001memory of >> my green engineering paper and like satisfaction I guess just say just read our students York and moving towards portrait of graduate and it's all about innovation creativity and critical thinking but it doesn't monitor just you look like you got some sun this weekend >> yeah I went >> I was out west >> oh that's right >> all day >> I don't think we're doing >> how did it go what did you catch intentional caught looking at that connection >> coding thoughtful about it. >> My son had a couple black cod >> and a rock fish too. >> Wow. >> Was this his first time going with you or had you been fishing? >> I think it was our fourth time going hlet fishing. >> Okay. >> They're big, right? I mean that's
002like >> hard to pull in. Well, they're the hard part is they're 800 feet down. >> Once you hook into one, you've got >> to reel in 800 ft of line to get them to the boat. >> Wow. >> So, that's the >> And do you have help with that? >> So, you're on your own. It's like here's your bow. Do it. >> We have a chartered ship. So, >> wow. >> So, those are the ling, right? >> Wow. Will they go ahead and clean them for you? Yeah. >> Okay. >> Yeah. You're going to be set for a while. >> What? I'm going to guess like three pounds. >> These are probably >> I also feel like >> Oh, wow. >> That's amazing. That's incredible. Yeah. And like I said, Westport is just one
003of my favorite places to go. Where did you guys stay? >> Is that that kind of big one and you can It's a path to the >> We have time to >> No, no, it's not that. >> It's three stories. >> And it just it hasn't there was four of us. >> It's big enough for everybody. >> Oh, but I ended up at one point I booked a hotel there and it was one that uh oh, somebody famous stayed in. I want to say the Kennedys of all people, you know, and it was this uh it's this hotel and I love finding really unique places as my husband calls them quaint and uh the hot water didn't work at first and you know there was so much wrong with it. He's like no more quaint
004places. >> Yeah. I'm not a big fan of quaint places if that's what makes them quaint. >> This we're only there for a few hours because we'd get up we had to be on the boat at 3:15 in the morning. So >> Oh wow. Oh my gosh. >> And was it two days of fishing or just That's amazing. >> No wonder you're >> excited about >> So Craig, did your wife get to try out her new bike? Thank you for helping my homework. as much as I could. At least I have my little bell on your lap. I knew it. Okay. Hello. I see we're already recording. Um, it's five o'clock. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome. My favorite goal. Not that we're supposed to have favorites, but it is mine and I will more next year
005when I don't get to do it anymore. Um so welcome everyone. We are here for our um annual review of goal four which is innovative creative critical thinkers. And I am just going to turn it over to the team to maybe do a few introductions. There's some faces that maybe not everybody knows and we'll get started. >> I'll turn it to turn it over to Dr. Dunham. >> All right. Thank you for having us here tonight. As uh President Hayes said, we have a group here which I'll introduce in just a second. Um we are here to share work that's been done towards goal 4. As I shared with President Hayes last week, she doesn't know I was trying to get out of continuing to do this, but um if you were at the CTE
006dinner, which I know many of you were, you got to hear some of what is innovative and creative within our system as well. So um congratulations to Dr. Director Shuimman for putting that on and continuing to lead that program. As it relates to the goal four presentation tonight, um I want to first start by thanking President Hayes and director Sanderson for their help in guiding us through um this presentation as we got ready ready for this. Um tonight presenting with me I have executive director of high schools Heather Miller um executive director of teaching and learning Dr. AMD Butler, assistant director of instructional technology and library services Shelby Reynolds. And then assistant director of curriculum instru instruction Dr. Nikki Smith, she just graduated or got got her hood um a couple weeks ago. >> And
007then you'll be familiar with uh Dr. Craig Foster, director of research and evaluation tonight. Um here to help us with this presentation. So um I will also say um this is scheduled to go an hour and a half. We have 68 slides, so we're going to move pretty quickly through this. Um, I've instructed the team to make sure they're kind of concise in their talking points. Um, and certainly are they're happy to follow up with questions, but I'll be monitoring time along the way and may interrupt as we're going through it. So, this is, as uh, President Hayes said, innovative, creative, creative, and critical thinkers tonight. And, um, it's our goal four. This is our final goal report for the year. Um we do do them a little bit out of order but um we
008we start with goal five and kind of work our way kind of through the system. So we're at goal four now. Um Dr. Foster in preparation got some guidance from uh Dr. King on some thoughts around being innovative and creative thinkers and so provided a quote for us. And then as as I just said this is our um fifth goal. We've done one, two, three, and five already. There are um five measures in equity mean statement in this goal. And so a lot of what we're going to provide you tonight will be organized around that um around those measures in statement. And then we've got them grouped in this way. U measures one and two are around critical thinking. We've kind of we've lumped them together. So you'll see data that relates to kind of
