 being recorded. Can you hear me okay? Just type into the chat box. Yes, that'd be great. I see someone is typing so that's a good sign. So we are going to go ahead and get started. I know that there will be some additional people joining us and then some will be listening to this recording later so we want to go ahead and start. For those that are on the web, we are here. The ARC is here in Nashville, Tennessee meeting with our advisory board. So we've actually got our stakeholders together, pulled together to think about the next year for the ARC. I am Candice Jones and I'm actually the Virginia State Coordinator for the ARC and also the school turnaround liaison. And I'll be helping to facilitate today's session about best practices and engaging stakeholders in the design and implementation of new standards and assessments. That's a mouthful, but we are excited about the panel that we have together today. We've got a mix of practitioners as well as researchers and actually all of them have practical experience in the field. And as we think about strategic communications for SDAs, this is such a big topic right now, particularly with the rollout of the new education regulations. The Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, as we'll be referring to it throughout today's session. So we are excited about that rollout and we know states are as well, but it also means that there may need to be some changes in their state action at where they are now and then thinking about what adjustments need to be made and same thing with assessments and accountability and on. And so as this rollout happens, how do we communicate with our stakeholders, with our schools, with our districts, with our parents and families, with the community, business leaders, et cetera. And so we have three panelists today that will be talking with us about their experience or about their research in this area. First up, we are going to have Dr. Heather Zavadsky and she will be talking with us about a research paper that she did that focused on five states and their communication practices, where she really broke down and looked at what were some of those best practices and what were some of the challenges in the strategic communications in those FCA's. One of those FCA's that she looked at is Kansas, actually, and we have a panelist who is the former commissioner of the State Department of Education in Kansas, Diane DeBacker. She'll be talking from her experience as a commissioner rolling out the common core standards and challenges that we can learn from that practical experience. And then our third panelist is Mike Martin and he is with the Hunt Institute and will be speaking from his research on the work in Kentucky and Tennessee and their communications around common core and rolling out new standards and assessments. So we've got some great knowledge in the room and we're really excited about that. For those who are on the web or on the phone, you can type in any questions that you have throughout our sessions today and we'll be monitoring the chat and making sure that those questions are added in. Some of you sent questions in advance and we thank you for that. And so what we'll do is we'll have each panelist will be speaking to us for about 10 minutes, give or take, and then we will have some facilitated discussion among them and then we'll open it up for questions. So as you're listening to their presentation, feel free to write down any questions that you have. We'll get through all three of those and then we'll open stuff to the room here and to the web. So I think we'll go ahead and get started with this chapter of our speech. Good morning, everybody. I'm Heather Zavatsky. I'm from the Building State Capacity and Productivity Center. I'm excited to be here. Oh, I can... Oh, okay. Thank you, everybody. Welcome. That's me. And that's me. All right. So I kind of wanted to start with being a little bit interactive just quickly and yes, I had to get a picture of a political football because that has all known state standards. You know, when we started out with Common Core, it used to be kind of okay. And then all of a sudden, boom, it just became a big thing. So when you're thinking about a state education agency and communicating about state standards, what kind of purposes are you meeting when you're communicating about state standards as an FDA? Just yell out or type out, focus in the room here. So what does an FDA need to do when they're communicating about standards? Be clear. They need to be clear. Bring multiple stakeholders. Multiple stakeholders. Education speaks. So again, that clarity, avoiding jargon, those types of things. So the things I've put here, so you want to inform stakeholders. You want them to understand the purpose behind the standards and why you're even making this change. You want to, within that FDA, and align the work within the SEA and all those different departments that typically are built originally in silos. You want to have communication alignment then with the LEA. You want to gain their support, especially with something like Common Core. As we know, most FDAs have to switch from using the word Common Core to state standards because that word became such a problem. And then you want to inform or communicate about policy. You either want to inform policy makers to get their support or you've got policy that you are talking to your internal and your external stakeholders. So there's a whole lot of different communication purposes and a whole lot of levels there. So it becomes very complex. So given that, who should drive that message? Who should vet it? Who should craft it? What vehicles do you put it out there? Is it the top level SEA chief or superintendent? Would it be the academic department because it would fall logically under there? Is it the communication department because they're trained in communication and avoiding jargon in those types of things? Or is it government relations because we're talking about policy and meeting support with stakeholders and having legislators support with the SEA and trying to accomplish, or is it the legal department to try to look at that thing? So that's one of the things that we were trying to get to at BSAP when we started our benchmarking project in communication. So just a quick bit about benchmarking is the idea that you are looking at the best type of model and the understanding that you can't necessarily or you won't necessarily find the best model in the area you're looking at. So if you're looking at the best type of school, you may not look in the same district. You might find the best school in that district, but ideally if you could find the best school in one arena. So benchmarking looks at outside of industry sometimes to find the ideal type of model or target, and so we did that with this benchmarking, and I'll show you the model in a moment. We benchmarked last year we had five states and Kentucky was also involved, but then they pulled out, but they were involved with the pre-work and a lot of the work. And we had the Kentucky commissioner actually speak at a convening last year. Those of you might have been there. And then this year, in year four for BSDP, we also have five states who are right in the middle of all those site visits and are almost finished. And what we're trying to do is gather promising practices on how these SEAs are thinking about and organizing strategic communication, and then we want to give these folks some content expertise. So some have said to us, we really want to understand how do we know that we're communicating with the field. And so we're trying to provide some content expertise and then create support networks. So we have some SEAs that have literally said, you know, we're starting with communicating with the field, but we have a couple of other SEAs that that's a real strength with what they're doing. So we're trying to get these folks together so they have the opportunity to share their thinking and their practices. And that's what we did last year with our convening. We'll have another convening this year. It'll be, we're going to have a webinar with our participants in July, and then we'll have a bigger convening with opening it up to other folks in early fall. So this is a model, and I don't know how well you'll be able to read the text, but this is a model that we built last year. This is built upon strategic communication approach from the Department of Defense that found out after 9-11 that having all these disparate organizations and divisions and departments that have a piece of national security but that aren't aligned in communicating is a problem, and so they developed this model. And if it doesn't look exactly like this, we kind of need to fit it. But this is a model that we're using. The idea is to get an understanding of how it really fits across this complex process of communicating internally and externally to the public. So the first part is leadership. So a message would be led by a leader. What are the kind of major tenets of the