001miss cooper thank you i don't know if dr sal is here yet [Music] 32 people on 73 invited okay uh i would like to say on behalf of the board good afternoon to everyone and at this particular time i would turn the uh workshop over to mr watson or dr sale right kevin thank you dr sal um thank you rick so good evening everyone um and welcome to our workshop this evening on our community portrait of a graduate i'm really excited to be with you this evening here this evening with you and as part of our welcoming uh this evening you heard me welcoming folks as they were coming into the room which is quite frankly reminiscent of all of our meetings this past year um as we've had oh my goodness it feels like
002at least 20 30 meetings throughout this this last year um all virtual um in the beginning certainly they were in person and you'll notice in our timeline momentarily that later on we moved to majority of our meetings virtually and had an amazing turnout i can't thank um our community enough our parents students um staff for their participation um i think everyone's going to be really proud of the product that that we're going to be sharing with you this evening before we get started um and i'm not sure if she's in this space i i remember back a couple of um in the beginning of this process and for some of the new board members um they would not have been on the on the board at this time but during the 2018 we were encouraged
003to apply uh for this grant for the portrait of the graduate grant i was actually a professional development session when speaking to some of the grantees i was on a joint call with dr martins uh was very confident quite frankly that we were going to receive this grant um given our planning around our strategic plan uh we had talked about our commitment to this portion of the graduate work um i think med quite frankly after the conversation was also very confident uh that we would receive the grant um and and we did um the team put together an amazing proposal um it was well received and of course you know we had our major players as part of the writers and so dr casamaro melissa meg and mead um and we did a great job
004presenting it um and and to eventually receive the the award um what what what proceed with but then followed uh was really an opportunity to start engaging our community um and initially those meetings were in person uh we were at the black box we filled up the room with with people from higher education uh parents students uh teachers um commerce business business people um it was it was quite frankly it was it was a great display of the investment in our school system um and and and then things slow down right and so and so in january 2020 um i remember it was like yesterday i believe we had a board meeting on that january um i was at a board meeting in that january and we had a meeting thursday morning in boston um
005and so i had an opportunity to work firsthand with ray and elise and meg and ann around this project and beginning to get an idea of what this was potentially could look like for danbury public schools um there were a lot of exemplar districts in the room they were showing us exemplars of what the pog looked like um and and frankly i think our path was was well spelled out for us just in terms of community engagement stakeholder engagement um and and i think you're going to see that we did an amazing job engaging our community um before we get started i i want to thank the because some of these things just don't happen without support um patrice nelson i don't know if she's here but she was um she was assigned to us
006or recommended to us um as a point person um to to to help co-lead this project um so patrice joined us from the um connecticut center of school change um and and served as an amazing facilitator throughout this work um we hired two teachers to help also co-lead this work and elise i don't think elise is with us tonight um but the least english teacher at the high school ray english teacher at the high school grade is on with us now you'll hear more from him later they also did an amazing job and then meg you know as as as the administrator quite frankly helping to you know shepherd this work along the way um i can't thank all of them i can't thank all of them enough for getting us to this point um
007last but not least amy spelino i amy i i want to thank you um you know as as a board member uh participating in this process you you didn't have to participate in the way you did you were 100 invested we appreciate it um i know you were awarded by some good dinners at home when we were able to get them to you um but but we we genuinely i mean sincerely appreciate your support and participation throughout this process i don't think anyone could have envisioned from the beginning that you would have been from us from the beginning to end of this process and it means a lot to all so we just want to thank you um i also just want to thank quickly um you're going to notice some great videos in this
008presentation um i i want to thank the parents who who said it was okay for their children to be part of this presentation this evening because quite frankly they're going to steal the show and so i think it's important that we we we thank them um and then you're going to also see community members having given up their time i acknowledge many earlier in the process but community members who not only volunteered their time as part of this process but then they also went the extra mile and said okay i'll also persist participate in your video kevin and they did that too um and so um the presentation i think is a is a sound one um but but but but the commitment is even more important i think that's going to show throughout this
009process last but not least i want to thank angelo janet and lewinelli i don't know if lewinelli has joined us yet we we asked them on top of everything else that was going on in the district uh we found an opportunity an opportunity was presented to us from the bar foundation to join a grant called design at the margins which focused on equity for school districts and when districts are um developing their ports of the graduate being mindful of your commitment to equity in your district when developing curriculum when when when when designing professional development um and angelo lou and ellie janet they will be speaking about this a little bit later on but i want to thank them as well because it's not as if these folks receive extra checks to participate in these
