trying to achieve? And then we are going to have a series of perspectives that are going to talk about strategies they have employed at the districts, the communities, the regional, the state, and at the federal level to address scale and sustainability. And then we will talk about some of the immediate policy implications for this work in today's context. So this is in the order of speakers. You will hear from today me, Kristi Cowers, at the University of Washington. And then you will hear from Lynn Leahy, who is a curriculum specialist in early childhood education with Everett Public Schools in Washington State. And her partner in crime, Kimberly Kinzer, who is the Director of Early Learning, pre-K through fifth grade at Seattle Public Schools. They are part of a three district coalition focused on P3 work. Then you will hear from Vincent Costanza, who is an early childhood program specialist with the New Jersey Department of Education. And then finally you will hear from Jacqueline Jones, who has recently left her post as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Learning at the U.S. Department of Education. I do want to note that Vincent is the only one who does not have an alliterative name presenting today. We have KKs, LLs, and JJs. And so Vincent is a little left out on this one. I'm going to start with just some broad context in terms of thinking about scale and sustainability of pre-K through third work, but really this is applicable to any kind of comprehensive and collaborative work that you are engaged in. Most often we think about scale as being related to spread. In other words, how can we take something that is good and working well at a small level and spread it so that it reaches a larger population of children or reaches, stretches across a geographic region? So how can we take something and spread it to more people, in our case more children and more families? That is one important dimension of spread or of scale, but we also should really be considering the spread of ideas, beliefs, values, and principles that support this work. Pre-K through third grade approaches are really new think, and so it's not the same as just extending, for example, a vaccination program. Really what we're also thinking about is spreading new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of working together, and new ways of transforming systems. So when we think about scale, we need to be thinking about spread in all of those different ways. Other dimensions of scale that we should be thinking about include the depths of our work. So while we might be really busy doing a lot of meetings and having a lot of collaborative conversations, we really need to be thinking about whether or not that work is trickling down and truly impacting change at the level of practice. So we need to be thinking about are our system reform efforts really creating the change that we want to see in classrooms and in programs where young children are being served every day? Another dimension of scale to think about is are we creating shifts in ownership of this work? So rather than just having one office or one person or one agency really be responsible for maintaining the collaborative work, are we seeing ownership taken to scale where multiple people and multiple organizations are taking responsibility for maintaining the work? And then finally, we need to be thinking about sustainability in terms of financial stability. So while we might have short-term grant funds or short-term infusions of private dollars, are we thinking about ways to build in financial stability so that the work can continue over time when those short-term time-limited talks of money go away? So I think it's really important as we think about scale and sustainability to think across these different dimensions. And there are, I think, these are my three P's. I think there are three tools to achieve scale. And you're going to hear about these in different combinations from each of our next speakers. In order to achieve scale, there's really three primary tools. The first is partnerships, is finding other people to do this work with and to undertake the collaborative effort together with. The second is to focus on professional development. And this is really in thinking about how are we providing learning opportunities for key people in the system so that we can begin to create common knowledge, shared vocabulary, really a deep understanding of each other's motivations for being in this work. So how are we creating some common, some common understandings of why this work is important that then guides our activities. And then third and finally is a focus on policies, is how can we be putting in place policies, standards, rules, regulations, and other policy mechanisms that help to instantiate this work beyond the human beings involved. So if we were all to retire tomorrow, there would be a legacy left behind us that would continue to work. So as I said, those are my three P's that I think are most crucial to achieving scale. And with that, we're going to now turn it over to the rest of the speakers who are really going to bring to life how they have embodied this work. Our first speakers are going to be Lynn Leahy and Kimberly Kinzer from the Pre-K through 3rd Cross-Bistered Coalition here in Washington State. So Kimberly and Lynn, it's all yours. Thank you and good afternoon. Our other counterpart Ann Arnold, note the alliteration there, couldn't be here today, so we're excited to be part of this. I want to say that the Coalition has been such an exciting group to be a part of. We oftentimes in school districts operate in silos, and we don't think necessarily that any other school district has as much going on as we do. And the idea behind coming together was how do we think outside the box and how do we as a group of school districts, three school districts, do our best to serve children better. Not in the same way, but serve children better. So as you can see, we have quite a few kids up and down the I-5 corridor that we're working with, and we thought if we could put our heads together and learn from each other what we're doing and leverage those things, we might actually have an impact, not only on our own districts, but maybe on the region and the state. When we got together about a year and a half ago, we talked about some of the things we were hoping to influence. And first and foremost, of course, was that students were better prepared for kindergarten, first, second, and third grade. I know Christy talks a lot about the horizontal and the vertical alignment, and that's something that we have found in the coalition is something we have to be really intentional about. It just doesn't happen on its own. Families better connected with schools, and also the thing that we've talked a lot about and tried to focus on is how do we do a better job of connecting to our pre-K communities? Everett and Edmunds have been a little bit ahead of the game from Seattle, and we've had the opportunity to learn from them about how they're reaching out to their partners and making a good connection. The support overall for a coalition, we feel like we have a lot of power together as opposed to individually. So if the three of us go to a meeting and have the opportunity to speak up, we can be quite bossy. And oftentimes we have loud voices together because we have a common mission and we have common ideas of how we think we might be able to improve. So here are the desired impacts and outcomes, and they don't encompass everything that we want to do, but we're trying to stay focused and work on the following things. Of course, as a student achievement, we want to increase the understanding of what it means to have quality early learning and kindergarten preparedness. We talk about how all kindergartners are ready for kindergarten, how all kindergartners are prepared, and so how do we define what that might look like and how do we help folks have a common understanding of that vocabulary? Because from one district to the next or even sometimes one school to the next, we have varying opinions about how children should be coming into kindergarten. We really want to work on our transitions pre-K through third. How do we ensure we have a common understanding between our pre-K partners, whether they be Head Start, eCAP, Step Ahead, family, friends, and neighbor? How do we make sure that we're speaking the same language when we're talking about cognitive development or social-emotional development? And through this coalition, we've been able to reach out to private partnerships. We've been fortunate to have the Gates Foundation support our coalition and really give us the opportunity to reach out to other partners in the community. So we started out in 2011, and we hosted three meetings between 2011 and 2012, where the goal was, how do we really have effective professional development