it is Saturday at 10:00 a.m. eastern and we are going to be going over the SL 6990 and the prais 5412 I'm really excited that you guys are here with me today my name is Kathleen Jasper and I'm thrilled to be going over the leadership exams with you today so we have a lot of prospective leaders who are you know working towards this test but we also have teachers who are just interested in kind of having a look at this test and seeing if it's something that they want to do so all are welcome for this webinar again we are working on the SL 6990 and the prais 5412 these are leadership exams so these are the exams you take when you are trying to become an assistant principal or a principal or something like that so let me know in the chat if you can hear me okay I am live on a webinar if you have not registered for that webinar and want to join that webinar and get the resources I talk about in the webinar you can go ahead and click the link on social media it's in the description and you just fill out the form on that page and you'll have a link to watch the we web live webinar um you can engage in the chat there and then we will also be sending out emails after the webinar is over with an offer code and um all the resources we talk about today so just let me know you can hear me okay in the chat and if you're on social media welcome welcome I'm just going to check my you uh YouTube page make sure I am live and I am checking Facebook making sure I'm live and it's going let's see and I am awesome so perfect now let's get back to the presentation so I want to First say a couple of things the SLA 6990 Is My Jam I love this test I love prepping people for this test I've written several um study guides online courses things like that for this exam now this free webinar will definitely get you started um and some people pass this exam by just using our free stuff and we have lots of free things for these two exams but if you need a little more support and you want to prepare you know in a comprehensive way we do have paid materials So today we're going to be working from the free study guide that comes when with this webinar so when you signed up you were taking into a thank you page on the thank you page were the uh webinar links and then the study guide that you can download and save to your computer there's also a link on that study guide to take you to the paid study guide this free study guide is just a snippet and it's great you can use it and use this webinar and pass if you're trying to save money but we also have other resources that are very comprehensive and so I just want to show you those today so that you know you have lots of options okay so let me just share my screen really really quickly and on our website we have uh books and courses for the SL 6990 and the Praxis 5412 these exams are identical except for one difference and I'm going to talk about that when we go over the test specs so we have the study guide here and you can buy it as a digital download or you can let me just share this tab you can get it on Amazon there's a button on the website that will take you there you can see we have tons of five-star reviews for this book this has helped thousands of people pass their exam now besides that we also have let me go back here we also have an online course for this exam this is super comprehensive and it comes with the study guide and an audio course so let me just show you what that looks like really quickly the online course start course here has I mean if you look at this menu over on the leftand side you can see there's just so much information it comes with handouts for the particular section I'm talking about then I go through you know all the different things there are tons of videos there on everything so that's really helpful and then of course we have a comprehensive constructed response section on the online course um you can see these are the handouts there and then of course I go through them in this video very specifically and then one thing that we've added which I'm really excited about I want to do more of is the audio course option so when you buy the online course you get the audio course so you don't have to buy both but um this is a good way some of you I'm this way I like to put my headphones in go for a walk vacuum the house whatever it is and this is a really great way to do that so that's we we love that we're offering those and I'm going to try to do it for lots of the exams that we have now um let me go back really quick here you can get just the study guide you you can get the online course which includes the study guide and the audio course or if you just want to spend $15.99 you can just get the audio course it's a great companion to the study guide but remember when you get the online course you um you get everything okay and there's an offer code in the chat that my colleague Jana is going to um put uh that's she's going to uh put it in the chat for you and um you can go ahead and use that that offer code so don't buy until you use the offer code because you'll get 20% off and that's really helpful especially for the online course because it's a little more expensive so Tracy says she bought the study guide well worth it I'm so glad Tracy that plus this is going to help you a lot so um that will really really help you so s lla 6990 or prais 5412 they're the same test let me show you what that looks like so I'm going to go into our study companions here okay so you know no matter what test I'm prepping for I will always send you to the etss study companion this document is very very important it's the document I use to build my materials it should be the document that guides your instruction so you can see here that we have the blueprint we have six content categories from strategic leadership all the way to community engagement it gives you how many questions are in each section you can see instructional leadership is the biggest one with 27 questions at 177% obviously because we need to be instructional leaders first and foremost that's our job but of course all these others are very important and then the the last section is the constructed response which is tough you got to um write four constructed response um essays in 75 minutes so these are scored separately so you will take the multiple choice or they call it selected response and you'll have 165 minutes for that you can see that right here up at the top and then that portion of the test will be concluded so you can't use like any extra time from your selected response into your constructed response it is two separately timed sections so once you've hit submit you finished your selected response then you move into the essay portion or the constructed response I'm going to do a full constructed response today so it will help you but this is something we need to practice because it is a big task and of course you're trying to be become a principal or an assistant principal so this test is not going to be easy right it's going to be more difficult so we want to make sure we prepare properly now this is the blueprint for the 6990 now let's have a look at the blueprint for the 5412 notice it is identical strategic leadership all the way down to community engagement but it's missing one thing it's missing the constructed response for those of you taking the prais 5412 it is the same test as the SLA 6990 except it does does not have a constructed response section it's all selected response and you have 2 hours and 45 minutes to complete that now really quickly I left the constructed response in our 5412 book because it's very helpful for you to review that so you get the critical thinking that's really really important in order to an answer the selected response so I left it in the book because I just feel like it will better prepare you for the multiple choice section so you don't have to freak out and worry about it and say oh my God I got to write essays if I'm ready if I'm doing the practice 5412 but it does help to become familiar with that because critical thinking performance-based assessment you know writing for the for the exam is really helpful when studying okay now the second thing I want to tell you is that this assessment the SLA 6990 and the prais 5412 is aligned with the psel standards those are the Professional Standards for educational