010professional development sessions to help and further inform our work so ray i think i am ready to get started with the slideshow and i think i think we can get started [Music] here so the the slideshow was broken up into a couple of buckets mission and vision and really equity statement and values just to remember the board is part of our journey um equity statement and policy that we had approved a couple of years ago december 2018 mission envisioned as part of the strategic planning work that had uh started this process um and and i think this evening part of our job is to connect the dots for you um and so the the next step is the pog coalition and journey and so we'll be walking through walking you through our stakeholder engagement sessions
011um and we want to walk you through that and and and then we will start off with our preamble and one of our teachers uh after getting feedback from all of us on uh what we felt what was important for the portrait for our pog um we had a couple of teachers and one of our teachers who took the lead on the preamble so we want to share that with you and then that's going to lead the way into the portion of the graduate characteristics and i think after the presentation the board the community will have a greater appreciation what those characteristics mean um and and and and how that could later inform our work in the district whether it's professional development whether it's recruitment whether it's curriculum designed whether it's experiences for our children
012so a vision admission and this is a process some of the board members were on the board at the time we had a revised vision statement and mission statement in which we had received various feedback from our community helped inform fanbury public schools aspires to advance all learners to their highest potential and our mission of danbury is in partnership with families in the community provide transformation learning experiences designed to provide thoughtful and prepared graduates and so the equity statement and i don't want to read it i would give her give everyone a minute just to take an opportunity to look at this this is an excerpt from our policy later on we will make this available on our website and for anyone who would like to see the full policy they'll be able to click
013here on the powerpoint and so not very different from our meetings um over these last over these last several months quite frankly uh we've asked um angelo webax uh lulanelli and vivax janet uh to step in to our pog meetings and give us updates from the training sessions they had been in with design at the margins and so like those meetings i would last like to ask linely angelo janet to share a couple of words about what they learned in design at the margins and how that should inform our work given this umbrella of equity and diversity thank you kevin um i can give an an overall perspective on um you know what we did with um design achievement at the margins um so you know myself lewinelli and janet as well as two students
014that i chose from one of my classes this year they joined us as well in the pd overall was great work we had a chance to work with other educators from other districts on the east coast and not only were we working with educators and teachers but we were also working with students as well so we got to hear you know stories and experiences from you know other adults as well as teens because i actually had opportunity to go into a breakout room with a young lady that was in seventh grade so we got to hear their stories and their experiences and what we did was there's for before each session that we had and this was um a span of i think we went from february through um through april and uh before every
015session we had pre-work that we had to do and a lot of the pre-work focused on what we were going to do for that session and um some of the things that we focused on was the first thing we focused on was starting with ourselves and we got into how historical context matters and we we talked about how history repeats itself we talked about radical inclusion as a foundation for equity so a lot of our work revolved around equity and it revolved around a marginalized student and one thing that they taught we talked about was being aware of our own lens and our within that lens we have our own biases so um you know biases come with with our lens and then we got into some mantras for equity and one thing that they
016really harped on was that we're all designers and um as designers we have an impact on people especially the people who are the most excluded especially the people are the most marginalized and um some other mantras was being an includer um being part of the process so we had to you know choose one that we thought we were and you know we we shared out and talked about that and then one of the last modules that we did was talking about creating empathy and um we talked about mainly the role of privilege and oppression and then we also talked about anti-blackness within curriculums and within schools and again the focus on all of our work was equity and then also the the marginalized student and what we did at the at the end in our
017last meeting uh we did we reflected and some of the reflection questions um that we talked about was you know what would have to be true um you know for education to be led by the marginalized um what do graduates need to know and be able to do to create and lead the education ecosystem and um how might teachers and administration give up power so that the margins are never static or permanent and you know they talked about a lot of the work that we did you know was to talk about and focus on the purpose of education that includes participation in the economy democracy you know uplift and freedom internally and externally so the last thing that we we left off with was you know what do we need to add what do we
018need to subtract and one of the things lasting things i want to leave us with is my two students some of their concerns that we talked about was one was the curriculum um they said courses don't reflect or help them learn about their own cultures so that was a big thing that they talked about and they also talked about how they felt leaving dhs and their juniors by the time they leave dhs they thought that our courses focus on academics and preparing them for higher education in college but they felt like um you know what about life outside of college and real life experience so they wanted they talked about wanting more courses that deal with real life experiences and um i'll pass it over to to janet and she wants to ask me you
