001oh yeah all right good evening um welcome everyone uh in attendance I know we're gonna hear from you very soon but let me do some businessy stuff first I'm calling the Wilton Board of Education meeting to order off on October 20th uh is there a motion to approve the agenda so moved thanks Ruth second thanks Pam all in favor all right are there any comments from the public okay is there a motion to approve the consent agenda so moved yeah a second all in favor all right this brings us to the best part of the meeting our salute to Excellence this is a practice that was started three three years ago by Dr Smith and the chairman of the board at the time Chris Finkelstein and so we take very randomly in terms of timing
002but the superintendent and the staff select programs that they feel are deserving of special recognition by the board and by the public so this evening we are delighted to have another award salute to Excellence and I'm going to turn it over to Dr Smith to do the introduction thank you very much and welcome everybody and welcome to our viewers at home we're so very pleased tonight to recognize and celebrate our Unified sports team Wilton United and also announce that Wilton High School has again been recognized as a Special Olympics unified Champion school which is tremendous schools are recognized for demonstrating an inclusive School climate exuding a sense of collaboration engagement and respect for all members of the student body and staff and unified Champion schools that receive this National Banner recognition have had to meet
00310 national standards of excellence so these standards assess a special Olympic Unified sports programs inclusive youth leadership practices and whole school engagement so tonight joining us to celebrate and to present the banner from the seaac is Paul mengold who drove down this evening from Woodbridge our high school staff that are here are Mr Elias arita Emily Rappel and Patty Berkowitz and then we have a number of our students I see Alan and I see Emma as well as a number of their mentors so what I'm going to ask is that all of our students and staff come forward we're going to just gather right around me here and then I know a few of you have a few things you want to say so come on up [Applause] thank you so come here because great
004this is perfect so why don't we have Mr mangles from up and you can we'll have you present the banner and if there's a few things you want to say we'll start with you I think we can have our friends hold the banner and then I know we want to hear from Emma and a few others those things don't come in blue and white okay in colors request we'll have to hit the uh um congratulations this is certainly a well-deserved honor Dr Smith stole a little bit of my thunder in this presentation but I I everything he said was right on target for those of you who don't know anything about Unified sports or have never been to a unified sporting event I think you're missing one of the greatest things that happens in a
005high school setting and at a middle school setting in Connecticut we have about approximately 135 high schools that are actively involved in this Wilton being one of the best we also have about 85 middle schools we're starting to grow that back I mean obviously the pandemic they're a little blew that off out of our lane for a little bit but we're coming back strong and I I can't thank you enough for supporting it financially and your great leadership Dr Smith and our our principal I don't know where she's Dr O'Donnell thank you and our coaches all right who are here this evening one was a former student of mine okay and uh happy to see her actively involved in Unified sports but they do a wonderful job and and the things that Dr Smith said
006about all the the 10 factors this is a national award this comes from Special Olympics North America and there are over a thousand applications for this award and only five schools in Connecticut got this award and it's wonderful that it would happen again after a four-year tenure and then to come back so you know your support our your athletic director's support which makes this happen without the athletic director you know it's kind of a uphill battle and we see that with a lot of schools but our coaches and and your financial support and recognizing it uh it also uh your support makes it uh sustainable the sustainable program many schools do not have uh paid coaches and therefore what happens is a big transition and then we lose programming and we start all over so
007it's wonderful that you can find I don't think you'll find and haven't been a former athletic director this is the highlight of Athletics and it's what Athletics is all about and you guys have done a wonderful job and I wanna I'm sorry it took so long um it's well worth my time and your efforts all of you to put on such a great product and a great school and a tremendous Unified sports program and for those of you who don't know what Unified sports is it's a collaboration with students with disabilities partnering with students without disabilities and participating in a wide range not just Athletics as Dr Smith said and so I thank you again for supporting it and congratulations on a great award and hang that with pride [Applause] thanks again so Emily we
008have someone else who wants to share a few words you're gonna talk to everyone just make sure your voices up all the way you ready thank you everyone for coming I love Unified sports I get to play soccer with my friends my coaches helped me a lot thank you for this award go Unified sports [Applause] I very very well done thank you thank you thank you Emily for you and the team so in addition to the banner a small town right so we'll hang that with pride we'll have a banner handling ceremony like we do with the rest of our Championship managers we want to thank Bobby Russian and our Athletic program for supporting this program so well we know they're going to continue their support and we're going to you know we'll be back
