Demystifying Systemic SEO Webinar Notes

greetings everyone and thank you for joining us for our demystifying systemic seo webinar series before we begin because every single person on this webinar is involved with the care of children in some way whether you are a teacher other school personnel a parent a community member a caregiver this week we were all on the emotional roller coaster which plummeted us to a point of agony in despair as we watched the senseless murder of young people and teachers in texas our hearts go out to all of the students staff families and community members who are trying to make sense of the senseless at this time more than ever we need to reach out to each other with empathy care and love to be reminded of good over evil and also to be reminded of the necessity of care and compassion at all times so again thank you for joining us for this this demystifying systemic sel series we hope you have been able to participate in some of the other sessions that have occurred most recently the session that was on student voice a couple of weeks ago there will be more so stay tuned today we're going to be digging into supportive school and classroom climates i remember when i was appointed a high school principal in a very challenging school in my hometown my marching orders were to immediately focus on culture and climate not academics but culture and climate i did and boy did it make a difference so i clearly understand why take a minute and just think about your school experience and talk about in the chat a time when you felt extremely safe cared for and protected in your school you felt that you were ready to engage or what would you have needed for that to happen just take a minute and think about it and put your responses in the chat please i see someone just wrote i needed someone to see me the importance of being seen strong relationships people willing to listen willing to care feeling like i belonged someone to engage my curiosity thank you so much for going back down memory lane for reflecting on what it was like for you i'm sure some of these same um conditions that were important for you are conditions that you are working for and looking for in the schools with which you engage so let's frame this whole notion of supportive climate for a minute we are when we talk about supportive school and classroom climates we know that sel implementation cannot occur well until there is a supportive school in classroom climate where all students feel valued cared for engaged supported some of those same characteristics that you surfaced as you thought about your own childhood experience and we know there are so many things that contribute to a supportive classroom and school culture relationships the importance of knowing that you belong feeling relational trust with students with staff with everyone who engages with the school community we know it's important that staff excuse me are well grounded in their own sel including their ability to be culturally competent and their willingness to model sel we know that students need to focus on their own social and emotional competence we know that in order for there to be a supportive school climate students need to have an opportunity for student voice which was the topic of our last series we know that discipline policy policies must be revisited through a lens of equity and fairness and then we also know that family engagement is critical if we are going to have a supportive school and classroom climate it's also important for students to be able to develop their social and emotional schools at all stages of their school experience because they feel more academically engaged when they have a sense of belonging and safety educators can do things such as develop shared agreements with their students and engage in other community building strategies so the focus is always on improving the school culture and climate at this time we're going to watch a short video clip that really does show a manifestation of some of the things i've mentioned and some of the guidance we're going to receive from our panelists in a few minutes as you're watching feel free to drop things in the chat in case you want to come back to your thoughts later so with that here's the video clip we want school to be a safe welcoming place where kids want to come here every day they could be coming in in the morning with lots of different emotions we're so glad that you're here this morning that we want to help mitigate so that they feel safe and secure at school good morning jolene we're glad you're here let me tell you what's happening this morning we have pancakes for breakfast and pears it's very important that school be a reliable consistent routine place where you know what to count on where things are somewhat predictable not so much that they become boring but so much that they give you that calm feeling that i know what that's about i know how to participate and that actually opens up the opportunity for more learning [Music] thank you wow pancakes and pears that would certainly help me get my day started in a very positive way you can watch the rest of that video at your leisure we will have the um the link to the full clip later but that was just to wet your appetite for what we know is coming so at this time it's my pleasure to introduce our two panelists who will be sharing their words of wisdom and their guidance on this topic so i'm going to ask them each to come on screen and i'll read a little bit about them so the first is dr camille farrington camille looks like she might be calling in so let me go to michelle oh there's camille okay welcome camille dr camille farrington is a managing director and senior research associate at the university of chicago consortium she is a national expert on academic mindsets and the measurement of psychosocial factors in academic settings her research focuses on understanding how learning environments provide opportunities for positive development experience for students so welcome camille we're excited to have you here with us our second panel thank you our second panelist is michelle jackson michelle is the high school sel support manager and the office of social and emotional learning in chicago public schools for 17 years she has worked in and alongside schools to help cultivate safe and supportive learning experiences tailored to the needs and cultural identities of students so michelle welcome really excited to have you both here with us so let's begin by just painting the scene when we think about a safe and supportive school climate what does it look like what does it feel like to be in a classroom and a school with such a climate if you had to describe the ideal climate in classrooms and schools what would what would your description include and let's begin at the classroom level by asking camille for her thoughts on that question thanks very much for joining uh really happy to be with you this morning so uh i think in the chat we saw exactly what that picture looks like it's a place where young people feel seen feel cared for feel known they're eager to be there it's a place where they feel like good things are happening and they're you know kind of good anticipation to walk in the door you feel welcomed i feel like you your ideas may be challenged but your personhood is not going to be challenged your dignity is not going to be challenged you're going to be able to you don't have to pretend to be somebody you aren't and you also don't have to hide parts of who you are and so being able to bring your full self without being worried distracted guarded um but it's a it's a safe space to be and i think it's also really important just a physical environment that it's a place that's beautiful and inviting and feels like love and care was put into it and that conveys to you that you're important and that that surrounded by beauty and interesting things i think all of that really creates a an environment that makes people want to be there and able to learn and engage at their highest level thank you that is so powerful not having to hide who you are being able to show up as your authentic self that really struck me thank you and michelle let's talk about it a little more um from the classroom level to the school level what what do you look for as indicators in the whole school i'm glad camille mentioned um what a school looks like i often think of what a school feels like when i walk in the doors and looking for a place that inspires curiosity from both adults and students um the power in creating i know we overuse this phrase but windows and not walls um or mirrors and not walls as well so i when i walk into a school especially in chicago where we have a diverse number of schools and and culture from community to community can be so very strong and inspiring i'm looking to see that cultural representation um mirrored across the school from the students um to the families to the epistemology of the communities being embedded within the schools i'm also looking for adults who are able to view and and share their own cultures and still provide the support that students need to feel again as was mentioned in the chat and by dr farrington identity belonging that safety that we we know is so important for students to be able to thrive and learn thank you yeah i'm going i'm going back for a minute to i keep going back to my high school principal days um we had small learning communities like schools within schools and i once asked a senior what's the difference between your section of the school and the rest of the school and i'll never forget his response his response was you know out there are my people but in here is my family and it was just the way that he said it so you knew the relationships were really solid and that he had a special affinity for the people that he engaged with on a daily basis thank you so let's talk about the connection excuse me between excuse me between culture and climate and social and emotional learning and social and emotional development so what does one have to do with the other can you have one without the other and again let's begin with camille yeah so the um again if we if we think about the physical environment well so i'll start just by saying that young people are making sense of what's happening to them all the time and it's the sense that they make of their environment that determines their engagement that their behavior and therefore their learning and development and so we have