leadership so any big test by a big testing company for any state or even the nation is always going to be aligned with a set of national standards and the national standards for that many states use for um educational leadership are the psel let's have a look at what those look like because it's important you get to know these standards cuz is going to help you with the test and it's going to help you with being a leader all right so let's go to that right here okay so I'm going to link this up in the email you get from me once the webinar is over so don't worry about trying to download this right now you will get it I just want to kind of look at it you can see it's a 36-page document and you know it has a lot of information notice that we have student learning Mission Vision and goals ethics and professional Norms these are all things that are on the exam and then we get down into the actual standards and you can see this is standard two ethics and professional Norms all of these words all of these phrases are in the right answer choices on the exam so you don't have to memorize this document I just recommend using it as supplemental material to help you uh study for the exam and to help you identify correct answer choices because you you are going to see on this test that they give you four answer choices and all of them look good I get that question on I didn't see any answer choice that stood out because they all looked good I'm going to talk to you how to find them today but um this will help you kind of discern the correct versus incorrect answer choices on this test that can be very difficult and there's just you know some good graphics to understand and it'll just help you um understand the foundations on this exam so definitely check out the ps's and again I'm sending you an email about an hour after after this webinar is over and you will get all the links and things that I'm talking about today okay so one thing that people I see people asking in the chat I bought the book but I want the online course and well since the course comes with the book if you already bought the study guide and you would like to get the course we will apply your purchase of the book to the online course and we do that for anything all you have to do is send proof of purchase if you purchased on our website we can find you but if you purchased on Amazon we can't find you so we just ask that you send a screenshot of your order and we will send you an offer code that gives you that price off the course okay so don't worry if you decide you want to upgrade you can we will take that price of the book off the course okay all right so let's get started we are going to be working from let me share screen one more time I'm always sharing screen we are going to be working from this free study guide here now again I talked to you a little bit about the paid study guide they are different so this free study guide is five pages it has 10 problems here and then it also has detailed answer explanations okay it's just a snippet now if you want more you can order our full study guide let me zoom in here and this is the digital version because it just helps me um share it with you guys but you can see that the entire book is broken up by content category within each content category is just tons of information I of course have the test specs I always have the test specs for you and then I get into all of the information it's very comprehensive now if you do get the study guide the full one please read it a lot of people just go straight to the practice test and that's okay to do but in order for you to understand everything on the exam it's really important that you read the study guide and then after that at the very end well after each section let me show you this really quick after each section um hang on let me go back to my table of contents here sorry about that so like you can see here strategic leadership and practice questions after each section I have 10 problems that Go just with the section you're in that way you can see like okay these are what the questions might look like when um when we are uh in this section of the exam let me just make make sure I'm sharing screen here yeah I am okay I just I thought maybe I'd stop sharing screen um so you can see this is section one we've already gone through all of section one's stuff you know you read red red you know all these things and then at the end of section one you get to 10 practice problems with detailed answer explanation so you can get to know okay this is a strategic leadership question this is an instructional leadership question this is an Ethics leadership question all right and that'll help you there and then finally at the end of the book book let me scroll this way so I don't make you guys dizzy at the end that's managing operational systems sorry it is a big book there are uh 250 pages in this book where are we here um okay at the end we have the analysis which is the constructed response you can see I have tons of prompts here for you that are really going to help I'm going to go through a prompt today and then of course we have the full practice test so then you get a full practice test at the end with all of the content category questions in there and then finally one thing that I love about our books and a lot of people like about our books is that our answer explanations certainly give you a lot of information here but it also tells you what content category they come from so if you get a question wrong and you see you're getting like five questions wrong out of the Strategic leadership you know you have to go back to strategic leadership and you can see these uh Roman numerals here Will tell you all about that okay but today we're working out of the free study guide which is great as well um we're going to cover both SL 6990 prais 5412 I actually have this on a bigger thing here i' pulled out a few questions and then we're going to jump to the constru constructed response because I find people um struggle with that and that can be kind of daunting that task okay so let's have a look at question number one so if you have the study guide in front of you you can go ahead and pull it up if you don't just follow along with my presentation no big deal you can download the free study guide later I'd rather you watch the presentation here okay the one thing about the SLA 6990 and the 5412 is that it is the perfect test to work backwards you know I always say work backwards you always want to start with the answer choices for these scenario type questions okay now this question is pretty short so you could read the question first and it's fine and it's asking you to kind of Define A needs assessment um so we'll do that first but when you get to questions like this where you have this long scenario here and then big answer choices after it it helps to read the questions first let's go back to number one so it's saying A needs assessment is a systematic process for so we're talking about A needs assessment remember A needs assessment is when you analyze data all kind of data in the school it's going to be um Behavior data achievement data Maybe surveys it it kind of does a lot you'll see A needs assessment in the school Improvement plan it is a way to collect data so when you see needs assessment think data very very important and as an instructional leader you are going to be referencing the data first and foremost all the time before you make any decision okay that needs to stay in your your head for this exam too when you are the principal or assistant principal you don't just go willy-nilly make decisions we want to make sure we are data driven and that we are looking over lots of things and A needs assessment is a great way to start so let's look at a determining and addressing needs or gaps now you'll see this a lot you'll see a word that matches the word in the question if you do slow down most likely it's the correct answer so determining and addressing needs or gaps between current conditions and desired conditions or wants this is the key A needs assessment you're saying what do we need what we need are the desired conditions okay we want you know reading uh scores to go up 5% that's the need what's our current conditions well we're currently at let's say we're at 45% we want to move it to 