001Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's study session where we get to go over the monitoring report for goal four. Always a a favorite day on the calendar during the year. So thank you everyone um for joining us to um which do you have a kickoff? I can do just just note well just noting that this is the fifth and final goal report for the school year and I really appreciated the efforts of staff as well as schoolboard members in um putting these together since we have school board um leaison and working with the staff to um develop these so that they're in good form not just for the board for the public. So thank you superintendent Tully. and we'll kick it over to Chief Academic Officer Dr. Obadia Dunham. All right.
002Thank you, President Cast, Superintendent Tully, and board of directors for having us here tonight. Um, we're eager to share on goal four. I want to start by acknowledging that uh, Director Hayes was our board liaison for this and advised us on this uh, report tonight. And then I just want to introduce the people here reporting with me. Um, immediate to my left here is Dr. Emily Butler, executive director of teaching and learning. And then Dr. Craig Foster, director of research and evaluation. Uh Shelby Reynolds, assistant director of instructional technology and library services, and then Heather Miller, executive director um of high schools. So, we're all going to contribute in the report tonight, and I'm going to kick us off, then we'll just kind of run it through with staff, and um certainly as in previous
003reports, if you interrupt us with questions is appropriate. So goal four we like to include towards the end because it feels like a cobating goal of a lot of the work and you'll kind of see hopefully the theme of how we've built this and I'll talk to you in a minute about um doing of how we've also just structured this goal itself to kind of think through that process but um it's an opportunity to think about um some of the more imaginative and creative things that are happening in schools and how do we emphasize and and bring those things forward. We have a um quote here to think about um a big chunk of goal four and the first kind of third of it you're going to hear about critical thinking and some ways that
004we think about critical thinking. So um we have got a quote here from Bill Hooks to kind of kind of frame some of that and as um director Hayes pointed out in our premeating Hooks does not capitalize their first or last name and so that's not a typo. Uh as superintendent Tully said, this is our uh fifth and final goal report of the year. Um we don't necessarily do them sequentially. So um you've heard early on we started with goal five and now we're going to finish up here tonight with goal four. There are variety of measures in that are identified in our strategic plan and these measures are pulled then directly forward. So we're going to kind of talk through and I'll show you in a minute how we've combined some of these measures
005to kind of think about um the work outlay goal for the first two measures are um we have some data from Panorama and some other sources that is really kind of focused on critical thinking and how and this is kind of a a interesting area for for a district to go into in that we typically think about math and reading and writing and those type of areas but really then what are students doing with it and so that's why we like to include this at the And um we have some technology and learning section that we're going to talk about and um as you can imagine our students and staff do have a lot of interactions in those areas. So how are we continuing to support them as well as um give them those skills
006readying them for the next level? And then as I've shared before we have quite a array of opportunities for schools or students in Northshore to take in our schools um starting in elementary and then really building up to some really robust high schools and some robust high school experiences. So we'll talk through just how those breadth of academic experience is and then hopefully you'll notice um as we build through this we've started with kind of this idea of critical thinking and then some things to build to it but really why does it matter unless students are able to use that critical thinking to do what we call maybe lifelong problem solving or as we've talked we talk about here solving social problems. So you'll get to hear um from executive director Miller about what that
007then that culmination of all this work looks like like what are we building towards and we've got some panorama data as well as just some things that uh executive director Miller will be able to point to kind of builds that story for us that narrative as we go through the evening we have a variety of data sources we've pulled from um we're going to bring back I ready aroundformational text not to spend time looking at how students necessarily doing for informationational text but also to try to help build that connection between abilities students ability to access um theformational text comprehension and what role that plays informational thinking. So you'll hear from Dr. foster on that. And then you'll notice some other panorama data around access to technology and artificial intelligence. And then kind of a
008environmental scan of some of the electives we've we we offer and advanced placement and IB opportunities. And then as I said, a final kind of look at how students feel about social problem solving and some different ways you might be seeing that out in schools um and some opportunities there. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to uh Dr. Foster to talk about these first two measures. Okay, we'll begin here with measure one. You can see it's a increased percentage of students who demonstrate the ability to critically analyze, interpret, and responsibly use data and information. and the responsible treatment of data information we typically weave in to critical thinking with the idea of it being part of the intellectual empathy and the moral component of critical thinking. So um here's our definition for
009context that we use in Northshore. Um and that is critical thinking is the practice of identifying having and giving good reasons for one's beliefs, values and actions given one's goals of truth and avoidance of error. And I really like this particular definition for its focus on accuracy and truthtelling. And it's there are and we could probably find 100 definitions of critical thinking. Um they overlap importantly because it is a real concept worthy of focus. But this one is a little nuanced in having beliefs, values and actions. And I thought that was nicely comprehensive. So with this definition in mind, when we turn to measure two, which is increased percentage of students who can justify a position with supporting evidence and can solve real world challenges in imaginative ways. You can think of measure two as
010really being the outcome of an effective critical thinking process. Right? If people engage in proper critical thinking, they should um be able to justify what they're thinking with good reasons. Now we might debate whether those are good reasons or not but that sort of deliberation is a requirement of critical thinking. So with that what we did a year ago and we did again this year is we combined measures one and two to um ease the digestibility of the overall presentation and um give a little extra time to focus more on critical thinking a little more deeply. So, here is a measure that I'm happy to say this is the last time I expect we will go over this measure. It was included a little over a year ago in the fall panorama survey. It was
011our beginning attempt to try to measure um facets of critical thinking. Critical thinking is a difficult concept to measure. I'm glad that I could join a lot of people in failing to measure it in terms of this item. Um, so anyway, not to belver the point, but um, this item did not go very well. I'm letting you know it was removed from Panorama this fall to make room for other other items. This is the item that this is an item that replaces it. And I'm happy to say I think this item has went much better. I think we plan to um, still improve it. I think there's some readability edits that we could make to the item, but in my mind, it was still effective enough to show how we could get at important facets
012of critical thinking through Panorama. Why Panorama? Because Panorama has a high response rate from grades three to grade 12. So, it's a good place for us to see what our students are doing and thinking. So, the item itself says, I'd rather Sorry, my my eyesight's not as good as it used to be. I'd rather rely on my own knowledge about most topics than turn to others for expertise. And it had a disagree to agree scale. You could see it there. We coded it one to five. And what I would ask you to take a moment and think about is are some of these answers more satisfactory to us than others in terms of what we would like to see our students report with regard to critical thinking. Um, personally based on my experience, I would
013find strongly agree to be the least satisfying response to this. And I would I would say agree is at least for me a less dissatisfying but still a dissatisfying response given some of the readability concerns that I had with this item. A student who just looked at it and said, "I'm tired and I'm putting neither disagree or agree." I', okay, I I can kind of understand that. And I might have received that feedback from a particular student at Inglemore High. So that further convinced me. So uh with that in mind, we can look at this table and see how our students are responding and um whether it matches what we'd like to see with critical thinking. You could see in this table that the percentage of strongly agree responses is below 10%. And that's encouraging.