that principal, central office leaders, superintendents, school board members can then take back to their districts or their buildings or their area and have an understanding of why pre-K3 matters. Oftentimes, the discussion in school districts is about intervention. How do we really look at prevention? How do we look at starting from the absolute beginning? And of course, we know that would be birth to five, but what can we do in a district to really make sure folks understand that the earliest years matter? We were lucky to have Christy speak and talk about Montgomery County schools in December, and then we were able to visit one of the schools in Seattle called the School of South Shore, and then we had Linda, Sullivan Dunzik, and Christy speak again about the early learning framework and about the work that Bremerton's done, and then we were so lucky that we were all, as a coalition, sent to the Harvard pre-K3 Institute on implementation of pre-K3rds so that we really could have the opportunity to build what our theory of action is here. And I want to say that this has been... having leadership involved makes a big difference, having our superintendents and our folks from the central office as well as our principals who are really in the schools and on the ground, having a common understanding with them about the work we want to do has been helpful. So when we got together at Harvard, we developed this theory of action, and it's really about partnership. I think that the meetings that we had in 2011 and 2012 really gave us the opportunity to build trust and build relationship amongst the three districts, which is key when you're doing work so that we can be really honest about our numbers and our data and to be able to say, how do we move the needle on these things? So we said, if we bring together leaders from large districts to build depth of understanding and share the work around successful early learning programs and develop strong pre-K systems in our district, we will create sustained support for a pre-K-3 strategy to increase student achievement, increase student learning as measured by the Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills and Interim Assessment Systems and Influence State Leaders and Policymakers around peak K-3. WauKids has been a huge central area for the coalition because all three of our districts, it's something we're working on and we've been required to do for our full-day state-funded kindergarten, and we have used that as a leverage point to not only build relationships, but also look at the commonalities we have in order to move things forward. So this year our three areas of focus for action have been in continuing to build background knowledge about child development and pre-K-3 implementation to focus on implementing WauKids together, focusing on the three components of WauKids and beginning to work together and with others in our region and state about developing a common understanding of what kindergarten preparedness is. In 2011-12 we were all implementing WauKids or piloting it for the first time and we found many challenges and we realized that if we worked together on this that we could help create a more effective and efficient way to make this transition process work. So WauKids is not really a test or just an assessment, but it's a way of helping children and families enter into the K-12 system in a way that ensures success. So there's a focus on connecting with families, connecting and collaborating with early learning providers and looking at children as a whole child and assessing not just their readiness in terms of their letters and numbers but looking at them globally. So we wrote an implementation grant request to the Gates Foundation to support this development and part of the idea was that not only would it help us to implement this in our district classrooms but it would help inform and influence decisions in our region and in our state so that we would support a successful implementation at a wider level and that we would do it in a way that would really benefit children and families as well as the teachers and administrators in our schools. So as part of this grant we were really able to leverage expertise and resources across districts. From Everett we found that we had people in our kindergarten classrooms had developed a lot of expertise on how to use an observational assessment approach and to collect data on infant children so they were able to share in professional development with others. Edmunds did a lot of work around how to do data analysis of our walk-in data and look at how you might share that with the pre-kate community. In Seattle we were fortunate to have some literacy alignment and balance literacy that we've been working on over the course of the last three years and we used our balance literacy document to go ahead and look at language and literacy on the teaching strategies' goal assessment through the lens of our balance literacy and our hope was to make it easier for teachers to say this is not something new that you have to do this is just observing these skills that the students have through the lens of balance literacy. So we took a fair amount of time aligning those two documents the balance literacy and the walk-in language and literacy and gave that to teachers and did some professional development on that and we invited Everett and Edmunds. And then one small thing which isn't up here is that in the beginning of WalkKids OSPI had done translations just in Spanish for their Introducing Me booklets and in Seattle we felt like that was not enough and so we went ahead and translated it into our top nine languages and then I spoke to Lynn and Anne and Anne said, is there a way for you to send that to us? And I said sure and I just pushed the button and there it went to both districts so everybody, all 85,000 children and families had the opportunity to really receive this booklet in all nine languages which was exciting. And then the last part I'll say about this is that Edmunds had done this really wonderful Jumpstart program in the past and shared that with us in Seattle and there are various schools in Seattle who have done Jumpstart in the past and done a great job so we offered Jumpstart through our grants through seven of our schools and they did it and we had an amazing amount of success with it we had families that felt so connected to their school from the first day they walked in and we also had principals raving about the fact that their kids felt really ready for the first day of school that they spent a lot less time teaching behaviors that kids needed to sit in the classroom and things like that in September because they were able to reach out to those kids in August. So a major component of our work was professional development for teachers and by leveraging our resources, our assessment staff, our teacher leaders, our consultants we were able to provide more quality professional development for all of our staff and they were able to learn from each other. So throughout this year we've also been focusing on developing the common understanding in language around Pre-K-3 we know that principals are critical for any change that occurs and so in November we focused on a principal institute and in February we are planning an institute that will focus on implementation for Pre-K-3 programs in particular looking at ways different districts are using funding from their districts to provide these quality learning experiences. And so just briefly we've had the opportunity to be a part of the law kids advisory work group lots of our teachers from the coalition and principals and we have made a lot of suggestions. OSPI in the state has been very open to our suggestions we've been very appreciative of that and as a result of that one thing they've recently come up with is just the beginning of a common understanding common definition of what the characteristics of children entering kindergarten are and we realize that this isn't a done deal but it begins a conversation for all of us to talk about what should children be bringing and we certainly know that not all children will be bringing the same that it's on a continuum that there's a developmental continuum but this really does begin to bring us some common vocabulary that we've all been wanting so much. So our next steps are just to continue our collaboration we have more professional development that we're doing across the district and at the institute that we'll be holding in February and our real push is to help to come to an understanding about common vocabulary and definitions for kindergarten preparedness. Thank you. Great, thank you very much to Lynn and Kimberly and Anne who is here in spirit but traveling today so I was unable to join them. At the risk of being a little overly prescriptive I want to just highlight what I think some of the key takeaways were