 Good morning, everybody. We're so glad to have you for the fourth and final session of our four week fall meeting this year from the Illinois P-20 Network. Today's topic is the career pathways. And really we wanna get in and focus on the nuts and bolts of what it takes to actually implement career pathways and career pathway endorsement work in school districts. So we have two school districts comprising our panel today. We've got two staff members, two leaders from Ridgewood High School and two leaders from Lake Zurich High School. I'm gonna have them introduce themselves in just a moment. But very quickly, in Illinois, we've been able to award career pathway endorsements to graduating high school seniors for two years now. This is year three. So the class of 2020 was the first year that was able to be awarded career pathway endorsements. And that year, Ridgewood High School had, and we've got the experts here. I cannot remember if it was four, five or six. Eric, Lisa, how many students do you remember earned? How many? Eight of them. Eight, so I'm way off and now I've got it straight from Eric's mouth. Eight students earned career pathway endorsements that year. And then last year, four additional districts around the state awarded career pathway endorsements. Over the first two years, we've had five districts award career pathway endorsements. A total of 47 students who are now out of high school have earned endorsements. 25 of those have earned career pathway endorsements in human and public services with a focus on education. 17 of those have earned career pathway endorsements in health sciences and technology. And five of those have earned career pathway endorsements in manufacturing, engineering, technology and trade. So I know sometimes, particularly if you're often at conversations around the career pathway endorsements, there can be a feeling among people like, oh, we're behind schedule on this. And the fact is, you're not. Number one, it's not a race. We're all moving at whatever pace we can move within our own school districts and communities and with our community colleges and partners in our communities, industry and business partners. Second of all, these are still very, very early days. And this will take a number of years. I tell the story of a few years ago, two years ago, being in a high school in a large unit district and they had a bulletin board in the CTE hallway with two career pathway course sequences within information technology. And the person I was walking around with said, yeah, those are for our eighth graders. And it was already on a bulletin board in the high school because that's how far out they were having to plan to ensure that teachers could be credentialed to teach dual credit classes, et cetera. So we're so glad you're here to be a part of this conversation. Again, we've got one school district that has offered students endorsements over the last two years. And the other district is on track to have its first group of students earn endorsements this spring, this May and June as they graduate. So with that said, Eric and then Lisa, if I can have you guys introduce yourselves and then Susie and Zach. I'll go first. Eric Lasky, assistant principal at Ridgewood High School, also in charge of career pathways. And I am Lisa Bellata from Ridgewood High School also. I am the director of career pathways and innovative programming here. I'm Susie Wagner here in Lake Zurich. I'm the director of innovation and I oversee our pathway endorsements. I'm Zach Gam, I am the director of curriculum K-12 and I help Susie with pathways. So let's get started by, I'm gonna ask across our two districts, you to tell us about the reasons that you and your districts have decided to invest in career pathway endorsement work. For Ridgewood and one of the misconceptions people sometimes have about me and Lisa as we talk about it, they think, oh, your school actually doesn't need you guys to do the work. Well, and actually, no, we had our jobs and we realized the value of this. And this was like our secondary evening work that we did because really it's about the equity. And we know that if we can provide our students a path to get a, where they can have a well-paying job, either right out of high school or with maybe a year of education, two years or even four years, that that's what we wanted for our students. That's sort of the gap that was missing with that send everybody off to college for your universities and teller. And if I could add, our goal was the 50% of the kids that were not meeting their needs. And we had to figure out a way to meet those needs. And if it took those evenings and weekends, we knew we had to do this for our kids. I think this was an extension of our work regarding capstones in CTE programming. So we had an effort of trying to create some dual credit opportunities for kids in those classes and then the state work, it really helped inform our process a lot regarding what kids could really accomplish and what the work we needed to do to help them get there. So it really helped define our work in a lot of ways and also create opportunities for students that weren't there before. So with that, I'm gonna direct this question specifically to Ridgewood and that you have had students graduate with endorsements each of the past two years. Can you tell us about the pathways in which students have graduated some of the highlights of their experiences both through the core sequences and through the work-based learning experiences. So this is where we want you to brag a little bit about what those students' experiences have been and what we need to be thinking about in other districts to help accomplish those again in either the core sequence or the work-based learning. To say like, if you look back 2020, we actually had six students in our education pathway. Out of those students, three of them earned the endorsement because they met all the requirements. The other three did not get their 60 work-based learning hours, but even though they didn't get, end up earning that career endorsement, five of them right now are in secondary programs to be in education. And I think the best thing about this is through, like they all sort of felt like they knew they wanna be teachers, but through that 60 work-based learning hours, they figured out what grade level they wanted to teach and what subject. And so that was really important thing for them. Another part is we've had a lot of students that actually had the manufacturing engineering technology and trades endorsement. We're fortunate enough to partner with manufacturers in our backyard that they would get the certifications first semester and then second