50% so we're currently at 45% we want to move to 50% the desired conditions also in a needs assess assment that's not the only thing you're looking at you're looking at disaggregated data based on subgroup based on um grade level we are looking at different assessments maybe their formative assessments versus their summative assessments versus their end of thee State Criterion assessments so this is uh a very complex process but if we are going to break it down to what A needs assessment is a is the correct answer but let's talk about b c and d just so we can have a discussion B surveying teachers to determine areas of improvement and where to allocate resources notice that um this is actually a good answer if you didn't know a lot like surveying teachers sounds good but here's the thing and I want you to keep in mind about surveys surveys they are there to measure attitudes about things so you would do a survey with teachers to figure out how they feel about a new reading program or how they feel about any new implementation excuse me that you put in place surveys are not going to give you the quantitative data that you need to make every decision surveys are qualitative data meaning that they cannot be Quantified in numbers it's more about looking at you know um anecdotal data but when we're talking about you know quantitative data to make decisions about a process we're going to want to do something more than a survey so be on the lookout for that surveys are certainly appropriate at certain times but when we are implementing programs to help increase student achievement surveys are usually not the best thing it can certainly supplement some of the data but we need those raw numbers where is where do the percentage percentages lie okay so B is out um and of course it's got all the good words here allocate resources but B is not the best answer C using student achievement data okay I like that to drive decisions made in the classroom okay this is a great answer choice you know I talk about the good words all the time student achievement decisions based on that achievement is all great but it is not as comprehensive as this a needs assist assistant A needs assessment measures gaps now this word gap here is very important too as an instructional leader you are looking at the Gap in the bar graphs you are looking to see where students you know where some students are maybe your general education students are high and your uh English language Learners are a little bit low your job is to close the achievement Gap I talk about that a lot in my leadership um videos so if you see anything on gaps or closing the achievement Gap it is most likely the correct answer okay let me just check something really quick here I want to make sure I forgot to turn on my um I forgot to turn on my there we go let me just go here make sure I'm sharing screen forgot to put my camera up okay we're good all right so um so C is out it's okay not as good as a all right want the best answer and D analyzing resources and determining allocation based on desire Stu student achievement okay this part of the qu uh answer choice is good determining allocation based on desired student achievement as educational leaders we have a budget right and so we want to um allocate resources based on the budget and where do we want the increase to come from where would those budget resources really work but we're not going to analyze resources to do that be careful this test is very Nuance we're going to analyze the data to do that and that's why a is better you don't analyze resources and then give them out you look at the data and say okay these kids need this these teachers need that based on the data then you send them out so again very nuanced be careful this word gap and desired conditions and current conditions are the best and it's going to lead me to A needs assessment okay all right number three now this is an example of where all four answer choices sound really really good and I like this question because I get these um messages a lot on Facebook and YouTube and things like that where people say I took the test and every answer Choice looked good all right so let's have a look at the answer choices first because this is a scenario question I don't want to get lost in this I first want to see if I can eliminate any answer choices and see if there's one that's a standout okay a form a committee of experienced teachers to analyze the data and come up with Solutions all right that one looks good I can't really eliminate it because that's what we want to do this is called shared leadership it's a big part of the exam and of course you're not making all the decisions alone as a leader you need to bring in you know the custodians your teachers staff members students parents that's why we have um student advisory or School advisory councils want to bring in the community so a looks good B review the Sip and analyze current goals identified in the plan all right B is okay but we're just analyzing current goals we're not analyzing data I don't know I'm going to put a little X there I don't love it but reviewing the Sip is is a good practice so I don't hate it C deleg part of the test to the assistant principal so time can be used efficiently okay now with things like this a delegation is um part of our job we cannot do all the things right and I am learning to delegate myself and enjoying it a lot in my business but it's hard when you have done it all yourself and a lot of leaders have a hard time with delegation myself included and so it's really part of that but when we talk about delegation on this exam it's usually attached to aligned with the strengths and the talents of the person so for example and this is not real life you're going to delegate whatever you need to delegate but on the exam think perfect world you would delegate based on teacher strength so let's say you're a principal and you um want to delegate the social media okay you want to you want you don't want to do the social media and there's a teacher who is just at social media well you might delegate that to her or him um let's say there's a presentation you want to give the the students or the teachers about you know current uh situations and where we want to be you might delegate that presentation out to a teacher because teacher-led presentations always go over much better than uh the principal standing in the front of the room telling you what to do and that teacher might be very strong in data analysis and presentation so typically when we delegate we want to attach that to a strength of the person we're delegating to I'm just going to put a little X I don't hate it I'm going to have to read the question D disaggregate disaggregate the data based on subgroups and analyze achievement gaps in areas of weakness okay this one here has got good words written all over it disaggregate the data okay first step in anything is you look at the data and you don't just look at it at a metav view you or I'm sorry at a at a macro view you want to get down and really disaggregate and get meta on that data you want to look at subgroups you want to look at each specific skill is with vocabulary they're struggling with is it comprehension you want to go deep into the data so you can make the best possible decision and that's what disaggregate the data means if you see the word disaggregate the data star it it's probably the correct answer then we have based on subgroups this is also a good word through data analysis we want to make sure that we are you know looking at the different subgroups now I always caution people in real life about subgroups we have to be careful that we don't solely rely on these subgroup labels um and I've seen some problems they had some things on the news about principles focusing on subgroups and bringing those subgroups into a presentation and only focusing their efforts on them in the presentation it was very bad but anyway ways subgroups is important for us to have a look at in data analysis but it's not the only thing but on this test it is a good answer choice and analyze achievement here's that word again gaps and areas of weakness D's got it all I'm going to circle it let's read the question the principle of Lees High School is working on increasing the curriculum and instructional Focus to include a