009again in four more years foreign [Laughter] and now Center everybody thank you perfect hey great awesome okay [Applause] thank you yeah [Music] [Laughter] appreciate it [Music] [Laughter] oh yeah patch yes people I've known since he was 18 months so yeah it looks pretty great pretty great that was all great and probably the highlight of our evening but we will probably I know it's hard to follow that here comes the buzz kill yeah well just for that I'm not going to give a board chairs report I'm not I'm just kidding superintendent Europe all right well listen you know it's I like to highlight and celebrate Heaven that was a good day there is some other good I mean this was a highlight but we do have some other good news last night I think some of
010us were together for an hour or so um down in the Clune we had our middle school high school combined chorus concert and if you didn't make it and I think most of the town was there because you couldn't find a seat if you needed one you can find the link online it was terrific so we want to congratulate all of our music teachers who participated um Francesca gray who's new to us this year working with Janet Nobles at Middleburg book will mandelbaum who is also new to us this year working at the high school with Malcolm Carlin and Mike Gordon was there also helping facilitate so they just did a terrific job since last we met we received news that in addition to our 12 National mayor semi-finalists 29 other members of the class
011of 23 have been recognized as commended students so that means those students placed among the top five percent nationally on the PSAT and msqt back in 2021 so we want to congratulate all of those students and then last just a little bit we'll have Bobby come back at the end of the Fall Sports season to give us an update but this season's been really successful so far it is rapidly coming to an end yesterday I think it was yesterday our varsity girls cross country team had their FCI championship and placed third Grace gugliyama and Maya salvino each earned First Team all fciac Sasha langholm and Leah Lombardi are in second team alessiak and Aaron Kelly one of our freshmen run the run the Freshman girls race for the FCX so that was pretty exciting and
012then on the boys side Mikey Burns earned First Team all leftiak and Alex Cohen earned a second Team all FCI so it's been a good week my report all right maybe now we should go home [Music] [Laughter] okay committee reports um I short circuited the meeting for this topic last time so I apologize but let's make up for it now so teaching and learning I know you have met so we met um October 4th and we talked about 6141s there are seven coming your way um physics two two three um Sandra Thomas Scott Durkee presented American sign language for Amy Broderick presented music technology 2 was Malcolm Carlin and Nyle Reynolds sports broadcasting was Maria Naim and Fran compar and podcasting and AP seminar were presented by Ken denage and fancomper I think I'm gonna
013leave it at that because it's all coming for you guys to just great go over here research um and then in general we just talked a little bit about 6141s and wondering what happens once all of these are approved um and can we go back at some point and kind of hear how they're going we have approved over ones and then we'd asked a question about what happens uh course from the list like how does that ever happened or does it ever happen we talked about the summer Intervention Program survey results um Lynn driver presented and about a third of the students families responded overall the feedback was really positive the one asked was to find out earlier to help with planning which I think is challenging in identifying that early who needs support at
014the end and then we talked about maybe doing surveys now that we have one ready to go maybe doing it right after summer program stops and the last thing we talked about was banned books week There's a community Forum to look into it to read to discuss in short I think it was determined that the positives outweigh the negatives and maybe moving forward we would take a look at everything that was going to be up there and keeping in mind our audience and what's going on in the world today and make some decisions about how it was presented and maybe the signage that was on the table with the books that were there okay thank you yep patience yeah yeah so we had also met on October 4th and we have a long list of
015policies that we're working through and I read them off last time and we kind of divided them into categories of things that need additional work I need legal review things that are just Technical and will come in the next few weeks and things and some of them that are on the redo category um but just to highlight everything it was the selection of school library materials that needs additional work to it work experience internship in community service program that's just technical the comprehensive planning policy is going to have a redo of its language along with the suicide and prevention and intervention policy um staff development policy needs a little bit of work to it student production of goods and services this is an old one we're not quite sure the purpose that it serves so
016we're going to investigate further and also have a legal act I put to it um placement of special education services we just need to make sure that the legal language is still appropriate and the technical language it still matches today and pilot programs and research projects also need some work along with Sunday activities but those are more of the technical nature and along with the prohibition and recommendations for psychotropic drugs okay thank you and uh business operations so we met this morning at 7 30. and the sun did come out just to listen to Andrew to talk about the outplacement for day schools in starting November 1st we'll have an increase in their tuitions and so that will impact us going forward we talked about electrical and fuel compromising budget wise Miller fiscal and Middlebrook
017have solar panels so that's very helpful but the other schools are kind of using a lot of electricity and a lot of fuel and Don of course will update us all on that in a more specific way but it was a it was a bit of a heart meeting this morning it didn't last very long but the sun did come out so Kevin was pretty optimistic at the end but we had to hear some hard hard stuff for sure okay thank you um well on that note let's plunge right into the financial report well nothing's blown up it's just there isn't a whole lot of lightness either right yeah um the financials before you are September financials [Music] um the numbers that you see do include the records the last uh financial aid those are