019did an excellent job angelo thank you so much the only thing i do want to add is um as a teacher you know in a classroom we're so much geared to teaching and making sure that our students have an opportunity to the curriculum and learn at their own style and at their own pace and when angelo's students mentioned that you know they don't have anything based towards their culture that kind of took me back a little bit and and you know angela and i and lewinelli discussed this even further and we took a step back and we're like we're right you know we have nothing that is connected for them to learn about their culture um they said that they felt that we didn't value where they came from or who they are as a
020individual student and everything was mainly based on academics they felt that equity wasn't involved in our curriculum they felt that they were not included as other cultures were included in our curriculum and in our classroom so that was that was you know valuable experience for me as a teacher to be there and to kind of listen from the students perspectives of how they felt our curriculum and our preparedness for them to go out of the real world was and um i wanted to you know just share i think it was a really really valuable experience too um as we explore our journey recognizing what we have done who we who we have become and to help us think different about what we could do better and on the future to support our students and to
021help them hopefully become successful as they further you know their education or uh learn you know how to uh explore the world after they graduate from from high school um i like angelo mentioned we did talk a lot about radical inclusion being intentional about bringing diverse um people uh together across race roles gender uh socio-economic status to build relationships and to lay gra uh the ground work for our community we um also talk about identifying barriers and work together to eliminate them as we welcome people and their stories and value them and their experiences and and we create a space for everyone to bring their full self and be equally valued we also talk about being mindful um raising our voices and allow those marginalized students um share their experiences like we did as we
022met together and hear them and and share our own experiences which for them i think it was also very valuable because i think at the end we all realize we all have our own stories and our own experiences that make us who we are and help us grow and develop um hopefully our fullest potential um when we talk about strength relationship and and across differences and and connect to others so it was a really really um valuable motivational um having the opportunity to meet other teachers to talk to get to know us even you know deeper and uh motivated us to work with uh the the rest of the team that work in the portrait of graduate so that we can um create uh this project and and hopefully use it as a guide to
023improve our school system our curricula think about what other resources our students need to be equally served and supported to be successful yeah and angelo lou and ellie thank you um ray can you go to the next slide for us so i i also wanted the board in the community to take an opportunity to uh read these next two slides the third bullet to the right of this document in many ways at least for me anyway encompasses exactly what angelo janet and louinelli were talking about already right and so we we're sharing the values and commitments just to remind the board in the community of some of the commitments we've made previously these were kind of the introductory documents if you will to our previously approved strategic planning direction and i i just want to
024use this as an opportunity to just say if if we didn't hear anything else i think we we heard that danbury students need and deserve a personalized uh relevant uh challenging um and supportive educational experiences uh and and i think and just just thinking back to the strategic plan that we presented it feels like 30 years ago but almost two years ago now um you know we we need to leverage our resources design our curriculum and train our staff um and to accomplish those goals right and and and over these last few months cara on her team melissa trish have been in front of the board talking about our work and designed around the pathways but what you have not heard is that cara is also you know working with her team to you know
025to revisit what experiences look like for kids um k5 throughout the entire system um to help achieve these goals and so it's it certainly ends you know in 912 with our high school this is an effort to look at the system from the funding from from the beginning when our kids you know first enter our classrooms and and begin to engage um books and classroom libraries in our schools and karen her team or reevaluating reassessing all of those processes to make sure that these experiences are relevant for kids that kids can see themselves in the in the curriculum that they feel like you know the experiences are personalized for them all these things are being reevaluated and reassessed as we're moving forward in this work um so it's not i just want to emphasize to
026the board to the community um this is not just the 9 12 commitment and exercise this is a k-12 commitment and exercise for a portrait we're ready right so i know i started out kind of thinking a lot of people for their participation but in the next two slides you will see that we've had a lot of people from higher education from people in the community people in commerce it's really been an amazing show of support i just want to thank everyone again and here's some evidence or artifacts from participation in those virtual meetings in the portion of the graduate and this is really just an opportunity to remind the board in the community of the process and and and we started uh you know some time ago um approving um starting this process when
027reevaluating and revising our vision statement for the district along with the mission statement we got support very support and feedback from our students from our staff from our families which helped to inform their revised statements vision and mission statement as as part of this journey the strategic planning process and direction was developed um and i and i think that now is going to need to be revisited uh kind of given uh the pandemic and what has taken place this last year and a half but the proportion of the graduate as you can see is sitting right here in the middle and what do our graduates need to have know and do in order to be successful in college career community in life and i think that's it was well timed you know we we shared
028our strategic plan and direction with the board and the community um and and had made a commitment to this pog work but recognized that it was going to take a lot of time and effort um and i i i feel like the timing was perfect uh there was a grant available for the district to apply for as i had opened with earlier and helped us to to to land where we are now and then of course equity which is in gray uh runs through all of these pieces um and so angela lou and ellie and janet spoke to its importance um and how important it is when designing experiences when designing professional development um being mindful of those marginalized students uh to making sure we reach and help to reach all of our students and