that's the most important big idea in thinking about the relationship between climate and development and so how people are experiencing how students how young people are experiencing their environment is what determines their learning and development and so again if the physical environment is a welcoming place a place that conveys that i'm valued and i'm important and that i'm worth investing in there are resources available to me i know and then do i know my way around that space or do i know where to get the things that i need so the kind of physical environment and then the relationships within that environment again am i known am i seeing all of all of those kinds of things but um classrooms and i'm i'm thinking mostly like at both the school or the classroom level uh part of what makes the the climate is what are the opportunities available within that climate and so do i have opportunities to explore new things to meet and connect with and try to relate with young people that are like me or not like me do i have a space to exercise agency and leadership and do i have opportunities to make choices because you know leaders don't become leaders in the absence of opportunities to you know practice leadership and we don't develop agency in the absence of opportunities to make choices so the developmental experiences that are available in a setting helped me as a learner to explore who i am in relationship to other people but also to to engage in and exercise some of my competencies if we think of you know young people have the potential for a full range of of academic and social emotional competencies and so what is it in that climate that's inviting and bringing out those competencies and having opportunities to exercise them and so i think there's a very very deep relationship in fact you can't separate out competency development from the environment which young people are in thank you and that was a nice connection to the last webinar about the role of student voice in helping to determine what their safe and supportive environment will look like and be like from their perspective so thank you so michelle what do you see as the next the connection between social and emotional development and a supportive school climate i mean it's everything one can happen without the other but not well when it's done very well you have that that deep sense of sel development embedded into the climate work of the school we in cps believe that it belongs at all levels and have looked at different ways to make sure that we are putting not just social and emotional learning but wellness truly um we've taken a step back and and are really looking at different ways to quantify or identify engagement and what does that look like and so i think for a long time we thought of engagement solely from the academic perspective or from attendance and now we're taking again a step back and thinking about wellness and connectedness as part of what climate work truly is and what lives at the heart of social and emotional learning when you look at the competencies um so we know that you know for all of our schools to be successful regardless of the community regardless of the background of the students we believe that seo has to be thoroughly embedded into all of the work that we do and so it's it's caused us to rethink how we structure um our supports we just came out actually about two months ago with a suicide prevention and mental health policy for our district that mandates behavioral health teams for schools but we knew that in order for behavioral health teams to be successful which is a tier 2 tier 3 intervention we have to make sure that universal sel and culture and climate are incredibly strong and so that was also built into that policy to make sure that we are not pushing students into tiering this unnecessary we want to make sure that we really do have um holistically a strong strong understanding of what culture and climate looks like throughout cps um and again making it accessible for every student every family um every community to be aware and and participate in the practice of engaging in true seo whether it's adult seo or student level seo yeah michelle thank you for um talking about the role of systems and making sure that you know the policies and practices um whether whether it's tiered supports or the professional learning that helps to make sure that all adults understand social emotional learning their own development because it's so important to think about it not only at the classroom the school level but then what's in place systemically to make sure that all the wheels keep turning as they should so thank you so let's go to the area of data excuse me and camille um since this is your specialty would you would you launch us what does the data say about the impact on climate on a student's um academic learning on students overall development their attendance their engagement what what is data saying yeah so there there is a lot of evidence of the connection between um school and classroom climate and academic learning and social emotional development and then positive educational and life outcomes just to point to a few things a study in new york city of middle school students over time and this was an interesting study so it you know includes over 300 000 students 278 schools i think and and they followed over time and what they found is that first like this the schools that had better school climates and the classrooms that had better classroom climates were associated with better academic games for students controlling even for their prior test scores and demographics and all that and they also found that schools that improved their climate over those five years was associated with improvements in the gains that students were making in those schools over time so paying attention investing in school climate pays off in terms of academics we also see a study around classrooms that are growth oriented the idea that the teacher really believes that everybody can accomplish you know succeed at high levels and and sets up the environment to really support students growth that those classrooms are associated and that this was 9th grade math classrooms across the country again the growth-oriented classrooms higher math gains and then a kind of meta-analysis across looking at studies from k-12 uh 61 studies a total of 73 000 students in there and there they saw better classroom climates associated not only with better academic achievement but higher social competence and motivation and engagement and then lower internalizing and externalizing behaviors and that was especially true in classrooms they were looking at climates on kind of three levels they were looking like instructional support social emotional supports and then classroom management and behaviors and and that social emotional support climates that were strong in that were particularly connected to the social emotional development and confidence of of young people and then the last piece i wanna name is just study that um my team has done at the consortium where we were looking at the same student in two different classrooms um because oftentimes we think well students are either motivated or not motivated they're engaged or they're not engaged and so here we were really looking at measures of a classroom and then that students own mindset behaviors and performance in the in that classroom and then comparing them to themselves in a different classroom and across the board middle school high school around the country all different you know areas of the country all different races and cultures of students that classrooms that had more supportive learning conditions were associated with that student reporting better mindsets in that class than they did in that same student reported in a less supportive environment and then that student earned higher grades in those classrooms so i think that the evidence is very very strong that climate matters for learning and development kind of we know that is for sure right and the chat is blowing up with requests for links to the studies um we will make sure that you have you know we always send out resources so we will make sure that you have access to some of the studies um when you get the recording and the resources so thank you because the chat is on fire so michelle would you talk a little bit about how chicago public schools use data and continuous improvement in looking at the impact of culture and climate on on student outcomes absolutely um i was going to mention a study actually that you chicago is coming out with about protective factors but i don't want you guys to be mad at me because i can't give you any of the data yet it's something that's on the horizon but it speaks specifically to how data could be used and what some of our schools have done to really kind of mitigate the impact of covid and crime that we know is persistent um it actually also speaks to deidre what you mentioned earlier about that student that senior who saw school as a a place where you have family um so we're looking at a number of different ways to both introduce and fortify um the way that we're using data right now um we typically go through a series of continuous improvement um strategies on a bi-annual basis where we're looking at different ways to identify movement for continuous improvement for all all of our schools and so school leaders will come up with a continuous improvement plan and within that plan we have sel embedded into the work and so schools are not just holding themselves accountable but actually using the strategies of our department of the office of social and emotional learning as well as our sister and partner department to make sure that we are looking at evidence-based strategies for creating more cadence for social emotional learning more progress monitoring and then taking the next step into looking at how to use inventory skills-based inventories around sdl including the secca and other new tools that we're beginning to roll out including perts elevate and cultivate just to be able to get a deeper sense of how students are identifying scl in the classroom and what those gaps are not in an evaluatory way but just to make sure that students are getting what they need um and so it's something that we're looking into improving upon we right now district-wide have rolled out a number of different ways to screen um and to include that in our data collection um and we're actually moving to a new data