018included in those numbers what is not on the unrecogenated amount was it's the Ceridian conversion and remember I talked about some reading conversion was the old payroll third-party payroll software when new world was implemented they never brought over the history of payroll so we need to bring the history into a new world because Ceridian is no longer going to support us with it that came in at an estimated about 18 000 that is not part of the numbers yet that project is still ongoing and as you made a call we froze the budget on September 27th as a precaution to our Rising special education class the concern for the excess cost reimbursement and our Rising utility costs we did talk about the utility costs this morning um you while some of our utilities are trending
019similar to last year at this time two of them are running slightly higher than what we would like to see around this time that's the building Fuel and electricity one would say well we have the solar panels are we getting a savings from using the solar panels we are seeing a savings but part of the bill and I'm not an expert on electricity so bear with me on this is the delivery or demand part and that part I believe is the bill they can increase the rate on that and we have no say over it the usage or the supplier part of it is are usage times a rate that we can control based on our usage and we do get a reduction on our electric bill for the solar production that we have solar
020production is calculated and captured by a third-party vendor and then we do pay a small fee to that vendor for the work that they do so all in all it's kind of the same as we were um we are still watching the accounts at this point okay any questions comments was that increase in tuition payment just coming in November was it higher than expected we have never before had a mid-year rise in tuition okay we received letters beginning yesterday with schools part of the issue is this private schools are having difficulty Staffing because of the shortage of special education teachers and so they're paying huge premiums to get special ed teachers [Music] so there's no kind of contractual component the students who are currently placed okay have a contracted tuition rate it's for anyone who
021is placed from November first on will have the new okay and I think after this morning we found out that's typically a few kids during a year during the year but there's still no perfect way of predicting that any other questions or comments um and Dr Smith you want to just briefly talk about our meeting with the board of Finance just to summarize sure yeah so sorry to surprise you yeah not everybody was there so last Tuesday uh Debbie and I joined the board of finance and I talked to him through some of the information I shared with all of you at our last meeting and uh just tried to forecast for them some of the challenges we're confronting as we move into this next budget planning cycle including the expiration of the arpa grants
022the challenges we have around special education outplacement tuition costs and you know I think what I heard back and you know Deb you can confirm this they were generally appreciative to have the information sooner I think you know my sense is also and kind of chunking it because there's a lot as you know to absorb so going forward what we'll continue to do is take some opportunities I think next round we'll spend some time really looking at utilities and utilities forecasting whatever else we can put together we'll spend some time here with you talking through that much more in depth but then paid another visit to them and we'll try to do that on a more routine schedule leading into the budget planning the more formal budget planning meetings that we have and I would
023hope that you know we'll just have a Richard dialogue as we told when we get to that point of the school year okay thanks yeah and just to reiterate what you said or emphasize it is the members of the board of Finance were appreciative that we were coming and talking earlier and so some of the budget parts will be the background they will have not have to start from scratch there okay um any other questions for Dawn or comments all right let's move on to the school and District action plans did you want to introduce them yes I just introduced uh Dr Smith who is orchestrating this portion good evening everybody please help us all right just go with it okay yeah we can see it sorry so I wanted to talk to you tonight
024a little bit about how we're getting better and how we're getting better and getting better specifically I want to talk a little bit about how we are transitioning on what could be considered traditional strategic to what is known as continuous Improvement based upon this site so our purpose tonight is to share our learning about the signs of improvement but also review with you our district and building plans for improving the academic and social emotional outcomes for our students so strategic improvements so you may remember that last year we focused our strategic Improvement efforts on this acceleration of framework it was intended to address the unfinished learning identified in student achievement data which was caused by the destructions to teaching and learning during the pandemic but as I mentioned to you then this is not really
025something new or different this is just good teaching but is now referred to as high quality instruction what was different for us last year was the degree of focus and Alignment we brought to implementing these practices and by we I mean classroom teachers building and central office administrators instructional coaches academic interventionists and special education staff and as you know from the achievement data that we reviewed at our last meeting we experienced a great deal of success at it as a result of those Improvement efforts students are growing academically at historically High rates and we've begun to narrow achievement gaps that have persisted for years so how did we do it the gist of the Strategic Improvement plans last year involved administrators primarily with the support of coordinators and coaches clearly communicating the vision for Accelerated