semester, they would do internships with them. And those students, all five students that earned that endorsement were offered full-time jobs by the companies that they were interning with with benefits making a really, so they could be making $780,000 right out of high school. This past year in 2021, we sort of had the same thing. We didn't have as many students earned the education endorsement, but once again, they knew what they're gonna teach, the ones that did. And there's two of them now that are continuing on into college. And same thing with the manufacturing. We had some more earn the manufacturing endorsement offer full-time jobs as well. So Lisa, anything you want to add? Well, just our favorite story, Ricky Ayala that earned his endorsement with autos. He actually advocated for himself during the pandemic. He was so driven by the career endorsement process that he called Triton himself and said, how do I continue these courses? And he ended up actually all by himself during the pandemic completing the career endorsement. So we really like to celebrate him because we feel like he learned advocacy skills through this process. That's awesome. And one of the things we know is a really important part of the career pathway endorsements that we're not diving deeply on today, but we spend a lot of time talking about is the mix of competencies. There's the technical competencies in their career pathway endorsement area that earning the endorsement, they should have demonstrated that they've mastered those technical competencies. And then there's also the cross-sector essential employability competencies which we call the essential skills for short. And obviously Lisa's story right there is a great example of a student really demonstrating that they've mastered those essential skills and we know how important those are. So thanks for sharing that Lisa. Lake Zurich, you guys are on track to have your first group of students graduate with career pathway endorsements this spring in the area of manufacturing, engineering, technology and trades. Can you tell us about some of the behind the scenes work that you've done in two areas over the past year or so? One, working with teachers in the courses and two, communicating with students and their families about the opportunity. Yeah, sure. What we did was at first we had to take a look and see which courses we were offering that were dual credit. So we went through each of those courses and did some data work to identify which students had already taken the course sequences that included those two dual credits. Originally we thought that we were a few years out. We did not expect to be able to award at the end of this year. But surprisingly, as we did that data work, we noticed that we had students that were not only on track but two of our students had already gone through or were currently in the internship. So right there, we knew that we would have at least two students that were already prepared to be on track to get this endorsement in the spring. So we talked to the students over the summer. It was kind of rushed in hindsight. And if we had a little bit more time, I think that we would have done this in more face-to-face rather than through the Zoom communication. But we reached out to those families. We explained what the career pathway endorsements entailed. And the one thing that I think that some of the families got stuck on was that internship component, the 60 hour and how they were going to be able to do that internship when they have sports and after school activities and things like that. So of course it was optional and we had a few students that said, nope, it's not for me. But where we are right now, we have 10, including those two students that were already on track. We met with the teachers. We talked through what team-based challenges might look like. We are really lucky here in Lake Zurich. We have two very strong engineering teachers who already had really strong components of team-based challenges. So we worked with Jason. He came in, sat down with our teachers and us, walked us through the process to take a look at what our current team-based challenges look like and just added in a few more components to ensure that we were getting two of those experiences, which had to happen this year for those students to graduate with this endorsement. So we just finished one of the team-based challenges. We partnered with Baxter, who came in and worked with the students in an in-school field trip for the full day. And we will be debriefing with that team today. They got great feedback from the students. So there will be some shifts and changes made. For example, the students wanted it over a longer period of time rather than in just one day. Also, I'm trying to think of the other communications. The division heads, we did ask them to reach out to those families since they had a relationship with those students and families. From the district office, we thought that it would be more personal to come from them. Yeah, so anything else that you have to add, Zach? I would only say we're now in the process of refining that work that Susie talked about with the teachers in our other areas where we're going to begin the endorsement process for the human public services teaching and then finance and business services and accounting. So the dual credits are in place, and it's a matter now of I'm trying to build in internship opportunities as we can. And we'll talk a little bit later about Beth Slaughter, who's our community development coordinator, who's a huge help in that, but then also working with the teachers, hand in hand with those engineering teachers to kind of inform team-based challenge work and also competency, building competencies in so that we have valuable assessment practices aligned to those competencies that inform what the team-based challenges really will be measuring. One thing I want to just call out real quickly and the intention is not to publicly embarrass both Zach and Beth with praise, but we're going to do that. One of the reasons that Lake Zurich was able to ramp this up much more quickly than they had anticipated was because of years of previous work working with the College of Lake County on dual credit. So there was a number, they were pretty far along with that already. It just so happened that it worked out well where that sat. And then the second is Beth Slaughter, who is on the call today, is in a role where she's already, was already for a couple of years prior to this, a few years prior to this, partnering with community groups. They were doing internships, they just weren't part of a bigger program. And so Beth's already important and highly