targeted approach targeted approach means we need to get meta on that data right we need to drill down to students subgroups specifically students who are identified as low socio economic and ESC ESC as exceptional student education could also be special ed same thing what should be the and here's the key you'll see this a lot first step now forming a committee is great reviewing the Sip is great delegating part of the task based on someone's strengths is great but the first step you do as an instructional leader is to analyze the data very very closely so anytime you see first step go to the answer choice that talks about the data and you can see I had the correct answer Choice before even reading the question because it had all the good words and things like that so please when you see answer choices that all kind of look good like they do here zero in on anything that talks about analyzing the data and also disaggregating the data and that's why D is the correct answer now let's talk about this one really quickly now I have seen especially on the practice tests um for this exam and the study companion what they'll do is you've got this big old scenario with a data set and this tends to get people like oh my gosh you know this is a lot still go with the answer choices first because it's going to help you sometimes you don't even have to look at the chart I'm not saying all the time but sometimes the answer choices are written in a way where you don't have to get lost all up in here and and lose time and all of that so let's go straight to the answer choices before touching anything all right so a should the school investigate other reading programs that may maximize reading gains for all student groups all right that's okay B how can it how can the achievement Gap in the reading performance between total groups and the subgroup be closed closing the achievement Gap is our number one goal we want to make sure that while we continue to help our High Flyers fly high we want to bring those who are scoring low up up up up up to close the achievement Gap okay want you to visualize a bar graph and in the bar graph you've got a big bar that's going way up to the sky and it's looking good and then you have a lower bar here right and what you want to do as a school leader is take that low bar and pull it up we don't want to bring the high bar down that's not closing the achievement Gap closing the achievement Gap is bringing the low bar up to that high bar and that is our number one job I love B let's look at C what factors are most important in promoting Improvement in the school's overall performance and reading okay it's all right not as good as b d how many students are in each subgroup and how does that impact the data it's it's okay we talk about data but it doesn't really matter how many students are in each subgroup I mean possibly but what we're looking at here is performance so regardless of how many kids are on there the the performance is the performance so let's just read the question but B is the correct answer and I didn't have to look at any of this because it had all the the good words in it but of course on test day you just want to check and make sure so we have um I'm going to continue to work backwards here start with the question stem first so continue to go up work backwards so we're here after reviewing this data the Middle School principal should place the highest priority key on answering which of the following questions the highest priority here needs to be how do we get our low socioeconomic students up to the same level as our general education students who don't who are not quote labeled as low sces okay now again we don't want to bring in all the students who come from poverty and Target them in a way that's going to um embarrass them or anything like that but we just know as Leaders this particular subgroup and not everybody in that subgroup you're going to have plenty of students who come from poverty who are really good and High Flyers it's that's the problem with labels we tend to think oh he's from this side of town or he comes from low socioeconomic or he's this or he's that so he just can't do the things the other students can do absolutely not this this is just a way to kind of look at the data and say okay overall our Lowes kids are performing at lower rates how can we support them to push them up that's what that is for and we want to close that achievement Gap so B is the correct answer but I always caution please be careful about subgroups and labeling because it can be very detrimental to student progress all right let's take a look at number eight so on your study guide we're skipping ahead a little bit let's look at the answer choices because this right here is too much I want to see if I can eliminate anything all right a provide differentiated instruction that builds on students unique strengths and experiences all right I like differentiated instruction and you know building on their strengths and experiences all right B incorporate Project based learning activi ities into the curriculum okay A and B sound like teacher um teacher uh strategies you know teachers would differentiate the instruction and teachers would incorporate Project based learning although we could as Leaders require it or or push towards it or provide professional development in it so I'm not real sure but let's have a look see develop individualized performance criteria to drive instruction and assessment for each student Okay C sounds good but let me talk to you about this one individualized performance data that means you are giving students individual grades like based on their own individual needs right and the reason why this is problematic is because at the end of the year they have to take a Statewide assessment and everybody's graded the same it's a standardized assessment they might get accommodations if they have a learning disability or something like that but the benchmarks are the same so we don't want to develop individualized performance criteria we want to keep the criteria or the standards where they are and develop individualized instruction to help them meet that so be careful remember on uh the number one we had some nuances there so just be sure you you have a look and and see we don't want individualized performance criteria the performance criteria is the standard it's up here we never lower it okay we just want to support to bring those kids up so I don't like C D create and Implement stand standards aligned independent study programs okay here's the problem with this one standards aligned is like I love standards aligned everything should be aligned to the standards right and we want to promote that with our teachers just like what we do um as Leaders there are national standards we have our district goals State goals we're all aligned to that and all of those are aligned to a set of Standards a set of academic standards but the problem with this one is independent study programs um usually independent study is homework right they go home and do it it's a fancy word for homework and if students are struggling and typically these questions are about students who are struggling independent study programs are not going to work let's read the question right now I'm between A and B uh let's read the question after A needs assessment okay so the the leader conducted a a data analysis the leadership team has decided to focus on certain subgroups within the school specifically Ells English language Learners and low socioeconomic students the needs assessment data show these students tend to perform at substantially lower levels than their peers both in the classroom and on standardized tests Okay so we've got this group who struggling to perform the leadership team can best support teachers okay um who develop sorry best support teachers who serve these students by providing teach teachers with professional development aimed at okay so I I said before these sound like teacher practices and we want to make sure that if we're asking teachers to do these practices we're giving them professional development so now we're between A and B all right so which professional development would help us with students who struggle well right away differentiated instruction right because you're going to have Ells who have specific needs