029help everyone reach their full potential you're ready right good evening everyone i'm dana perez and i'm going to speak a little bit about the community portrait of a graduate as a danbury community we collaborated over the past year if not longer to identify a set of skills knowledge and dispositions we believed would be critical for our skill our students to achieve college career community and a successful life dr martens later is going to speak to the different attributes that we landed on as a coalition and what i can say is my experience in the coalition and in the syrian committee is that arriving to these dispositions was not easy um and i think each and every participant worked very diligently to make sure that what we put forth is going to be beneficial for all
030of the students in danbury public schools whether they choose to go to college or straight to the career path and i'm pretty excited with what we arrived on um this is a group of student ambassadors that work with us and our administrators at rogers park middle school they work side by side with us to ensure that our policies and practices are representative of all the students at school and help us to enhance and improve our policy and practices to make sure everyone has an equitable experience and when it came time to take a picture of the class of 2024 and who this portrait of a graduate was actually going to support these are the kids that we chose at our school to take a picture of because they are true leaders thank you dana carmen
031good evening everyone thank you kevin uh adding to what uh dana just uh shared with us uh i'm honored to present this section of the slideshow because i think it's the one that you're gonna like the most it's very hard to hear you you may have to speak up or bring that maybe increase your your volume a little bit carmen can you hear me now what's your playground oh is it any better just speak louder can you hear me that's better okay so um as i was saying um i have one of the best slides that you're gonna see tonight um and early on as part of the coalition and the steering committee we went back to the very basic and said to ourselves three things um that were important to me and to the
032rest of the steering committee number one is the road map the guidance we wanted to really demonstrate that this is not just about high school kids this is a commitment like kevin said and dana said for students k all the way through 12. number two we went over to reminding ourselves who are we doing this for who is at the forefront all this work is for who and of course is for our students and then number three it was very important for the coalition it's something that we said over and over again to allow people to have a voice in this presentation in this initiative and that of course includes our students and of course being the elementary principal and south street school who better than for us to start at the beginning and so
033i went um to my kindergarten class and you're gonna see in the next two couple of slides you're gonna see two questions that i asked we didn't practice this we didn't we didn't prep them this was genuinely coming into the classroom and asking them two questions and this was their response and if you ever want to understand and want to go and look at what our kids are capable of doing you're more than welcome to come to south street believe me kindergartens know what they want and they know what they need to get there thank you thank you carmen that's perfect i don't think we're getting audio carmen there's no audio right ray can you start that over yeah i will start that over i think i might have to be unmuted for this i
034guess okay let me know oops sorry about that let me know if this works yes oh it'll catch up give it a sec you want to be a police officer why do you want to be a veterinarian you like to protect animals in the whole world when you grow up a singer why do you want to be a teacher because i like to do the names and give out the crayons and tell people whose calendars i'll play some stuff really why do you want to be a police officer so i can retouch people wonderful the next slide is i wanted them to tell me what do they need in order to achieve their dream go ahead ray what do you need to learn you need to be nice what do you think you need to
035learn how to do to be a great teacher to help people learn what do you think you need to learn how to do well in school to be a great teacher to be nice and respectful that's wonderful anything else you need to learn to be nice to people who's not doing the correct thing okay do you need to learn anything in school that's going to help you to be a great police officer okay what do you think you need to learn from school get faster like what do you mean what do you need to learn in school to be a good singer thank you carmen so we have um and we really just want to again applaud our community for their participation in this process uh we really feel like uh given given the um
036given the participation that we had uh we really we really do feel like this is a danbury portrait of the graduate and and certainly part of our goals and and i think you've heard uh cara and melissa allude to this um in their presentations about the pathway work you know certainly we want to be mindful of um where the projections are in terms of where their jobs might be in the next five to ten years but then but but then locally we need to also be mindful of um what what what the local trends are right here in our danbury community and so and so we we get feedback from higher education we get feedback in industry leaders right here in danbury we get feedback from our educators and so in our eyes we were
037able to put together a danbury portrait of the graduate that we think if we focus on these skills our kids are going to be well positioned to be successful already right and here are some projections uh some some reflections from some of our community members i just also want to share the full video can be reviewed on the website when we post it to the website uh we have feedback from students from staff etc but we're starting closer to the end of the video uh just for um the sake of time [Music] see all these different parts of the community that sometimes are difficult to reach out to all collaborating on this idea of what it means to them that a danbury graduate should be and i also really liked the experience of being able