from what Lynn and Kimberly just presented especially in the context of the three keys of creating scale and sustainability that I talked about. They've really focused on building partnership across three of the largest districts in the state of Washington and so this not only creates sort of a bulk in terms of the number of students and families being impacted but I also think it's created some real shared accountability. It's not just one superintendent going out on a limb. It's three. It's not just a handful of principals in one district. They're going into this together as principals across districts and so I think the night side of that is shared accountability but having been a part of this a little bit there's also some really constructive peer pressure and for example when they posted some of these professional development offerings if they knew that two of the three but a third one wasn't all of a sudden it became really important for that third superintendent to be there because he didn't want to be the only one not present and accounted for so there's a partnership approach really is not only about scale but also some of this shared accountability and then they're obviously deep focus on professional development and creating common language and common vocabulary but then also sharing resources sharing sharing trainers sharing resources sharing space has really helped to create a level of scale that an individual district could not have accomplished alone and then finally in terms of policy change as Kimberly alluded to they're being able to accumulate lessons across multiple fights and have a louder voice in this work so for example the slide around kindergarten preparedness was really a push that came from these three districts to OSPI which is the Washington State Department of Education it's the office that's the superintendent of public instruction so they really helped to loudly use their combined voices to push for some changes within the department of ed so thank you very much for sharing your story Kimberly and Lynn we're now going to turn to more of a state level perspective and ask Vincent Costanza to share his perspective on his work in New Jersey so Vincent the floor is thank you and my apologies for the non-literative name I will point out though that my name is the only last name from a popular 90's sitcom so for whatever that's worth so the next slide you could go to Vincent and if you could speak really clearly into the computer that would be great too thanks so first the structure here in New Jersey we do have a structure of a division of early childhood education which focuses on preschool through third grade but has historically focused on our fully funded preschool program what was formerly known as our ad program smattering of other districts preschool programs as well but primarily that preschool program over the last few years we have with this division of early childhood education moved out into wrapping kindergarten under our wings but for me there's kind of a philosophical question here just as the tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it does it really make a note as well if you have this division and there's not many people there to work and does the work really get done that needs to get done of course the answer is you do do the work as best as you can but part of this is making really developing the partnerships because the work cannot be done cannot be done alone but first what's the work that we have identified to get done next slide so for the last few years some of our biggest efforts within preschool through third grade preschool through third grade alignment involve these two initiatives the first is the preschool for third grade leadership training series which is four sessions offered regionally throughout the state the leadership series for the last four years which was initially funded from the foundation for child development has a number of partners that go along with it which I'll talk about later in my presentation the second part is this kindergarten seminar five sessions offered regionally the kindergarten seminar has been in existence for the last two years and is designed to bring to life our kindergarten guidelines that we asked for kindergarten teachers to implement in their classrooms I know we're all living this with common core it's one thing to have standards it's a whole other thing to have people implementing them in ways that make sense to them to other people to children to families so in essence this is the idea of the seminar to help to actualize and make sense of our guidelines that we have for teachers I'm sorry this is Christy we're having a little bit of trouble hearing you so you might need to get on top of your laptop I'll see if I could raise the volume if that's any better better thank you all right go ahead great so first the leadership series they're for the first three years we had the components we had a pre and post survey four full day sessions which address topics such as program quality child-based assessment effective transition practices initially using Christy's nine elements preschool to third grade now morphed into buckets the important thing is helping leaders to identify the areas that we're thinking about with preschool to third grade what's kind of interesting is with our rather prescriptive preschool program if you ask an administrator in one of our preschool programs from one district to another they could give you a pretty solid consistent definition of that you know go out and ask a principal to define their kindergarten program or their second grade program for that matter you get for some good reasons very different answers the first thing we needed to do with preschool to third grade was kind of wrap our arms and help administrators wrap their arms around what are we talking about here so from the administrator perspective some things in the last few years that we've seen them work on and be most focused on are things such as revising screening procedures having surveys of where children come from when they enter kindergarten to first grade you know often times you have a kindergarten registration and there's no idea where kids are coming from the kind of experiences they have before they get to you the kind of experiences that families have before they get to you yet many districts are focused on community collaboration and getting family buy-in from a programmatic sense but also from things such as these are people who are voting on school budgets and often tend to be the most supportive the ones who have the little ones coming in so if you can identify where they're coming from there's a better chance that you're going to be able to elicit their support we've also seen principles and administrators focus on lesson studies and putting some meat on the bones of professional learning communities on a center based instruction doing things like embedding the principles in the kindergarten schedule to reduce transitions throughout the day and as far as administrators who have attended the series we get anywhere from superintendents, assistant superintendents elementary principals assistant principals, supervisors but by and large it's been attended by principals the next thing that has been our next initiative that's been in existence for the last two years has been our kindergarten seminar we've offered throughout four regions in the state four to seven sessions depending on last year we had a couple of options for some regions which is really built around the partnerships that we had some particular regions heard about the series and wanted to get in on it we started already so we had to make some hybrids to address their needs which we did happily so four to seven sessions this year we do five sessions these topics include child development assessment appropriate environments special ed again all topics that are addressed in our kindergarten guidelines but we really may come alive in this kindergarten seminar some things that we noticed from teacher participation we get a lot of starting off with room arrangement center based instruction is important well how about we make some centers with that revising schedules and adjusting screening procedures certainly all important elements and all things that are right there on the minds of teachers when they come into the seminar next slide please so what I wanted to share here was a sample assignment that actually I do with the administrators we've done we've had our first session for the year actually on Friday I have the second session where we'll be going over with this with how some of these administrators have started their investigations we ask the administrators number one to link up with their kindergarten teachers we ask them to sign up for the series with a teacher so you have a teacher who's going to the kindergarten seminar and then you have