visible role in the district has taken on an even higher level of importance and visibility as a result of this move to career pathway endorsements, but they did have a couple of critical pieces in place. So if you're looking at this going, whoa, how'd they do that so fast? We wanna be real clear that they had some of those things in the background. And so this can also give us indications as places where districts might start knowing that they might just be building a foundation initially to eventually come back and build it into a career pathway endorsement. So yeah, that's important to know. Susie Zach, anything else you wanna add on that? I just dropped a link in the chat for Elisa. I'm a member of that organization and I have just in terms of dual credit in partnership with community colleges, that partnership has been really fantastic for Lake Zurich and understanding things like the model partnership agreement, what dual credit can be, how we can help facilitate instruction for the teachers to get where they need to go. So if you wanna check that out, it's a really good statewide organization for dual credit. Agreed, just so everybody's clear, the Illinois P2I Network and Elisa partner closely, we actually meet as leadership monthly to keep that dialogue going because there are so many issues that are critical there. With that, I'm gonna drop a question in here for both districts and we'll come back to Joe's question in a couple of minutes. I think it'll come naturally out of a couple of these. But the early college credit course offerings often dual credit could be advanced placement, possibly international baccalaureate. They tend to be included in the career sequences, the career course pathway, career pathway course sequences, excuse me. They do tend to be dual credit, possibly dual enrollment classes. But tell us about the work you've done with your local community colleges and then internally within your own districts to expand dual credit classes and what your timeline has been alongside whatever those processes have been in each of your districts. I could start with that. We started working with Triton quite some time ago. Eric will do better telling you about the timeline. But what I do wanna tell you is that part of our recruitment process started that right now we have three freshman courses that are dual credit. We have our PLTW Physics and Engineering course. We have Intro to Computer Programming and then PE. So our freshmen receive three dual credit classes as of the end of their freshman year. Our PLTW Engineering class and our Intro to Computer Programming class is also one of our recruitment strategies. And by saying that, we then start to learn who are our STEM kids, who are our comp side kids. So we know how to start recruiting them and getting them on board for the next steps. I also wanted to add, I wanted to empathize with Lake Zurich about the internships. You're right, getting that 60 hours when kids have to work, when kids have to do sports after school or activities is hard. We took advantage of the pandemic schedule. We kept our flexible schedule in the afternoon. Our kids are able to do their 60 hours every afternoon if need be. We're super excited because like we said, we have the manufacturing companies in our backyard and we have recently partnered with a rehabilitation center so that all of our health science kids can also do the same in the afternoons to provide that equity for those kids that have to work after school or to do their sports. You know, Lisa, can you talk, I was hoping Ridgewood could talk a little bit about this because that's one of the things I really like about the way you've structured it. And one of the challenges that we have faced is in the creation of the pathways. Your organization of essentially two pathways is opposed to even the seven from 16 is helpful. The state of Illinois has gone to the seven endorsement areas but I really like how you have structured it. And so there's two. Could you talk a little bit about that? Oh, okay. So how we did our two pathways and then everything falls underneath it. So our career endorsements though are still, we still base it on the state, you realize that. But that work came from the fact that we took all those clusters and we said, where did they bust it in? And remember, we are a small school district. So we knew we couldn't provide all the offerings. So by doing that, we can generalize our electives and say, if you're on that arts and sciences pathway, these are the electives that would be good for you. If you're on the business and talk pathway, these are the ones that would be good for you. We can share our presentation of what our breakdowns look like if you'd like. I can send that to you. Yeah, that would be great because that's one of the challenges, you know, when we started early college and I talked about how we felt we had capstones for the core areas in AP, but you know, what about a student engineering or business? And so we built in the dual credits there. But then when we started thinking about pathways, it became a lot more complicated in terms of thinking about, well, how do the core curriculum classes fit with the electives to create these pathways because there's so many variables. And that's why I really wanted to point out the work that you've done, because it feels like that's really a good way to go because if you create fewer pathways in a sense, it becomes easier for students and guidance counselors to help support those choices because sometimes it's like a analysis, you know, paralysis because there's just so many potential pathways there. How do you figure it out? It's too much. One of the ways we did that too is our integrated math and science model. So on integrated science, we do have like a more health science related one. And then we have a foods and cultures one. So kind of breaking it down that way, which is also of course separated from our distinguished scholars pathway. We still do the traditional honors and AP, you know, a pathway. We will send you all those things I see in the chat. People want to get ahold of those. We are more than happy to share with you. I really appreciate that. And yeah, just to kind of circle back to one of Jason's questions. The part, if you haven't reached out to your partner community college, that would be one of the first things I would recommend is because they are going to be really instrumental in helping you navigate teacher certification credentialing as well as your HR department and your division heads and the teachers themselves will let you know what credentials they have and are able to teach dual credit. And there is a difference between CTE and core. So