because they are English language Learners so they're going to need support esol support they're going to need you know other things we're going to need to teach teachers about that and then low socio economic students are going to need something different probably and then let's have a look at this that builds on unique strengths here's something that doesn't get talked about a lot we think when students are failing on their standardized assessments are not meeting The Benchmark that they are like less than right it's kind of it's it's just in your head because you're like well the the scor is here they're not getting the score so they're not as good right but the thing is these students students who are elll have a lot of other strengths students who come from low low socioeconomic backgrounds have strengths as well and rather than thinking of it in a deficit way like oh these kids can't do this we want to think of it where are their strengths and how can we maximize um using those strengths to help push them towards um academic achievement so that's why I like a the best that build on students unique strengths and experiences remember you have students who came here from another country who are learning the language in a high school or in a middle school that is some crazy stuff that is really hard so they are like tough kids they they can they know how to overcome adversity and scary situations so these kids can do a lot they may not be performing on a standardized assessment in their second language that they just started learning 5 seconds ago but they have other strengths that you can use so and but that's really hard to do so we have to provide that professional development so a is looking good B incorporate Project based learning project based learning is okay but we have students struggling here so that's why differentiated instruction is the best thing here all right all right I'm off my Soap Box about subgroups and like labels and all of that make sure you come from a um an abundance thinking not a deficit way of thinking no more oh they can't do this they can't do that where are their strengths oh you know they might be scoring low on this assessment in English but look at what else they can do how can we use that to help propel them forward all right all right so I'm GNA go ahead and uh take a quick Break Stop sharing my screen here and just see um what we've got going on in the questions let's see Michelle all of Kathleen studay guides are awesome oh thank you um all right we got the offer code do you have an option for the online course okay any questions about the content that I'm talking to you about today just to make sure you guys need anything all right so that's those questions I was going on going with today those are multiple choice they call them selected response because you might also get to choose all that apply you know what I mean so um that's why they call it selected response rather than multiple choice but it's just a fancy word for multiple choice now we're going to get into the constructed response section now the same thing goes with the constructed response we want to work backwards and start with the task I'm going to show you how to do that in a minute you don't want to get all wrapped up in the scenario and then you have to go down and read the task and then you go back up to the scenario it's too much so we're going to start with the task first and then read because it sets the purpose for what we are doing now a couple things about the constructed response it's worth 25% of the overall score so you got to work the constructed response you got to make sure you grab some points there does it have to be perfect absolutely not you can have some mistakes in there they know this is a timed assessment they're not going to dock you you know tons and tons of points if you have like one grammar mistake but if you have a lot of grammar mistakes and it interferes with the learning um that's the one thing that with the reading that's where you would get docked but the focus is really on the content and using specific examples I'm going to show you that in a minute a lot of people do these very generalized um responses and they don't get into the specifics we need to get specific and use those specific details to support what we are trying to say all right and I'm going to dig into that in a second I've got a question here from Katie do you have any advice for choose all that apply type of selected response I tend to overthink those and either Miss some or include too many okay the thing with this the choose all that apply they're very tricky because um you have to get all of them you don't get partial credit so let's say it's choose all that apply and there are three correct answer choices out of five and let's say you got two of them you don't get the points you have to choose all three of the correct ones so one of the things is is that you can do is the backwards design that I just showed you typically the non the notc correct answer choices or the let's speak English Kathleen incorrect answer choices um and those select all that apply they will typically stand out and be wrong also look for similarities right if it's choose all that apply then you want to see if there are answer choices that are similar to one another and that will help you there those are tough there are not a lot of them on the exam remember you do not need 100% on this exam a d a d will get you through this exam so if you miss a couple selected response ones that are choose all that apply that's okay move on to the ones that you can answer really really well all right um but those are tough you just got to kind of work through them but the backwards backwards uh work backwards scenario helps okay all right let's hop back over to my presentation and let's have a look at my uh constructed response now for those of you in the webinar I'm going to send you this practice constructed response um so you'll get a link to to download this as well in the email that will happen immediately after this is over if you're watching in the future you've already received it okay so now notice and I apologize for all the text on the page because this is a presentation and I don't it's kind of annoying when you're doing a presentation and there's so much text but that's what the the test is okay so you can see we have this giant scenario here and a data set and then we have three things that we need to do you need to start here okay you need to start at the task because then what you can do on your scratch paper or your dry erase board depending on where you're testing you can just map out what you're going to do I would have a number one and leave a bunch of space a number two leave a bunch of space and a number three leave a bunch of space so let's figure out what we're being asked to do before we read this giant scenario number one conduct a nuanced analysis of the provided mathematics achievement data discuss ways to implement practices to measure student progress throughout the school year all right so those of you who are becoming instructional leaders you got to be fast on your feet what you're going to do here is you're going to summarize just a few pieces of the data you do not need to go through every line every column every increase or decrease it can be something general so I would put on my little scratch sheet summarize data for number one and then the second part of that make sure you're here discuss ways to implement practices to measure student progress throughout the school year well how do we measure student progress throughout the school year we do that through formative assessment so right away on my map I'm going to put formative assessment boom number one is mapped and done let's go to number two formulate a comprehensive strategy for engaging teachers in this process so they are properly trained key word here to use data to make instructional decisions so we just said we're going to use formative assessment but can we just be like okay teachers use formative assessment you're good right no if we want it done with Fidelity we need to make sure we are training teachers with professional development so one of the things that this test focuses on in the test specs is differentiated professional development because um like students when we're