014Um, personally, I'd like to see it at zero, but it is below 10% and um, there's a fair number of agree responses. So, in that respect, at least for me, would I like to see more students saying, "No, I disagree with this. I'd rather go out and consult with experts." Yes. Um, you could interpret this question to some degree as the confidence that a Northshore education has given them. And that's also a positive. But um consulting experts is an important thing today as it's been for decades. So uh this table provides the same data but it provides means. Um the means obviously reflect the percentages but they're a little easier to compare across groups. In this case what you can see in grades 6 through 12 is relatively consistent responding at least in terms of
015the average student response. Um there's a a very small decrease there by in grade 12, but it isn't big enough in my mind to really put much weight in it. What you see on average is a very mild amount of agreement that students would rather rely on their own knowledge than turn to experts. Now we can look at this item in terms of ethnicity. And what you will see here is really no substantial differences between the groups. There are groups that score higher or lower, but they're also the groups with the smallest sample size. So I find it difficult to make really any generalizability out of this. And to the degree that you take the self-report and think that it and infer that it reflects some degree of critical thinking, this shows something that's really
016important. And that is that um critical thinking is a is a different skill than the other skills that we assess throughout the year. And you you get a different pattern of responses with that. And that's one of the things that I find encouraging about examining this is seeing how um a lot of students can really show elements of critical thinking um that maybe we don't see if we don't assess it. Uh here we have the same results but disagregated by gender. And what you see is a small effect but I would say meaningful that on average female students are less reliant on their own knowledge than male students are on average. Um I developmentally speaking I wasn't entirely surprised to see a small gender effect but it is an average effect. Um and then we
017have a small number relatively speaking a small number of students that don't identify in a binary system who are responding more like the male students are but overlapping groups. And then here we have the same results disagregated by our usual additional demographic groups. And again you see fairly consistent responding at least in terms of you know what students say, how much they rely on their own knowledge versus expertise. Okay, with that we'll turn to the other panorama item. This one uh has been we've gone over this several times. U it's been there a long time because it is a panorama item. uh it isn't intended to be a critical thinking item, but I do think it gives us some information about whether students are engaging in the intellectual empathy part of critical thinking. Obviously, it's
018placed in a um domain of ethnicity or culture, but that's a pretty big u that's a pretty big grouping for navigating social problems in contemporary United States. So, um, we can see how much students are reporting that they're engaging in this. And again, I would encourage you to look at this and say, well, are some responses more satisfying than others. And in this case, I would think that I would assume most people involved with Northshore Education would say an almost never response would be somewhat disappointing. And then a once in a while might be a little bit disappointing. And then after that, it might feel sufficient in terms of what we'd like to see our students report. And then we turn to a frequency table so we can get some idea of where our students
019are falling out in terms of how they respond to this item. And you can see that um the majority of students do report they do report that they do this at least sometimes or more frequently than that. The other thing that you see in this table is that those percentages of students who say that they almost never do this decrease yearbyear. And I think that represents um our education and our racial and educational justice initiative and uh the developmental um progress that students make in terms of their sophistication about thinking about problems with this lens. Uh table seven shows again the same data but this time with means instead of frequencies because they're easier to eyeball and compare. And you can see they're the same finding that as students progress from grade 6 to grade
02012, they are more and more likely to uh report that they engage in this type of thinking. Here we have the results disagregated by ethnicity and you can see that there are some differences in terms of what students report uh on average how often they think about what people from other ethnicities or cultures go through. Um, I think that our when you look at this result on the average result, I think um it's interesting to think that students who identify as black or African-American are really one of the um they're one of the larger groups of the the five that are that we frequently don't have to um uh obscure the data because of privacy concerns, but they're the also al also the smallest group. So they might feel a sense of engaging in this
021more often because they might feel a sense of conspicuousness in our population. But um by and large you also see fairly consistent results. um by gender you see um female students reporting that they do this on average more than male students do and non-binary students reporting a much higher average which is interesting and then the results are disagregated by additional demographic group and um you see fairly consistent responding again um when you look at this particular item Here's our critical thinking definition again just for some context before we pivot to reading comprehension. So uh let's remember that it's the practice of identifying having and giving good reasons for one's beliefs, values and actions. And the goal is to find truth and avoid error. And with that um we have used the I Ready reading comprehension
022as at least an indicator of critical thinking. The uh we have focused there's two forms of reading comprehension. One's literacy and one's informational text. We focused on theformational text. Uh it simplifies the reporting and the focus. And typically critical thinking is done in an informational non-fiction component, although it certainly could be taught in any literature art class. There's all sorts of ways to contribute to critical thinking, but for our purposes, we examine the reading comprehension offormational text. And then this is just a a brief slide to make the connection between our I Ready work and our I Ready assessment and critical thinking. This comes from I Readyy's list of assessed skills. It's a long list. it it's too long to include in in this report, but of the things that stand out more, you have
023Oops, can we go back one? Um, asking questions about key ideas, citing evidence, um, identifying the author's point of view or purpose, integrating information from multiple sources, evaluating arguments, comparing and contrasting and integrating information from various uh, print and digital sources, and analyzing word choice, meaning, and tone. And these to me were all excellent ways for people to improve their critical thinking already existing in our uhformational text learning packages. Going on to the next slide. Um, here's an example from uh one of the I Ready support tools and it's uh about evaluating arguments. And I won't read it uh for the sake of of um not taking too much time, but what it really gets at that I love is encouraging students to read things from a skeptical point of view and to question what's
024coming at them. And for some of our students, that's really a matter of teaching them to have the confidence to um say, you know, do I really agree with this author? And it's interesting to remember that that's a skill that you see some college students, you know, they really have to work through like no, it's okay. It's it's time for you to start really judging what other people are doing. And then I I love picking this one because it has a claim tree and I like claim trees because it encourages the focus on evidence and the avoidance of red herring type of arguments where people go squirrel and they start looking for things that aren't germanine to the argument. Um just a brief reminder here of course critical thinking is more than just reading comprehension
025which is why we can't just marry these two and be done with it. Um, so things like intellectual humility, empathy, uh, integrity, being consistent, and distinguishing good arguments from bad arguments. These are all skills that layer on top of the reading comprehension. But reading comprehension is clearly a fundamental skill to get students towards critical thinking. So here in table 11 you can see the distribution of responses in terms of whether students were on grade level standard or not on this particular dimension of the overall reading comprehension. the there there's going to be a high level of overlap admittedly between this dimension and reading um reading comprehension be particularly as students advance because the test moves more and more in the dimension of comprehension and away from recognizing words and you can see we have consistent
026responding here from uh 22 23 to 23 24. There is a bit of a jump there in middle school, but we're still working through the sampling issues that go with that and that's we that's improved dramatically and this will give us a better baseline going forward. Um this table I think is interesting because it shows the um differentiation of students in terms of where they are with reading comprehension onformational text and there's a lot encouraging there. You could see um and this isn't new to us. You could see there are students that are really advanced on this skill. But you also see that there is kind of a polarization effect that occurs by the time students are in grade eight. And there's certainly a population of students that we really need to work with because