026learning and then helping staff to understand and implement the compliance consistently in the classroom what's important to understand about this framework is that although we can treat each of the components as separate Concepts in practice in the classroom they need to be addressed simultaneously in an integrated way and the best way to help teachers in doing that is to engage them in repeated cycles of data analysis planning implementation and reflection using the components of the framework to guide that process that work was done through a combination of program meetings professional Learning Time coaching cycles and iets and was supported through the teacher evaluation process and the academic intervention process the work was also highly individualized depending upon the demands of the curriculum and the skill levels of both teachers and students it's important to acknowledge
027that although we didn't meet with a great deal of success it was certainly not perfect and there is still room for improvement but I want you to hold on to that imperfection for a moment because that's where the transition from strategic Improvement to continuous Improvement will come in and so I shared with you a plan for academic Improvement which to be truthful is pretty much a repeat of what we did last year so I'm not going to go through through that in detail it worked albeit imperfectly so our plan is to institutionalize it for the wellness part I know Kim is slated to speak with you I think twice next month and so she'll be available too um talk it more in depth about the plan and answer some questions that I received I can
028give you a little bit um of an answer but I I really would prefer for Kim to be able to do that if that's okay I mean the bottom line um Nicola I think is that what we're trying to do so what's taking up everybody's time right now is crisis response and what we're trying to do is to get ahead of that by being more proactive and identifying problems earlier because when we intervene too late that's more of a Time suck than what we're trying to do proactively if that makes any sense but I think Kim can talk a little bit more in depth about that later that's okay and Ruth you talked a little bit about or asked questions a little bit about priorities and a number of um steps we have in the
029plan my only point is if you remember last year I think our plans were maybe four or five times the length they are now so I've tried to really pare it down and capture exactly what we're doing in terms of the academic part of that we're again we're not doing anything different than we did last year okay so I I don't think that it's um burdensome there does seem to be a lot under both our our efforts to increase the social emotional skills of our students as well as improve School climate but again with both of those things these are ongoing things that we've been doing so I don't think that it's an undue burden upon teachers we certainly as leaders and coordinators and coaches are hyper mindful of what it is we're asking staff
030to do so I think we've got a good plan and certainly if it does become too overwhelming for people we can certainly scale back on it does that make sense no it does I just um having it in front of me discreetly for this year without in conjunction of seeing it from last year and just trying to see how much of this is new and you're talking about putting time to it so it is it is it you know reinforcement and kind of institutionalization of a program or is it also new program new learning that gets added onto that right and I'm definitely aware that you know there's there's a tendency I think for us just see this good and certainly want to push it forward but I don't want to push it you know
031or add to it to the point that it becomes like a diminishing return sure I agree so you're kind of previewing what the rest of the slides are a little bit okay okay then we can move to the next one so at this point I want to talk a little bit about strategy versus business as usual so in a strategy to improve works it needs to become business as usual the way we supported teachers with the acceleration framework clearly had a positive impact on students that support needs to continue and become business as usual not an improvement strategy and if you'll notice I didn't call that plan I gave to you an improvement strategy it's just a plan for academic achievement and social emotional learning it's now going to become business as usual um but
032we also know that we still have variations in practice so how do we narrow those variations to ensure equity and sustained Improvement in learning if we could move along that's where continuous Improvement comes in next okay so to start this conversation I'd like to begin again with the acceleration framework and you can see that on the left as you can see the broad categories involve many discrete teaching practices and each of those can be broken down even further and just to give you an example feedback there are umpteen dozen books written on how to give effective feedback and that's just one item I have up there point is that high quality instruction involves a complex and sophisticated set of skills that have a high potential for variation among practitioners to narrow that variation we'll undoubtedly
033take a lot of time and effort but [Music] so what is the best way to approach this traditionally schools have engaged in what is called strategic planning and have been doing this for decades but across many Human Service professions there has been a move away from that sort of planning to something called continuous Improvement which is based on upon the emerging science of improvement or Improvement science to quote the Carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching which has been pioneering this work Improvement science seeks to discern what works for addressing a particular problem for whom and under what set of specific conditions it represents a field of study focused on the methods that facilitate or hinder efforts to improve quality in context-specific work processes and centers inquiry on on the day-to-day problems of practice that