I look, talking to your community college partner about those credentials and needs are just going to be really important. I'm going to jump, go ahead, Eric. Sorry. I'm going to say in the hiring practice, we changed probably about five years ago where we wanted to make sure we want, like all our business teachers are dual credit or computer science teacher has master in dual credit. So it's really too about your hiring practice and you're looking to hire. Great point. So as everybody can see, there's a lot wrapped up in just this dual credit piece. And this is certainly a place where districts can get started. I mean, now and know it's going to take some time. One question that popped in that's a little bit related to this because I think so much of our traditional middle school and high school math curriculum has been related to actually either what students need or the perception of what students need in a four year university setting. And so Amy Jo's question is, how has the pathways impacted your traditional math pathway? And if it hasn't at this point, are there, I'm going to add, are there conversations about it impacting your traditional math pathway? It has. And we, you know, it really comes down to now with the three different transitional math courses, which one, you know, by freshman software year, we almost try to figure out where is there any goal in which direction do they need to go in? So some of the students that maybe struggle with math a little bit more, we realize, all right, here's where they're starting, here's where they need to end in order to get into the career pathway of their choice. So that is actually having those transitional math options, the STEM, quantitative literacy stats and attack has really helped us to develop math pathways for each of those careers. What about, what about for a student who is performing well or very well in math, who traditionally was going to have that capstone of maybe an AP calculus, AB or an AP calculus, BC? Has this had an impact on maybe what their math sequence has looked like? And if not now, is there conversation around that? No, like the ones, the way you look at it, if the students going through that pathway and they're taking calculus, they're gonna learn whatever the math they need for that career. So those students, I feel like, no, we're not gonna really touch those, we're gonna let them go. We may say, oh, you might wanna be taking computers, maybe an AP computer science course along with a calculus, but it's more of those students that, they don't really like, you could tell that the math takes a little bit more time for them to get. So, and instead of putting them into a second intervention to get in that math support, we'd rather have that second class be a class that they enjoy, a class that they're passionate about that's gonna lead to their pathway. Great, thank you. Lake Sirke, did you guys have anything you wanted to add to that? Well, it's interesting because Susan, I had an opportunity to go be sharks for our MX Inc. students in middle school. And one of the big takeaways was how unprepared students were to do the mathematics in, as it relates to pricing and the percentages based on a profit and things like that. And we've had some beginning conversations about how that kind of work can inform mathematics instruction in the sequence of a student's education. Yeah, we've also recognized the need for those solid foundational skills starting at the elementary level. So we are starting in the fall with bringing in PLTW, the computer science strand. We're going to be bringing that into kindergarten for second and third and fourth grade to really start and understanding computer science at the basic level and then they transitioning into middle and high school. So we're really looking at pathways while the pathway endorsements live at the high school, we're really looking at strands that go all the way from elementary, middle and high to make sure that our students have that foundation so that they don't get stuck in the situation that we just saw last week in Mix Inc. where it was taking them, they felt they had to slow everything down to build that foundation of understanding the mathematics behind it. So we're also in the process of a math curriculum review right now where we will be taking all of these lessons learned and things and working backwards to make sure that we adopt the right resource and we provide our teachers with the right training to really ensure that our students are ready to go. So before I got back to Joe's question about kind of the backend keeping track of everything we're doing and student information systems, other pieces of software, different departments within a district, et cetera. I wanna ask this question because it relates to stuff that Eric, Zach and Susie have all talked about in the last couple of minutes. And that's the question we'll sometimes hear from parents in particular and actually at times from teachers as well. Wait, wait, wait. You want students to pick what they're gonna do when they're 14 years old. How do you respond to that question given some of what we've just talked about with middle school students and ninth and 10th graders? What does that look like in your district and how do you communicate proactively if you have to try and prevent that question or to answer it really ahead of time, and not prevent it? What do you think? New things, I can start to answer that one. Career exploration, right? We use some of our Perkins money to help our middle schools and start the Manzello that was formerly career cruising to start the career exploration much earlier. But when they come to their freshman year that whole year is based on career exploration. So they do a large project-based learning, a research project. They have a supplemental one in sophomore year, junior year, and again in senior year. So the career exploration never stops. The answer to your question, though, is yes, that question comes. It does come often, which is one of the reasons why we like the two broad career pathways. By having those broad career pathways, we are not essentially asking a kid to pick a career. Let's be honest, we don't know what some of these careers are going to be when they graduate high school. What we're asking them to do is think about an area. And as you also well know, sometimes them finding out what they don't wanna do is also about a return on investment. So we use that argument as well. And then- So that's, go ahead, sorry. As I say, that's the message to our parents is we want them to pick when they're 14 and they can experience it without them cost-scanning money rather than trying to pick it when