an administrator in this leadership series last year we noticed that our efforts seem to be on parallel tracks which led to teachers implementing ideas that administrators weren't ready for or administrators advocating for changes that teachers weren't ready for so we wanted to be much more systematic and coordinated this year so this year teachers and administrators as I mentioned signed up in teams and we're asking we ask the teachers to implement something from the kindergarten guidelines either be it focused on child assessment or on center based instruction or scheduling and to come up with a plan to how they're going to address the area that they'd like to change for the year we ask for the administrator to know about the topic that the teacher's investigating we ask the administrator to align it with the particular preschool third grade component and we ask them to think about whether that one component is a feature of just a particular grade or whether it's something that they see going throughout the entire preschool third grade continuum so for instance if your first grade teachers are having um sorry if your kindergarten teachers are having an issue with appropriate child based assessments is that something that's just with the kindergarten teachers do you notice that in second grade as well um do you notice similar themes going throughout the grades and then to make it relevant to the lives that administrators are living they're all responsible for implementing ISLIC standards which are standards for administrators supported by CCSSO so I ask them to identify a particular ISLIC standard that they could kind of layer on top of this again to make it more relevant to the lives that they're living the next step to this is actually on Friday when we go over this work I'll ask them to embed what they find into a walkthrough instrument so the next step is to okay as you make your regular rounds either through targeted learning walks or informed by other data that they're collecting well what does it look like when you do your walks throughout the throughout your building or throughout your program next slide please so as I mentioned earlier there's plenty of work to be done the kindergarten seminar and the leadership series are the two areas that we focus on really within preschool and third grade alignment and the work simply cannot be done without friends and without partners here's a list of some of the partners it's important to highlight ACNJ the grant through the foundation for child development initially came through advocates for did come through the advocates for children of New Jersey colleagues Cindy Rice and Kathy Priestley were in many ways referred to as founding mothers if you will of some of the leadership work that we have done in New Jersey and we're instrumental in helping to again foster the connection with FCD this year NJ ASCB is a new player on the scene if you will and it's interesting how important it is it's definitely better to be loved than feared because last year during one of our leadership series seminars we actually had administrators who were sending us texts from the national ASCB conference complaining that there was no early childhood presence there which led to a partnership and said okay well we think we could help you be part of that and this year NJ ASCB is a sponsor of our program and definitely districts in the fall I conduct what I refer to as a barn storming tour going to all superintendent round table meetings telling them, telling districts about the professional development initiatives that we had that we have going on this year and telling them that they should come and here's some of the changes that we're seeing in districts and in programs and it's made some tremendous headway throughout the state one thing that's worth noting is we have about 76% full day kindergarten in New Jersey when I started the work a few years ago we were hovering around 70% but really after these barn storming tours going out talking about the importance of preschool third grade alignment the place the kindergarten plays in that it's really been leaders and taking on district leaders, superintendents taking on district initiatives to really push for local leadership and you see examples of such alignment in districts like red bank, New Jersey dynamic superintendent who really implement some of the ideas they've had full day kindergarten for a while but you really see some of the other pushing up and pushing down as Christy often talks about but definitely you have to highlight the districts as being important partners so the partnership has led to increased opportunities for collaboration and definitely the need for translation I find that we often talk about similar topics and ideas but use very different language for instance the whole child initiative from ASCD which I have a link on right here seems to be a good starting point in conversations about things like approaches to learning it's been my experience with principals and administrators throughout the state they're familiar with the whole child initiative they're familiar with ASCD these are ideas and organizations as leaders that they're asked to live with but yet when you start talking about soft skills or not cognitive skills or approaches to learning being an important domain of development they might not be as familiar so to the extent that we could link ideas that are going on here the more successful we certainly will be the idea of 21st century learning critical thinking problem solving that we talk about for instance when we talk about some of the soft skills or non cognitive skills which I guess just as an aside are one of the most inappropriate names concepts that there can be and I realize that I'm guilty of perpetuating that right now but there's nothing soft about the skills that we persist in self control curiosity but yet we still call them so perhaps this will be the last time that I refer to them as that next slide please so if there's an effort to build partnerships and translate some ideas certainly ideas into practice but help to see people that were often talking about the same thing we need to think about well in what ways do we build bridges so integrating the seminar leadership series certainly one approach to building bridges as is this conference that we have planned I will say that this conference was originally planned as a kickoff conference but we have this thing in New Jersey and on the east coast called the Superstorm and it is now going to be a culminating conference which might even work out for the better but the idea is to be more intentional about integrating the work of early childhood and traditional K-12 by examining ways that were investigating similar endeavors certainly these presenters that are listed here are going to help us to do that we have Deb Leong to think about how self-regulation and executive functions will help non-cognitive skills and influence learning in early childhood Dorothy Strickland will talk about common core and how common core could be integrated into the focus on things like approaches to learning and executive function it is a very difficult thing for teachers with standards such as common core literacy of math but yet we are going to talk to teachers about the importance of social-emotional development persistence things that were highlighted by law kids certainly but now with kindergarten teachers who are going to ask to pay attention to such things as well there is so much pressure put on them how do we help them to do that so we need to help them to do that and that is what this conference is about and then the last slide more for me than anybody else although certainly helpful for others I hope as well you know this work of preschool for third grade involves a lot of change and maybe you know and I think from a leadership perspective some very classic kind of textbook change theory that maybe we don't always pay attention to enough first order and second order change you know some of these things you know really ask folks to change the way that they do it that they have done things from for a long time so I guess another P that I would add to Christie's list is is being practical as well for administrators and I've seen this to help keep administrators calm through many of these hard change processes is that when you talk to an administrator about implementing a different kind of schedule in a building or in a kindergarten classroom that it's something that can actually be done that it's something that there's not going to be a mutiny because of the change that's implemented and I think because of these things you start to build trust in relationships with people that know there's a path here to implement this change and that's what we're doing in New Jersey great thank you very much Vincent and I appreciate the both the image and your closing thoughts