027the barrier between them and critical thinking is going to be fairly substantive in terms of if you're having a hard time comprehending the text, then how are you going to sift through it and get to that upper level skill in terms of critical thinking? And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. So my job is to just talk a little bit about some of the ways that we teach uh critical thinking through uh the different uh intellectual humility, empathy, and integrity that uh Dr. Foster referred to. So we typically use uh some of the teacher-led critical discussions that um you might see in the classroom to teach intellectual humility. uh some of the writing assignments that lead to argument or persuasive essays where students have to present a viewpoint where they need to be
028open to new ideas. they need to present uh their own self-reflection or argue from uh someone else's point of view would be some of the ways to teach that intellectual humility uh intellectual empathy with the Socratic seminars which I know some of you have gotten to witness and sometimes they are put on a perspective that they wouldn't originally take and so they have to research that perspective and then present that perspective as if it is their own and that those roleplaying um opportunities I think really do grow students in uh that taking someone else's viewpoint and and presenting it from that um vantage point. And I think those are incredibly powerful opportunities and they can start pretty young um with uh smaller uh examples like you know um lunch lunchroom food or something that can
029become um far more interesting to them as they get older. But uh those are the kinds of ways to just start with empathy as as our students uh explore the world around them as it hits them. um pretty quickly nowadays. And then intellectual integrity. Uh our ethnic studies framework is probably the best example we have. Uh we have lead teachers right now going through training and they are um just doing amazing work. Uh that framework pro produces not only consistency when you measure other um pieces of our own uh curriculum up against that but it also provides uh ways to evaluate what we are doing in the classroom and then checks everyone's own biases against that framework. So it's a really uh pretty amazing incredible piece of work that we have. so many people in
030this district that have taken part in and the work they did just this last week here in this room uh to continue to spread that um wealth of opportunity will provide and continue to um move through our district and give kids the opportunity to uh continue to I think just inform all of our students the opportunity to move forward in understanding one another. So those are some opportunities that we have already going on in Northshore uh to support measures one and two. So continuing our work. Thank you. This is one of my favorite goals um for obvious reasons. I had a also um thank you for the report too. always nice to read through it for the tracking purposes and I think this isn't just applicable to goal four and it might have come up
031before is when we're looking at the comparison year to year to year. Um it's a little bit difficult to follow because we only get 2023 2024 and it'd be good to know if we're improving or not. I know it's difficult to have that comparison given student population change over um students maybe going in and out of the school district. Uh it's a bigger conversation around anonymized individual student progress tracking as opposed to overall data. Right? This this data is better than not having the data. Um, but just considering what are some of the are we considering any of the anonymized individual student tracking and how that might look. Um, yeah, it's a great concept and it's definitely where we need to take this going forward. Um, it it can be done. It's particularly limiting in
032this goal because the at least in terms of the panorama items, they're new. So there's no no place backwards to take them. But um as we as I um get more familiarity with um I think in some cases we've moved things to be a little more on target and then when that happens it allows us to keep building on that going forward. But um definitely there needs to be um I I see the benefit of a long-term longitudinal um approach like that. Sometimes that will be an average group. Um so they change, right? Sixth graders going to change every year. Is there value in trying to follow the same students over time? And so then you have one particular group which is a sentiment I think I've heard before. Um we do achieve that and
033we've started to do that more in strategic goal three by doing the within year analysis. So then you have only the same students beginning and end. And I think that's the most important scope for the district is to get in the habit of looking at that where are they at the beginning where they at the end even that analysis loses a small number of students. So when you start to do that by year, that's going to grow and then you're creating more complicated analyses and losing more and more people. But there is something to be said for saying, hey, we had these 60 kids from grade six, seven, and eight and what happened to them. And I'll try to incorporate more of those where I can going forward because um that's ultimately what we want
034to see, right? Is we want to see where's the mean? is it or whatever mean, median, whatever the metric is, are we satisfied with it? And then if it's gone down, do we need to respond to it? So, I'll try to make sure that we build on that more going forward. I could just take a minute to uh to riff off of your question, Director Han or Director Tran. Um the I I think ultimately in service to each individual student I mean this is exactly what what we need to do is follow them make sure that they're progressing within a year and from year to year but that's I mean that's a more complicated thing to try to try to present and we're we're not we're not going to get into the weeds that way.
035So, it's I think it's a balance between the third 30,000 foot view and then sort of narrowing in on you know what what does that tell you and when we get a little bit closer how do we differentiate um and ultimately each individual student. Um the question that I had was about your very very beginning uh slides. Um the very first question and interpretation I guess. Um and I really appreciate in the in the um report how you went into um some discussion on on interpretation and how this might be potentially revised going forward. Um because I thought honestly the first time I looked at it I thought well I'm going to want to do my homework and you know educate myself as opposed to just going and asking somebody for the answer you know
036which I think is one way that that somebody would say yes I strongly agree I'm going to you know try to educate myself do my homework and not just take the answer from somebody else. On the flip side of that, if you go down to the the far end of the, you know, the very end of this section when we're talking about um what is it? What is what was it called? The um the arguments where you you want you want we want our students be persuasive arguing if you want want our students to be critical of what they're they're hearing. So you want them to question any answer that they they might get. So, I can see how that could sort of play off of each other and um it's almost like they're competing
037with each other. You know, we we want our students to do both things to not just take the answer that they might be given and think about it themselves and evaluate it themselves. Um but we also want them to rely on expertise and know that the expertise is there and have that that iterative conversation if you will. That's my thoughts. Well, I think this um introduces a lot to unpack and I'm not going to open up all these bags because I want to be mindful of the time. But I think what one of the things you're getting at would be I' put the question this way. Can you have too much intellectual humility? And I think in a way the answer is no. And I think in another way the answer is yes. Uh people
038are are pretty conservative about changing their points of view, particularly when they're really invested in them. And I think we need to recognize that to some degree that's a good thing. I think we'd be worried about somebody who read a book and they said, "Now I'm I'm now I'm super liberal." And then they read another book and they're like, "Today I'm super conservative." You'd go, "Wow, that's that's a lot of change." Um, in my experience, I think the bigger failing is people not being intellectually humble enough. So, if anything, they tend to resist too much and they don't change too quickly. And that's what I think makes intellectual humility a a great concept to bring in. But um but there's just a lot a lot of thinking to do in terms of where you go
039with this particular dimension. And that's why I added to the report some of the ideas in there like well what are arguments that fool people and can we train students to recognize those arguments. I do think the foundation the eight intellectual traits I think those are are pretty darn good and I think we can get a lot of mileage out of those. Um, but yeah, we don't want our students to be totally underconfident either. And and we wouldn't want that. I think we all know that the item, by the way, I should have mentioned was lifted like the previous one was, the epic fail from last year. And so this one was lifted and I don't know, you have a reluctance to go, hey, you published this item and now I'm going to change it.