038to work with students who were part of the coalition also and i felt like their voice was heard very often being able to work closely with the ideas of the parents and the students was a pretty cool experience i'm an early childhood educator in the community and this project uh gravitated my you know pretty much my attention to it because of the different capacities i can um bring my views into the project uh first as a parent of a junior high student who will graduate in few years uh then as an early childhood educator i'm a childcare director of a preschool in the community and um and also representing my immediate um community as a community leader an immigrant from the asian indian community the graduates have to be um have to have the skill
039set for the jobs uh then they did have to be market ready they have to be ready for the global market but also the best part was it was looking at um the systemic you want to tell it systemic inequalities in the community uh as much as we enjoyed january as a diverse community when we put up whoops i'm sorry everybody my bad an immigrant from the asian indian community the graduates have to be um have to have the skill set for the jobs uh then they did have to be market ready they have to be ready for the global market but also the best part was it was looking at um the systemic you want to tell it systemic inequalities in the community as much as we enjoy jamboree as the diverse community when
040we put a project together like this it was important all of this thought processes are brought together into the project and rolled it on and tailor-made the right way and it was challenging but it was awesome to have all these different voices um come to something together and to be able to agree on what a danbury graduate should look like it is looking forward to the future of deanberry this is what you want danbury graduates to look my own starting from my own graduate who will be graduating six years from now i want to see him as an innovator i want to see him as a collaborator i want to see him as an excellent communicator i want to see him advocate for himself and someone like him okay thank you um so i'm going
041to my name's bray coletti um i'm one of the english teachers um that um kevin alluded to earlier unfortunately at least tobin samaha is not here with us and she carried a lot of this load um early on and uh she hasn't been with us for a while and she's missed in spirit um but uh she was a really important part of this process so i just want to go through uh the timeline and and how we got to where we are um so starting in uh january of 2020 as kevin said we went to boston for um a convening with the bar foundation um we created um our coalition we just designed our action plan um and then came um you know between january and march we ran our first coalition meeting and we
042were um really excited to start our our thought exchange survey where we were going to engage the community and what they thought the skills and dispositions that they felt our graduates needed to have would be but the pandemic came we had to pause our work um from march to may um but when we decided to restart the work in may what we found was a very eager coalition um that very much wanted to re-engage in this work and that really made it very easy for us between may and june we were able to run the thought exchange um you know in the schools and in the community um and we're going to talk about that in a little bit um and that was so we were able to go into the summer with a pretty
043good head start we had a lot of information that we were able to work with when we started back up in the fall unfortunately as we know the fall again we had to pause the work in the beginning um because of the pandemic and the situation that was going around but when we did restart the work again again we found that our coalition was very eager to to meet with us i mean we had an extremely productive december um leading into the new year we were able to actually you know take those that focus group data from the previous spring and develop our categories run focus groups around it um and here you can see us now january to june presenting to the board of education and finalizing this work so that we can submit
044it all to the bar foundation so it's been a very busy 18 months for us and the coalition has been very dedicated to this process all along and so is the community and just to show a little bit about what that coalition commitment looks like you'll see we ran 10 meetings we had 69 members um and they came from you know the public school system from the community college university religious communities when we ran the thought exchange we had over two thousand participants uh with you know shared over two thousand thoughts almost three thousand thoughts um and we ran approximately 65 focus groups on the thought exchange and on the results of it um and as you can see we were able to hear from the administrative side we're from teachers uh we're also able
045to hear from students um and other things you can see here we ran um quite a few different focus groups um around different stages of this um so just to talk a little bit about the thought exchange which started this all and was the initial um where we got our initial thoughts from our initial ideas from we ran it twice because we wanted to make sure that the results of it were more representative of the diversity of our community as you can see we had roughly uh over 2 000 participants um and what we ran the price for was because we wanted to make sure that we were hearing from as we heard earlier in the slides um the marginalized people not at the table as you can see we were able to by running
046it twice increase our participation in the hispanic community and make sure that we're here for more people in the community as well as you can see from the stakeholders we're able to hear from lots of different people and especially students we heard from over 1100 students in the thought exchange survey and we also heard from uh over 477 people in danbury public schools um teachers and administrators so we really were able to hear from a lot of different people uh we're really proud of the student participation in this so after we ran the thought exchange everybody was able to comment on it we basically came up with what were the top 20 thoughts what were the thoughts that the community was gravitating towards and as you can see from the picture on the right here