collection tool next school year so i'm um hopefully excited about that um that's going to measure a bit more of what we're doing with mtss including seo and and i'm interested in seeing what that data is able to provide for us moving forward so we're we're in this pocket this weird place in time where um it's right for the picking we're coming you know out of this two almost three-year um world change and um we know that this work is so incredibly important um it was important before but it's very much important now and and our work has been elevated in our district in a way that it hasn't before and so the pressure is really on to be able to meet the needs of students and so we're just trying to rise to the occasion um in providing as much feedback to schools as much pertinent data whether it's the five essentials which dr farrington is very familiar with which identifies kind of how teachers and students and families feel about the environment of a school the culture and climate of a school and and the work of teachers we're using and trying to figure out ways to filter all of this different data coming in into something that's actually productive for schools to be able to use for improvement it's a long ramble but we have a lot going on thank you a long ramble but an appreciated ramble according to the chat where by the way someone from the consortium is listing is putting links so if you're like me you'll want to save the chat and have have access to those links and you know i'm always one who's very been been a strong advocate of teacher research and practitioner inquiry and research and how do we make sure that we're also capturing the qualitative research from teachers the stories about how the focus on social and emotional development is resulting in improved culture and climate so i just want to say those are important stories that hopefully are being captured as well because they really resonate with with a lot of people so let's talk a little bit about um the adults so what is the role of adult interactions in developing climate i mean you know think about a school setting with all the dispositions and temperaments um how do we make sure that the adults are aware of how their interactions impact the climate and michelle because you're talking from a school-based lens i'm going to ask you to go first on that question the role of adults is everything and we really as a district we started the work of working with students to make sure that sel was embedded in every classroom and we did a lot of boxed kits initially and and strategized on ways to work with high school students to make it impactful and we realized that we made a big mistake we have to work on the adults and get the adults prepared to be able to not just model coach and teach sel but really do a lot of examination of self um self cultivation in order to be able to work with students and create culture and climate that resonated with all of our students and our families and so the role of the adult in the creation of strong culture and climate of strong seo is really to be able to again identify self um a lot of our coaching at this point is around for teachers and and the learning that we're doing um both with our i'm actually in our teaching and learning office today because i'm going to leave this this conversation and um work with one of my partner departments um to embed more sel into the curricula that is um being taught across the district and so we've done a great deal of work this year to make sure that seo lives in all of our core content um but the role of the adult is always to make sure that they are actually able to present not just their best selves but to be able to um elevate the work of seo throughout the classroom in ways that are both culturally relevant and sustaining um and that create more and more ways for students to not just be able to have a voice in the classroom but to really have almost a power exchange where students are empowered to be representatives of their own learning and to be able to model what that looks like for all of our students and so it's a huge lift but we're beginning to look at this work in an entirely different way than we ever have before thank you and i keep going back to you know so even what's the role of the school leader uh putting on my principal hat again you know how do you how do you transform a typical school artifacts like a like a faculty meeting so it's not about i used to always say not about moan and grown but about grow and glow how do you acknowledge the humanity and give give the adults space to to really shine and to to appreciate each other and and to constantly feel good about being part of the school community thank you so camille what would you say when it comes to the responsibility of adults and the disposition of adults to make sure that they're contributing to a positive school culture and climate i love everything michelle just said and think that she really pointed to the the critical pieces like how adults show up for each other for their work um collectively as the adult community because that sets the conditions for what's possible in that school space and then how adults show up for young people in in classrooms so it really is so much about just the power of the person and um what they're bringing to their interactions with with both adults and young folks and so the africa the self-awareness the really kind of intentionally directing your behavior and emotions and focus towards the things that are going to be most beneficial to your colleagues and to your your students and and then adults in classrooms have really specific roles obviously your role is to teach academic content but i i really like that we as a field have been expanding that conception not just my role is to teach academic content but my role is to develop young people and that includes their intellectual and academic cognitive development but that can't be separated out from their social and emotional development their identity development their sense of who they are in the world like those things are interconnected in young inside young people and so we can't parse them apart in terms of their classroom experience so setting up the conditions the relationships the interactions within a classroom and and creating the conditions that really support learning i see um my friend jen from uh from mineola new york is in the chat here and i love the way she describes this to her teachers is setting the conditions so students can benefit from your high quality instruction so and i think that really says it also providing that setting those conditions and then providing developmental opportunities for young people like that is the job of of um of good teachers and the third so it's kind of setting the conditions providing developmental opportunities and then the third really important piece is just the modeling piece because young people are watching you always and how you manage your own emotions when you're interacting with with them on how you problem solve how you include other people or not how you respond to challenges to your authority like all those things um speak volumes to uh how again how young people make sense of the environment they're in and the messages that are communicated to them about their value their autonomy um their dignity um and their potential and what the world is like you know all of that gets communicated through how teachers behave in a classroom right thank you you are so correct students are always watching the adults and the adult behavior so at this point i'm going to open the q a and begin to pull some questions that our audience members have put into the q a so the first one is sometimes when we talk about school and classroom culture we talk about outcomes how it's seeing you know how it sounds how it feels but what are some small first steps for schools which have a more punitive disrespectful culture that has been in place for years so what would be some small first steps to overcome a punitive and disrespectful culture so either one who wants to go first michelle you want to take that one i can take a crack at it thank you um i think i think i always go to talking with the students first and so i think for a highly um punitive system and i i watched a charter system in our city try and change their student code of the student code of conduct over the summer last summer and i watched where it fell apart um it has to come from students and so the guidance the um not just the voice but the the tone the recommendations um again i spoke earlier a bit about community epistemology like the families the communities they have to have a stake in identifying what works and what what doesn't work for when we're talking about discipline um if you don't have that buy-in if you don't have that feedback from someone who's experienced it from someone who looks at it from a different lens it ultimately may fail i think the other thing that you have to consider is what what are you giving up what are you getting um and making sure that adults feel highly trained and capable that they have the supports in place to be able to use other measures for moving towards a more restorative framework then what are the supports that are existing in that framework to be able to give adults what they need if you're moving from something that has been happening for a very long time in a way that people may may not have felt safe about but they felt comfortable and complacent doing and so just making sure that again you have the right people at the table to be able to identify the flaws the missteps and to be able to create decision rules that are more aligned with shared work and shared understanding again shared agreements is the best way to go and so we in chicago we work with a group of students every year to modify our student code of conduct and to give us feedback and then they go out and train other students on what that actually looks like and so we've changed the title of that document to the student rights and responsibilities document in order for them to have ownership in it and to be able to amplify that throughout our district thank you michelle there's lots of great ideas being entered in the chat as well in terms of first steps everything from having students help in the development of the language having them sign contracts playing games i remember really enlisting the support of the football basketball team because the students respected them so so how could i use