040But we we will almost surely update it because our population it could be a little clear. Plus, we're used to items where agreement is good and then to have one where agreement is not good is it it's not worth the pain. We'll we'll fix it up. But, um but yeah, I like what you're saying. It definitely um yeah, want the confidence and the open-mindedness. Um yes, also fixated on that. But um I I do also wonder about the compliance that you're in a rhythm of yes is the better answer and that's what we're looking for that they just kind of got in the oh they must want me to rely on my knowledge more right that that's kind of the that might have led to some of the responses. Um it's it is certainly it's
041certainly a concern. Yes. Um, keep in mind that Panorama sometimes flips the um I think they flip the scale behind the scenes. So, the students can't just redline the you know, I'm happy but uh but yeah, it's it's a chronic survey design concern. So, I'll I'll keep an eye on it. Yes. Um and you know, adults, we miss the no, the not and the send like oh flew right over that. Um, and I I I it sounds like what we're really looking for is not only that they have the intellectual humility, but the confidence that they know where to look for the answer, right? that we are entering this world of misinformation and disinformation and and I apologize if I'm jumping ahead, but I know that our digital citizenship curriculum um having accidentally stumbled into
042some of the classes on that that gets into that that that is some of the work we are doing around critical thinking. I've watched teachers lay out, okay, let's look to see where this answer came from. What is the website? Who is behind it? And walking kids through how to assess is this valuable information that's trustworthy, right? And that is part of all that. So, I'm just throwing that out there that that's also part of the strategies and supports that we're working on is our digital digital citizenship curriculum. And just to the point of We like to silo things in education and really it it's all hands on deck dealing with this. Yeah. I think um you're jogging my thinking but I I think the goal with the item is consulting experts is not the
043same as agreeing with experts. So what you want is the intellectual humility and perseverance to go do it but then to have the confidence to be skeptical when you go through this. But lest I go on and on about this, it when when an educational organization throws out critical thinking, I think sometimes they um they don't realize what they're signing up for because we all want it. And so what I'm really happy to get any feedback because it's not my decision to make, it's our decision to make about where this goal goes because there's different ways to to tr try to go after this. Um the safest one I think is intellectual perseverance, right? Can you just stick with the problem? Intellectual integrity is another good one. Are you are you changing how you evaluate
044arguments? People make this mistake all the time. The anecdote is good enough when you agree with it, but when it's somebody else's anecdote you don't agree with, it's an obviously horrible fallacy. So, um, we're really just feeling out ways to get at this dimension. And it it's a struggle for all for anybody that signs up for critical thinking. It's a struggle in terms of what you look for. So, what that means is something that we can tailor at Northshore for what's right for our community. Um, and I'm happy to get any feedback people want to give about that. Uh, that actually brings up a good point about that persuasive essay because someone in my household brought home this exact topic for their persuasive essay and one of their um, evident one of their points was
045fashion. So just we'll let that rest where it is. There was no we did not describe anything but it was just fashion. Um because we're eight. Um but I think to being able to like perspective take against your opinion um and analyze your feelings and your thoughts and your perspective and then also listen hear and um think about somebody else's perspective because that's something that I think a lot of really strong critical thinkers do and people who make really sound decisions are able to see what's going on from someone else's perspective and being a be able to acknowledge it and um try to understand it. And so it's not just getting information about something, but it's understanding somebody else's perspective on something and which is probably also really hard to measure. Um, but it, you
046know, as goes with that whole person approach or whole systems thinking approach for kids is that the direction I'm going is not the only direction available and it's not the direction somebody else is going. They're both there and they both exist in the world and I should know about both of them before I set my decision in stone forever, right? I didn't have a point, but now it's out. I appreciate the energy around the critical thinking and this goal in particular. Um, I also do want to point out we're at 540 and we still have a couple more measures to go into, too. So, um, if we're okay, are we good to move forward? Oh, just wait. The fun stuff is coming. Um so I'm going to be uh talking you through the data around
047measure three which is technology and learning. The measure as written is uh the increased percentage of students who access technology slash digital tools and innovative learning spaces to enhance student learning and expand personalization eg adaptive technology collaborative learning and critical thinking projects. Um until this year, uh we focused a lot on the access part by way of looking at how many things we had and how many things do students have access to. Um in my mind, the there's an appropriate metaphor about pencils like we don't count our pencils as a measure of how successful kids are with pencils, right? So I think it's great that we have pivoted a bit to look at some measures of student perceptions of how technology uh is being taught in the sense that it supports their learning. So that's
048what these uh next two items will be about. Um the first uh item again much like some of the other things we've seen is new to the panorama survey this year. Uh school is helping me learn how to work with technology. Um so this is a perception uh thing of course p perspectives of our students uh we would want um the responses to favor you know agreement or strong agreement. So this is one of those that's not a trick. We're not moving the liyker scale around. Um pretty straightforward. Uh the this next slide uh table 13 shows uh the frequency of responses that the layout of this data will follow very much the same pattern that we saw in the previous the previous measures. Um you can see that um generally speaking students are in
049agreement with this statement from grades 3 to 12 um with you know some varied strongly agrees here and there. Um but generally speaking you know pretty favorable responses. Um you can see that the disagrees on this table do increase as we move through the grade levels and you're going to see that trend again in a few places. Uh on the next table, table 14, uh this is the the average uh as Dr. Foster shared earlier, just the average of those indexed scores uh for grades 3 through 12. Um you can see an overall decreasing trend again across the grade levels. Uh in my lovely conversations with Dr. foster and we have many and I enjoy them. Um, we think that it could be that some of our younger students just don't know what they don't
050know yet. They they're not necessarily exposed to, you know, a a wider variety of technologies that maybe some of our uh older students who have gained a little more independence have been exploring without the support of educational staff. Um, so that's why we see some possible, you know, reason for the decrease in scores as the grades increase. Uh table 15 shows disagregation by um ethnicity. Again, we have some n sizes that are a little smaller here, but generally you can see that we have um fairly favorable scores in our uh Asian and black and Hispanic Latino groups, which I think is great. Um and we'll get we'll jump into that Hispanic group a little bit later when we talk about um technology as well. Um this was for table 15 is for grades 3 through
051five. Um in grades 6 through 12. Um you can see similar results in terms of our average scores. Um with notable peaks in our Asian uh black and Hispanic Latino groups. I think for the same reason that Dr. Foster talked about before that black group. Uh our group of black students is smaller. Um and so you know statistically that could be um not necessarily as significant as say our Asian group at 3.61. Table 17 shows uh disagregation by gender um for all intents and purposes fairly the same little wider spread it looks like um with our male students but generally the average is the same. Uh that was for grades 3 through 12. Table 18 shows us um 6 through 12. And again, we see that decrease in overall average scores. Um but still pretty
052consistent among genders. A little bit of drop with our students that identify as non-binary or identify as neither. And then uh table 19 is disagregation for grades three through five by um our demographic groups. um 504 EL EL or EL special education highly capable. It is notable that our um ELLL group has a fairly high score here. Um that could be for several reasons. One being um typically students in that group use a lot more translation technology um either with the support of staff members or um you know that they're bringing into school with them. So, um leveraging that kind of technology to support their specific goals, uh it's probably more frequent than say a highly capable student who doesn't necessarily need that sort of um technology available at all times. Um, special education is
053also a little bit on the high side and we know that uh many of our students who have IEPs um are outfitted with technology- based uh accommodations, different services, hardware, um specialized software that supports their particular learning needs. So, I'm not terribly surprised that the scores would be ever so slightly higher for our students receiving special services uh in those two areas. Um grades 6 through 12, uh same demographic groups and again, you know, we see some similar patterns here with our um students receiving services for learning English uh having pretty high or or a higher average score there. I think for the same reasons we talked about before. Um let's see. Okay, so my favorite new item um will come as no surprise to you. Uh we did add an item this year related
054to artificial intelligence. Very timely and relevant. Uh the prompt you can see on the screen is school is helping me learn how to work with artificial intelligence. Again, we would like to see scores that are at the agree strongly agree end. Um, but I also think that neither disagree nor agree is somewhat significant here only because we're just in the emerging point of bringing these tools in in safe and ethical and responsible ways. So, it could be that we have some students that are like, was I supposed to expect to learn how to art, you know? So table 21 shows the frequency of responses on this one for all grades and you can see that uh strongly agree you know and agree decrease as you go through the the grade levels. Um the explanation one
055possible explanation here is again our younger students just may not know what they don't know or they may assume that something is artificial intelligence that really isn't. Um so there's a little bit of maybe awareness. uh at those awareness lacking perhaps at those younger grade levels. And then as our students become more independent in those later grade levels and are exposed to more artificial intelligence tools in their personal lives or via the phone that they carry around or the watch or their glasses or their million other things, right? Um they may recognize that we are not explicitly yet teaching skills around the use of artificial intelligence. Um you can see that kind of bears out in the strongly you know the disagree and strongly agree to those um scores skew much like the the other