047you can see things like organization and perseverance problem solving techniques on creativity and you can see there the diversity of our community on the critical thinking skills and these were the thoughts kind of dwindled down and kind of what they looked like so this is what our starting place was from as far as what were the you know the dispositions and the skills that we felt our graduates needed to have these were the top 20 skills that we were looking at from the beginning um and the next pages here the next two pages i'm going to show you are really just the highlights of the thought exchange and what they focus in on um are the different stakeholder groups that we're able to hear from as you can see here we were able to hear
048from students and their voice was very important as you can see from the third bullet here that they learned they wanted to learn about saving and managing money that did lead to some curricular changes with personal finance becoming a required course you can see that we heard from families um as well and we were also able to hear from community members um who wanted to you know hear more about science and accountability and we were also able to hear from people in danbury public schools and as we said earlier a lot of teachers and administrators and a lot of those voices were able to be heard here um and as we ran those focus groups so what ended up happening is we took those top 20 thoughts um and through coalition meetings and through focus
049groups with teachers and community members and administrators and students we were able to kind of reduce those 20 down to what eventually became the categories for the portrait of a graduate we ended up with about seven of them and from there we ran focus groups to see how the people in the community would respond to those do they represent um what we've wanted to see for our graduates in danbury public schools um and we ran quite a few of those i ran um make over 30 of these and we were able to hear from a lot of different people as far as what their opinions were on it and bring that back to the coalition so that we could revise what these categories and these outcomes would be um as you can see from the
050focus groups that we ran around the initial draft of the portrait of a graduate which you're going to hear about in just a couple of minutes here a little further on in the slide we had quite a bit of participation here as you can see um teachers and students um we're well represented here we also are from community members parents administrators alumni and as you can see here in our stakeholder groups as well um when we ran approximately 23 focus groups you can see again a lot of student representation from 9 to 12 here um a little bit from pre-k to 8 as well and then that led us to what we're going to introduce to you now which is our portrait um it's gone through quite a few drafts in quite a few stages
051um and so we needed a preamble for it and so mitch peterson uh took the lead on that and with some feedback from the coalition um in some revisions we were able to come up with this final statement here which kind of sums up um what our we hope our portfolio for graduate accomplishments which is that upon graduation all learners will be able to communicate effectively and collaborate with others to create innovative solutions to problems that advocate for a diverse array of topics and issues and with that i'm going to hand over the the presentation to megan who's going to take us through um what our portraiture graduates thanks ray i feel like i should have a drum roll or something i'm sorry that i do not maybe the next time we revise the portrait
052of the graduate kevin spoke about me being confident with the money funders and i was confident because i know that this community is a good investment and i know that because i've worked here for 12 years now and i think that the equity um the equity work that preceded this really solidified my commitment again to the district and to this into this project and so um without further ado these are the five categories you'll hear them referred to as buckets we needed a word where do we want where we're going to hold these things hey put them in a bucket so these categories really represent the attributes and they encompass some skill pieces that we think every single student in danbury deserves to graduate being proficient in the first category is advocate there's a lot
053of discussion around the word advocate we talked um a great deal you can go ahead right thank you um we talked a great deal about the diversity that we are also very proud of in this district and then there was a lot more conversation about the so what so so we care about our diversity what are we doing with that what are we instilling our in our students in terms of how can they elevate how can they lift up others and that we heard a lot about empathy in the beginning and so empathy where do you go with that and so the idea is that we want to make sure that our students are um are positive agents for social change and that they are valuing diversity and that they are valuing diversity by ensuring
054that we are always actively working to protect the rights of everyone in our community um there's been a tremendous amount of conversation around social justice and injustice and i think that um our group was um was really painfully aware of that and i think that the work of the design at the margins helped to emphasize some of these pieces and i know i personally feel like a better educator for having participated in that project we talk a lot about educating the whole child and i really think that these categories speak to the need to move beyond reading writing and math that people who are really bright and can't advocate for others can't interact with others they don't go too far and so we want to make sure we're attending to all of these so advocate
055is really moving beyond appreciating our diversity which we do but to make sure that we are protecting um the rights of others the second category is a collaborator and i think that kovitz certainly highlighted for me the need to collaborate right we we encountered problems just in a school system that i can tell you never came up in my principal preparation programs and um we were smarter for working together um and i think that the pandemic really underscored the need for not only human connection but also the positive things that happen as a result of that and i think that the key here is really interdependency right so i can be really good at one thing i need to depend on others i can't be the kid doing all the work in the group work