so again in summary and as a one minute warning for Jacqueline that she'll be up next on this the key takeaways in the three P's from Vincent portrayal of what's going on in New Jersey again partnership there instead of across districts they're really partnering across sectors it's state agencies partnering with advocacy organizations partnering with professional associations again a really deep focus on professional development and I think one of the really key things that's been going on in New Jersey is recognizing that even our leaders and administrators need a whole lot more than one shot days there really needs to be a long-term commitment to providing them the foundational knowledge and behaviors that they need in this work and again the importance of common language and then finally I think some of the really groundbreaking policy changes that are going on in New Jersey not just the way they've structured the Department of Education by having an early childhood unit that focuses on preschool through third grade but really thinking deeply and specifically around issues related to kindergarten for example and then how to begin aging that up into the early grade there have been a few questions that have come in we're going to hold them until Jacqueline has presented so to those of you that have asked questions they have been noted and will get to them but now we're going to move along and hear from Jacqueline Jones who has recently left her post at the U.S. Department of Education. Jacqueline. Thank you Kristi. My charge today is to very quickly go through some of the levers that policy both federal and state policy can be used for to really support and sustain this P3 effort so the next slide takes a step back and just sort of gives us a look at what it is we think we're doing in P3 alignment. We really are trying to form a very smooth continuum from preschool to third grade around standards, curriculum assessments professional development, accountability, quality governance and probably a lot of other things but these were the ones that struck me and I think it's important to lay them out because it's complicated. It's a lot of moving pieces. I think as you listen to the work that Vincent is doing in New Jersey, you see that it takes a broad perspective and then a kind of getting into the weeds also as to how you're really going to do this. Next slide please. The next, okay. At the federal level I think there are some existing incentives for this work. If there's ever ESEA reauthorization this is a huge opportunity to better align preschool efforts with the continuum to third grade. Title I, as we know, has always had opportunities for preschool but there is also opportunity to really have a kind of P3 alignment. So as you look at these existing federal policies, these programs really, Promise Neighborhoods, I3, Stronger Head Start Collaboration, I think it's important for practitioners to put into practice a sense of how they can use these programs and use this funding to really support P3. As some of you may know, the Department of Education has a preschool to pardon me, a birth to third grade agenda and that is absolutely perfect for aligning this work. So you'll see in lots of programs in education this notion of looking across that continuum. I think that there has been a huge amount of work to think about the quality of early learning programs, the quality of preschool programs in particular. And yet, I think we need to probably look at how we can use federal policy to extend that thinking about high quality preschool to support high quality kindergarten through third grade programs. We have ways of looking at the environment of teacher-child interaction and we use that a lot for preschool. It could be very good federal policy to think through talking about high quality as we talk about the work of kindergarten to third grade also. And of course one of the great efforts of the government is to support research on the elements of effective practice and certainly as we think about this P3 work, it is tremendously important that we have some data that says it is effective that something happens. Either we have stronger outcomes for children or whatever our goals are that there is research that can support it. I think at the federal level to figure out what are the most effective elements, the most important elements for good sound programs. So there's a lot of federal policy and you all can probably think of other things that are there, but I think at the federal level there is work to be done and existing work to support this effort. And I think this is a really important time at which the government is very open to looking at this area of preschool to third grade. Next slide. At the state level Vinton has talked about the New Jersey structure in which there is a division of early childhood responsibility for preschool to third grade. That is an important governance structure that states can really think about and it makes life a little easier. It doesn't solve all the problems but it certainly makes life a little easier to have that structure in place. Also states have credentialing authority and the notion of a P3 teacher credential is a real commitment to a state and it really has an impact on how university programs will be structured but it also speaks to the continuum in terms of the training that you want for teachers and the commitment that the state is making. An alignment of preschool and K-12 standards I think is really important for states to think through. And this is not just putting them together. If Vincent remembers when New Jersey decided to align their preschool and K-12 standards it was not an easy task. It's not simply a matching task. It really means folks coming together and thinking about what their goals are. And sometimes groups of folks really have to come together and think about it but to have one set of standards that really is preschool to K-12 in this case we're looking specifically at preschool to grade 3 I think is an important way in which a state can start to structure its work. Greater opportunities for professional development for teachers across this P3 continuum. It's very easy to have professional development thrown around but to have a focused and really clear notion that these groups of teachers from preschool to third grade need to come together with whatever the resources the state has to really think about how they bridge this continuum is really important and I think can be very effective. And again, data on the effectiveness of programs. It's often the case that states will fund preschool programs but not fund evaluation of those programs. And then when one wants to continue a program and sustain it there are no data to say whether or not it's been effective. I think this is an important piece of the work that states need to think through in their policy that they fund preschool programs, they fund their preschool to 3 work but they also have to think about the ways in which they support important data gathering that will give them the information they need to make more effective policy across this continuum. So I think states have a big role to play in how they structure themselves, how they use their credentialing authority how they really start to look at the standards only the states have responsibility for curriculum and standards and how they talk about that and structure it is really an important way to sustain the work always budget but aside from budget, this notion of really having preschool to third grade as a kind of structure and a way of thinking for the state and that means for districts and schools is really important in continuing the work. The next slide. The next slide is into the higher education and I think that both the federal and state governments can support policies to really strengthen higher education in this regard. Across the country there is huge concern about the quality of teacher and administrator preparation but certainly in the area of early childhood there is real concern about improving that quality and as states and the federal government think through the ways in which they will support teacher preparation and administrator preparation we need to think about what it means to prepare folks for working with children from preschool to third grade. It is easy to have a notion of a credential that I mentioned earlier but it's really important that that credential really prepare folks across the continuum. Sometimes you'll have a P3 credential but basically the higher education programs have really prepared folks for one thing for either the preschool program that's getting stronger or for maybe for kindergarten or for higher grades what we need to support higher ed to do is to really revamp their curriculum really support an increase in stronger staffing for higher ed so that teachers can come out of these programs with the