them as advocates for this work so thank you um so we go to another question there's a question about school boards so there's a question about school boards are mainly interested in having students gain skills and looking at test scores as the way to see progress so how is information about the importance of culture and climate being shared with school boards so they get it so that they'll prioritize it and they'll support efforts around culture and climate have either of you had experience in convincing school boards swaying school boards anything like that i i don't have direct experience in this but what i would say is that that parents and caregivers families business people in communities the stakeholders in schools um fully understand that what they want is not just a high test scores from their young people that they want their they want them to be well they want them to be healthy and thriving and they want them to develop the skills to be able to be good family partners and community partners and and workers and all the things and so i i think that that in fact school boards hear that from families and communities um and and over time i am seeing some shift in what what's value you know when the only metric is a test score then that's what we use but but as as we start shifting to being paying more attention to climates and cultures and the conditions for learning i i don't think it's a hard sell actually for school boards i'll put in a plug for an organization school board partners which partners with school boards to build build the capacity of school board members because it's a it's as we can see around the country an incredibly important and powerful role that in every local community and so organizations that help build the capacity of of citizens to serve on school boards i think is a is a really critical critical piece involved yeah i also um i'm reminded about the number of our castle districts that have really started to engage their school boards in the work of seo in general by by incorporating for instance our three signature practices so they'll begin the school board meeting with a warm welcome and they'll end with an optimistic closure or one one district i'm thinking of where i've done some work is they have their school board members handle their emotions by using the strategies from one of our evidence-based programs so they all learned how to turtle right so so the more you speak the language and get them to explore the practices i think the more they'll be inclined to say yes this is good and yes this is what needs to be done in schools to contribute to a supportive culture and climate so thank you we have a question about the role of families let me see if i can pull it up again here it is so how do you work with the families to understand their own children's developmental needs do you ever collaborate with the medical profession to the evaluate the understanding of those needs so how do we how how do we make sure that families understand their role in understanding their young people to support us supportive school climate climate it's a tough question um and we're still i think we're in the process always like ever evolving in that process of family and community engagement um we are the third largest district in the country um we have a again a large diverse population of families that support our schools and so we look to families to be able to share what we know are are there you know truths and and we have a lot of value for the importance of identifying and bringing in and creating safe spaces for parents to share um their community beliefs and their understanding of seo but it's still something that we're tweaking because it looks so many different ways across all of our different departments what the outreach looks like what the feedback is and so it's something that we're trying to codify in a way that we can share with others but we're still in that process of trying to figure that out right now it's been a lot of unfortunately parent trainings um but not a significant amount in the way that i would like to see of family feedback where we're getting that information back in about specifically what the needs of students are and what the needs of communities are for this work and and that's where i know that we've we've dropped the ball or still i don't maybe drop the balls a little strong um we just haven't identified maybe the best way to get you know the really rich feedback that we know that our families have thank you so there's a question probably our final question is about goes back to data collection the fact that data collections so often falls on teachers um how do we how do we use these data collection tools so the teachers and school leaders are not continually overburdened with collecting data have either of you found a way to uh minimize the the burdensome impact of just collecting data and the fact that it very often not only falls on teachers but very often it falls on teachers of particular subject areas or particular grades so how do you remove the animosity around data collection yeah i really appreciate this question and i i think that it depends first of all no one should ever collect data of any kind unless you have a plan for using that data and have the capacity to respond to that data and so um that's a baseline thing uh and then the the question of like what is data used for and you know by whom and for what purposes and so the um the i think that it's really important i'm a big advocate of you know we talk about shifting from downstream metrics and downstream measures in other words after the process is over and we get you know academic results so test scores and those kind of um downstream metrics and to shift upstream so if we know that those downstream things are that students academic outcomes or long-term outcomes are a result of their engagement in learning right and only the learner learns as zeretta hammond says and whether or not students engage in learning depends on something farther upstream which is how they're interpreting the environment that they're in and how they interpret the environment that they're in is either even farther upstream what are the conditions in which we're asking them to learn and so trying to shift to um get more of that kind of upstream measurement and data and feedback on those conditions and how young people are experiencing those conditions and that those are data that are immediately useful to teachers and should go directly to the hands of teachers so it's very different if someone else is collecting data or if i'm spending my class time collecting data that somebody else is going to use to make decisions about me or my students is a very different dynamic than i'm going to collect data directly from my students about how are you experiencing this thing how is it feeling to you am i me am do you feel welcomed do you believe that i you know believe in you like those feedback back to teachers around that is really immediately actionable and the and the students are the only ones who know the answers to those things right it doesn't doesn't matter what the teacher is trying to create in a classroom it matters how that's landing with the particular set of young people in the room with them or on zoom with them or out in the field with them and so getting that feedback directly from those students and i saw earlier in the chat my beloved colleague nina ryan put in links to the pertz elevate tool and the consortium cultivate tool and these are two align tools that that my team has been working with the folks at pertz to to develop and one is a school level tool and the other cultivated the school level kind of across the board what how our students experience in their classrooms and elevate is a tool that teachers can use themselves to get feedback directly from their students over time and it it creates the kind of partnership between a teacher and their students and like data back to the teacher that is just so valuable for their ability to create the kind of context that are that again as jen mentioned says like that so that students can really um take advantage of the high quality instruction that teachers are bringing so i think it it depends what kind of data for what purpose for you know and who can respond to that thank you the what and the for what purpose and i had not heard the terms downstream and upstream before so i love that framing and if there's anything that can go in the chat that could be a resource for you more about that particular terminology and before we look at the big takeaways um i want to remind you all to please look at the chat lots of good links in there someone just put in the link for our um castle three signature practices books because a lot of people say well what's that um references to our sel exchange in the fall so be sure you look at the chat let's look at the big takeaways um from our presenters so we could go to the takeaway slides so i think one overarching theme that we all heard was that creating the conditions for students to engage in sel requires school-wide and classroom learning environments that are supportive culturally responsive and focused on building relationships and community thank you another big takeaway incentivizing districts to support school and classroom environments is an imp is an approach that requires guidance and criteria for funding to expand resources for districts who are creating those conditions and we know so many of the districts on the call today are doing that another takeaway taking a collaborative inquiry yes what's up approach to developing supportive school and classroom climate begins with initial root cause analysis to unpack and understand the experience that students have in school to implement systemic scl strategies fostering a strong school climate and again part of that root cause analysis is really engaging the voice of young people hearing directly from them what's what's happening i would like to thank dr farrington i'd like to thank michelle jackson so much for your participation with us today