009both of those measures. And then um some just some sharing around some of the stuff practice in the organization to help with that. And then measures three, four, and five get um separate heads of data as well as talking points. And then um this is one of our challenging a challenging goal for us to measure and think about what are the best ways to collect information. So um over the years and then as Dr. Foster's come in, we've tried to refine how we think about it. But just to give you a sense of where the data poll will come from tonight, um Panorama, which I know the board is very familiar with, I Ready. Um the I Ready data is similar to what you've already seen, but there's a reason we want to weave it
010into this as well. It's a slightly different slice of it. And then there's just some environmental scans of courses we offer in the district at the middle school electives and then advanced placement and IB programming. And then um finally kind of some more PAMAN data and just a showing of some clubs that are really around social issues. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. fostering. He's going to get us started with um our first two measures of the night. >> All right. Thank you. So, uh here's measure one. Increased percentage of students who demonstrate the ability to critically analyze, interpret, and responsibly use data and information. Um it's something I also find inspiring. I love this goal. Um, one thing that I think is important is to if we're going to
011have a concept, we need to be able to define it. So, here is a um working definition for Northshore that I have um adapted. Uh the critical thinking is the practice of identifying, having, and giving good reasons for one's beliefs, values, and actions given one's goals of truth and avoidance of error. I think that's a wonderful goal for any educational setting. One way to consider critical thinking is to think of it also in terms of broad intellectual dispositions. One thing I like about the intellectual trait approach is it's a little more accessible for people than the myriad of skills involved with reading and synthesizing and analyzing and the foundation for critical thinking is an excellent resource. I pulled four of the uh intellectual traits that I think are particularly valuable for our community and those
012would be intellectual humility, recognizing the limits of one knowledge, intellectual perseverance, uh commitment to reason despite the challenges that can occur, intellectual integrity, which is being true to the same arguments across all sorts of different situations. So not changing the way that you argue about something based on something that you want to believe or not believe and intellectual empathy perspective taking to understand the arguments that other people provide. And so that's just sort of a broad basis that we can use for considering critical thinking. Uh we combined measure one and two. There really isn't an effective way to distinguish these two at this time. So it makes sense to consider them together and streamline this process. We've done this for a few years now. And so here we'll bring in measure two about percentage of
013students who can justify a position because you justify a position with good argument. So it's basically an critical facet of critical thinking. Okay. So then here we come to we basically have um three different ways that we broadly examine critical thinking. Right now, we have two panorama items that measure key facets of critical thinking. There are many many facets, but there's a couple that that we're using now to get at pieces of critical thinking. And then we have our reading comprehension. So, here we have our first facet of critical thinking. Um, some of you that have been on the board longer might remember the history of uh we tried one item out and it didn't work so well and then we replaced it with this item. And I think this item is actually doing what
014it is intended to do. And so here for context, you have the item and then you have the the agreement scale. So students can either endorse the item and uh that would be strongly endorsed would be a five and then strongly disagree would be a one. Obviously the neutral point would be in the middle. And this is based on this book, the death of expertise. Uh it is just a summary of a lot of scientific literature about this topic and confirmation bias and people um being not willing enough to consult with experts and really value their opinion. And so that's sort of the basis for why we settled on this item. And then here we have the item and here we have the responses. And at this point, um, especially as we think about going
015into a year where we are getting ready for the next strategic plan while we watch this strategic plan sunset, I really want to be more pointed about what makes an evaluation loop effective. And it's it begins with good measurement and then it's really only effective if you look at the results and you're going to respond to them. And you have to look at the item and say, "Okay, is this satisfying? And if it's not satisfying, what are we going to do?" And so, even though I have some reservations about keeping this item going forward, I still want to engage in this exercise as we think about building our research and evaluation capacities more broadly. What would be a if you think about our seniors in particular, what would be a response here that you would