skills and abilities and dispositions they need to really support children preschool all the way to third grade and I think that would be tremendous strengthening of our teacher preparation and programs across the country. And advocates, Vincent mentioned the advocacy groups that are working with the folks in New Jersey and I think that across the country we've seen advocates really stepping up to this work and so I would ask that the advocates really think about all of the state and federal policies that they see and go out there and support this kind of alignment support opportunities for alignment when they may not be explicit there may be simply opportunities embedded in programs but to go out and really see if there are ways in which they can make this work. It is important work and it cannot be done by just the state and the federal government alone I think the advocates have a huge role. So this was a very fast overview but again I think policy work is going to be critical as we move early childhood programs that are preschool focused along but also as we think about the fact that no preschool program alone is going to guarantee success at the end of third grade or grade 12 that we need to have policies at the federal and state level that really are going to support that entire continuum. So if you think about the role of kindergarten I am so proud to hear that folks are thinking of ways to improve the quality of kindergarten programs. This is often a sort of unattended grade where nobody really has much responsibility for it but to see kindergarten as a critical piece of that continuum to see first and second grade as really critical is important. So again federal levers that we have some existing ones but I think supporting the quality of programs across the continuum supporting research and elements of effective programs and the state looking at its own structure its own credentials gathering data and then really looking at the ways in which we can find both federal and state support to increase the quality of higher education programs for teachers and administrators will do a great deal to support this work and to get much better outcomes for children. Fantastic thank you very much Jacqueline and it is such a privilege to be able to have sort of the depth of your experience and perspective given all that you have done for this country over the last several years so thank you very much. Two of the key takeaways I think from Jacqueline's remarks are that we can't really tease apart this policy change from partnerships and professional development. She laid out some really key sort of incentives in existing policy efforts and policy endeavors that really can leverage and incentivize partnerships and really push on professional development so we need to see those three pieces really intertwined that they impact one another in multiple ways and then the addition that she added that I think is really important is this role of higher education both in terms of preparation to can be and should be continued to be played in research and evaluation. And so I want to add just a few more comments on policy before we get to handful of questions for the panelists. One of the things that I often think about in this policy work is that we tend to get stuck in thinking about fixed policy or those hard policies that really are statutory changes, rules and regulations changes things that require some sort of legislative body to endorse when really there are a lot of more what in the literature are called flexible policies that are the guidance, the informing rules and regulations that can be set by states, agencies, districts, central offices and others. It's the guidance that's provided to really help implement. And so I think if you go back to how we define scale and sustainability at the beginning of this, but it's not just about spreading to broader geographic regions, but really spreading vision, spreading motives, creating shared language, shared understanding, shared vocabulary, that we need to be thinking a lot more about these flexible policies. One concrete example of that is around Title I. For a very long time people believed that Title I could not be used for preschool programs when indeed the policy itself said it was okay, but there was just this prevalent belief that it was not okay. As soon as some bold policy makers in state agencies and other places started providing some informed guidance saying it is okay, you can use dollars these ways. There has been an increased use of Title I to fund preschool programs and to focus on alignment. No hard policy change was needed. It was simply somebody needing to step out and providing some guidance on what was already on the book. That said, and what I really wanted to spend a few minutes talking about is existing policy trains that are moving right now. I think when we think about P3 or Pre-K through Third Policy, it is not necessarily new policies that need to be created, but rather getting on some policy trains that are already moving and being sure that there is a P3 perspective being integrated. For example, all states have one or more of these kinds of governing bodies. Early childhood advisory councils, state boards of education, local boards of education, local city councils. To what extent do they embrace P3? Do they have committees and spokespeople that really speak out for this specific age continuum from preschool through third grade? If not, how can we be infiltrating their ranks and really making this part of their common knowledge, their vocabulary and their priorities? Second, all states are really focused on creating new evaluation systems for teachers and principals. To what extent are we infusing a P3 perspective in that? How can we measure student growth in those early grades in kindergarten, first and second grade? They are untested years. What are responsible ways to be thinking about teacher performance? How do we think about what's unique about the role of elementary school principals in supporting this work? How can we be infusing into the state mandated evaluation systems for those teachers and principals a really explicit focus on the P3 years? Common core state standards, those have come up a bit. I'm glad Jacqueline addressed these in terms of thinking about not just to connect the dot approach to common core and existing state early learning standards, but really being intentional about creating meaningful alignments which also could include ensuring that states have K3 standards for social and emotional development for approaches to learning, since common core only focuses on reading and math how can we be pushing up some of the values of early learning standards into the K3 years? And then this has also been mentioned a couple of times. But it's worth a second mention is that the common core state standards were written on the premise that every child gets full day kindergarten. And yet we know that not every child is getting a full day of kindergarten. So how can we be ensuring that that kindergarten year where some children are getting two and a half hours of instruction per day and others are getting six or seven hours of instruction per day and yet all of those kindergarten students are going to be expected to reach common core standards? How can we be addressing that and make sure that children are not getting short changed and teachers aren't going crazy in half day kindergarten classrooms? Other trains that are moving that I think are important to think about, QRIS systems, quality rating and improvement systems. This is common speak in the early childhood world but I have to say not a lot of superintendents or school principals have any idea what a QRIS is or why they should care about it. Where if you think about Kimberley's and Lynn's comments about preparedness schools should really care if children are entering their kindergarten classrooms coming from high quality programs or low quality programs. They should also know who those early learning programs are so that they can connect with them and build these partnerships. So beginning to integrate the QRIS speak and values into the K-12 world I think is very important. Similarly, KEAs or kindergarten entry assessments are really important and those are happening in the kindergarten year but how are we ensuring that our early learning partners are engaged in that process and that our early learning partners are feeling included in decision making around kindergarten entry assessments. They're not seeing this as a judgment or evaluation of their performance but really a way that they can know how they can get better, how they can improve and how they can more closely partner with not just kindergarten teachers but elementary schools. State longitudinal data systems also a train that is moving quickly in most states but do we have really strong early childhood and early elementary