greetings everyone and thank you for joining us for our demystifying systemic seo webinar series before we begin because every single person on this webinar is involved with the care of children in some way whether you are a teacher other school personnel a parent a community member a caregiver this week we were all on the emotional roller coaster which plummeted us to a point of agony in despair as we watched the senseless murder of young people and teachers in texas our hearts go out to all of the students staff families and community members who are trying to make sense of the senseless at this time more than ever we need to reach out to each other with empathy care and love to be reminded of good over evil and also to be reminded of the necessity of care and compassion at all times so again thank you for joining us for this this demystifying systemic sel series we hope you have been able to participate in some of the other sessions that have occurred most recently the session that was on student voice a couple of weeks ago there will be more so stay tuned today we&#39;re going to be digging into supportive school and classroom climates i remember when i was appointed a high school principal in a very challenging school in my hometown my marching orders were to immediately focus on culture and climate not academics but culture and climate i did and boy did it make a difference so i clearly understand why take a minute and just think about your school experience and talk about in the chat a time when you felt extremely safe cared for and protected in your school you felt that you were ready to engage or what would you have needed for that to happen just take a minute and think about it and put your responses in the chat please i see someone just wrote i needed someone to see me the importance of being seen strong relationships people willing to listen willing to care feeling like i belonged someone to engage my curiosity thank you so much for going back down memory lane for reflecting on what it was like for you i&#39;m sure some of these same um conditions that were important for you are conditions that you are working for and looking for in the schools with which you engage so let&#39;s frame this whole notion of supportive climate for a minute we are when we talk about supportive school and classroom climates we know that sel implementation cannot occur well until there is a supportive school in classroom climate where all students feel valued cared for engaged supported some of those same characteristics that you surfaced as you thought about your own childhood experience and we know there are so many things that contribute to a supportive classroom and school culture relationships the importance of knowing that you belong feeling relational trust with students with staff with everyone who engages with the school community we know it&#39;s important that staff excuse me are well grounded in their own sel including their ability to be culturally competent and their willingness to model sel we know that students need to focus on their own social and emotional competence we know that in order for there to be a supportive school climate students need to have an opportunity for student voice which was the topic of our last series we know that discipline policy policies must be revisited through a lens of equity and fairness and then we also know that family engagement is critical if we are going to have a supportive school and classroom climate it&#39;s also important for students to be able to develop their social and emotional schools at all stages of their school experience because they feel more academically engaged when they have a sense of belonging and safety educators can do things such as develop shared agreements with their students and engage in other community building strategies so the focus is always on improving the school culture and climate at this time we&#39;re going to watch a short video clip that really does show a manifestation of some of the things i&#39;ve mentioned and some of the guidance we&#39;re going to receive from our panelists in a few minutes as you&#39;re watching feel free to drop things in the chat in case you want to come back to your thoughts later so with that here&#39;s the video clip we want school to be a safe welcoming place where kids want to come here every day they could be coming in in the morning with lots of different emotions we&#39;re so glad that you&#39;re here this morning that we want to help mitigate so that they feel safe and secure at school good morning jolene we&#39;re glad you&#39;re here let me tell you what&#39;s happening this morning we have pancakes for breakfast and pears it&#39;s very important that school be a reliable consistent routine place where you know what to count on where things are somewhat predictable not so much that they become boring but so much that they give you that calm feeling that i know what that&#39;s about i know how to participate and that actually opens up the opportunity for more learning [Music] thank you wow pancakes and pears that would certainly help me get my day started in a very positive way you can watch the rest of that video at your leisure we will have the um the link to the full clip later but that was just to wet your appetite for what we know is coming so at this time it&#39;s my pleasure to introduce our two panelists who will be sharing their words of wisdom and their guidance on this topic so i&#39;m going to ask them each to come on screen and i&#39;ll read a little bit about them so the first is dr camille farrington camille looks like she might be calling in so let me go to michelle oh there&#39;s camille okay welcome camille dr camille farrington is a managing director and senior research associate at the university of chicago consortium she is a national expert on academic mindsets and the measurement of psychosocial factors in academic settings her research focuses on understanding how learning environments provide opportunities for positive development experience for students so welcome camille we&#39;re excited to have you here with us our second panel thank you our second panelist is michelle jackson michelle is the high school sel support manager and the office of social and emotional learning in chicago public schools for 17 years she has worked in and alongside schools to help cultivate safe and supportive learning experiences tailored to the needs and cultural identities of students so michelle welcome really excited to have you both here with us so let&#39;s begin by just painting the scene when we think about a safe and supportive school climate what does it look like what does it feel like to be in a classroom and a school with such a climate if you had to describe the ideal climate in classrooms and schools what would what would your description include and let&#39;s begin at the classroom level by asking camille for her thoughts on that question thanks very much for joining uh really happy to be with you this morning so uh i think in the chat we saw exactly what that picture looks like it&#39;s a place where young people feel seen feel cared for feel known they&#39;re eager to be there it&#39;s a place where they feel like good things are happening and they&#39;re you know kind of good anticipation to walk in the door you feel welcomed i feel like you your ideas may be challenged but your personhood is not going to be challenged your dignity is not going to be challenged you&#39;re going to be able to you don&#39;t have to pretend to be somebody you aren&#39;t and you also don&#39;t have to hide parts of who you are and so being able to bring your full self without being worried distracted guarded um but it&#39;s a it&#39;s a safe space to be and i think it&#39;s also really important just a physical environment that it&#39;s a place that&#39;s beautiful and inviting and feels like love and care was put into it and that conveys to you that you&#39;re important and that that surrounded by beauty and interesting things i think all of that really creates a an environment that makes people want to be there and able to learn and engage at their highest level thank you that is so powerful not having to hide who you are being able to show up as your authentic self that really struck me thank you and michelle let&#39;s talk about it a little more um from the classroom level to the school level what what do you look for as indicators in the whole school i&#39;m glad camille mentioned um what a school looks like i often think of what a school feels like when i walk in the doors and looking for a place that inspires curiosity from both adults and students um the power in creating i know we overuse this phrase but windows and not walls um or mirrors and not walls as well so i when i walk into a school especially in chicago where we have a diverse number of schools and and culture from community to community can be so very strong and inspiring i&#39;m looking to see that cultural representation um mirrored across the school from the students um to the families to the epistemology of the communities being embedded within the schools i&#39;m also looking for adults who are able to view and and share their own cultures and still provide the support that students need to feel again as was mentioned in the chat and by dr farrington identity belonging that safety that we we know is so important for students to be able to thrive and learn thank you yeah i&#39;m going i&#39;m going back for a minute to i keep going back to my high school principal days um we had small learning communities like schools within schools and i once asked a senior what&#39;s the difference between your section of the school and the rest of the school and i&#39;ll never forget his response his response was you know out there are my people but in here is my family and it was just the way that he said it so you knew the relationships were really solid and that he had a special affinity for the people that he engaged with on a daily basis thank you so let&#39;s talk about the connection excuse me between excuse me between culture and climate and social and emotional learning and social and emotional development so what does one have to do with the other can you have one without the other and again let&#39;s begin with camille yeah so the um again if we if we think about the physical environment well so i&#39;ll start just by saying that young people are making sense of what&#39;s happening to them all the time and it&#39;s the sense that they make of their environment that determines their engagement that their behavior and therefore their learning and development and so we have that&#39;s the most important big idea in thinking about the relationship between climate and development and so how people are experiencing how students how young people are experiencing their environment is what determines their learning and development