teachers what do we do we differentiate our instruction well as Leaders we can't just do a one-size fits-all we have teachers who know about formative assessments already and giving them a training on you know the basics of formative assessment is a colossal waste of time and they will not like that but giving them a training on Advanced formative assessment would not be a waste of time but then we have novice teachers in there we have teachers who just started this year and they have no idea what formative assessment even is so a basic training on formative assessment would help them so be sure if you're going to use the professional development angle which we are because we need to train teachers in formative assessment we make sure we add the word differentiated professional development or scaffolded professional development because it's in the specs number one and we want to use the words in the specs and number two we need to differentiate our instruction As Leaders just like we did when we were teachers so for number two on my map I'm going to put differentiated professional development and I might even put um basic for the new teachers Advanced for the for the veterans and just leave it at that moving on to three because we're just mapping quickly for our um for our ask here because we still have to read and we still have to write all right so now I have I'm looking down on my map or my notes for number three anticipate Pro potential challenges and complications in implementing your plan and I should have put here and uh Express how you will um combat those okay but I'm going to do that in my writing anyways well what are some challenges always time money um buy in anything those are basically the three things time obviously viously how are teachers going to do this professional development their their uh schedule is already full um where's the money coming from I mean as instructional leaders these are things you're going to have to think about all the time and so we need to make sure we anticipate those and have a plan to combat those barriers or to overcome those barriers and challenges okay so number one we're we are uh just summarizing the data and we're going to talk about formative assessment how we can use that to measure student progress throughout the school year and then make instructional decisions doing that two comprehensive strategy for engaging teachers is going to be differentiated professional development and I would say training on how to um I would I would use common assessments here I'm going to talk to you about that in a minute we would train the teachers on how to build common formative assessments so that all the teachers are using the same thing so they can get together in their plc's professional learning communities and not only analyze the data but analyze the same data I'm going to analyze the data from my formative assessment you just gave the same formative assessment how did your kids do oh they did better than my kids what were you doing what did you do well I did this oh cool I'm going to do that now notice that having a common assessment and a data analysis together and discussion is going to help us become better but we need to train them to do that and then three anticipate potential CH challenges I'm going to say um time and also new teachers let's just say on our staff we've we've hired a lot of new teachers which is the reality in most schools We There is a teacher shortage so I'm going to say time um and uh the amount of new teachers on staff who need to be trained in this area okay that's what I'm going to do now let's just read the question here just to be sure but I already have my plan I already know what I'm going to do but let's see here as an aspiring School leader you are assigned the task of evaluating School Improvement plan aimed at elevating student achievement in okay we're talking about mathematics so we're going to be talking about the math team the most recent performance dat in mathematics for grades 6 through eight is below and you can see it's here so we have um overall students meeting we have 55% in sixth grade 48 in 7th and 51 in eth typically meeting is usually 50 around 50% across all schools across all states in um public Ed I've looked at lots of performance data we try so hard to get above that 50 or 60 or 70 and we can't we're always at 50 but we shouldn't stop trying now we have our special education kids who are 32% 28% and 35 so they are significantly lower then we have our low socioeconomic status 44 41 and 46 not as as um low as a special education but still not there and then we have our general education kids who are um meeting and then we have English Learners again who are low well this is the same kind of thing that happens all the time typically special education students who come from poverty and English language Learners are going to be a little bit lower but again remember not every kid in the special education column is going to be performing lower you might have a kid here who's doing great who's way way past they're not just meeting expectations they're exceeding and you might have kids in here and you might have kids here all exceeding expectations but again we're just looking at this as a General Baseline all right and then it says here the ex uh extent School Improvement plan incorporates new Mathematics Curriculum tailored professional development blah blah blah and then it's asking us what to do here so we got it let's move into our actual writing okay so we're going to talk about number one first conduct a nuanced assessment uh of the of the data so we're going to summarize the data and then we're going to discuss ways to implement practices this is going to be a three pair paragraph constructed response number one is going to be my first paragraph I need to summarize the data and tell you how I'm going to do um formative assessment let's have a look all right so the first part is going to be the summarization of the data the data set reveals substantial disparities in mathematical performance across diverse student subgroups that's just an intro section right and now see this for instance or for example now I'm getting specific I didn't just say oh some groups are low and some groups are high I got to get specific special education students manifest a particularly low achievement rate of 28 to 35% depending on the grade level so I grabbed some of that data in there you could just say special education students in sixth grade are 7% lower than those the than the general ed kids however you want to say it doesn't matter just summarize pieces of the data similarly and now I'm getting more another specific detail English language Learners and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also underperform compared to general education students all right again a specific detail so I got a little percentage here I got I talked about the different subgroups I got specific very important on this okay and then now I'm going to the second part of that task what are you going to do about it how are you going to meet their needs okay to meet the needs of these students throughout the Academic Year we will Implement department-wide performance for or sorry formative assessments now I'm going to explain formative assessments and then I'm going to get specific again notice I go General specific General specific this approach uses periodic low stakes assessments and Student Self assessments to monitor progress provide real-time feedback that can be used for instructional adjustment if you don't have this kind of wording of course I got my doctorate in educational leadership so it's real easy for me to kind of come up with this you could just say for ative assessments are a valuable tool in monitoring progress with students that's it and then now I'm going to get specific in addition math teachers will use their weekly professional learning communities to build common formative assessments notice now I didn't just say formative assessments then I brought in okay we're going to bring the teachers into their plts they're going to build formative assessments together and then I explain why it's important building common common formative assessments will help the math team build continuity through throughout the department and will ensure effective data analysis and