message? And then that message, it sits above internal and external communication, and it needs to be aligned. Internal communication refers to kind of all the departments that lead and implement whatever the reform approach is, and it also includes, it depends on how the SCI considers legislative, but it could be inter... There is some internal and external there. External is important to understand the kind of two audiences with external, so with the LEAs themselves, the practitioners that have to implement whatever reforms are coming out, and then there's the general public, which is also very important, because as we found with one FDA, you may have everything lined up and ready to go, but one FDA had their reforms that went out for public referendum. They didn't expect that to happen. It got loaded down and everything went out the doorway. So they had a lesson learned there. So the message campaign, whether you want to or not, will sit over those two pieces, and it's important to think about how do you align those pieces. And then the last part is that there needs to be some kind of evaluation feedback loop. I'm sure the evaluators here will appreciate that. You need to understand how well does the message work for the different stakeholders? Do they understand it? Do they buy it? Does it make sense? Are the communication vehicles that you're using, is that working or are you hitting the right audience? And then how do you make adjustments? So what makes this the model that I just showed you, what makes it a strategic process? Excuse me, and how does that differ from how SDAs, from a few years ago, when they were just working on communication, how does that differ? Well, instead of it being a department that's kind of off over here and they do communication, often it was thought of in the past as you have a public information officer, and the main thought about communication is that it's an external media type of rule, and now SDAs are gradually thinking about it as a holistic agency-wide process, where it really cuts across the entire agency. It's tied to agency goals, usually the strategic plan, it's tied to agency goals, and it considers those internal and external stakeholders that I talked about. And so knowing that, you have to change the language depending on who the stakeholders are. A quick aside, one of the SDAs that we talked to, the one that had their referendum vote, what they learned was they were extremely good at communicating to legislators. That's quick, short, full of points that are easy to consume. But when you are talking to an external stakeholder, it's very different. It's very emotional, because people connect to schools on an emotional level, and so they realize that they hadn't hit that other external audience. It keeps control of the message ahead of time. So if you know that you're about ready to come out and communicate about a new teacher evaluation, you really have to think strategically ahead of time to anticipate what's going to happen and really get the message out there on what you're trying to accomplish, for example, so that on the front end you have that instead of being in defensive mode, and then it employs a continued feedback process that we talked about. So that makes it strategic. So given all about what do the SEAs do, what did we see in the benchmarking from last year and this year that seems to be working, one is that communication is aligned from one point, and so the top-level leadership needs to be involved in crafting the message, communicating it out. And typically there's another layer between, depending on how big the SEA is, where someone is working with the chief or superintendent to get it to these other layers, but that it's done in a way that's consistent and clear, and then considered communication needs at the different levels. So who are we really trying to talk to? We have put up at BSCP a few tools. We're still vetting them and putting it up, and one of the tools, I'm not sure if we've posted that one yet, is a way that SEAs can sit down and just write down who their stakeholders are and kind of map that out so that it's a thoughtful process up front. Multiple opportunities to share information. The SEA leaders that we spoke to that seem to be doing a good job of communicating will always say, you know, communicated, over-communicated. I feel like I'm successful when I'm communicating when people tell me it's too much and it stops. So multiple opportunities in different ways. You know, you have social media, lists serves, external engagement opportunities, but lots of opportunities to share and gain information. Adjust the messages to meet your communication goals, whether you're trying to get clarity out to the field or you're trying to gain stakeholder support. You know, why are we changing these standards? What are they really? You know, the feds didn't sit in the corner and write all these. That's not how these originally happened. So all those types of things. Acknowledge the differences between policymakers, implementers, and the general public because these are different audiences and you probably have a different purpose. And then a lot of the SDAs that did well tested these on small stakeholder groups to make sure that the messages make sense. And never was a time when they did that that they didn't end up adjusting the message. Create an organizational structure and call it to the foster of the communication. Now this one is actually turning out more so to be key. And we're finding out this year, too. And if I have the time, you'll let me know. At the end, I'll show you a quick overview of the way one SDA structured itself that works particularly well to avoid many of the pitfalls. But just how you organize your departments make a really big difference. So one of them that I just visited last week, everything under instructions fit under one person. Everything. Accountability, everything. It's a very big department, but everything was under this person rather than having, you know, instruction here, accountability in another. That in and of itself made a difference. Proximity makes a difference, and that's not something the SDA can always control. But even if you're on different levels in the same building, that gets tricky for just that ad hoc impromptu, you know, coming over and speaking to governmental relations, it makes a difference. We were in a number of SDAs that are in a completely different building, and it's fascinating how they talked about how it really creates the... And you don't even mean it. It's just natural and us, them, those people in that building. And no matter how hard they try to avoid that, it's still a reality. Encourage cross-division approaches. So having intentional meeting times where divisions that logically should work together have an opportunity to collaborate. And I've been in SDAs where the leadership didn't necessarily think that that would be valued, but the folks that were doing that work that had an, you know, an ad hoc opportunity they created themselves really liked it. And so that's something that worked well for some of the SDAs. And then consider what should and should not fall under communication. This became really apparent more this year. Communication is an area that everything fits under. Absolutely everything. So you have, you know, media relations. You have the website. You have public information requests. You have, you know, changing surveys. And it's a stunning amount of things that you wouldn't think of that need to be organized and parsed out. And the communication department, which isn't usually large and a lot of SDAs cannot do all of that. And so, and, you know, they would say, well, I don't understand why IT isn't handling that. Or I don't understand, you know, why isn't legal handling like that? So that's a really important thing to think about on the front end is capacity there. Another thing that we found out that is really important is, how do you align communication between the policymaking folks? This is a classic problem here. The policymaking folks and the folks that implement it. And so having a close relationship with governmental relations, Idaho was one place that was in the project last year. And their communication director was speaking weekly, formally, but, you know, constantly, with government legislation. And what was helpful to her was that when something came out that was a policy and people said, well, you know, there's these myths about how that came to be, she was right there and was able to respond to the public, no, this is who was there. So that was really important. And then leverage information from the voices in the field. So there were some, I believe it was, Arkansas was a state that had not only teachers of the year talking about Common Core and how it impacted their classrooms but there were kids on videos that, you know, last year we did the stuff and it was separated. It didn't make sense in this year. So using the voices from the field to kind of keep control of the message and really understand, I