034have genuine consequences for people's lives this approach has been widely adopted in the medical field and is now heavily influencing work in education continuous Improvement differ from strategic Improvement so up here what we have is kind of a comparison between traditional strategic Improvement and what's known as continuous Improvement the terms I use are linear versus iterative planning and what we're going to look at is the format assumptions dispositions and how we use data So In traditional linear strategic planning it's a traditional format that delineates all of the improvement work that a school system is going to try to undertake in a year it includes a combination of vision mission values goals and so forth the traditional kind of template that you're used to seeing with iterative planning it's a non-traditional format which you're going to
035see tonight that attempts to represent the relationship between a theory of action and the mechanisms for Change and I'm going to talk about mechanisms for change in a little bit because that's an important concept and continuous Improvement and we use non-linear formats these formats need to be constantly revised and updated [Music] in terms of assumptions traditional strategic planning we think that problems are well defined and understood in advance and what needs to be done to accomplish District goals that is the solutions is knowable in advance how come metrics are reviewed at regular time intervals and implementation is really a matter of compliance with the plan in iterative planning problems need to be researched to be understood and what needs to be done to accomplish District goals isn't completely knowable in advance both outcome and process
036metrics are critical but should be reviewed only when appropriate to the process and Educators need to learn their way into meaningful change there's one thing on this chart I'd like you to take away is that statement um what what we're trying to do is complex and when we approach this from a compliance issue teachers are simply just doing what we say when we're watching what we need to do is to engage Educators in the inquiry process so they themselves learn how the practice impacts students we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute the dispositions in traditional strategic Improvement is scientific management breaking the work into component parts monitoring and holding Educators accountable and managing formal processes whereas with iterative planning it's really a disciplined inquiry approach adopting a learning stance taking a
037systems perspective which I want to talk about also in a minute possessing an orientation towards action one of the things one of the phrases that we're now using is what can you do by next Tuesday which is important we want people to be action oriented and to be doing um capitalizing on the perspective of Educators and persisting Beyond initial Improvement efforts and for data it's really the difference between simply looking at quantitative outcome data and using that to hold people accountable versus quantitative and qualitative data to measure small scale tests of change we would go on but going back the bottom line is that we've been guided misguided to think that we know how to solve problems in advance and then can just write a plan and make sure it's implemented I think intuitively we've
038always known this but we just didn't know how to do it differently we are now beginning to understand that we should approach problems from the perspective inquiry and be very disciplined in following the inquiry process and so what does that involve exactly this is a visual representation of the inquiry process advocated on Improvement science it starts by spending time deeply understanding the problem and the system that produced it in fact one of the basic principles of improvement science is that a system is perfectly designed for the results it gets so we need to get better at understanding and defining how that happens before we embark on Solutions enlisted here are some tools that can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the problem in the system things like root cause diagrams and empathy interviews
039The Next Step at the top is to develop a shared theory of improvement and again there are tools to support us in doing that up to this point the process may seem pretty familiar to those of you of you who have engaged in traditional strategic planning but this is where continuous Improvement departs from prior practice instead of thinking of this theory of action thinking that this theory of action is the solution and then scaling it up across a building or District which is the traditional approach continuous Improvement uses rapid cycle prototyping and testing on a small scale before scaling up for those of you familiar with design thinking prototyping is kind of an experimental process where teams build prototypes to capture Design Concepts and then test them on users with prototypes teams can Define and
040validate their designs so they can scale up the right practices in a way they slow us down to speed us up by taking time to prototype our ideas we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early or sticking with a weak idea for too long I think that kind of speaks to what you were you were getting at so once you've developed a prototype you move into the heart of the process which is the plan do study act Cycles or what we're calling pdsa Cycles so what you do is you take a prototype plan how to implement it implement it and then study the effects and I have to say that's one of the things we didn't do very well with traditional strategic planning and then once you've studied how that plan to
041study I go plan to study acts like I went you then act and depending upon what happens the ACT part of the cycle may lead to further refinements of the Prototype or may necessitate going back to the drawing board because it's possible your theory of action was wrong which is another principle of improvement science that your initial theory is most likely wrong these pdsa Cycles are repeated thus the iterative name to the process and you don't scale up until you've perfected the Prototype or you have the right prototype scaling up is also approached differently because we need to acknowledge that what worked in one set of circumstances with one set of teachers and students may not necessarily translate perfectly in different circumstances so the scaling up needs to incorporate elements of the pdsa Cycles as