decisionmaking okay uh task number one is done there are a few sentences here you could leave out you don't have to have it be this big okay but what did we do here for what was the first task first task was conduct a nuanced analysis which we did right up here we kind of summarized what's going on the second part was discuss ways to implement practices to measure well we did we are going to to meet the needs of these students I probably should to measure and to measure their progress I would proba well did I say progress monitoring I think I did yes monitor progress right here I might want to include measure progress the word measure because in this now that I'm thinking about it in number one it says to measure student progress I might want to grab that whole thing and say to measure student progress throughout the year we will Implement formative assessments that just brings it back and makes it more specific uh and shows the grader who's grading my essay that I am answering that but this is fine the way it is but you know I'm always thinking about revisions constantly all right and so and then I get specific about how they're going to use their plc's to build common formative assessments and all of that and we're done okay now what's the second bullet or the second task formulate a comprehensive strategy for engaging teachers in this process so we said they're going to build Comm common formative assessment ments in their plc's but right here the word trained means I got to figure out professional development so paragraph number two is going to be all about professional development let's have a look okay the next step is to implement a comprehensive strategy for Teacher engagement in this process that's just um an intro sentence you don't even need it you could start here I've seen lots of constructed responses that are great that just don't even give you an intro sentence I did it here but you could just be like boom implementation will include professional development and data literacy and effective plc's perfect so I've got professional development which I talked about training in data literacy and effective plc's and then I bring it back to where teachers will learn to design common assessments as a team and disaggregate the formative assessment data these assessments produce to make instructional decisions I use the term assessments a lot I might want want to say exams tests something like that people say well what if I use the same word over and over again it's fine you're talking about assessments so you're GNA say assessments you're talking about students so you're GNA say students it's okay if I went back now that I'm reading this again of course I wrote this last night but if I were to go back I might change it to Common formative exams comma of formative checks um something like that but don't worry about it it is fine so not only did I tell you that we're going to do a professional development then I get a little specific in what that professional development looks like common assessments the to show them how to disaggregate data blah blah blah now I'm going to get even more specific about the professional development okay um I've got it here the professional development will be teacher Le right um with two respected teachers from Team Administration for the training that always helps teacher-led professional development shows the reader of your essay that you understand that um that teacher-led professional development is much more effective than the principal coming in and saying you will do this right when a teacher who's had success says hey I did this in my classroom and it works really good I'm going to show you guys how to do it most teachers will listen and be more open than if the admin team comes in and demands things we know that for sure and then I might want to include here just saying this I said implementation will include professional development I might say differentiated professional development um or scaffolded professional development but it's going to come up in my next paragraph so it's all good and then I have Administration will be available to support and then I have a little bit here to support our new teachers novice teachers will be paired with instructional coaches skilled in in data- driven instruction so I am addressing my new teachers here okay I might want to say one more sentence like I talked about in the beginning um new teachers will be given basic uh Common Assessment uh professional development and our veteran teachers will attend professional development on Advanced common common assessment formative assessments okay that might just help but this is fine the way it is we don't have to make it perfect we just got to get a three even a two is okay we just need to grab some points here all right now it's the third part which is anticipating potential challenges right we always want to do that when we are leaders we want to this sounds like a great idea what's the challenge my old principal who brought me in as a teacher and then again as an assistant principal would do that to me all the time he'd be like I'd have this great idea and he's like did you think about this did you think about this did you think about this and I was always like you come from a place of no why do you always come from a place of no but he was right he was a logistics genius he knew where the bottlenecks were going to happen he knew that my idea was going to fall flat on its face and he always held my feet to the fire on that and I got better about anticipating challenges so that's what this is about here so anticipating challenges and barriers to this process is essential this is another intro sentence you don't have to say that you can start right here the two biggest barriers to this plan are time constraints and lack of experience within the department okay time is always time time time is always the biggest one so now I'm going to get specific to combat time constraints we will use budget re reallocations to fund substit to teachers who can relieve regular math faculty weekly providing them with the needed time for their plc's so this this works really well here I said I want to train teachers right when am I going to train them after school on Saturdays they don't want to do that that's not when they want to do their professional development so as a leader I'm going to look in the budget and I'm going to say okay we're going to get you a sub on uh every third Wednesday of the month okay you you're not going to teach in your regular class you're going to go with with your professional learning community and you guys are going to work on this stuff and teachers love that you got to find the money and there's not a lot of money but if you're going to do something this big you got to give it the time and remember you can do whatever you want in this essay because it's not real and you don't have a budget and you don't have anybody yelling at you that you can't do it so do it so you're GNA bring in subs and this also ensures faculty are getting paid for their time another specific detail this helps with buyin along with pairing uh and then I say here along with pairing novice teachers with those who are experienced remember I talked about that here in my second paragraph So I'm referencing it here in my third we will Implement a scaffolded professional development approach beginning with basic data literacy and progressing to Advanced instructional strategies okay I knew I had written that somewhere so now I'm adding to the professional development and this is going to we did two things right we said time constraints and lack of experience well the time constraints is bringing in the sub subs and the lack of experience is the differentiated professional development we're going to give the newbies the new stuff and we're going to give the veterans the tough stuff and we're going to move the newbies up towards the tough stuff just like we would with our students and then here just some support this will be differentiated so all teachers professional development needs are met we want to meet the needs of our veterans and meet the needs of our novice teachers finally the administrative team will be dedicated in supporting the faculty of this implementation we don't need this here but it's just a nice one to say hey what