mean, it's hard when you have all this buzz around a topic like standards, you can lose who the target is. It's for the students and the teachers and they're the experts that are really the ones that can say whether these standards are better but the last set of outcomes, I think it's the last set of outcomes I'll talk about is using multiple schools and strategies around controversial issues. I don't have enough time to dive into the particulars they are in the benchmarking group that we have but there were a whole lot of interesting things that they did. We want to address concerns early and often. We had SEMC had really nice quick back sheets. They were meeting with legislators early that came on with stakeholders so that they really understood using voices of the field that I talked about and then bring the opposers and the supporters to the table. One, I don't know, found out they were the state that had all their reforms they spent a long time on just to totally go away because of the referendum vote. And what that leader said at the time was when you have a meeting, a stakeholder meeting and you have folks that say they support you, broadcast those meetings. You have records then who is there, who is saying that they support you. Later when you turn around and nobody is standing behind you at least and people are saying that it was made up somewhere else. You have some evidence there. So some real interesting little just tactic there or hindsight that we learned from some of these states. And then it's really important to have feedback tools information that's probably the area where states are that's less of a stream. There's the typical things like website hits and things like that and some random surveys attached to certain types of meetings or convenings but it's not really thought out how that's done and I think a more strategic way to evaluate how well that's working would be helpful. So like I mentioned, we're doing the site visits now where I'm almost finished. We're going to have an informal webinar for the participants on the 19th and then we'll have a meeting in the fall. Let me get to I think you can read this pretty well. So there was an SDA, I was actually just in the SDA last week but the way this was and this is not a verbatim picture of their org chart but you had the chief, the superintendent and her role was mostly outward facing to the public so she she did a lot of outward facing she did three school visits a week she was out in the field a lot her chief of staff was more internal, hardly ever left and met with her daily. She also had with her cabinet as daily calls with the immediate cabinet and the immediate cabinet are folks on that top level row and what I find in all the SDAs is you have if I could draw a circle around the chief of staff in that top level row those are regular meetings that happen pretty often, at least weekly, almost in every SDA so internal communication there's pretty connected, pretty clear people feel pretty clear where it starts to get fuzzy is the next level under. So the person on instruction was above all things instruction that is communication that had to do with anything academic academic reform which is a high percentage of things coming out of the SDA but for content purposes she vetted things first and then it would go to the communication department that would make sure that it's clear and not jargony and that it got littered in the way that it needed to be and then the people there were actually two people under her one was kind of student support and hers was academic and then those people so what they called the e-team the executive teams that top player and then the a-team were the people under them so you have the assistant superintendent school improvement and then the implementer folks are under there that was the a-team thought a little fuzzier they weren't always as connected they had meetings and words and as long as they could have been but usually where the bigger breakdown is down below with the folks that are actually trying to implement policy and they're actually also communicating externally about the approach and policy so that's a really important area to make sure it's connected real quickly with their communication department the things that were so a big problem we're having from some SEAs is they're in charge of everything they're in charge of public information requests and in some states those are huge and in this organization that was over with SEGAL teams and we had another SVA that because it's a survey and it goes out on the website they were in charge of the technology for all surveys with all the things that this team of three did that just didn't make sense and so really thinking about what is an IT type of job and you even have like deep learning so really thinking about the many different things of following the communication that makes sense to be over with the relations in regal that's driven by academics and so that's an important thing to think about that we're having a lot of and I will stop right there that's probably my time that's perfect, thank you very much and if you have any questions for Heather feel free to write them down we're going to move on to our next speaker Dr. Diane DeBacter who is as you can see on your screen she is Director of Education Research for RTI International and is the former Kansas Director of Education and another fun fact is that she was a Senior Education Advisor to the Abu Dhabi Education Council in the United Arab Emirates so very cool I've been on my year now and there's a little bit about that not a lot but mostly just to remind ourselves that it's nice to live in a country where you do have a voice and even though we talk about how contentious some of our standards have been every state around here has had some type of questioning about whether or not the standards were correct we live in a country where you can question especially as we approach the Fourth of July if my pleasure to be here and I think what I'll be able to do for you is take what Heather talked about in the studies that they've done across the different states and show you what it was like in one state and before I talk about the specifics I just want to tell you a little bit about how Kansas is structured different from many sitting around here we have an elected Board of Education so those 10 members are elected on a four-year term so that's different from yours where you have them appointed by governor but they're elected Board of Education members Article 6 of our Constitution is constantly brought up in the state of Kansas in the authority of K-12 education elected Board of Members and I see some people smiling around the room because you know you have another something within your own state not an Article 6 but something similar the legislature on the other hand appropriates the funds and sometimes that's where you get into a bit of a tussle the commissioner of education the position that I held for about five years is appointed by those 10 elected state Board of Members so keep that in mind as you think about the experience in comparing it to yours within the Constitution it says that the curriculum standards are to be set by the state Board of Education they set the standards in five different content areas as you can see up there every seven years they're reviewed it used to be every five years but we found out that five years was not nearly long enough to see if a set of standards was doing what needed to be done and also we did gauge a lot of that off of what was happening with the National Association so you think about the National Math Association National Science Association those aren't typically reviewed but about every seven years so it just so happened in Kansas the timing was perfect it was really the perfect alignment of when our standards broke for review and when the National Governors Association and the Council for Chiefs decided to work on standards so ours were up for review in 2010 so the process that we used to adopt the Common Core Standards and we did call them the Common Core Standards in the beginning as Heather said we did make some changes along there but in the spring of 2009 NGA Council Chief State School Officers began the work to develop those Common Core Standards in Math and English Language Arts again if we think back to when ours were to be reviewed it was the absolutely perfect timing for us so in response instead of doing the process that we had typically done which was just a very insular type of process within Kansas we formed a couple different committees we formed an Executive Review Committee which was a very select committee so it was our state our state top people in Math and in English Language Arts so you all have them in your state you could name them for me right now top 10 Math people in your state and you could do that so we had that in the two content areas then we had a larger review committee and then most of those consisted of Kansas educators and the Kansas State Department of Education