056side of that table. Uh table 22 gives um that average score based on grade level. Um no surprise here we see higher levels of agreement in the younger grades and lower levels of agreement at high school in particular. Looking at table 23, we have um grades three through five uh broken out by ethnicity. Um what I think is lovely here is higher higher scores in our Hispanic Latino students as opposed to some of our other um ethnicity groups. I think that's significant because we are focused on serving these students um in ways that they have not been served before. So my my assumption is what's sitting behind this might be um explicit and intentional use of artificial intelligence tools to support students who uh are in happen to be in this group and who may
057not be at grade level for any particular subject. So there could be um teachers leveraging tools either with students or to support students. um it might be difficult for a third, fourth or fifth grader to actually see those explicit moves, but we would hope that that is the case here. And then seeing on slide um the next slide, table 24 shows that same um breakout for grades 6 through 12. Again, we see slightly lower scores uh because we believe that kids are recognizing at these grades that um there's more that we could be doing and they're right. Um, but we still see a higher score in our Hispanic Latino group, which again could be related to the significant support that we're um putting into supporting those students. Um, and though it is not expected that
058the vast majority of students in the Hispanic or Latino group are learning English, there is definitely the possibility that there are some students responding to this positively because they're using translation tools or other services to help them uh be successful in school. Table 25 shows a breakdown for grades three through five by gender. Slightly higher scores for our female students. Um, I tend to think this could have something to do with um some creativity aptitude that often our younger female students might uh embody. And we have opened one AI tool that has been vetted for students and it is within Canva which is one of our more um favored creative expression tools. Um and it's very possible. I haven't looked at the statistics to back this up, but my suspicion is that there could be
059some um creation of amazing artwork by students in those grades in that tool. Uh grades 6 through 12, we see slightly lower scores. Um again, still favoring our female students and um lowest for our students who don't identify as male or female. And then table 27 u these last two tables will show um statistics for our groups based on some other characteristics. Again we see ELLL highest once again in grades three through five. Uh interestingly we see the lowest average score among our highly capable students. Not to be a broken record, but I think some of our highly capable students have been exposed to artificial intelligence tools that they are not seeing used in their classroom and they're like, "What are we doing?" So, I think that's where some of that's coming from. That bears
060out again in our uh breakdown for grades 6 through 12 where we see high um EL or ELLL scores and lower highly capable scores as well. So taking all of that in mind um things that we do and are doing and plan to do related to this particular measure um starts with infrastructure. Uh we are just in the final days of standardizing every instructional space in the district with the same audiovisisual equipment. And that may seem like we're focusing on stuff, but the importance there is that there will be no instructional space in the district where students don't have access to the same kinds of technologies. Just at the beginning of this year, um the access that a student had to an interactive uh display panel depended on the particular classroom that they were in
061or the teacher that taught in that space or, you know, decision- making from two or three phases of this ago. and so we didn't have an equitable experience for students across the district. So standardizing this technology not only gives students access to the tools but also creates an environment where we can have professional learning opportunities where teachers can't say I can't go to that because I don't have that equipment. Instead we can see grade level teams, department teams, school teams coming around um best practices as it relates to this and not isolated use of those technologies. I also will point out that audio systems are really the one educational technology that is backed by a ton of research. So maintaining these systems and having expectations for teachers to use them is really powerful. It is
062the one techn it's not the most glamorous but it's definitely the one that has the best research behind it. In terms of professional development, I mentioned before, you know, creating this um environment across the system where everybody has access to the same set of tools, but but can use those tools in a an infinite number of ways. Uh gives us great opportunities for professional development, including modeling best practices, especially as it pertains to artificial intelligence. Um we have produced our guidance around artificial intelligence and we've uh created several artificial intelligence um courses that we have delivered to teachers beginning uh last spring and all the way through this year. Um and part of what we do there is to model uh how teachers should be using and how students should be using artificial intelligence to
063like do good and not evil, right? So modeling good prompting skills, modeling critical thinking as it pertains to thinking hard about the prompt that goes in and thinking hard about the stuff that comes out and not just assuming and not just copying and pasting. Right? These are critical thinking skills. We also deliver professional development in multiple modalities. Just like we leverage universal design for learning for students, we do the same for teachers and not everybody learns the same. And everybody has different ways of bringing in content and making sense of concepts. So we have asynchronous, we have in-person, we have hybrid, we have digital, we have a very robust staff toolbox where people can do independent learning. Lots of options there. Um, strongly this year, but definitely in bits and pieces leading up to this
064year, we have been uh doing more work to align our professional development with the initiatives that folks are experiencing in the classroom. So rather than I'm going to a schooly training, teachers are I'm going to an MTSS training where I may also learn how to adapt my schooly classroom to have kids doing different more personalized things appropriate to their um particular needs. So that's been a lovely outcome from the reorg where instructional technology and teaching and learning have become one. Um it definitely started before this but it's really come alive this year. I'm excited about that. We also have been focused on student- centered learning environments where all students are leveraging their particular assigned device and the services available to them to personalize the experience for themselves and where teachers can um not just make
065every kid do the same thing so to speak. The picture on this slide is actually um one such experience. This is a little lesson delivered through Seessaw which is our learning management system for the littles. And this student is interacting with um an activity that's giving them feedback. So they're dropping shapes into categories and they're getting feedback from the tool. And this was developed by the teacher who wanted the student to learn about pentagons or you know other shapes. So while this student and a student sitting next to them might be doing similar things, they're not doing the exact same activity and they're not getting the exact same feedback. So this is a personalized learning experience. Um, I've talked about that a little bit. Uh, personalized learning, again, aligning the tools to MTSS and UDL
066very explicitly. The like this tool helps with this sort of engagement and this tool would be a great service for our students in that tier three. Um, and also focused on project-based learning activities for students too, so they can bring, you know, technology to the table to serve higher purposes. And I'll finish with critical thinking projects where we have um several schools doing interdisciplinary projects that bring together you know multiple content um sets of expertise and um AMD I think you're going to talk about those last two. Yeah. Great. KMS community outreach and national history day. Yeah. Uh Kenmore Middle School has a a fabulous community outreach work that they've been doing where they bring real world um projects into the classroom and they have been um Principal Robertson has gone out and found projects
067to bring into the classroom where they've really actually tried to solve some of those projects and then present them back to the the uh community organization where they came from. And then uh National History Day is just another example of real world problems that they um they are working to solve and then present and travel across the country to show off their presentation. So we have lots of different uh critical thinking projects that our students are involved in as well. I'll also put in a plug though it's not on this slide, sorry. Um for our AI immersive camp that we're offering this summer, this was a sort of serendipitous um activity that was came across our desks a few months ago. Um in Spirit AI is a an organization that brings together alumni from MIT
068and Stanford to work with students, high school and middle school students in particular um but also um folks in higher ed as well to look at artificial intelligence in service of solving social problems. So this summer we have a two-eek camp that we have about a hundred students already registered for um that will allow them to learn about artificial intelligence um from a content standpoint but then also be able to leverage their skills to attack a social problem. Um super excited about it. We have uh really great support from some of our vendor partners. We were able to secure $21,000 in scholarships for these students. So, 22 of these students are going to this camp for free, which is really cool. If you're interested, that starts July 7th at North Creek High School. Yeah, I'm
069excited. So, I think um it's time for questions and discussion. All right, we're going to continue with the tradition of me asking first. Um, I have a couple questions. I heard translation of the data multiple times, which is really helpful. Um, how are we proving or disproving that hypothesis around the data? For example, I heard, you know, there were higher scores in some of the groups, specifically the Hispanic and Latino groups in some of these questions, and we said it is likely because of access to translation technology and exposure to more technology compared to some of the other groups. How are we um kind of proving or disproving that? are we doing that work? Um, so we best understand the data and understand if that truly is the the truth or if it's still hypothesis
070to that. Um, well, good research creates more questions and I I think that's what we're seeing. We can't predict the differences between groups until we see them. And then that leaves us with wonderings and um when necessary we will dig deeper into you know why these things are occurring. I I couldn't I wouldn't feel comfortable saying prove or disprove. I mean I think if there are certainly places where we need to dig deeper and try to understand the predictors of an effect. Um there's also limited space that we can use in the panorama vehicle and there's also limited interventions we can do in terms of going into a classroom and surveying students. So at at some point the learning does more harm than good and that's something that we have to balance and figure out.