056i can't be the kid doing none of the work in the group work and i think that the idea of collaborating um with a solutions oriented mindset is really what we were trying to get at here hearkening back to being respectful of diversion thinking and differing types of opinions the third category um is one you will see very frequently in different portraits of the graduate and i think that really speaks to the fact that we need to be good at this we need to be good communicators and that's not just saying what i think it's saying what i feel being able to receive that information from others that it goes beyond just this traditional reading writing and speaking just the process of trying to find a way to communicate the portrait of the graduate involved
057graphic design and so i think that we really broadened our thoughts about what does it mean to communicate it's not just getting your point across it's also participating in active listening this reminds me of emotional intelligence right i need to be able to understand where someone's coming from i need to be able to communicate where i'm coming from and i think that as you'll see and hear a little bit more about these pieces they really do work together i think to make a positive and productive person the next category is innovator there was a tremendous amount of discussion around this category um we had as ray indicated we had seven to begin with we had critical thinking and we had problem solving and all of those things are good but we landed on innovating an
058innovator is really utilizing critical thinking to solve problems in a creative way and we heard about creativity from our from all of the thoughts that were shared and so i think that the innovator really encompasses a number of the pieces that were communicated to us through the feedback of those that are that um that participated i think also inherent and the innovator of einstein you know how many times do you fail before you get it right part of it is being resilient in the face of innovation and adversity and failure and learning how to get back up reflect on what went wrong and try it again the last category is learner and i think this also went through a number of iterations students were very clear most of my focus groups were students students were
059very clear they wanted to understand how to adult um when they left school you know things like personal finance and everything that encompasses you know car loans college application processes all those pieces um they wanted to be able to feel confident that they were able to do that and so the learner really encompasses knowing yourself being able to pursue additional learning advocating for yourself knowing what you need as a learner and adaptability and i think that that's really really important when i think about the little faces from carmen's students at south street they're going to have jobs we don't even know exist and so the idea of continuously learning is something that's really really key and we want to instill in our graduates so how do you measure all of this stuff um we have
060a couple of ideas and as has been indicated a few times this cannot just be a danbury high school exercise students need to have a number of opportunities recursive opportunities to practice these attributes to get feedback from teachers and so i agree with kevin when he says the timing really could not be better we need to build some of these pieces in along with other revisions that need to be made to the curriculum so that way these are thoughtfully integrated into the learning experiences of our students on a pre-k 12 endeavor so these are just a couple of thoughts that we had this will certainly need to be fleshed out further as we continue to work on the curriculum you can go to the next slide please thank you and i i do you know
061i'd be remiss to say that the portrait of the graduate is something that is expected by niask our accrediting body for the high school and so we have just had our visit the old standards did not require a portrait of graduate the new standards do um and so i think that we have been developing these with a number of things in mind our accreditation process has certainly been um in in my mind as well thank you thank you thank you ray thank you meg um so so one as part of our next step um and this is our kind of last transition before questions um it's going to be important for us to continue the feedback loop with our school community and so you know along the way there will be curriculum updates there'll be
062professional development updates uh there will be budget cycles um and i think it will be important for us to continue to inform the community how things are going i mean continue to get feedback particularly from our staff um and in any improvement strategies that we're looking to implement and making sure that we have a continuous cycle of um of communication going um the next one is expand equitable learning environments and and you heard how important from from angelo from lewinelli from janet uh when talking about that work at design at the margins ensuring that there's an opportunity for all of our kids to be engaged and be mindful of the most vulnerable in this designing process um you know our our team um you know probably unlike quite frankly any district that i've been in
063um you know the director of curriculum instruction would be overwhelmed by what's ahead and frankly cara melissa trish and the team they couldn't wait to get their hands on this stuff um and so i'm looking at the next bullet strengthened curriculum assessment professional development they they've been waiting for this day so that this could be handed over to them so they can connect all of the dots for pd connect all the dots for curriculum connect all the dots for future purchases um around curriculum and curriculum design in our district um so this really is a great opportunity for us moving forward last but not least and which i think will also be exciting for the school and the school community is branding the porsche of the graduate you know so so typically districts have symbols
064associated with their pog uh we we were leaving that for later a little later on down the line because we wanted to make sure and actually we were encouraged to make sure that our pog any branding efforts from our pog is aligned with our branding for our academies uh so we just want to be strategic as part of that process uh but i i remember it like it was yesterday at danbury high school we were meeting with some students and one one of the young ladies who has since graduated she said you know that symbol is important to me meaning that someone that's at the bottom right corner of your screen right now i remember that symbol when i first started in danbury public schools as a kindergarten student and so we know we need