and so again if the physical environment is a welcoming place a place that conveys that i&#39;m valued and i&#39;m important and that i&#39;m worth investing in there are resources available to me i know and then do i know my way around that space or do i know where to get the things that i need so the kind of physical environment and then the relationships within that environment again am i known am i seeing all of all of those kinds of things but um classrooms and i&#39;m i&#39;m thinking mostly like at both the school or the classroom level uh part of what makes the the climate is what are the opportunities available within that climate and so do i have opportunities to explore new things to meet and connect with and try to relate with young people that are like me or not like me do i have a space to exercise agency and leadership and do i have opportunities to make choices because you know leaders don&#39;t become leaders in the absence of opportunities to you know practice leadership and we don&#39;t develop agency in the absence of opportunities to make choices so the developmental experiences that are available in a setting helped me as a learner to explore who i am in relationship to other people but also to to engage in and exercise some of my competencies if we think of you know young people have the potential for a full range of of academic and social emotional competencies and so what is it in that climate that&#39;s inviting and bringing out those competencies and having opportunities to exercise them and so i think there&#39;s a very very deep relationship in fact you can&#39;t separate out competency development from the environment which young people are in thank you and that was a nice connection to the last webinar about the role of student voice in helping to determine what their safe and supportive environment will look like and be like from their perspective so thank you so michelle what do you see as the next the connection between social and emotional development and a supportive school climate i mean it&#39;s everything one can happen without the other but not well when it&#39;s done very well you have that that deep sense of sel development embedded into the climate work of the school we in cps believe that it belongs at all levels and have looked at different ways to make sure that we are putting not just social and emotional learning but wellness truly um we&#39;ve taken a step back and and are really looking at different ways to quantify or identify engagement and what does that look like and so i think for a long time we thought of engagement solely from the academic perspective or from attendance and now we&#39;re taking again a step back and thinking about wellness and connectedness as part of what climate work truly is and what lives at the heart of social and emotional learning when you look at the competencies um so we know that you know for all of our schools to be successful regardless of the community regardless of the background of the students we believe that seo has to be thoroughly embedded into all of the work that we do and so it&#39;s it&#39;s caused us to rethink how we structure um our supports we just came out actually about two months ago with a suicide prevention and mental health policy for our district that mandates behavioral health teams for schools but we knew that in order for behavioral health teams to be successful which is a tier 2 tier 3 intervention we have to make sure that universal sel and culture and climate are incredibly strong and so that was also built into that policy to make sure that we are not pushing students into tiering this unnecessary we want to make sure that we really do have um holistically a strong strong understanding of what culture and climate looks like throughout cps um and again making it accessible for every student every family um every community to be aware and and participate in the practice of engaging in true seo whether it&#39;s adult seo or student level seo yeah michelle thank you for um talking about the role of systems and making sure that you know the policies and practices um whether whether it&#39;s tiered supports or the professional learning that helps to make sure that all adults understand social emotional learning their own development because it&#39;s so important to think about it not only at the classroom the school level but then what&#39;s in place systemically to make sure that all the wheels keep turning as they should so thank you so let&#39;s go to the area of data excuse me and camille um since this is your specialty would you would you launch us what does the data say about the impact on climate on a student&#39;s um academic learning on students overall development their attendance their engagement what what is data saying yeah so there there is a lot of evidence of the connection between um school and classroom climate and academic learning and social emotional development and then positive educational and life outcomes just to point to a few things a study in new york city of middle school students over time and this was an interesting study so it you know includes over 300 000 students 278 schools i think and and they followed over time and what they found is that first like this the schools that had better school climates and the classrooms that had better classroom climates were associated with better academic games for students controlling even for their prior test scores and demographics and all that and they also found that schools that improved their climate over those five years was associated with improvements in the gains that students were making in those schools over time so paying attention investing in school climate pays off in terms of academics we also see a study around classrooms that are growth oriented the idea that the teacher really believes that everybody can accomplish you know succeed at high levels and and sets up the environment to really support students growth that those classrooms are associated and that this was 9th grade math classrooms across the country again the growth-oriented classrooms higher math gains and then a kind of meta-analysis across looking at studies from k-12 uh 61 studies a total of 73 000 students in there and there they saw better classroom climates associated not only with better academic achievement but higher social competence and motivation and engagement and then lower internalizing and externalizing behaviors and that was especially true in classrooms they were looking at climates on kind of three levels they were looking like instructional support social emotional supports and then classroom management and behaviors and and that social emotional support climates that were strong in that were particularly connected to the social emotional development and confidence of of young people and then the last piece i wanna name is just study that um my team has done at the consortium where we were looking at the same student in two different classrooms um because oftentimes we think well students are either motivated or not motivated they&#39;re engaged or they&#39;re not engaged and so here we were really looking at measures of a classroom and then that students own mindset behaviors and performance in the in that classroom and then comparing them to themselves in a different classroom and across the board middle school high school around the country all different you know areas of the country all different races and cultures of students that classrooms that had more supportive learning conditions were associated with that student reporting better mindsets in that class than they did in that same student reported in a less supportive environment and then that student earned higher grades in those classrooms so i think that the evidence is very very strong that climate matters for learning and development kind of we know that is for sure right and the chat is blowing up with requests for links to the studies um we will make sure that you have you know we always send out resources so we will make sure that you have access to some of the studies um when you get the recording and the resources so thank you because the chat is on fire so michelle would you talk a little bit about how chicago public schools use data and continuous improvement in looking at the impact of culture and climate on on student outcomes absolutely um i was going to mention a study actually that you chicago is coming out with about protective factors but i don&#39;t want you guys to be mad at me because i can&#39;t give you any of the data yet it&#39;s something that&#39;s on the horizon but it speaks specifically to how data could be used and what some of our schools have done to really kind of mitigate the impact of covid and crime that we know is persistent um it actually also speaks to deidre what you mentioned earlier about that student that senior who saw school as a a place where you have family um so we&#39;re looking at a number of different ways to both introduce and fortify um the way that we&#39;re using data right now um we typically go through a series of continuous improvement um strategies on a bi-annual basis where we&#39;re looking at different ways to identify movement for continuous improvement for all all of our schools and so school leaders will come up with a continuous improvement plan and within that plan we have sel embedded into the work and so schools are not just holding themselves accountable but actually using the strategies of our department of the office of social and emotional learning as well as our sister and partner department to make sure that we are looking at evidence-based strategies for creating more cadence for social emotional learning more progress monitoring and then taking the next step into looking at how to use inventory skills-based inventories around sdl including the secca and other new tools that we&#39;re beginning to roll out including perts elevate and cultivate just to be able to get a deeper sense of how students are identifying scl in the classroom and what those gaps are not in an evaluatory way but just to make sure that students are getting what they need um and so it&#39;s something that we&#39;re looking into improving upon we right now district-wide have rolled out a number of different ways to screen um and to include that in our data collection um and we&#39;re actually moving to a new data collection tool next school year so i&#39;m um hopefully excited about that um that&#39;s going to measure a