staff members we submitted comments during each of the comment period for those of you who are around during that time you know that you could submit comments to NGA and Council Chief State School Officers we did that one of the smartest things we did is we updated our board every month on what was happening even if not much had happened it was on our agenda so it goes back to something that Heather talked about making sure that you have a record of what you did because that was very important and you'll see that in a timeline coming up here pretty soon our state board adopted Common Core Standards on October 12th of 2010 what's interesting about that I had served for a year as the interim commissioner and that was actually the same day that they appointed me the permanent commissioner so it was kind of a very interesting day in that I know Heather is actually laughing about that but I had served for a year as interim and they decided they liked me enough and I liked them enough that they did that first and then went ahead and approved the Common Core Standards it was really a very smooth process for us the Common Core Standards we felt like the standards that we had at the time were very much aligned with coming out so we felt very, very comfortable with that our process also included some other things and I think it's important to visit about these a little bit because many of what we did is also in Heather's work we aligned them with our college and career expectations at the time Kansas had a P-20 Council again I think most of your states also did that so our P-20 Council I was co-chair of that along with our president and CEO of our Board of Regents our higher ed system we did a gap analysis through that P-20 Council according to what we already had what the Common Core Standards looked like achieved and that's one of my points is that use your partners as much as you can and I'll visit about that a little bit more the University of Kansas which is one of the you might have heard of the Kansas J Hawks that's where they reside the professors of math in English looked to those Common Core Standards and I'll never forget the comment that the leads of that made they said if high school students can do this if we drop high school then we are going to have to change what we do as they start college we're going to have to change because they're going to be much further ahead than what we typically see students so we had this great endorsement from our P-20 Council from the achieved gap analysis to one of our biggest universities we had public meetings about the standards everywhere everybody on our staff had an organization of what Heather showed up there but every member of our staff said yes to every invitation so if it was a breakfast with a literary club in somebody's house on Saturday morning we were there if it was in a big auditorium where there were a thousand people there we were there we went to everything so that people would know about the standards that's just how we do business in Kansas I think it's very similar to how you do business in the Appalachia region you're pretty hospitable and you say yes to most of the invitations especially as public servants as most of you are you say yes we had a Kansas Education Commission that I had formed while I was interim commissioner some of our top educators and administrators in the state and others that looked at it had endorsed it they had signed the MOU we were part of a smarter balanced at that time we did the survey of enacted curriculum which was through CCSSO that kind of gave us an idea of where our current standards were and then we used that common core achieved common core tool so we did lots of things as we went about adopting those standards we also had we knew that we had a lot of good company the states that had adopted common core everything in yellow, the red the states had not at that time and that of course has changed a little bit since then but we really felt confident that we had chosen the right path for developing this round of standards that would be with us for seven years and tried to put it in that context there's a timeline I think that this is important to look at because remember we began that review in the spring of 2009 the line perfectly was when we would have done that at our state anyhow October of 2010 our state board adopted those standards through 2011 and 2012 districts started implementing the new standards and that was completely up to the district as to how they wanted to do that we gave a recommended timeline for implementation but it was not mandated we're a local control state so we left that up to the district to implement those two full years of implementing in December of 2012 though our state board decided to change the name of the common core standards the Kansas College Incorporated Standards and that was in response to some rumblings that we had heard throughout the United States that there may be some questioning in the next legislative session about the common core standards or federal and you guys know the whole story I don't need to go through that so our board was very proactive in saying you know ours weren't I mean we have confidence in our process but in order to try to be ahead of that message as Heather said we changed the name to the Kansas College Incorporated Standards not surprisingly in the spring of 2013 our legislature they'll introduce to ban the common core standards in the state of Kansas so it did kind of play out the way that we thought it was going to play out and really from that point on from the spring of 2013 we were in defense mode in the state of Kansas but we survived that because we had documented everything that we had done and we felt that we had input from lots of people in the process that we had with the other people that we had involved and so we were able to keep that at bay in spring of 2013 spring of 2015 the legislature it actually I should go back to 2013 that bill did not make it out of committee and so things just kind of sat still during 2014 there were some things connected to it spring of 2015 our legislature legislated both to ban the common core standards that vote failed by a very slim margin that vote failed at 2 o'clock in the morning I was in the galley as that vote was happening but it it did fail and then in the fall of 2015 our SEA began the review process according to the timeline next year is 2017 remember ours reviewed every seven years it's 2010 so right on the timeline reviewing our standards again we have done it a little bit differently this time around or that the new commissioner has and Randy Watson is his name I give him a tremendous job and great credit he has placed every vocal opponent to the standards on that committee on the committee so what is that saying keep your friends closed yeah so here's some lessons learned strategic communication plan is absolutely necessary we didn't have one I can honestly tell you and I bet Heather found this out in her research as she read that Kansas we did not have one we could easily put one together after the fact and we did some things right I think it's because some very smart people were working on it people on my team that were in the state but we didn't have a plan that we laid out we knew what we wanted to communicate who we needed to communicate with we knew to be honest we knew to be transparent but we didn't have a roadmap and I think that's a lesson learned a roadmap is essential now that roadmap is going to change you're going to take a few detours along the way there's going to be a few speed bumps but we should have had a better plan we were very transparent and honest and again I think that's just part of who we are as a state lots of stakeholders are engaged with we engaged everybody we can and this is where I really put a plug in and I'll do it again and Nate mentioned it and his welcome to us is we are not SEAs are not as good as we should be as to using the resources that are available as you think about your health centers as you think about your regional labs as you think about your equity centers as you think about your universities your business partners that are out there be sure and get all of the stakeholders engaged we communicated to everyone and everywhere you hear me say that we listened and we made changes as we went along we educated every time I did a presentation on the common core standards so that people who didn't know it they had heard about how horrible they were and you would give those examples especially of elementary math and they'd say people have a problem with those so we educated as we went along and we had multiple people delivering the same message the message wasn't just from me the message was from everybody who went out it didn't matter who was talking about them we had a standard template so everybody had the same PowerPoint presentation we all reviewed it we practiced it we practiced it we critiqued each other as they did their presentation we tried to throw them questions that would come their way so