065to be mindful of you know these symbols for our school community for our kids what that symbolizes for our district and so we just wanted to be really careful intentional about this process and so we will be back to try to figure out what the branding looks like for our district with this work right so just one last thank you to everyone to our students you saw some of them in the video let me just also say about the video you did not get to see some of our high school students middle school students with similar questions that come and ask the younger students i encourage everyone to take an opportunity to look at that video andrew lambeau who i think has a career in the news um um kind of kind of led the
066entire thing so he was cut out of the video i asked that you take an opportunity to see that video in its entirety i want to thank the community members people in business higher education they were just amazing people to work with our parents our board of education members amy thank you so much our teachers administrators and and anyone who has contributed to the portrait of the graduate we want to thank you all your participation in our thought exchange our surveys um and ray thank you for for sharing that information um all of that feedback has informed and helped to lead us to where we are today so i think the next slide ray is our questions one um it so and and then of course i would thank you um but our questions and
067miss cooper just wanted to hand it back to you and and thank you for um carving out this time for us this evening and i i would imagine uh the board might have some questions for us thank you for watching thank everyone for participating in this uh workshop and bring this information to the board uh at this time uh does any board members have any questions mrs cooper i'll ask one this is richard can you hear me yes i can okay um kevin to you what words can we associate with the portrait of a graduate is it uh our vision is it a creed i'm looking for something that you know i can connect to to to what it is you know without a long drawn you know conversation that long very wrong paragraph or
068anything like that is there any anything that you could uh share with me that that might help me right right right so so mr genelli i i i think um you know something that immediately comes to mind when you ask that question um i think i i think this beca becomes our north star as in the district i think we're going to find um and i think the cabinet and i will continue to be back in front of the board in the community um as an example as part of the budget process uh when when talking about um the the commitment that we're making to the portion of the graduate right and then and then what that means for resources uh for our district and so i think we've gone through um you know significant
069efforts to talk about um the pathways for for the danbury academy um and and recognizing the investment that's going to take well this requires an investment k-12 right and so i think in within the district it requires a different kind of investment change in the way potentially the way we work perhaps changing the way we deliver professional development perhaps changing the way we order supplies and books and materials uh you know perhaps changing the way we teach um uh but but then we also maybe need to be resourced differently um and so in many ways i i see it as you know almost like a north star for us as a school community because i think we'll continue to point back to the portion of the graduate that hopefully will be approved at the next
070board meeting and then all of the supports and efforts that he associated with that pog i like that north star to me and i associate with that a guiding light so very apropos thank you very much thank you mr nelly are there any ques other questions from board members i don't have a i don't have a question mrs look at rachel um i just want to say it was a phenomenal presentation [Music] i enjoyed it immensely i'm so i'm so excited and you know thrilled i think i see this as a springboard to new and exciting things to come as a result and so i just want to thank all of these great minds here today presenting um really great job i'm really proud and excited i was part of two focused groups and i
071really enjoyed those discussions so um and amy thank you for representing the board i know there were many meetings so thank you thank you rachel thanks for mentioning that because i i really think this work is going to unleash quite frankly the talent that we already have here in the district i think our teachers are going to be invigorated by this work i think our administrators are going to be invigorated and like you i think our parents and our kids most importantly are also going to be really excited once once this work gets underway yeah i i just wanted to add that um to that kevin that i like the collaboration very much and any time that you can include all of the stakeholders and listen to their opinions um you know you're going to
072be successful so thank you very very much to everyone it sounds very good but to me it sounds like we're going to go to school year round instead of 180 days thank you kathy are there any other comments no except to um with the academies coming on um the timing is so perfect kathy just said something interesting you don't go to school yeah a lot of a lot of the academy the internships externships all extending the wall of the schools in order to do a lot of these things so the kids will be putting in a lot of their time i just want to commend everybody i want to keep going on it's very impressive work very solid work and very sound work the north stars is probably a new symbol for us but uh
073this will guide your budgets i think it was kate that asked a few months ago you know how we're going to direct our direction how are we going to talk about um resources well when you talk to the council and you talk to the mayor you talk to folks this is what needs to get in front of them uh i think all of you know that and it should serve us well so i thank you very much thank you doctor if there are no other questions from board members i will need a motion to adjourn unless mr watson has some additional information do not miss cooper but i would like to just thank everyone um again for their participation in this work um the crazy thing is folks are so excited and and i think
074kathy said something about you know working all year round well kara's already asking her team to work all year round and and and and folks need a break folks need some time off but folks are committed to to to to ensure successful experiences for our kids and staff so i'm really looking forward to to what's ahead okay okay thank you again thank you everyone i need a motion to adjourn the workshop come on motion made by um rachel seconded by what's happening okay seconded by amy all they've been in favor say aye aye aye motion's okay you