042well and so this is why we refer to this as a scientific inquiry approach we develop and test hypothesis about teaching and learning and then learn from our mistakes which is fundamentally different from thinking we know the answers in advance you know just to give you an example and I hope John you don't mind and you can talk to Jen more about this a little later we had an initial Theory going into your continuous Improvement and through the process of implementing this initial thought we kind of had to back up and say oh the problem wasn't what we thought it was yes right so just to make it kind of concrete by by implementing we discovered that our initial Theory wasn't right traditionally we probably would have written a strategic plan and just done it
043now what we're going to do is we're going to go back and rethink our theory of action so next slide go the last thing I want to leave with you is this other principle of um continuous Improvement and it's called the toothpaste heuristic so what you have here is a tube of toothpaste but you'll notice we have some writing around it the form the characteristics and the mechanism so the form is how it's delivered it's a it can be delivered as a tube or a pump my understanding is in some countries it comes in a tin or a tablet that was news to me and then there are the characteristics how it tastes how it feels the color but what cleans your teeth is the mechanism it's the fluoride the abrasives and the detergents right
044it's not that the form and characteristics aren't important because they get you to brush your teeth but those things don't clean your teeth so when you think about teaching and learning we don't want to confuse form and characteristics with the actual mechanism that causes learning right let me give you an example we tend to look at structures and processes that don't necessarily may contain the mechanism but may or may not contain mechanism let me give you an example feedback so sometimes people are taught the form of feedback right you've ever heard of the sandwich you give positive feedback then corrective feedback then and with positive feedback that would be a form the characteristics might be something I mean you know that it's specific timely relevant descriptive those are the characteristics of the feedback but when
045you really look at it what makes a difference the mechanism for learning is when the teacher communicates to the student that they have confidence that they will achieve the goal that's when feedback actually makes a difference that's the mechanism so just to kind of summarize what we're trying to do through continuous Improvement is get to the actual mechanism that causes learning and I don't want you to walk away thinking that the forming characteristics aren't important but again they're only there to get to the mechanism if that makes any sense okay what I'd like to do now is to have a little science there and Improvement science fair so what you notice around the room are some of the initial representations of what the schools are working on um oh wait do you want to show
046the video so when we were learning about this we went through a simulation called the coin spinning simulation uh working in teams we were all given various coins to spin and we had to figure out who could spin it the longest we were given you know pennies dimes nickels quarters and we timed it on our phone and we had to figure out who could spin it the longest and what were the factors that went into it right why did certain people with um certain coins able to get to the highest amount so this is um from The Institute for Health Care Improvement and kind of a debrief on how they use the coin tossing simulation to help people in health care understand this continuous improvement process [Music] what are some of the attributes of teams
047that are able to successfully spend their coins what does it take to to learn how to spin a coin really sure when we asked teams what got you to that longest spin oftentimes they're very creative so they define surface in lots of different ways they try lifting a tablecloth over the table and trying it on just the bare table surface they'll run out of the room and try a brushed concrete floor they'll put a book down or a purse down and try it on lots of different surfaces so they get as as creative as they can possibly be about what that definition is of surface additionally they try to run a lot of tests and just you have 15 minutes to spin so and you can actually get a lot of spins in that time
048and so they try as many different things as they possibly can additionally they start to create a theory sometimes they don't even know that they've created a theory so sometimes the theory is around who at this table could be the best spinner because not everybody is going to be a spinner and so they'll run tests and they'll rule out who are the who are the not so great Spinners and then we'll go then they'll go get to the best spinner and then then they'll move on to their next Theory which is perhaps the quarter or the nickel or or one coin or another is going to be a better spinning coin so test out the theory and try to rule out the coins that are not great Spinning Coins how much did to rule out
049one surface or one spinner or another so well first not everybody ends up collecting the data some teams get so into the doing part of the pdsa cycle that they just do do do do and they're they're tracking so many spins at the same time that they're not going back and actually creating a prediction and actually tracking their data over time if we were to ask them what was the thing that worked they probably can't tell us because it wasn't documented and so they're always those are the teams that sort of come up short of like actually I don't know what worked but those that actually did document oftentimes they'll try they'll they'll do one run of all the coins or one run of all the Spinners and then they get a hunch of which