they're 18 and now it's starting to cost them a lot more. And then to answer one of the questions in the chat, we use our advisory, all our students in our advisory when they do the career exploration. And then it is an English one project in early December where now they actually will do the research on that pathway and they actually do a presentation in their English class. And then in their integrated math class, they actually do a project as well that looks at return on investment and how many years of education, what is it gonna cost? What are the salaries? So they actually it's embedded in a few different areas freshman year. And if they pick up a dual credit or two along the way that transfers into the school they wanna go to all the better. Yeah, one of the things we keep talking about in conversations I'm in both at the district level and at the state level is the notion that measuring this accurately, the impact, the success of career pathway endorsements is actually really complicated. On the one hand, the easy part is the data I gave everybody at the beginning. This is how many students have earned endorsements. This is what areas they've earned endorsements in and I think and hope we'll be able to watch that go up. The tricky part is when we have a student who decides before their internship they've had enough work-based learning experiences they've had enough course experiences that were really good and they like them but they do not wanna do this for a career. And that is a success as well because we're helping that student hopefully giving them opportunities to explore something else or at least have conversations about that. But that's a hard success to measure, to quantify as we move forward. And so it's important that all of us that are advocating for these things are continuing to bring that up as well. Before we move on, I wanna hit one of Joe's questions and that is how are you celebrating the students who earn career pathway endorsements? Lake Zurich, this is more about what are you thinking that's gonna look like Ridgewood? Obviously we've had two unusual end of senior years so far for this. So you may have different ideas about what this will look like in the future. We've also, I wanna acknowledge how the situation where is be has been figuring out their own systems and they've made a lot of progress with that. I mean, last year, it wasn't until mid to late April that school districts could enter their information for who was gonna earn an endorsement. That's already open now and so that's available. And once you've entered it, while you have to update that information every year with what your team-based challenges are where your students are doing internships, it really is not a reapplication process for a school district for an existing already approved endorsement. It's an updating process to keep the data that ISB has up to date. So that's gonna look a lot different on ISB side of things as well as they work through things on their end. So with that said, what is celebrating students who earn endorsements look like for you guys? Ridgewood, do you guys wanna jump us off on that one? Yeah, three things we do. We announce them at our senior award banquet at the end of the year. They get a cord that they wear at graduation and then they are all listed on our website. So if you go to our score website, you'll see all the names of the kids that earn endorsements. Awesome. Lakezerk, do you have any ideas about that? Well, we just started this conversation during our CNI and BLT meeting with the high school. Really just trying to think out of the box how are we going to celebrate our students without it being, oh, we're celebrating our students for every single thing that they do. But we really think it's very important we do celebrate these students. So we did throw around the idea of having a cord for graduation. I love the way that you put them on your website, Ridgewood. We've taken a look at that. I think that that's a great way to really promote those students, but we're still in the conversations. So we're definitely open to ideas of how to share, but we're gonna work with our high school to really try to think of a good way that works with our district. Zach, what do you think? I'll just echo what you said there and also parallel however school districts recognize students who earn the seal of biliteracy. I think this will probably take a very similar path. That's awesome, Zach. Thank you for making that comparison. When I start conversations with people who are unfamiliar with the career pathway endorsements and some of you have heard me say this before, I almost always started with the seal of biliteracy. And so I think that's reasonable. I did just drop in the chat a link to a tweet from Jerry Cook from a week ago, I guess already. Jerry's the principal at Wheeling High School and they put up a new board each year and they're not actually putting up the endorsements I don't believe specifically on there, but they are putting up industry credentials on that board along with, I mean, they've always had a high honors graduate space. And when I say always, I mean literally going back to the 60s in the building. And so this is another idea that's similar and certainly what they have on the left or they could shrink the middle and certainly start putting up their students earning pathway endorsements in addition to the industry credentials. So I wanna hit on a couple of other things that have come up in the chat. First of all, we had the other question from Joe which is how are you keeping track of this? And I'm gonna work hard to keep my mouth shut because I have a lot of ideas about this after 10 years of leading instruction and technology and doing a lot with assessment about what I think are the most efficient, easiest ways to do this. But Ridgewood and Lake Zurich, can you guys jump in and tell us how do you keep track of this and manage students kind of the collection of data through the career pathway endorsement process, please. We use a really sophisticated program called Excel to document. Right now where we're at is just recording what students have completed in terms of their classwork, their internship hours and then the team-based challenges. There's the tool that the state has provided that Excel spreadsheet also allows for a little more detail as you upload information to the portal. But then I would also say that whatever tool schools are using for CCRI reporting because if students earn the pathway endorsement then they're automatically college and career ready independent of all the other metrics on that reporting tool. Ridgewood for now is doing the same. We've invested a lot of time