071So I I don't quite know I don't quite know how to give a general answer to that question. Can Do you want to clarify and have me ramble on more? No, that that that's good. I I don't know if it's of value to prove or disprove the hypothesis. It's more of a verification of we believe this is true based on this data, but to your point, we can't go in further to figure out if it truly is. Well, we do go in, right? I mean, it's people won't we don't have time for people to appreciate all the conversations that occur around the data and there's a lot of data that we report. So, when we find something like this, the conversations follow and and we do what you would probably call an informal analysis that's
072of the more street qualitative type of perspective. and um you know there's no place to unpack those thousands of conversations that happen. So it does prompt those type of responses even though people don't necessarily see them in the in the PowerPoint in the um the presentation. It um which is which I love. I mean that's my job is to um to try to solicit findings that are interesting and then the conversations that follow the ELLL finding u in terms of the AI especially with the grade 6 or 12 it's a big difference right we the standard deviations around one and um when that happens in the data both here and in I ready we often see differences around 02 of a and so it's like 10% 20% of a standard deviation that that ELLL mean
073and the other means are like they're getting near a standard deviation apart. So, there's something really big going on. But what could be unpacked is is that for all the students or for some of the students, it's just an interesting finding. We don't have an answer. I don't have a definitive answer for it right now. I think it's also important to recognize that in terms of that question that this is perception data and there's something different when you think about perception data as opposed to like looking at outcome data looking at you know if if our theory of action is when we give students access to translation tools or this kind of technology then they will better access curriculum or they will better understand a concept. so that you know they'll ultimately meet or exceed
074grade level expectations and move forward. I think it would be interesting to take the perception data and couple it together with some of that academic data that we collect in other places and see if there is perhaps a correlation. I was just going to follow up on that because I love me some good data and a mystery is always fun, right? and and I find it fascinating why um our ELELLL students uh rate higher. I find it heartbreaking that 26% of our eighth graders are three or more grade levels below in reading. And given the limited resource, time, money that we have, I would rather us put our energies into looking into the why for the concerning heartbreaking data than the well that's kind of interesting. You know, we can look at it and go
075that's that's kind of cool actually that that's higher. But let's if we're going to dig into why and take that time, let's do it around the data where um we we know kids need to be reading at grade level and we've got to put the energy there. My my question is a somewhat a a follow on with director trans also. Um in looking at at the wording again I know there's only so many words we could put in there but um I found myself wondering what exactly that the students were um what question they were responding to. Is it that school is helping them to learn how to use the technology, the devices, the AI or whether school is effectively showing them how to use those the technology, the devices to learn better? It you
076see the difference between them learning about the tool versus learning how to use the tool for something else. Right. Exactly. um understand your question and you know clearly there's at school they have access to it or hopefully everyone will now have equitable access you know across the board and I so stop me if I I just go rambling off but that you know it generates other wonderings with respect to are some of the responses that we get because we have some students who don't have access outside of school and so yes school is very much helping them to learn how to use the technology and they have access to the technology to help them learn. Um, so I also wondered um for our older students, particularly with the responses with AI, if they just their
077responses were because they figured they already know how to do all of this, you know, and so their their scores went down. Um, and it it could be I mean they have a lot more experience and many of them outside of school are using this kind of technology for a lot of things. So maybe they just get to the point where they feel that they already know it. So no, school isn't helping me with this because I don't I don't need that help. Um, and back to intellectual humility. Well, as as briefly as I can say the these items were not lifted from published research. These were created in-house. They were reviewed several times. Um there's no place to land an item that makes everybody happy. I can tell you that there was a variant
078about, you know, it's helping me learn how to solve social problems because that's how our goal connects. But then you're surveying really maybe more than one thing at a time. So the item was worded this way for a couple of reasons. the school is helping me is consistent with the way Panorama words other items. It was also worded that way to avoid students who are superb at AI because they learned it all away from school. So we really wanted to capture whether school is teaching them to do this and that's something we have to consider when we look at the results. But the reason it's worded this way is the whole point of an evaluation loop is to make it compelling. So, we want to know whether students feel like school is helping them do
079this. Um, I don't have a way in my back pocket to assess how good they are with technology. Um, um, we we can do that, but this was the way that we settled on to try to make this compelling to have our system look at it and see, do our students self-report that we are helping them learn these two skills. So, that's why they're worded the way they are. And just to pull some if I'm to pull some threads together, you know, going back to the wording of the measure itself, you know, there is the access aspect which this directly measures, but the point about enhancing student learning. I mean, I think that there's again there's just going to have to be a need of trying to pull together multiple reports and um and trying
080to figure that out. It's just I think it's something it's good that we're wrestling with it because that's what we're trying to get to is um there's it's every six months it's going to be different anyway. So, we're just going to have to keep wrestling with it. I think I'll try and make this quick since we're coming up on time and we have one more measure. I think um as far as you know I I acknowledge we have limited resources and where we want to spend our time is very important. Um, I'm wondering if we're taking any action based off of the data that we collected specifically on AI. That's question number one. And question number two is, are we helping the students understand what AI is? Because I don't know if a majority of
081even the adult population understand that a search engine is also a form of AI and AI has been around for a very long time. So when we ask you know are we teaching you student about AI do they understand what we're asking when we say AI uh my guess is that we have a variety of understandings of what AI is both among our student population as well as our adult population. Um we have instructional technology has attempted to not just teach AI explicitly but we've also um embedded it within uh a number of the professional learning opportunities that have been offered this year including uh one uh that was required for all staff to attend. So it was not a training specifically focused on AI. It was a training focused on universal design for learning.