everybody delivered that message the assistance from our partners we did rely on our common center a lot at that time we were obviously at rail central so we got to be very good friends with Donna and Belinda at central and south central we used our rail a lot our rail central which is out in Denver the other thing that helped us out is that we really got it down to time and money as legislators or others would say you need to do something different we need to change these standards we told them how long it would take the average time to do standards that it takes money we also then tied it back to the assessments at that time we were going to be smarter balanced and we said it's going to take millions of dollars to develop new assessments and that resonated especially with legislatures Kansas is at that time they were beginning a downhill slide we're at the very bottom now we now have nowhere to go up in terms of our budget but that did resonate with us is we talked about how demoralizing this was for educators and that they had spent two years you remember that timeline they had already had two years into these standards changing lessons changing curriculum changing the way they teach districts investing lots of money and time and professional development and so our teachers were the ones in front of those committees and in front of any of the opponents saying you know this is hard for us to do as educators we can't really switch on a dime we believe in what we're doing we believe that these standards will make a difference you need to give us time and let us show you the proof we'll be in the pudding if you just give us enough time so we talked a lot about that and I end on something that's a little it's that it is important that you do communicate no matter what and that's why we lift on three you can see the guys picking up there they didn't lift on three I believe that we did lift on three in Kansas for the most part it's my pleasure to communicate about those standards and thank you so much great now we're going to transition to Mike Marston who is going to talk about strategic communications in Kentucky and Tennessee so I hopefully will hit on a lot of the same points make a few a lot of what I just heard resonated a lot with what we saw in Tennessee and Kentucky in terms of best practices not perfect practices but like a lot of good things so I'm just going to basically run through some key takeaways that we had looking at the communication about standards in Kentucky and Tennessee which we're really seeing starting around 2008-2009 leading states really doing a really good job and it's been hard as many of you know for both of those states as well so I just want to talk through what we found and I'm just going to go through these points quickly and the first of which is this idea of proactivity so it gets a lot harder to communicate about something when people are already distrustful in other words and I just it's amazed me all prior to this job I worked at the North Carolina Department of Education over the course of implementing the Common Core it was it's just really interesting to see how much harder it is to communicate when your audience doesn't trust you so moving quickly it's really really important I would say too I mean you know a lot of what these things are you know websites webcasts face-to-face meetings all these things were done in Tennessee and Kentucky and one of the other things that I think both these states did and other states that do this successfully is they get good at communicating about communicating that is collecting the data that says we met with this number of principals and teachers we talked about this issue in these different forms and they really the SEA really carefully collects that and has that on the ready part of that is because it's just really really hard to you know in a state like North Carolina we have almost 100,000 teachers and so it's really really hard to actually have each one of those teachers feel like they've been talked to and that's just the central challenge of an SEA and so I think they become good at saying well these are all the maybe you didn't get talked to but these are all the avenues that we did talk to people and communicate about it secondly I think Tennessee and Kentucky are great examples of coordinated communication so the SEA is not at all alone in this there is the governor and there is the legislature and I think in Tennessee and Kentucky both of those this year and with Bredeson and Haslam the governor was really communicating about it and that is really really important so I think that's another part of when we get into conversation about this that I think is really important how does the SEA sit in with all the other bodies and policy makers thirdly educator engagement obviously that's really important and I think educator engagement both to communicate with them but then to get them as advocates because there's just there's something positionality wise that's sitting in an SEA it makes it hard to communicate and be authentic for as much as I taught high school math for five years I'm very much self-identified as a math teacher but once you're out of the classroom you don't have that positionality and authenticity so I think the engaging educators and getting them to speak on behalf is really important both of these states I think use really simple messages kid based messages right you know in Tennessee the thing they were saying is you know we have not been truthful in our advertising about what how kids are performing so just having really simple kid based messages was important for both of them engaging partners again sometimes the SEA is not the best voice and so it's really important to have the business community higher ed parents and obviously educators principals teachers engaged and able to talk about the transition plan for the inevitable in the case of Tennessee and Kentucky I think was really a lot about score drop I think that was really good both of those states did a really good job of planning for that inevitability that when the standards were going to be implemented that test scores were going to go down and in both cases at least back a few years that was not met with a ton of pushback which it could have easily been now on the other hand I think there was another kind of thing that happened with the common core that maybe wasn't as well what do we mean by this and Governor Hunt who still is I don't know how old he is but he's still very active in our institute and this is something of course he was an education governor 16 years as a governor but he's very very good about connecting messages to the health and opportunity of the individual and of the state and I think both of these both Tennessee and Kentucky in the transition had that as a central part really a number of good examples of the commissioners and the governors and folks in the SEA meeting with stakeholders and so getting feedback and part of that is just really listening and then modifying your message based on what you hear so those are the big takeaways I think they reflect a lot of similar things to what you heard previously I just have a couple kind of points moving forward that can be sort of maybe a good place for us to jump off in terms of the conversation and this is a challenging question but I think there's really setting aside the issue of how well you communicate about anything and this has been talked about already and I say this with some hesitation because as a person who cares about the outcomes for kids and making sure that SEAs are really working hard on behalf of kids there's probably a point of which there's just too much change on the system maybe it's more than the SEA can handle but maybe it's more than teachers can handle and so I think this is a really important conversation the thing that we sort of saw particularly in Tennessee and Kentucky and in no way do I think one is the right way and the other wrong but Kentucky really led with just standards, assessment and accountability and Tennessee reformed the standards and the assessment but also really pushed teacher evaluation fast and to Nate's point they are seeing some really positive results I also think that that puts an obvious additional amount of pressure on the system and on educators so I think that's an important question especially as States look to respond to ESSA there's a lot of return of decision making to States and I think there's probably lessons to be learned I don't even have to talk too much about this one but I say this particularly about standards because as a former teacher and a person who works in professional development I've been engaged in looking at state standards for however long I've been working just a long time but I think that if you go back seven or eight years parents just didn't know what standards like people didn't think about and so but I think we're in a new I think it's a new time I think people know about it now I also think one of the other things that we have to really think about