and money in other platforms that promised us they'd be able to track this and it turns out they can't. I don't want to say anything positive or negative but we are exploring other places to try to find that. So one- Eric, can you share which platforms you sort of have looked at? Just because I have been in discussions with at least one and it sounds amazing. I'm just interested on where people are going. We have 26,000 students K-12. So when we do release this I gotta have a plan moving forward for when this gets bigger and having 20 students a year when we start is gonna be okay but when it's a thousand plus it's gonna be a nightmare. So let me jump in and say this so that to take Eric off the spot because we can certainly have and I've been wanting to do this for two years to have separate conversations around just this topic and it would be great to have all of you with EdTech and data folks also at conversations like that. Couple of things. First of all, starting with instruction. I think when we do the team-based challenges as part of courses it's got a couple of benefits. Number one benefit is in courses that maybe are not as authentic and particularly as we get outside of CTE and into some of the core areas when we do move into those spaces having teachers and students together experience what a team-based challenge or a problem-based learning unit can really look like can be pretty transformational for instruction and assessment broadly within our schools. And so that to me is a great benefit. There are certainly co-curricular activities that can fulfill the requirements of a team-based challenge and there's nothing wrong with doing it but from an equity perspective if I've got students moving through a course sequence already having them do the team-based challenge as part of the courses is awesome. Number one and number two, again if it can further improve instruction and move our building further towards authentic learning that's a benefit. Number three, coming back to Joe's question if I know all the students who have completed that course successfully have participated in that team-based challenge I have one less thing to keep track of. I do believe that most of the keeping track of this can be done within our student information systems. And I'm going to call out three here particularly given the number of school districts in Illinois using either Skyward Infinite Campus or Power School it starts to make it easier to support solutions within those three student information systems. Now, not everybody's using those three and that's okay but I think in most given my experience with most student information systems that's placed to start there are a lot of products out there promising to do a lot of things in this space. And those may be options also we're certainly not at a point where we're where we're promoting any particular product but this is a great conversation that we can offer support to having more of. So we'll loop some people together including you Joe and we'll follow up with that for some upcoming additional conversations around that. With that said, I want to give a shout out to IWIN and we've also done videos on specifically on building partnerships for work-based learning. And if you're not familiar with IWIN we'll include a link when we share a follow-up from today so that you can take advantage of that IWIN is the Illinois Work-Based Learning Innovation Network so specifically focused on work-based learning topics real quickly on this one from both districts what have been the keys to establishing partnerships within your communities? But what are the quick things you would say to help get people started and I'll just establish if a district can afford to hire someone like Beth who is responsible for that that's always a great way to do it and Lisa certainly take advantage of that Beth's keeping herself very busy. So beyond hiring a position what are some other keys to create those partnerships? One thing that we found we don't have anybody designated to this. We found that going to those chamber of commerce lunches actually helped us establish some partnerships. Another big one when for us was the Rotary Club. We were able to establish partnerships that way from there, we not worked. We cold call, we email, we invite them to see our facility we invite them to have donuts and coffee and talk about what we wanna do and it's worked. It's worked. We are now ready to launch our health science pathway next semester as the pilot based on just the way we've done it. It was the same for manufacturing. It was the same for education. And I guess for Lake Zurich we are lucky enough to have Beth in the role that she is in. She goes out of her way day in and day out to network get to know members of the community, chamber, the Rotary, all sorts of events and cold calling, emailing, dropping off flyers anything to connect with community members. And I know that not many districts have that opportunity to hire somebody in that position but we do definitely see as this process goes on how even more needed that position is to manage all of this work because her work goes beyond internships now and it's much, much bigger. So we are very lucky to have you, Beth. Thank you for all you do. I would just add too, I'm just gonna ask Beth if it's okay Jason to talk about the consortium that she's invited people to because I think that's been a really good place for conversation and maybe anybody here interested who wants to join that conversation as well. Beth, can you talk about that? Sure, so I basically invited Lake County, excuse me, area district representatives to come together. We meet monthly the first Friday of the month and really too we started kicking this off with focusing on specifically that internship piece best practices how just anything and everything around what we're currently doing, idea sharing, forms. So we have a Google drive where we share documents. We've expanded that to all college and career readiness indicators and looking at how we're doing data collection what that kind of forward facing report looks like how we can impact those numbers really just a great group effort. We've got probably at least I'd say 10 area districts participating the more the merrier. So if you'd like to join us our next meeting will be December the third it's gonna be hosted at Mundelein High School. So we're gonna rotate within the district's hosting and we all build the agenda items together take notes and just share and collaborate. And I think one of the reasons it's valuable is because just as we're having this conversation every district is in a different position and as it relates to internships they've got a