082And there's a segment of that training that talks about the application of artificial intelligence to service goals and strategies within UDL. Um we also have I would say pretty robust guidance as it pertains to the use of artificial intelligence. What it is, what it isn't. Um the extent to which people ingest that guidance and use it on a day-to-day basis is variable. Um, and then I would say what, and I'm gonna make eye contact with Director Hayes because she was with me at a uh community forum at Inglemore High School last week where AI was the topic. And we did a little bit of slideshow just to make sure everybody was meaning the same thing when they talked about artificial intelligence. Um, and then we started some tabletop conversations about, you know, use of these
083tools at home. And there were students in the room and parents in the room. And the pervasive takeaway for me was um we have a lot of work to do to help change our system to adequately even bring artificial intelligence literacy into the hands of our teachers and our students. And as director Hayes put it so eloquently, we are a big, sorry, not very nimble system that doesn't respond well to rapid changes in technologies. We just aren't. And I would say that's true for our district. It's true across the state. It's true across the country. Political conversation for another time. But we we have this challenge in front of us that we can't even well define because of how quickly the technology is changing. Uh one example of this that came up recently was we
084have adopted chemistry curriculum at the high school level that uh is provided by CK12 which is an open educational resource. Awesome. It's freeish, right? It's free like a puppy you might say. This is wonderful curriculum. It was vetted through our CMAC process five years ago, I think, as a supplemental chemistry curriculum. Teachers adore it. without notice, that provider embedded an AI tool into their entire platform. And because our filters are robust and it spotted the AI tool, it blocked that curriculum. And so we ended up in this conversation about and it was it was it's been a fascinating though frustrating conversation. Do we open that up uh given the prevalence of AI now within this tool or do we keep it somehow blocked knowing that we would be giving students access to a tool that
085could fundamentally change how instruction how teaching and learning happens in that particular content area. And we're again we're not a nimble system. We can't bring it back through CMAC in enough time for it to be useful. We can't continue to pretend like service providers are not going to keep adding AI tools into their platforms. Schooly just announced and made available their AI tools. There's a big old button that flashes at me every time I log in as an admin. Turn this on. Turn this on. Turn this on. Uh Britannica, one of our favorite open encyclopedic resources, now has a chatbot that is powered by ChatGpt. So students have access to basically chat GPT within Britannica. So I we're in a situation where we either adjust or we fail like I I don't mean to be
086harsh about it but AI is the disruption to disrupt all disruptions. It is the thing that has to force some conversations about how we teach students. What is relevant? What are they getting in a school experience? And how are we preparing them when they walk off that graduation stage because 30 seconds after that they're going to be in a world they already are in a world but they're going to be in a world where it's going to be expected that they have some literacy skills around AI that might have been too provocative. This is why we adapted Panorama on this issue is to be a forwardinking district and it creates this conversation and at the very least you have 12,000 students who twice a year go am I learning this at school and the teachers
087see it and the administrators see it and they know it's coming. It's not like they're um they're unaware but this is prompting that response. This is part of prompting that response and why we've met and supported this type of change. I mine's What do you need from the board? How much time do you have? What? Well, maybe we'll plant that seed. Um because we've got a technology parameter. Do we need to update that? What What do you need us to do to help? I would enjoy further conversation on this topic. Okay, done. President Cass, we're at 620. We have two more measures to go. What's going to target time for us tonight? Well, I think 6:45 would be reasonable. We think I can I can move through measure four. Here we go. Breth of coursework.
088Um, so measure four is increased equitable access and enrollment across student subgroups in the arts, social sciences, sciences, and technology classes. So for this very small um print uh chart it's it's quite all right. It shows the past three years of middle school elective wheel courses. So basically the whole point of this chart is to show that we have lots and lots of offerings at our middle school in the elective wheel and it's all based on what um middle school students want to take and what our middle school teachers have the expertise to be willing to teach. So um that's what lands on the elective wheel. There are lots of different opportunities even within our middle schools. So, it's really pretty impressive that our kids get uh such a vast amount of options at the
089middle school level and lots of them fall into the arts. They fall into um lots of technology choices already at the middle school level. So, CTE, there's just a lot of choices in the middle school for kids. Uh then if you move on to um our AP Whoops. Oh, I'm moving. I thought you were moving. Sorry. Um, so here our AP um courses, we have a lot of opportunities at the high school level in terms of AP. Over the last three years, it really has continued to stay fairly stable. Some go up, some go down, but generally we have quite a um large number of enrolled students in our AP courses. Our social sciences tend to be the highest enrolled followed by um math courses. sometimes exchanging places with our science courses. Uh but we
090have a lot of students enrolled in um a variety of courses of AP um throughout our years. So our students are enrolling in a lot of highlevel courses. Our IB courses are very much the same. We have continued uh large numbers of students enrolled in our IB courses. Uh it stays traditionally high. So we have a lot of students participating in some highlevel coursework. In table number 32, uh this is the percentage of AP courses grouped by um department and disagregated by ethnicity. So this one we can spend just a little bit more time. If you would like to look at all of the small numbers here on the screen, you can probably see it better up there. Um I think this one shows a little bit more interesting uh information about um what percentage
091of our population and what the uh what the topics are that they are interested in. So if we look at our science courses, our technology, uh, and then social studies, I guess I was surprised a little bit by the large numbers of social studies, um, courses and, uh, who's taking those courses. So I found that to be surprising to me. Our next um table 33, we have still um our females versus males. We do have more males enrolled in business and we have more females enrolled in English, but the percentages are not vastly different. We have approximately the same um percentage enrolled in social studies. We do have more males enrolled in technology education. World language is pretty close to the same and our math jumping back up is within 2%. So I think generally
092um we're pretty close. Health was interesting to me that it is off by about 3 to 4%. But otherwise I think our um numbers are fairly similar. That is one year. Really really quick sorry question about so n size is n size measuring how many students are enrolled in those classes or how many students are in the population in Northshore in general? That would be that would have access to those questions but may or may not be enrolled. There it's enrolled. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for answering that. Surprisingly brief from you. Great. Okay. Table 34. All right. On table 34, we have AP course enrollment by um school department and disagregated by demographic group again. And this one is uh by our 504, our English language learners, our special education and our highly capable
093students. Uh again, we have a a large number of students enrolled in social studies. This has to be because we offer social studies classes. I'm looking at you. But I think it's interesting because I would expect a higher number percentage in math. Maybe it's because I pay so much attention to math lately. But um honestly, I think that the percentages are going across um are not all of that different. I do would like to see an increase in some of our um population of special education students taking some of our um wanted classes. Actually, that that is something that I think could be a goal of ours. And in table 35 are middle and high school students in the least restrictive environment by proportion over time. If we look at our LRE categories 80 to
094100% they have increased every year and I think that that is the direction we are trying to move with our students who receive special education services. uh and then we are decreasing in the other percentages except we have a little bit of an increase in 0 to 39%. So um that is our breath of coursework and then for our strategies and supports we have I think just if you look at all of the tables that we've provided we continue to offer just an amazing amount of course offerings that reflect the interests of our kids. Uh I think it's impressive uh the amount of courses that change and come across our table every single year, especially being now down in curriculum and instruction. Uh there are a lot of courses that are interdisciplinary, so they um
095really speak to what the students are asking for. There's a lot more culturally relevant content that students are asking for as well. Uh and then we have been able to provide more information sessions to families about um the future and what it is that that students need to do prepare to prepare for that future. I thought the family symposium even though it was it had a small number of attendees if we move the time don't have it on the most beautiful um night of the year. uh you know it was about 75 degrees outside but if we move it a couple months earlier uh the content for that evening was fabulous and every single one of those sessions could be something that many of our families need to access with the information about how to
096access college and what is the American system provides. So that is definitely something I think we need to do again just at a different time of year. Uh so very impressed with with how that was put on at North Creek High School. Uh and then um supporting staff with with training. Uh we just need to continue to always offer how to support all the diverse learners in our classrooms. And there are so many things that we can focus on from how to provide accommodations for our multilingual learners and so that our students can meet the cater requirements that they need. uh there's just a lot for everyone to learn. None of us ever quite has it mastered. And then all of this data that we've presented to you has a second layer so that we