are we going to do as the admin to support the teachers all right all right I can't believe it it's 11 o'clock and I am done now I'll take a few questions let me just go to my oh lots of questions here how many constructed response questions in 75 minutes four you got to do it four times now not everyone is going to have three tasks to it some of them will have just two bullets but I did a hard one here because I wanted to show you but just what I like to do is I take each bullet and I make it its own paragraph and I just Hammer that until it's all answered and then I do the next bullet as the next paragraph what about the use of instructional coaches in a school building is that just as powerful as teacher-led absolutely look I love teacher-led professional development because that's what I did as an assistant principal I I worked with plc's and I grabbed a bunch of teachers that I thought would be good I have this funny story I I had them I had the um the baseball coaches I really wanted we were trying to to implement um using the test specs and planning uh using data and all this stuff in the math department and we got the baseball coaches who are typically those who I mean I'm being stereotypical but at my school you know they participated and they were awesome but they were not like I want to lead the professional development you know they just come to the faculty meetings and like do what they needed to do so we got the baseball coaches and it wasn't my idea to do it it was um my uh colleague who was the instructional who was the APC she's like I'm going to get the baseball coaches to lead the professional development and she did an awesome job she trained them to lead the professional development so that they would be really good and you wouldn't believe the buyin when we had the baseball coaches up there leading the professional development talking about data all this stuff everyone's like oh I'll do that and if I had stood up there or she had stood up there and said it they would have ignored us so it was brilliant I love L professional development but instructional coaches absolutely anything you can use anything just defend it my struggle with responses is that I've been too General in my response yeah that's all you got to do is add one sentence for example and give me an example that'll bring in the specifics you don't have to get into a whole other paragraph go General and then say for example the plc's will be teacher-led we will get somebody from the math department who is well-liked to deliver that's specific or for example we will use p LC's notice that the professional learning communities was not mentioned in the question I brought that in as a specific detail you just need a few specifics or the specific data for example the students in this category are scoring low therefore we will Target them using this instructional strategy whatever it is um all right can you display three sides again your response to each paragraph Katie I'm going to send them to you in an email you're going to get the responses in an email so don't worry about that you want to see that that essay that I just wrote and you want to look at it I'm sending it to you in an email in about 30 minutes so just be on the lookout check your spam sometimes my emails go to spam and then take it from the spam and drag it into your main inbox so you never miss an email from me so you'll get that along with the offer code okay all right no problem Katie thank you okay so I'm on time this is amazing uh does anybody have any other questions let me just go over a couple more things number one you're getting an email once this is over if you're watching on social media there's a link in the description for you to sign up you'll get that email number two we worked from the free study guide today but of course there are the paid study guides number three oh let me go here I W to um show you some free resources here number three my YouTube channel let's have a look at that I have a whole playlist on my YouTube channel just for leadership ship okay now in this playlist there are obviously let me go where's my SL where are you okay this is from an old webinar it's going to play here let me just press okay we're stopping there all right um this playlist has all of these different videos here okay I also have an assistant principal writing pool task here um principal pool task writing this is when you you have to write on the spot sometimes like I had to take the leadership exam and then I had to do an additional writing exam for my district becoming an AP in my district is really difficult so this is an old webinar but a lot of people use it and it's helped a lot of people so check out that I will link up all of this in the email so you can go straight there so the YouTube is awesome then also let me go back let me go no let's go hang on here let's stop sharing there um let me go to YouTube let me go to my channel really quickly sorry um another thing that you can see on my YouTube channel is leadership um where are we YouTube there we are uh I have a leadership um playlist sorry I'm fumbling over my words today leadership playlist which is it has a bunch of videos on um how to answer your interview questions as a leader so there are a bunch of questions on you know or a bunch of help on you know what what do you say when they ask you this in your leadership um interview what do you say when they ask you that so it really really helps a lot of course I can't find it right this second because I'm live and I'm looking for it but it is a how to become a school leader ah here it is school leadership there we go it's GNA play so let's just stop it from playing okay School leadership for what I do today okay not okay um I've got the prais SLA in there as well and then I've got these other videos in fact uh Jana if you're listening um let's link this up in the email because it's got everything so this school leadership has the SLA it's got the work backwards strategy and then it's got assistant principal tips should I get a PhD jobs beond the classroom it's got a bunch bunch of stuff there and an old webinar um and then of course assistant principal interview tips so that'll help you there the other thing I have is Tik Tok I'm having a lot of fun on Tik Tok I'm doing a lot of different things here so you can follow me on Tik Tok also our Facebook page has tons of resources here you can see I'm live here but we have you know blogs videos all of that really really important and we also have a leadership um Facebook group so I'll link all of in the email so you can just click the links and it'll take you straight there okay so if you need more let us know info@ Cathleen jasper.com if you'd like to get the study guide you can do that on the website we're going to link up that email with the offer code and all of that uh somebody's asking me can I get the discount on Amazon unfortunately we cannot discount on Amazon we have it's we can't give discount codes it won't let us through KDP so um with the physical book you can't apply the the 20% off but it's certainly worth it the physical book will get shipped to you in two days um so it's kind of like we wrote the book we're in charge of the book but they're in charge of the pricing so I apologize for that um can you say again how we show proof of physical study guide to access more sure so let's say you bought the physical study guide on Amazon just shoot us an email at info@ Cathleen jasper.com and include a screenshot of your order make sure your name is visible and just show us that you bought it you can scratch out your address and all that and um we'll take that and then we'll send you back an offer code that you can use to get that off the course so that'll reduce the price so you're not buying the book again so you can totally do that and lots of people do and we're happy to honor that okay uh let's see here can you display the three slides d da I think we're good use her YouTube channel to pass the free response yes Gary use my YouTube channel take Gary's advice go to my YouTube channel and look at the constructed response there thank you Gary all right everybody I hope you have a wonderful Saturday you've done a lot a lot today get the resources you need and then go sit by the pool and have a margarita or whatever you need to do okay