different process they use the scheduling is different. And so just a place to talk through that and understand what's best practice is really valuable. One of the things I'll jump in and add we're so lucky to have people from across the state here today and we have some other people that I know are gonna be watching this video early next week as soon as it's on YouTube who are not here today from literally end to end across the state north to south and east to west. And so if you're hearing what Beth's talking about and you're like, hey, we're hours and hours and hours away from Lake County we're not coming to join that meeting but we wanna start something like that here that's a conversation that we're happy to help facilitate that's central to the idea of the Illinois P-Twin Network. So feel free to contact me after we can connect you with Beth to also have some conversation there about starting it and we can certainly help you think about how you organize that and try and support that in a bunch of different ways for you regionally. So thank you Beth for sharing that. So I'm gonna shift gears now and ask Ridgewood a couple of questions. I'm actually gonna add a third. So first of all, Eric and Lisa what would you say has been one of the secrets to your success thus far with regards to the career pathway endorsements? I think when we started the really one of the main key to our success is we start out with being a competency school and I see Mary Reynolds on this call and without her we never got that far she guide us to that. But then as we realized and we, by going to a lot of professional development on companies education we realized that career pathway and that's when we started seeing Jason at a lot of conferences and John Furrer and hearing them talk and realize well this ties into it. And then instead of saying that we are a competency education school we said no we're a PWR school. They all go together if you wanna give our students the best future and that's sort of how we now branded ourselves. So I'm gonna go back to something from Ridgewood that you talked about earlier and that's the schedule. Can you talk to everybody a little bit because that's something I brag about is what Ridgewood does with their schedule because we know how hard it is especially in an equitable way to work in work-based learning experiences for students. And the schedule alone is not the only barrier to work-based learning experiences but it's a big one for most high schools and most school districts. Can you talk to us a little bit more about what your schedule actually looks like so people watching this can understand oh this is what a day in the life of a Ridgewood student or teacher might look like and that's different than what it looks like here maybe in our own school district. It looks a lot different Jason and I have to be honest with you we are still selling it to a lot of our teachers so I don't want you to think it's easy by any means to change something like this. We're not heroes, we're just, we're pioneers like the rest of you. So what we do is we have an alternating block schedule so the kids receive their block hour long classes in the mornings from eight till 12 and it rotates every other day. And then in the afternoons, we have a flip of flex time and lunch. Flex time is a time where students are able to get enrichment activities, things like robotics. They are able to get remediation time, differentiate for math, for English, for whatever they need, whatever their needs are and then or they can actually have time to maybe explore a new hobby. For example, if teachers are willing to give that. In the afternoon's done, we have these skinny periods where teachers can use it for extended AP time, they could use it for a Socratic seminar time, that kind of thing. But it also then allows us the afternoons for these internships, for these classes at Triton that are on campus classes, for these extended classes at Triton like autos that takes hours for the kids to go to the grade schools and do their observations. So those afternoons, a kid can be gone from 12 to three o'clock based on our schedule if that's what they need. So it's really different. So that is, and I really appreciate Lisa talking about how hard it is because I don't wanna pretend like any of this work is easy. All change work in schools is hard and takes a lot of time and we'll have setbacks along the way. So that's a great call out, but it's also really great to be able to plant a flag at certain places and say, well, this is what this can look like and how it can benefit students. Are there benefits for teachers, Lisa or Eric, would you say in that schedule? Eric doesn't wanna say. I think there are benefits for teachers. And some of our teachers have said so. They like having extended time with their kids in the afternoon. Our math teachers, especially champion this, they use that time to reach their students that need extra help. They also use it for project-based learning time. So a teacher might not actually be teaching. They would just be facilitating time for kids to collaborate and work in groups. I know our engineering teachers are loving it because they have all this time now to actually finish projects that kids wanna do choice projects. They can do their laser printing at that time. They could do their 3D printing. So a lot of teachers are loving this. Some, not so much, but we're gonna get there. We're gonna get there. Well, I think that's a topic that we could dive into separately because schedules are so, time is such a A, a tradition in our schools and B, really creates some parameters. How many times have we all probably experienced as students a science lab that took place over two days when there was no instructional reason for that, it was because that was just how long it took. And so these are really thorny issues. Last question for Ridgwood in this little section and then we're gonna bop over to Lake Zurich before we finish up. What's one thing you would do differently based on what you know now when you look back a couple of years with your initial implementations with the career pathway endorsements? So, as we're learning new things or we're seeing different ways to do it, we talk about these platforms and stuff. We're seeing so many more newer ideas and how we can really, it's really about evolving around experiences for students and how we could integrate. We feel like we need to have a little bit more integration of like our English and math courses with a lot of these pathways works. So while we had some stuff in place and then we started doing career pathway work, it might have been nice, and you can't really, we have some great