050Spinners or which coins are the best and then they try it multiple times to try and get it reliable and and those teams that have the longest Spinning Coins tried one service multiple times to get the longest spinning so it might be 10 seconds and then they tried again and it's 11 they tried again and it's 12 and then they feel really good about the fact that hey we're consistently at a really high number of seconds that's the one that's going to be the longest excellent so it sounds like teams that are successful collect a little bit of data just enough yeah um and uh and enough to build our confidence we talk about that a lot in Improvement we just enough data to get a higher degree of confidence yep and our change is
051going to result from Improvement exactly and it just made me think about the importance of asking questions right that's what makes us that's what helps us be creative and helps us build um good theories is is we're able to formulate questions who's the best spinner you know which surface is is going to be best for us which coin is is going to offer the the longest Spin and it allows us to um explore an assumption without judgment against that assumption yeah so with one of our teams somebody was adamant that all those over the age of 50 were going to be the best Spinners because they had a chance to spend coins in their childhood whereas they thought that younger people at the table weren't going to have such great spinning skills people could have
052easily looked at him and said well that's just a joke but they actually said hey let's test that out and it actually turned out that those over the age of 50 at the table were the best Spinners and so rather than just ruling on somebody's assumption as that's just an idea everything's on the table to try it and suddenly people felt like they belonged they felt like their ideas were contributing and it's because it was in the form of hey let's it's a question let's learn about it so I know that when you set up the game and you give people instructions you give them that pdsa tracker that you want them to fill out how much do people actually do that I would probably say about 50 of the time and we're asking people
053to do it very quickly so in 15 minutes you can run 20 different spins that's that's an intense amount of tests for a small amount of time and so to ask people to also be writing down what their prediction is and like I said they get so into the game and the doing that they don't stop to make the prediction or don't stop to actually see did this work or did it not work and then how are we going to iterate on it um however when we debrief with them and we talk to them about what what about in the real world what if you were to have been running a project and this is really about improving patients lives and then you actually move the dial and your local government or a reporter or
054your leadership team comes to you and says what was the what was the secret sauce what was the deciding factor and you can't give them that answer There's real implications from that so you're asking folks to collect a lot of data um in a very short period of time but how do folks manage that what do they do so they are continually surprised at how easy it is that we gave them a blank wrencher and you're just asking them with a pen and pencil to plot on a run chart there's nothing that's stopping you from taking that same idea and going home and you don't have to have Excel or any other type of program to produce a run chart for you you could start on a piece of paper and people have that realization
055a lot of wow this is way easier I have no excuses of why I'm not measuring so and your experience now what's the longest spending coin you know that's an interesting point in the in the situations where we've tested us which has been in the U.S so that remember it's a quarter a dime a nickel a penny generally the longest spinning coin has been about 13 to 15 seconds I don't know that I've seen something that went higher than 15 seconds which is interesting because then that's the bounds of the system that's the limit of how we before we can go so if we were to think about we want a system that's going to get us higher than 15 seconds we would have to look at completely redesigning that system changing the surface maybe
056changing the coins putting different Spinners in place probably spending changing the coins I bet is probably the biggest redesigned piece we would need in that system in order to get it to perform different results and how often are we trying to get a current system to perform at results higher than it can because we're not actually looking at how do we redesign the system [Music] there's a lot packed into that video but I think it gives you a sense of the type of process that we're trying to move towards um and just to summarize with some big Ideas a system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets your theory of action most likely is wrong don't confuse forms and characteristics with mechanisms and we need to support the process of teachers in schools
057learning their way into meaningful change to do is again have this little Improvement science fair I'm going to ask our building principals to man these various charts and what I'd like you to do is to try to rotate around and just have a conversation about what um what aspects of continuous Improvement they're working on maybe five ten minutes per if you could per site yeah per site okay all right everybody oh and by the way I wanted to tell you Joe you want to share with anybody well we destroyed the Guinness book record we did Even though Dr Smith didn't completely believe us but we did yeah was your spinner over 50. yeah yeah one of our Spinners was just turning again okay okay everybody all right so if somebody's limited maybe to five minutes
058I'll set a timer check would you thank you and I'll just give you a signal to rotate okay and try not to all congregate at one place yeah perfect a bit more time um [Music] and so you can see um is experience [Music] um you're at your one minute warning you're so good at that um your timer [Laughter] citizens intentions [Music] [Laughter] [Music] which is foreign [Music] schedules [Laughter] [Music] it provides foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] foreign [Music] faces [Music] um here okay yeah [Applause] thank you and so we're I mean this is okay yeah well um so I'm glad to see you we're all engaged I'm just wondering if anybody had any thoughts questions comments it's a lot to take in for me just and I didn't even get to all of them so yeah