about communication is it seems to me that the argument that well standards are not curriculum is like kind of an impossible thing to communicate about I mean I'd be interested here with everybody who thinks about that but that has proven itself to be really really really a challenge and I think that will be a challenge for standards generally is that when you see assignments and you don't like them it's the standards and so I think obviously what I'm not advocating for I think is SEA is developing curriculum but I think we have two last things I think this relates kind of to ESSA is that I think you know as we have higher standards and states particularly look at modifying grading systems and accountability systems I think there's an opportunity to really think carefully about how when we implement higher standards and put them into accountability systems just thinking consequently about what that will mean for states and communicating about that and then lastly I think ESSA you know I've seen this we had an event in February and it was titled opportunities and responsibilities that's how everybody's talked about ESSA in other words it returns a lot of decision-making to states and with that a lot of responsibility so in some ways I think that's a really exciting time for SEA leadership but I also think there's a lot of things that have happened over the last six or seven years that we've learned a lot from they've been really ambitious and I think I'm hopeful that you know states can take it from this point and really lead it. Thank you so much to all of the panelists I just want to move into some questions and I know we are almost at 11 o'clock and we have until 1130 so we'll just kick it off with some discussion among the panel and I'd love to hear from you all particularly since in the ARC region we have many states that have a lot of rural districts and so I'm curious what advice you would have for SEA's that that are dealing with that and what strategies may have stood out that apply to a rural context. One thing I will say is one of the things we've seen that's coming out the SEAP did we have this publication called SEA of the Future that was published from rural schools and so we talked to a lot of stakeholders in SEA's and in the field from rural schools and one of the things that happens is that policymakers sometimes they're so much focused on urban that they're forgetting about the differences with urban and rural and so you'll make a policy that works for urban districts but because of size and scale and distance it doesn't work for rural schools and then there's just the obvious that you have to be sure that the message is getting out there to everyone and that the vehicle works for everyone so sometimes there's technology access challenges and things like that and there just needs to be an effort to make sure to include those different stakeholders. And in Kansas we obviously we have more rural than we have anything else and what it helps does and I'm not sure that I always thought it was the best structure but now I think it is we have Education Service Centers I think most of your states have something similar but our Education Service Centers I think there's seven of them across the state they're independent, they're not under the State Department of Ed they're their own entities and so they but they're great partners and so they take what a lot of say in the policies they're being formed because they're very active with their local state Board of Education members for the people who are from their area but they're able to take that and then because they don't have the constraints of the State Department they're able to be much more creative in how they go about solving problems within their own region so I think that was our greatest assistance with our rural communities because they are in those rural communities and they're able to put their own flavor in their own spin on it and yet still come around kind of through the back door meeting the requirements of the policies just one thing I would say about that in North Carolina is I do think like whoever the folks are especially in the state like North Carolina you have a lot of pretty far-flung places from Raleigh and I think that it's really important that you know in North Carolina we have regional and I think it's important some of the dynamic when it doesn't go as well as you would like it is sort of a pass-through so basically that person that's out in the mountains gets an email before the districts do but that's about it versus making sure that that person who's going to be representative of what's happening in the SVA deeply understands it believes in it as the person who's going to be local and only successful in some cases and when it's not it's when it's just a kind of like chain of knowing about things and one of the things we didn't get to touch on much in our earlier in the earlier portion of this session is social media and how a State Department of Education might leverage that or not in the discussion certainly it's one of the ways that resistance is coming up or you're able to monitor what the public is saying about standards and how can State Departments get in front of that or utilize social media to get their message across and control the message in chances their communications department is now a whole they've added a fifth person a very very small department one communications director as Heather alluded to and heard they're everything they're washing the dishes in the community kitchen they do everything they're taking the pictures they kick off for summer reading and so one is that I think they don't have a lot of capacity in terms of communication and many of them in the communications department have a few years on them I don't know how to say it anymore kindly I think just and maybe it's just you know you talked about student groups and how other how some states Nate talked about how commission or a coin is starting to use student groups to help solve some problems get a young person in I mean get anybody they sent high school in and say how would you communicate this message and make it but it seems appealing so one is just more capacity relying on some partners and really getting some people in who know how to do social media I'm not very good at it I mean I will tweet about something before I hit my plane this afternoon about this thing you know there's some people that are just so darn good at it I think we need as state education we need more professionals about that area I know while I'm seeing in the field they're using social media a lot and we do have some tools that we put up there too some of them are doing a good job at making sure it's pretty well coordinated and so that helps keep it as a proactive vehicle for messaging and it's interesting too a couple things to think about well one is a generational gap and then I think about so Terry Holiday in Kentucky would be known to before he was retired to take his iPhone and film some big convening he's at and then post it and put it out there he himself used it a lot he was a great example of getting out to the field and then you have to think about what are the rules and policies in LEAs around social media so if you're trying to reach teachers that teachers aren't allowed to use Facebook then you know your Facebook page may not be that but it's just kind of figuring out what the local rules and policies are but the the FDA's are using social media to communicate with the public and it seems to be a good vehicle for them as far as we found so far funny one of the things we through some of our work we were engaged with working with like a public relations firm and one of the things it was just they were having a conversation and one of the things they said was you know basically one of the things that is not a winner is to engage with someone who's being negative or to try to like they were basically like it is not a battle that you can win if you are basically reacting to somebody on an internet on like a chat it just goes poorly if you don't win hearts and minds you just create so I think like yeah I mean that's sort of unfortunate like that's not really a forum for debating the issues but on the other hand like our standards are great that this is what's happening in X County here's a picture here's a professional development they're doing so it's about educators and people and not about the politics and maybe we should adopt that car commercial that's on now that you can only react to the car and the features and emojis maybe we should try that and just react so we may have some nasty emojis come back but at least you don't have that she did that if that sparks another thought and it's kind of related to social media but how does it CF general public and some SDAs have a really good website where folks who find information some though we had one SDA that they really spent a good I'd want to say like 70% of their time answering questions because their website almost caused more information frustration than