bit more of what we&#39;re doing with mtss including seo and and i&#39;m interested in seeing what that data is able to provide for us moving forward so we&#39;re we&#39;re in this pocket this weird place in time where um it&#39;s right for the picking we&#39;re coming you know out of this two almost three-year um world change and um we know that this work is so incredibly important um it was important before but it&#39;s very much important now and and our work has been elevated in our district in a way that it hasn&#39;t before and so the pressure is really on to be able to meet the needs of students and so we&#39;re just trying to rise to the occasion um in providing as much feedback to schools as much pertinent data whether it&#39;s the five essentials which dr farrington is very familiar with which identifies kind of how teachers and students and families feel about the environment of a school the culture and climate of a school and and the work of teachers we&#39;re using and trying to figure out ways to filter all of this different data coming in into something that&#39;s actually productive for schools to be able to use for improvement it&#39;s a long ramble but we have a lot going on thank you a long ramble but an appreciated ramble according to the chat where by the way someone from the consortium is listing is putting links so if you&#39;re like me you&#39;ll want to save the chat and have have access to those links and you know i&#39;m always one who&#39;s very been been a strong advocate of teacher research and practitioner inquiry and research and how do we make sure that we&#39;re also capturing the qualitative research from teachers the stories about how the focus on social and emotional development is resulting in improved culture and climate so i just want to say those are important stories that hopefully are being captured as well because they really resonate with with a lot of people so let&#39;s talk a little bit about um the adults so what is the role of adult interactions in developing climate i mean you know think about a school setting with all the dispositions and temperaments um how do we make sure that the adults are aware of how their interactions impact the climate and michelle because you&#39;re talking from a school-based lens i&#39;m going to ask you to go first on that question the role of adults is everything and we really as a district we started the work of working with students to make sure that sel was embedded in every classroom and we did a lot of boxed kits initially and and strategized on ways to work with high school students to make it impactful and we realized that we made a big mistake we have to work on the adults and get the adults prepared to be able to not just model coach and teach sel but really do a lot of examination of self um self cultivation in order to be able to work with students and create culture and climate that resonated with all of our students and our families and so the role of the adult in the creation of strong culture and climate of strong seo is really to be able to again identify self um a lot of our coaching at this point is around for teachers and and the learning that we&#39;re doing um both with our i&#39;m actually in our teaching and learning office today because i&#39;m going to leave this this conversation and um work with one of my partner departments um to embed more sel into the curricula that is um being taught across the district and so we&#39;ve done a great deal of work this year to make sure that seo lives in all of our core content um but the role of the adult is always to make sure that they are actually able to present not just their best selves but to be able to um elevate the work of seo throughout the classroom in ways that are both culturally relevant and sustaining um and that create more and more ways for students to not just be able to have a voice in the classroom but to really have almost a power exchange where students are empowered to be representatives of their own learning and to be able to model what that looks like for all of our students and so it&#39;s a huge lift but we&#39;re beginning to look at this work in an entirely different way than we ever have before thank you and i keep going back to you know so even what&#39;s the role of the school leader uh putting on my principal hat again you know how do you how do you transform a typical school artifacts like a like a faculty meeting so it&#39;s not about i used to always say not about moan and grown but about grow and glow how do you acknowledge the humanity and give give the adults space to to really shine and to to appreciate each other and and to constantly feel good about being part of the school community thank you so camille what would you say when it comes to the responsibility of adults and the disposition of adults to make sure that they&#39;re contributing to a positive school culture and climate i love everything michelle just said and think that she really pointed to the the critical pieces like how adults show up for each other for their work um collectively as the adult community because that sets the conditions for what&#39;s possible in that school space and then how adults show up for young people in in classrooms so it really is so much about just the power of the person and um what they&#39;re bringing to their interactions with with both adults and young folks and so the africa the self-awareness the really kind of intentionally directing your behavior and emotions and focus towards the things that are going to be most beneficial to your colleagues and to your your students and and then adults in classrooms have really specific roles obviously your role is to teach academic content but i i really like that we as a field have been expanding that conception not just my role is to teach academic content but my role is to develop young people and that includes their intellectual and academic cognitive development but that can&#39;t be separated out from their social and emotional development their identity development their sense of who they are in the world like those things are interconnected in young inside young people and so we can&#39;t parse them apart in terms of their classroom experience so setting up the conditions the relationships the interactions within a classroom and and creating the conditions that really support learning i see um my friend jen from uh from mineola new york is in the chat here and i love the way she describes this to her teachers is setting the conditions so students can benefit from your high quality instruction so and i think that really says it also providing that setting those conditions and then providing developmental opportunities for young people like that is the job of of um of good teachers and the third so it&#39;s kind of setting the conditions providing developmental opportunities and then the third really important piece is just the modeling piece because young people are watching you always and how you manage your own emotions when you&#39;re interacting with with them on how you problem solve how you include other people or not how you respond to challenges to your authority like all those things um speak volumes to uh how again how young people make sense of the environment they&#39;re in and the messages that are communicated to them about their value their autonomy um their dignity um and their potential and what the world is like you know all of that gets communicated through how teachers behave in a classroom right thank you you are so correct students are always watching the adults and the adult behavior so at this point i&#39;m going to open the q a and begin to pull some questions that our audience members have put into the q a so the first one is sometimes when we talk about school and classroom culture we talk about outcomes how it&#39;s seeing you know how it sounds how it feels but what are some small first steps for schools which have a more punitive disrespectful culture that has been in place for years so what would be some small first steps to overcome a punitive and disrespectful culture so either one who wants to go first michelle you want to take that one i can take a crack at it thank you um i think i think i always go to talking with the students first and so i think for a highly um punitive system and i i watched a charter system in our city try and change their student code of the student code of conduct over the summer last summer and i watched where it fell apart um it has to come from students and so the guidance the um not just the voice but the the tone the recommendations um again i spoke earlier a bit about community epistemology like the families the communities they have to have a stake in identifying what works and what what doesn&#39;t work for when we&#39;re talking about discipline um if you don&#39;t have that buy-in if you don&#39;t have that feedback from someone who&#39;s experienced it from someone who looks at it from a different lens it ultimately may fail i think the other thing that you have to consider is what what are you giving up what are you getting um and making sure that adults feel highly trained and capable that they have the supports in place to be able to use other measures for moving towards a more restorative framework then what are the supports that are existing in that framework to be able to give adults what they need if you&#39;re moving from something that has been happening for a very long time in a way that people may may not have felt safe about but they felt comfortable and complacent doing and so just making sure that again you have the right people at the table to be able to identify the flaws the missteps and to be able to create decision rules that are more aligned with shared work and shared understanding again shared agreements is the best way to go and so we in chicago we work with a group of students every year to modify our student code of conduct and to give us feedback and then they go out and train other students on what that actually looks like and so we&#39;ve changed the title of that document to the student rights and responsibilities document in order for them to have ownership in it and to be able to amplify that throughout our district thank you michelle there&#39;s lots of great ideas being entered in the chat as well in terms of first steps everything from having students help in the development of the language having them sign contracts playing games i remember really enlisting the support of