voices at those data planning tables to ensure that the longitudinal data systems are including yes state funded pre-pay but also childcare and early head start and a full array of data that will help paint the picture of the kinds of programs and services that our youngest children are receiving. And then other policy considerations would include thinking about transition. I just learned of a new policy statement adopted by a local board of education in California yesterday around transitions that schools and that school districts are now required to have some formal transition practices in place to know where children are coming from and to have partnerships with those providers. So how can we be thinking about putting transition practices into policy? How can we be thinking about family engagement in policy and then link back to some of the other moving trains? Should family engagement be part of principal evaluation system? Of teacher evaluation system? Should it be a more embedded part of certification for teachers or elementary school principals? How can we start embedding these really important values of P3 work into existing policy infrastructure? So I am now going to turn to some of the questions that were raised and I'm going to pose them to all of the speakers. Kimberly, Lynn, Vincent, Jacqueline all feel free to jump in. One of the first questions I think is just notion of funding sustainability. Kimberly and Lynn and Vincent in particular you all mentioned private funders that have made this work possible. How do you see or what do you see being long term financial sustainability or funding sustainability for your work? School District, we are looking at the fact that some of the funding will end this year and have shared that information with the board along with specific information about what will be necessary to sustain the various components of the pre-K3 effort and to ask them to consider that the impact of those and to prioritize that in terms of their budget decision making. So it's moving into the basic education funding and use of categorical funds away from just the grant funding. I would say there's a few things that have helped being part of the coalition. One was doing the jump start and using those funds to kind of ignite some passion around that and then having folks in our own district in the title department and the finance department get excited and say, great, how can we fund that for more schools if not all schools for next year so that we're taking the piece of what we received from private funders and then putting it into our system. I think in New Jersey we've, as I mentioned for the first three years we were funded through advocates for Children in New Jersey who had a grant from FCD that went away this year so that changed our dynamic a little bit in our partnership with ASCD we're actually charging district teams a nominal fee to attend the leadership series and the seminar as well as the conference and in comparison to other things that they do it truly is a nominal fee but again for me it really puts so much on you know on the local level yes we can continue professional development initiatives but then when work continues in districts which is really where it needs to work and I think where you know I've referenced the move to full day kindergarten which is now in New Jersey which is not mandated attendance is not even mandated certainly in New Jersey that 76% do have full day kindergarten and again that's a testament to local leaders taking it like superintendents taking it upon themselves and having me and people from my office go out and talk about the importance of initiatives like full day K preschool for third grade alignment so you know it looks like funding for these initiatives might not be as prevalent as it was however we are using funds that we have for the professional development happens and districts are using funding in different ways to make sure that these important initiatives happen Jacqueline I don't know if you have anything you want to weigh in on you know I think in the best of all possible worlds this work would become just a part of the way that a district does business I think we need continued funding to someone said to jump start these efforts but it would be obviously important if certainly if the state supported this in some way but if the districts really saw this as simply the way in which they worked and it wasn't an extraordinary thing there is professional development money there is always a way of making sure that you know you leverage the funds you can and I think also looking at those funding sources it might be that looking again as you mentioned at title one funding to see really allocate that and dedicating a bigger chunk of that to p3 could be a way that districts could really support some of the work in an ongoing way and actually Christy if I could I mean a number of the initiatives that we talk about or these components of a preschool to third grade system do not cost money paying attention to particular transition practices do not cost extra and knowing putting on your kindergarten registration a question about attendance for preschool or homeschool or family child care knowing something about where families and children spent their time before they came to your district does not move that cost any money but yet if you're a district that wants to communicate with families better from a school board perspective a district perspective it's something that is doable doesn't cost money and could have very big impact so while it would be great to have lots of money to do a whole bunch of other things like we're doing in states it needs to be clear too that there are certainly are things that do not cost money to do great so another question that came in was around partnerships and if any of you are or have ideas about partnerships with social services or support services sort of extending beyond the education sector to be thinking about some of this alignment work and I know at least partially this could include child care and family child care that you just touched on that but Jacqueline this might be something you want to weigh in on too given the federal work group that's really trying to look across service sectors do you want me to start sure you know I don't think any of the work can be done in isolation and so the partnerships are tremendously important from the federal perspective and a policy perspective what you want to do is leverage all of the resources and I think as you look at the social service agencies there's often funding there that will help support some of this work certainly as you mentioned child care goes from birth to age 13 there are monies there I think there are ways in which you want to align a lot of the sort of health and social service issues for kids in high quality programs with these non-education agencies so I think you should see them as partnerships it's not always easy there are lots of regulations state, federal, local regulations that often kind of keep things from happening smoothly but I think it's important to look beyond and across these agencies for the same kinds of indicators of quality as well and professional development and looking at funding that can go across all the sectors in Seattle public schools to be partners with the city of Seattle and in the last two years have piloted a coalition for holistic education in order to really reach out to practitioners, preschool child care providers kindergarten teachers we meet about every six weeks and talk about these things it's the beginning but like you were saying Jacqueline we can't do it in isolation we really leverage those partnerships to do what's best for kids I just wanted to jump back in here and this comes from the experience at the federal level of working on the early learning challenge competition there was an initial piece in that work the application which folks had to think through at the state level how they were spending all of their early learning resources what's our commitment what are we doing across the state it pulled together all the sectors and perhaps at a district level it's a good opportunity to think about doing that same kind of thing what are all the early learning sectors how are we using our resources get the big picture of that landscape and then see how the partnerships can really build which I want to quickly jump in there is also a question if P3 is the same as pre-k through 3rd and where does pre-natal fit into this I just want to quickly address this in that I think most of us think about the P as being programs and services that children experience before school pre-school there's the P which means it can be variable depending on who you are and which partners are at the table right now it could just be state pre-k and so it really is a pre-k through others where they've gotten a little deeper