not and then there was another one I was just recently came up with a really nice tool on their website where folks can go in and ask questions and it leads them to it leads them to the person that can answer that question and so not only are they able to analyze data by the questions that are constantly coming in about what where they need to communicate better but it's helping the public get to an answer easier and it's taking a burden off the SDA now the communications department was in charge of that so there is that but it still eliminated a lot of time answering things so that was an interesting tool that I think like one of the things you said that I think is really important is like because of the size of communication departments and also because communication departments often don't have like instructional expertise and if you're talking about standards it's just like you can't like you can only talk about them in like their higher and better broad terms for so long before people want to know and so in that sense like communication as an effort needs to be part of your work chart up there and it needs to sit squarely in the instructional divisions or academic services or whatever it's called in the particular SDA is really working at getting those folks better so the SDA I was in last week this is the first time and so we're at about our lines are tense but this is the first time I've seen that the person that's leading academic one is over everything that really is all things academic it's under one place but two a large part of her role is communicating and she obviously that she's the front line and then it goes through the communications department but it really seems to solve a lot of natural problems that occur a couple questions were a couple questions in the room and then if there are any questions for those that are on the web feel free to type them into the chat box and we can get to those as well so I saw Gary I saw your hands first and then there it would just comment about what we were talking about one of the things from your opportunity to do is actually going now to the high level we were having a hard time describing the seniors here's a guy 60 years old when I'm kind of talking to junior high kids I'm not relatable you know there's my grandfather up there talking to me about prayer but what we found I think is what you guys talked about it's really important when you need to somebody with the knowledge and the passion to be there number two you need to be able to have a young person if you're relatable this is the third thing depending on where you're at when you come down a Logan County time to make a presentation they start right off like somebody local when you go in you get credibility with the young person you get credibility with somebody local the message is coordinated between the three and as a team you can do those kind of things and I think it's to your point two the communication department four or five people can't do it it's on base whatever the message is something that I've heard coaches do is pass the filter the difference between other staff and the depth of knowledge building up what Gary said between that local and applying it to the shadow of a kind of team and CCSSO did a very good job of that a couple years ago and not having the communication specialist come to separate meetings meeting as a chief and that made a tremendous difference at least it did for Kansas and the first time I asked our communications director to go to the meeting she said why would I go to Disney? because you have to know what the message is you have to hear what the others are saying across the United States and I think one of the leaders in doing that at the time was Idaho their communications person knew just as much as Tom Luna did so that's a really good point that they're not somebody who's just in the background anymore they're not the cameraman that's behind the camera a camera person they are out front and they have to know that topic inside now but there's a point there we're still seeing a gap so in the statute of communication we're trying to get folks to connect it up at the LEA wide level and what we'd like to see is communication embedded all through an SEA communication plan but when we had the convening last year we talked to people and how was it we had all these chiefs speaking about how they see and organize the role of communication their SEAs, we had Tom Luna and then we had communication directors and the communication directors would say well the first half of the day which was the leaders wasn't useful to me but the second half so they're trying to get that connection between the top level leadership and communication and communication and content experts we're getting there in some places but we're not there in other places so it's hard to meet the needs of SEAs when they're seeing it as a very separate and segmented activity Is that a good thing? Yes, it was a good thing but for a couple reasons one is we did see the whole political controversy coming I mean there was we saw that that was going to happen We're now in some situations and we tried that and I don't always speak for myself I think it made us look like maybe we were trying to see something Well, we again I think there were some of that but the other thing is that at about the same time our governor came out with a big community college or a tech college initiative that was all around that any high school junior or senior could go to tech school free of charge and so that was all around college and career ready so it made sense to time it at that same time and then we were able to get our governor to he never did fully support the new standards but he never spoke out against them and that was a win I mean some people would see that it wasn't a win but it was a win that he didn't publicly speak out about them because had he we probably would not have had to AM vote or it would have passed rather I understand this concept because although I think maybe we were trying to not change the standards they probably would not be we had something else to go with ours so that helped nice question well I think there's a comment that we launched a recent couple of years ago is called the holler holler holler but it's the holler one word dot o r to get a change of that LMS we have our 100 teachers from our recent presentation we're currently live streaming all day long viewers from all over the U.S. very very much we take a little thank you thank you for that Tony I thought you had a question yeah I had a question from Heather what are some best practices that maybe you've encountered for those stakeholders that maybe have a conspiratorial impetus behind what they're doing they're trying to argue on the basis of ideology right yep what have you found it seems like states that have those folks they have them at the table they have them there so it was Tom Luna actually that had the advice about streaming these types of meetings but you have to have those folks there and you have to try to get at what their issues are and there's a balance between trying to help them kind of debunk whatever myth that they have versus you're digging in and it's an argument that's never going to go anywhere but you certainly can't start that process without some kind of face to face and getting in there we have a few SEAs right now that what they really want to learn about is how do you communicate with legislators that are just very oppositional because you know they need to support them and it's the same kind of thing just getting in one on one Idaho did a bit of that and just getting a lot of factual information out ahead of time so they're supposed to understand and again to think about have you read the standard because there's all you know people have actually read the standard let's see if that's in there if that's helpful yeah and a lot of what I've heard has come from the legislators some of them are the ones that have the ideological resistance and how do you discuss do you go into their their camp you know and I mean because I mean it may be so one for one example an FDA had a brown bag lunch you know at the capitol and they actually had the standard and then unpacked them with them talked about them tried to debunk some of those myths so some of it is going there to them there is a lot of weekly communication you know getting ready for a session there's a lot to do but little in fact sheets and things to get out ahead of time knowing what those myths are going to be getting out in front of that and just spending time with them because you know everybody has an opinion about the standards so did you read them did you read them and so you know I'm packing bits of that I think Diane you talked about that really I'm packing bits of it and saying okay now do you see can you see that it's in there what we did often too is we'd say what standard or give me an example of one that you're concerned about and usually they couldn't answer it back and we'd say what are you concerned about