the football basketball team because the students respected them so so how could i use them as advocates for this work so thank you um so we go to another question there&#39;s a question about school boards so there&#39;s a question about school boards are mainly interested in having students gain skills and looking at test scores as the way to see progress so how is information about the importance of culture and climate being shared with school boards so they get it so that they&#39;ll prioritize it and they&#39;ll support efforts around culture and climate have either of you had experience in convincing school boards swaying school boards anything like that i i don&#39;t have direct experience in this but what i would say is that that parents and caregivers families business people in communities the stakeholders in schools um fully understand that what they want is not just a high test scores from their young people that they want their they want them to be well they want them to be healthy and thriving and they want them to develop the skills to be able to be good family partners and community partners and and workers and all the things and so i i think that that in fact school boards hear that from families and communities um and and over time i am seeing some shift in what what&#39;s value you know when the only metric is a test score then that&#39;s what we use but but as as we start shifting to being paying more attention to climates and cultures and the conditions for learning i i don&#39;t think it&#39;s a hard sell actually for school boards i&#39;ll put in a plug for an organization school board partners which partners with school boards to build build the capacity of school board members because it&#39;s a it&#39;s as we can see around the country an incredibly important and powerful role that in every local community and so organizations that help build the capacity of of citizens to serve on school boards i think is a is a really critical critical piece involved yeah i also um i&#39;m reminded about the number of our castle districts that have really started to engage their school boards in the work of seo in general by by incorporating for instance our three signature practices so they&#39;ll begin the school board meeting with a warm welcome and they&#39;ll end with an optimistic closure or one one district i&#39;m thinking of where i&#39;ve done some work is they have their school board members handle their emotions by using the strategies from one of our evidence-based programs so they all learned how to turtle right so so the more you speak the language and get them to explore the practices i think the more they&#39;ll be inclined to say yes this is good and yes this is what needs to be done in schools to contribute to a supportive culture and climate so thank you we have a question about the role of families let me see if i can pull it up again here it is so how do you work with the families to understand their own children&#39;s developmental needs do you ever collaborate with the medical profession to the evaluate the understanding of those needs so how do we how how do we make sure that families understand their role in understanding their young people to support us supportive school climate climate it&#39;s a tough question um and we&#39;re still i think we&#39;re in the process always like ever evolving in that process of family and community engagement um we are the third largest district in the country um we have a again a large diverse population of families that support our schools and so we look to families to be able to share what we know are are there you know truths and and we have a lot of value for the importance of identifying and bringing in and creating safe spaces for parents to share um their community beliefs and their understanding of seo but it&#39;s still something that we&#39;re tweaking because it looks so many different ways across all of our different departments what the outreach looks like what the feedback is and so it&#39;s something that we&#39;re trying to codify in a way that we can share with others but we&#39;re still in that process of trying to figure that out right now it&#39;s been a lot of unfortunately parent trainings um but not a significant amount in the way that i would like to see of family feedback where we&#39;re getting that information back in about specifically what the needs of students are and what the needs of communities are for this work and and that&#39;s where i know that we&#39;ve we&#39;ve dropped the ball or still i don&#39;t maybe drop the balls a little strong um we just haven&#39;t identified maybe the best way to get you know the really rich feedback that we know that our families have thank you so there&#39;s a question probably our final question is about goes back to data collection the fact that data collections so often falls on teachers um how do we how do we use these data collection tools so the teachers and school leaders are not continually overburdened with collecting data have either of you found a way to uh minimize the the burdensome impact of just collecting data and the fact that it very often not only falls on teachers but very often it falls on teachers of particular subject areas or particular grades so how do you remove the animosity around data collection yeah i really appreciate this question and i i think that it depends first of all no one should ever collect data of any kind unless you have a plan for using that data and have the capacity to respond to that data and so um that&#39;s a baseline thing uh and then the the question of like what is data used for and you know by whom and for what purposes and so the um the i think that it&#39;s really important i&#39;m a big advocate of you know we talk about shifting from downstream metrics and downstream measures in other words after the process is over and we get you know academic results so test scores and those kind of um downstream metrics and to shift upstream so if we know that those downstream things are that students academic outcomes or long-term outcomes are a result of their engagement in learning right and only the learner learns as zeretta hammond says and whether or not students engage in learning depends on something farther upstream which is how they&#39;re interpreting the environment that they&#39;re in and how they interpret the environment that they&#39;re in is either even farther upstream what are the conditions in which we&#39;re asking them to learn and so trying to shift to um get more of that kind of upstream measurement and data and feedback on those conditions and how young people are experiencing those conditions and that those are data that are immediately useful to teachers and should go directly to the hands of teachers so it&#39;s very different if someone else is collecting data or if i&#39;m spending my class time collecting data that somebody else is going to use to make decisions about me or my students is a very different dynamic than i&#39;m going to collect data directly from my students about how are you experiencing this thing how is it feeling to you am i me am do you feel welcomed do you believe that i you know believe in you like those feedback back to teachers around that is really immediately actionable and the and the students are the only ones who know the answers to those things right it doesn&#39;t doesn&#39;t matter what the teacher is trying to create in a classroom it matters how that&#39;s landing with the particular set of young people in the room with them or on zoom with them or out in the field with them and so getting that feedback directly from those students and i saw earlier in the chat my beloved colleague nina ryan put in links to the pertz elevate tool and the consortium cultivate tool and these are two align tools that that my team has been working with the folks at pertz to to develop and one is a school level tool and the other cultivated the school level kind of across the board what how our students experience in their classrooms and elevate is a tool that teachers can use themselves to get feedback directly from their students over time and it it creates the kind of partnership between a teacher and their students and like data back to the teacher that is just so valuable for their ability to create the kind of context that are that again as jen mentioned says like that so that students can really um take advantage of the high quality instruction that teachers are bringing so i think it it depends what kind of data for what purpose for you know and who can respond to that thank you the what and the for what purpose and i had not heard the terms downstream and upstream before so i love that framing and if there&#39;s anything that can go in the chat that could be a resource for you more about that particular terminology and before we look at the big takeaways um i want to remind you all to please look at the chat lots of good links in there someone just put in the link for our um castle three signature practices books because a lot of people say well what&#39;s that um references to our sel exchange in the fall so be sure you look at the chat let&#39;s look at the big takeaways um from our presenters so we could go to the takeaway slides so i think one overarching theme that we all heard was that creating the conditions for students to engage in sel requires school-wide and classroom learning environments that are supportive culturally responsive and focused on building relationships and community thank you another big takeaway incentivizing districts to support school and classroom environments is an imp is an approach that requires guidance and criteria for funding to expand resources for districts who are creating those conditions and we know so many of the districts on the call today are doing that another takeaway taking a collaborative inquiry yes what&#39;s up approach to developing supportive school and classroom climate begins with initial root cause analysis to unpack and understand the experience that students have in school to implement systemic scl strategies fostering a strong school climate and again part of that root cause analysis is really engaging the voice of young people hearing directly from them what&#39;s what&#39;s happening i would like to thank dr farrington i&#39;d like to thank michelle jackson so much for your participation with us today

Transcript for:Demystifying Systemic SEO Webinar Notes

Transcript for:
Demystifying Systemic SEO Webinar Notes