into their collaborative work might be including head start child care, family child care so there's a richer perspective of P and yet other sites are also including early head start infant toddler providers and pre-natal providers so I think it really depends on it varies from location to location who's at the table the issues of alignment, collaboration sharing resources, creating common vocabulary are the same it's just the number and diversity of partners at the table another question came in around and Jacqueline started to hint at this is that it feels like a lot of the work right now is still heavily lodged on pre-k and kindergarten and so the question was how is this work beginning to push up into grades 1, 2, and 3 and really change the instructional practices of those classrooms so with our professional development this is Kimberly in Seattle we have been working on a professional development plan it's a five-year plan we're in year 4 and this year we have rolled up to 4th and 5th grade and we're working primarily with our 19 full-day case state-funded schools and we have worked in cohorts so we have five different cohorts this year and the initial cohorts were pre-k, k, and 1st grade so working to talk about instructional strategies and content mostly in balanced literacy so that we have a common vocabulary in the last couple years we've been able to move into 2nd and 3rd grade and then this year we have been able to offer two demonstration sites in two schools one in the north end, one in the south end where we can bring in new pre-k, k, and 1st grade teachers to observe actual practice while it's happening in kindergarten 1st grade, pre-k 2nd grade one of the things we are doing in Everett and Snohomish County is to do joint professional development around early literacy from pre-k through 1st grade with a few 2nd grade teachers involved and in this professional development we are going to each other's sites so that we are observing in each other's classrooms and we are observing a consultant doing literacy modeling and working on developing common vocabulary and assessments into 2nd and 3rd grade I think to me it's a great observation and I think in part the answer is that certainly K-Focus has been for good reason kindergarten has been in an absolute purgatory for a number of years now and there's a lot that we need to do to support people who are teaching and children who are there with that said I think like Jacqueline had mentioned pre-school is not a silver bullet, a good kindergarten program is not a silver bullet we need to think about what the experiences are for children certainly beyond preschool and kindergarten and I think the issues that districts struggle with and work with kind of present the opportunity there I work with so many districts that talk about you know we noticed on our 3rd grade assessment that our children are having difficulty struggling with open-ended responses for instance or non-fiction texts which of course is a big topic with Common Core well okay those are great things to start with what is if that's what you're saying in 3rd grade what do the practices look like in 2nd grade that would help to support those things going on. Christy you asked about school board involvement then of course the next question would be okay well in what way are we funding professional development programs for teachers perhaps materials for classrooms that would get at that issue in 3rd grade to make sure that we're seeing sustainable practices in 2nd grade and then what does it look like in 1st grade in kindergarten and I think if you use you know data that you're seeing throughout the preschool 3rd grade continuum especially at the end of 3rd grade because that's on the minds of a lot of people I think that's a good starting point to say okay well what are the practices that need to go on backwards in a backwards kind of design way if you will that that can address practices throughout the continuum. Jacqueline did you want to weigh in? I'm good. Good well we are coming to the end of this webinar and as I alluded to at the beginning this is the last of our 8-part webinar series but we the collaborative group of partners who are the pre-K through 3rd national work group want to keep doing something so in order to help us think through what might be most useful we have 3 polling questions that we would love for you to respond to the first one is related to the contents of the information that would be most interesting to you in the field would you like to hear more case studies sort of real life stories of work that's on the ground would you like to dig more deeply into content specific areas what does literacy or math or stem or assessment what do those sort of content specific areas look like pre-K through 3rd grade would you like some summaries of relevant research that exists would you like to have more interaction with experts in the field we realize interaction is limited on these webinars would you like to find ways to have deeper conversation with experts we're asking you to just pick your one most favorite questions just to help us think through next step so we'll give you about 5 or 6 more seconds on this one and then we'll close the poll and we'll see what you all think momentarily this is the magic wizard count vote on our end and while the counting is being done I should also say that we are an all volunteer group we actually do not underwrite our work we all do it because we care deeply about this work and think that we can together share lots of good information so it looks like on the ground stories are most intriguing with some relative research right behind it so the second question then is more focused on in a moment I don't remember off the top of my head it's more focused on sort of the level of work we've tried to make explicit that we know that this alignment work is going on at many levels the school level the district level at the state level at the federal level and then there's issues that are kind of across all levels is there a particular level that you are most interested in hearing about or do you prefer to keep the focus sort of at this across all levels and trying to ease apart what are some of the common issues that might transcend each of these levels so while you're noting your top preference for this I will just acknowledge the partners who are in the pre-K through third grade national working group we have the University of Washington represented by me Sharon Ritchie at first school at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Jana Fleming at the Erickson Institute in Chicago Bridget Hamery who is with the University of Virginia and helped to develop the class assessment Mimi Howard who was a National Head Start fellow Lisa Guernsey at the New America Foundation Tom Jerecker with National League of Cities and Tom Schultz with the Council of Chiefs of School Officers so it looks like the primary interest is continuing to do across levels with some mixed preference around state and district or community levels and then our last question before we close for the day is more around the delivery mode if webinars is the preferred venue or if there might be other modes with content delivery and here you can check all that apply you don't have to just pick one those that you think would be most useful to you so we have webinars electronic prints so newsletters or e-newsletters or sort of white papers that came out electronically face-to-face meetings we've considered pulling together something like that or a National P3 conference web-based interactions so again, web-based but more interactions would be chat rooms or much more interactive webinars where the audience can participate more or video lectures and presentations so while you are answering that last question I also want to acknowledge that the technology the actual webinar platform was generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that's literally the only funding we've gotten for this work and so we're very grateful for them for making this happen so let's see this last answer and you want it all of course you do so a little bit of everything that's actually good feedback and I hope you will all stay tuned both through the National Pre-K through third listserv the new America Foundation Early Education Blog we will be announcing sort of next steps in the next few months about what we want to accomplish together then as a final reminder all eight webinars will be archived on our website there's the address the slide deck for the first seven are up we're still working on getting videos up but the history of our work to date can be found here so on behalf of myself and all of our partners thank you for listening and thank you to Kimberly, Lynn, Vincent and Jacqueline for your really wise insights today it was truly a pleasure thanks and have a great afternoon everyone thank you Christy