097can identify um any gaps that we need and um why maybe students aren't accessing certain courses. So there you go. Measure four. real quick wondering around the data um because it shows 0% uh in Wanik of English language learners and 0% female and I know that we have four English language learner students that are enrolled in the welding program. Yeah, there's a little nuance that we need to point out. Okay, that is these are AP courses. So the real mystery was where does Wanik align with AP? And this was a fun adventure that took a lot longer than I expected, but it is a uh it is a course at the DigiPen Academy that ties to advanced computer science principles. So don't confuse it with the WAN itself. If you want a Wanuk report, go
098to strategic goal 5 that we did in November with the certification and all the great efforts that that group has done. Okay. Just one really quick comment because I know we have to move on on the timing of things. We learned a lot from the family resource center in terms of like what attracted folks to come out to these events and it was really their students performing, there was food provided, there were was child care, all that. I know we can't do that every time, but if we want people to attend something like a family symposium, providing something like that would probably help. And I would tag on to that coming from my geographic area, it can you know doing something at the end of the workday coming from the south end to the north
099end is sometimes a barrier for folks too. Um and my I just have a wondering so um college and the high school classes you know again the these reports can only be so large. I get that especially as we're bumping into our and our the end of our time together. But any thought into looking at at that data as you know within measure 4. I I'll look at whatever the board wants me to look at. Um it I mean we're routinely now hitting 40 tables. So exactly I I make these decisions in my office about how big they can get and then the font gets too small and I feel uncomfortable with that ugly table. So um it yeah this maybe is an offline request or well yeah no it which it could be but
100I know that program has grown since the state started covering the fees. So it just might be interesting to see for diverse representation within college and the high school programs. And let's remember that we cover advanced academic experiences. I believe that's the goal five connection. So this is how does this relate to critical thinking? And um we've had a tradition with this goal of associating it with AP and IB courses that we could think of them as sort of um one of the more advanced type of experiences people have. But which courses and why to map on to a critical thinking social problem solving goal is something that I would need to think through. Measure five. This is our social problem solving measure. Increased percentage of students who apply learning to solve real world culturally
101relevant challenges in imaginative ways. This um question was new to the panorama survey in the fall. Participation with great was grades 6 through 12. And you can see there the um scale about student perspective. School is helping me to learn how to address issues in society and from strongly disagree to strongly agree. This table provides the excuse me the frequency of responses discre disagregated by grade. So you can see across there from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Ideally we would reduce the number of students who do not agree. Table 37 gives us the type analysis that was in 36, but this one uses means and standard deviations to make the comparison across the grades easier. There's an interesting what Craig calls a U-shaped function where greater student agreement occurs in grades six and grades 12.
102Table 38 begins to examine the student perspective about school and social problems solving which is disagregated by ethnicity. Generally speaking, students from different ethnicities report similar beliefs. Um, students identifying is white report on average the lowest satisfaction with this social problem solving. Table 39 looks at it by gender. Table 40 by demographic group. Interesting here too, the English language learner reports the greatest satisfaction. We don't really have an explanation as to of why that might be. Those those three items, technology, AI, and social problem solving. Those ones all go right in a row. So if they're really happy with the technology, it might be dragging those responses. So I'm going to embed one. And are you happy with research and evaluation right in the middle? So they can just uh table 41. Um we tried
103to think of all the clubs that we have and there are many more than that are listed here that can easily identify with social problem solving. Um we could have done three pages probably of clubs but we did uh limit the list to this. Um many of these experiences are explicitly tied to critical thinking and social problem solving. Um and there's things we haven't listed like the social um the student justice collective, the student justice network. Um you'll see on the next slide that innovation lab high school is primarily geared towards interd interdisciplinary projects, project based learning. They just finished better world day where they're actually looking at social problems and coming up with solutions. So when we look at strategies and supports to increase um the students responses to agreeing with social problem solving
104being in their classes, Craig and I spent some time talking about that it could be that this teachers aren't really explicitly connecting the fact that these are social real problem issues. We believe it happens regularly throughout our courses, but it's not a direct connection to what they're doing in the classroom and they're working together with their peers collaboratively and then moving to the panorama question of I'm engaging in social problem solving. So making that direct connection may not be occurring. So we may need to be more explicit about that. I mentioned interdisciplinary opportunities as both Shelby did and AMD did this evening. We have AP Capstone um at North Creek High School. IB theory of knowledge is another course that directly um connects students to global real life problems that they need to solve. Ethnic
105studies project-based learning. Um we've mentioned National History Day this evening, our robotics competitions that our students participate in. Fantastic opportunity to look at how to solve the real the next technology problems perhaps. Um, but we know that we need to create additional opportunities within content areas to focus on social problems. I do believe it exists. I also because I see it when I'm out in the classes, the principles see it, the school leaders see it. I don't think it's explicitly connected to the answering that question. So, we may need to do further investigation around that. If I could just offer brief summary and I I appreciate what uh Director Hayes said about really making sure that we're focusing on things like eighth grade reading and some of those um important academic areas. I would also
106offer that both goals two and four allow us to expand our thinking about what intelligence is. And when we look at some other areas of intelligence, we get to see some students that are marginalized by practices in reading and math that may um rise up. So um I agree we need to continue to focus in those areas and it's also good to see some of some of that other intelligence recognized as well. So appreciate the opportunity to do that this evening. I was just going to say that I think there's some really neat opportunities, particularly when thinking about alternative forms of communication that our kids are having a lot more robust access to in them being able to demonstrate intelligence in a way that is understandable by other people because I think that's a lot
107of kids get left behind in a lot of ways because their access to being able to communicate well. And so I get why some of the special ed numbers were, you know, saying like, "Yes, I'm getting a lot more access to things because of that technology piece is providing that for them because those are kids who historically would not um be acknowledged as having a lot of intelligence. So I think that's a really important thing that we need to remember. And also same thing goes for English learn English language learners. the same thing. It's like that commu the communication piece around the technology piece for those particular groups is really um highlighting the abilities that they have that have been historically not able to be measured because they haven't been able to demonstrate it. So
108EA team to that point I just want to note that's the benefit of the technology levy directly that was a line item in that work as an example one of our young um Sorenson CP Johnson award winners had his iPad with him at the concert hall and because I I happened to be stand there I could see him using it before he came up on stage. And so it was just a perfect I thought through line to how the communicate just like you said vice president so tech how the technology just unlocks the worlds for our our kiddos. It's a good way to use technology. Sometimes it gets a bad rap. Um, I I know that this is more than just about our own individual children, but I do want to acknowledge that I do
109see the difference and the impact it has even in my own home having a third and sixth grader, the critical thinking, the questions that are being asked and I ready and me being able to look over his shoulder and see, oh, how are you answering these questions? And they're actually very thoughtful, right? And that's not just something where you could just click through and get a nice score, but he has to think about it and he has to challenge himself and he actually has to have reading comprehension, which I think is important for um a lot of our students who are learning English to be able to have that help in reading comprehension because sometimes my third grader struggles and he's English first language so I can't imagine what it's like for a family that
110doesn't have English as their first language. Um, and I see it also with our sixth grader with the I think he called it argu argumentative essay. Yeah. Yeah. And um talking about what type of government system he would prefer and so it was very entertaining to listen to to that. Well, thank you everyone. this again. We we could we could stay here longer, but we have we have some business to do. So, thank you so much. Um I'm going to call this study session ajourned so we can prep for the 7 o'clock meeting. Really appreciate the report and all the hard work. Thank you everyone.