stuff in place. You don't wanna get rid of it. So it's really just rethinking how we have the whole day set up and maybe doing a little bit more cohorts, especially with our freshmen, maybe starting the having them pick careers maybe in seventh, eighth grade and now freshman year is more of a cohort year where all the math, the English, the science is related to their pathway work and then they can choose to stay in it or they can move to a different one. So that's sort of like the direction we're hoping to move and maybe we wish we were to start with. Awesome, thank you. And Lake Zurich, less than a year ago, I don't know that you were really talking about this. I mean, here we are. I think you're about 10 months into these conversations and you've got team-based challenges happening and internships happening. What supports have been most helpful to you in your initial work and implementation of the career pathway endorsements? Well, I can just kick that off. Honestly, the partnership with you, Jason, has been absolutely instrumental. We had some ideas. We were looking around at other districts, but many districts were doing things differently. Some of them had pathways outlined, but they weren't directly tied to an ISB pathway endorsement. So really understanding what the pathway endorsement entailed, working alongside Jason, has been absolutely instrumental. It was really good for our teachers to see an outside entity come in and speak with them as well. For some reason, I think that they just, they see somebody from the outside as they really have that background. Jason has done this with quite a few districts. So the trust was already there. And really working with us through this process in our initial year, helping us to make sure that we weren't making missteps. And while it's still very fresh, and I'm sure that the way that we started wasn't the way that if we, in retrospect, that we would do that again. It's definitely been helpful, just having somebody to pick up the phone and ask a question. Are we on the right track? Did we look at this in the right way? So that was really important. Anything else to add, Zach, with things that help? I will just echo what you said about Jason without a doubt. Being able to work with a really collaborative group, starting with P20, and then seeing the work that Ridgewood has done has been super helpful. The one thing I would also add is we began our process based on the existing courses that we had. One thing, if we were gonna start from scratch, I might, and this would probably help with internships, is look around the community for industry needs. What does our community really need? And so I think that that would help in terms of the creation of pathways and career pathway endorsements and internship partners and things like that. And that's, I think we did that in a, after the fact, where we didn't start with that, may have been helpful. Yeah, and I think that we did what we had to do. So we knew that once we found that they were students that were so incredibly close, we didn't have the luxury of waiting, and nor did we want to. Our kids deserved this, and so we had to speed up that process. But as we're moving forward, now we can take a look at that, right? Once we were able to slow things down after we get through the next two, I think that that's really gonna become quite a big part of the way that we begin this process. Finally, finishing up for either of both districts, any of you, five years from now, what do you either think or hope career pathway endorsements or career pathways work will look like in high schools in Illinois? Well, I'll answer because I've thought about this a lot. When I got to like Zirk, there was no seal of biliteracy. Process and nor were there any dual credits, right? And so the seal of biliteracy framework and foundation had already been established in the state. It's recognized by colleges and universities and also employers as a real and a valuable credential or identifier for a student on their transcript. And I really believe in five years we'll see something similar with the pathway endorsement and that may even carry a little more weight in terms of employability than the seal will. And I would like to see it grow also in terms of recognition for post-secondary work for students too. I think that's where it's the trajectory. Thanks, Zach, anybody else? Yeah, in five years, here's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping that these conversations are just as exciting as when we say what colleges our kids are going to. I wanna also see t-shirts that show what career pathway endorsement that they've achieved because I think that's where the celebration needs to come in. And for us at Ridgewood in five years, I'm hoping we could say that 100% of our seniors have at least one career pathway endorsement. I know that's been Eric and I, that's our goal. Five years, we could do it in five years, Eric. We got enough left in us. And I think it becomes more of a heightened issue for college-bound students as well. Well, now maybe this is a requirement to get into certain colleges as you must have this endorsement and this experience. Yeah, and even beyond universities and colleges, I would really like to see industries and businesses instantly see that they have this stamp on their diploma and they already know what competencies these students are coming to them with and that they recognize it and promote that. Oh, we're looking for students that have this. I know that some of our families, they're wondering what's in it, what is in it? What do they get out of this at this point? And I hope that that won't even be a question in five years. I hope that everyone will just know what these students are bringing to the table and they will be considered first for jobs, possibly entry into different universities and college programs. So, yeah, I have high hopes. Well, I wanna thank all of our panelists and everybody else who joined us live. There's so much going on around the state. And again, it is early days. This is not a race. Please don't say to yourself as we finish this up, oh, why aren't we here yet? But rather say to yourself, okay, what's our next step here? And we've heard a lot of different options for next steps. We've certainly given me a little bit of additional homework and we look forward to continuing to engage everyone across Illinois in this conversation. And the most exciting days, of course, for some of us personally are the days that we're able to be in schools, seeing this actually happening and we can't wait to be in each of your schools. So thank you to our panelists and thank you to all of you who are here with us today.