059I just need some time pretty engaging yes I think so they were all very very upbeat and very very excited about doing I think this process is more meaningful for everybody yeah it changed it it may seem very good that came very clear that it was more meaningful the Genesis of you taking this on was did it come from the last year's so we have been working with an organization that Kevin introduced us to It's called The partnership for educational leadership they were the group that supported us through the acceleration framework and last year while we were talking about the acceleration framework we became aware that they're very into strategic planning reframing into something different and so through our conversations we became somewhat intrigued by it and so we decided that would be the focus
060of our Leadership Institute this summer that we learned about the process and that we're trying it [Music] I fixed music to my ears I asked the same question all the time about you know it's great that up here we think everything works but when it comes down to our students it doesn't matter what we all think it's really how they receive it and I think that this is I think you guys have finally hit it so thank you thank you and I love to hear from all of you and I'm sorry we didn't get to all of you and Chuck no offense but I would have loved to have heard more from them I know about the like how it's all working I kind of felt like you needed to have the background for it
061yeah I know it's almost like going to it the CU class and they spend so much time on the theory and the development of the History part and this much time on the Practical part of how I can treat and I'm like um but I don't think you can really get a flavor of what the schools are doing and then in the less than 10 or 15 minutes so maybe we could set up another time where you could have more in-depth conversations or we could even use teaching and learning for that yeah anybody from the board could join that's probably the best place yeah yeah that would be fun maybe they can just concentrate on one or one of them and I'd even love to hear from one of the IL teams that you know
062we're willing to the IET IET teams that are working in these areas in relation to yeah yeah I mean because we're thinking for the second half of this school year well I mean because this is round one of you know what is supposed to be a dynamic process so um we can maybe have a redo and just see where we are what we've learned and the process about the process and also about you know the various problems we're focused on and we'll bring in some different players Nicola had a great idea too sorry I can't have it's like jumping in and joining like one of your all's meetings oh sure you know when everybody is made that way right and schedules are crazy but you can truly understand and be in the middle of it
063yeah that absolutely joining our meetings around this too so the more the merrier yeah no it's good it's really helpful any other comments all right keep it up yeah thank you yeah thanks Sarah you've told me she likes it when I geek out [Laughter] okay um [Music] the Wilton High School Costa Rica trip we need a motion to approve the trip as presented at our last meeting I so moved to approve the trip okay as proposed in the last meeting my second okay all in favor opposed all right anybody want to go yes all right um and how about the Wilton High School German exchange trip is there a motion to approve that exchange as presented at the last board meeting so moved your Nicola second all in favor okay you can't be unanimous thank
064you and the last action item is to discuss and approve policy 6146 performance-based graduation requirement um all right we have seen and talked and sent questions are there any remaining questions or comments that we should go over before a vote is there a motion to approve policy 6146 as revised I moved to approve policy 6146 and that's revised does that need to be following yesterday to change the name to Korean technical to CTE so we'll just make the technical edit to CTE okay is that good at it yep okay okay so um Ruth you want to withdraw your motion I do I withdraw my motion okay and now you want to make another one I will make another one I've moved to approve policy 6141.60 with the additional edit just discuss okay changing applies [Music]
065yeah technical education okay is there a second any more discussion all in favor okay [Music] uh there's a calendar of next meetings um I do want to say that we are hoping to have an executive session on the November 3rd night uh to update the board on negotiations executive session and we'll set a time before the meeting I just don't know quite yet whether it be 6 or 6 15 or 6 30 we'll have to figure that piece out but if you could get that on your calendars that would be great and that's just an update there's no approval there it's an executive session we're not through them but it is an update and then the rest of our board meetings and the long-range planning meeting do you want to talk a little bit about
066that um so long range planning as we've met several times over the last several years it was the long-range planning process that really gave birth to the portrait of The Graduate so we're going to do a couple of things on that night one is just again update the committee about portrait of The Graduate that is I think on the minds of you know many across the district which is great and there's a lot of toe holds developing in the curriculum so that's well underway so given the name of the committee long-range planning we're going to take the second part of the meeting to talk about what's next and so the whole intention of that is to try to look over the horizon and to continue to think forward as we continue to evolve as a
067school district so we're going to try to engage in a process to get us to continue to you know I tried to do six to eight okay um are there comments from the public all right then this meeting is adjourned thank you [Music]