and often times they'd come back with what the curriculum was that a local district by the local control had to use and we'd say that might tie back to standard you know second grade math standard but what you're not so we would often just say what is it that you're concerned about and it wasn't the standard I'm going to get back to the accountability issue and accountability of opposition so if you're really pushing back against testing okay well what kind of test would you use to know how well the kids are doing or what would you suggest we use to measure teacher effectiveness if you don't want to use certain percentage of the state test it's often when you ask that question there's no answer I think one of the things I think working in a quality like a qualified way for that is like it's almost like changing the argument like I mean one of the big things about it is like some of this stuff is just going to jerk teachers around so much and I think there's a lot of like there's a I think it's really hard to push back against that argument if you can't be specific about what within the content is different you're just like I don't want this thing right and you can't articulate it but then if you add the argument to like you know if you add teacher voice to the argument that says we did all this stuff and we think this is good we don't think everything about is perfect we don't love the test that is a sentiment that teachers have but like it feels to me like those sort of arguments because they're practical and they're coming from teachers a lot of people I just have one final comment on that and it kind of leads us into the future because we've been talking about the past with ESA you know especially as we think about the non-academic standard the non-academic indicators that every state has to put in I think that's where we need to be extremely careful as to what we put in because that non-academic indicator could lead us to have these same type of discussions and it could completely send this off on a different path in the discussion because ESA it really does give us great opportunities and responsibilities but that non-academic standard and one that's been kind of popular in a lot of states is the social emotional measure I was around in the 80s I started my teaching career in the 80s and we talked about confidence and debased education and I never had such backlash as anything with that and so we need to be we need to really think about these lessons learned especially around that one little piece that every state asked for give us something that's not tied around the test that we can use as a measure what's that going to be will it hold water does it really make a difference what is that one going to be just are you imagining if you do student surveys like a real concern about having that deal that's one thing I asked Nate before I left it it's talking about what you're going to do on that non-academic one because it could be our trouble spot it could also be our best thing that ever happened common core is to trust out there okay so we just have to consider that in our communication and I don't think social media is at all here as we run along because when I talk to people and I say what is it about common core you're on why study it, where do you study it on Facebook, Facebook and that became the gospel and that's what everybody was so they didn't trust anybody really it's made everything difficult different initials common core coming at us from a different direction and the other thing is that there are 29 new chiefs in the United States 29 new chiefs that have not been through what they don't have the battle scars and yet they need the wisdom of the scars and those that came before but we also need their fresh new thoughts so there's somehow that we have to balance that and how do we not make the same mistakes especially with new faces at the table and when you have good practices in your SDA that's one of our concerns is how do you work with talk to people about how do you work with an SDA to make their communication more strategic when we're measuring chiefs and you're in months so how do you help them put something into play that is sustainable that's best in the SDA and your organization and in practices versus in people when people leave then it's a common if you talk about the white term of the state becomes now the role of the state which I see as a very evolving role in terms of their success and the story of the SDA and how they get their seats on that board makes a difference in about three different ways that that happens the other thing we found and I'm finding more so this year is that the political structure the governance structure of each SDA a lot of them are very unique it can make a huge difference with communication sometimes it has to be very careful because you have an elected superintendent or sometimes the SDA will say well we don't even get to communicate about the reforms we don't get to do any reforms we just have to communicate about what's handed down to us on high and so all of that plays into the communication as well it's really interesting really interesting well we're coming up on time but I want to give you each just a moment just to share any closing comments any thoughts in particular about as we transition to ESA or ESSA what would be your top tips or one tip that you would share for representatives that are here from various states to bring back to their states you know where do we start what is the best place to begin in terms of communications around this shift I would say two things and so it looks at what are the opportunities and one of the things we need to be careful about I think because there is a lot there is a lot more flexibility in certain areas I think taking that opportunity to be very innovative and thinking about what you could do for kids is important and the way to get at that is to really get into the field and then make sure that the policies don't block those innovations but two is that when you think about flexibility you think about making sure that that who gets in power is able to actually leverage those opportunities instead of become an obstacle to those opportunities because of some type of political mine would be thinking about with ESA you're going to be implementing some new policies you're going to be writing new policies and implementing those that policy must have evidence policy without evidence is very dangerous and we've seen that happen before so what evidence do you have or do you expect to have that that policy is going to make a difference for student learning and it really is all about student learning and so how is that going to make us better how is that going to make us if you think of Nate's example with Tennessee with more students leaving high school with a certificate or going on to post secondary education how's that going to benefit us so policy with evidence I think that I would say is really I think you know I think ESA the headline has been changes things, returns power states and issues flexibility but I think about around one particular issue I don't think that it's going to solve I think it's wrong to say oh thank goodness AYP and MCL we are gone and I think that's a really big temptation because I actually think so one I think most people clearly agree that MCLB highlighted some really important things is now that AYP is not the only way to hold schools accountable for the performance of subgroups but it's really important that state systems continue to do that in a very real way and then I also think there because the testing requirements are virtually identical to MCLB that some of the nagging problems that we've had with assessment who supports assessments fully but some of the you know the outside influence on testing in schools that's not going to solve itself in the that's still something to be worked on to you know so the states that are looking at you know how many assessments are given how much time students are spending that work is fantastic work that needs to continue in a way just because of the thank you I'd like to thank each of our panelists for joining us today this was an excellent session and I have we all have lots of ideas to take back and work in our space and think about where we go next and so we'd love to continue this conversation this shouldn't be our only one but as we move deeper into the work we'd love to connect back with you all and share share what we're doing in these areas so thank you very much and for those who are listening into the recording because I think we lost some of our webinar participants right when we put up the wrap up slide so but feel free to send us any questions you have or any follow-up and we'd be happy to support you as you're thinking about communications in your states and you'll also be receiving an email from us with a link for an evaluation we'd love your thoughts on this session as well as how it was useful to you and your practice thank you very much for joining we'll talk with you soon no problem