016find satisfying or a response that you would find dissatisfying? If they're all satisfying to you, then the item isn't really worth anything. But I mean, we don't have all day, so I'm going to get to the point, but for me, I would be dissatisfied with anything neutral to disagreement. I I don't I wouldn't want our students to broadly say, "Ah, I really don't feel like turning to experts. I just wing it." Um I would find that dissatisfying. And if you accept that anything below a moderate agree, just agree or strongly agree, is dissatisfying, that means 50% of our students roughly are saying are providing us dissatisfying responses on this item. I don't think it's particularly surprising. Um I honestly I'm not sure it's terribly alarming. Well, actually, I think it's mildly alarming, but um what
017do you do with that? Anyway, let's move forward. So, here we have um over time I to be expedient, it's basically the same this semester as it was last semester. We can go ahead to uh looking at this by ethnicity. And here you see something interesting which is if you think about critical thinking as an important intellectual skill and I would and you accept the self-report nature of this as a valuable intellectual skill. we see an interesting pattern of results that um I think reflects a lot of the educational or intellectual commitments that our students have that we haven't seen in some of the more traditional standardized testing we've provided. So I find that refreshing and one of the uh assets of taking this type of approach to um go for and here you see
018at least from the self-report very similar uh responses for males and females for gender X. I can't explain that I I don't really believe that this group is broadly less interested in turning experts. I think there's some frustration coming out there and I think the placement of this item in the survey might be um creating these results a little bit. It's not a huge difference anyway, but and you can see in the standard deviation um it's much greater. So there's much more polarization in this group about this um this particular commitment to turning experts. And then here with additional demographic groups, you really don't see um any sizable differences between them. Okay. Now we turn to the other measure that we have for um examining facets of critical thinking. This one is not new to
019you. This is a panorama item. Um so we've had it all along and it examines how often do you think about what someone of a different race, ethnicity, or culture experiences? And I like to think of this one as really trying to capture that intellectual empathy dimension. It's contextualized here in terms of ethnicity and culture, of course, but um it it is um I think it maps onto that facet of broad intellectual traits as offered by the foundation for critical thinking. And then you can see the coding scale again, pardon me, just go back real quick, goes to one to five like that. And then we can see on the next slide um here you can see the response frequency. Again we've had this discussion before in terms of what responses are satisfying and if
020we see responses that are dissatisfying are there enough of them that we would feel like that's something that we need to address and try to fix in terms of what our graduates are uh experiencing. And I think this one, this item has been more satisfying to us because unlike the other item, you see the progression of student thought and development as they go from being in sixth grade to 12th grade. And on this facet, by the time they're in 12th grade, they're providing, in my opinion, it's up to to you to decide what a satisfactory responses. It's not just up to me, but you see generally satisfying responses. I think the student responses on this item are much more satisfying than they are on the other item. And so it would suggest that they're much
021more comfortable with that interpersonal quality of thinking about culture than they are of going and turning to an expert for whatever reason. Here we have that item over time. There's more waves because we've been using this item um for a longer period of time. And again, you see pretty consistent responses by panorama wave. Two years, two panorama assessments per year. And then across each assessment, you see that progression of how they respond in sixth grade to when they become much more culturally conscious as 12th graders. A normal developmental progression, one that we would like to see. And then here again we have it with ethnicity and thinking again of this as an intellectual skill and the area of critical thinking. It's interesting to see how students report the degree to which they engage in this
022particular type of thinking. The differences between these groups aren't huge, but they're also big enough that um I feel less comfortable just saying that's just random error. We don't need to um read too much into it. Um here you have it by gender. This is an interesting effect that the students identifying as male express much less commitment to thinking about what people from other cultures do on average. Um, and then here you see a reversal with students that don't identify in a binary system showing a lot of reporting a lot of thoughtfulness around this measure. And then we have our typical breakdown here by uh additional demographic group. And it's difficult for me to read too much into these differences. They look a little bigger than they really are because it they cross that the
023neutral point. So you see the twos and threes, but the groups are still fairly close together enough so that it it's difficult for me to suggest a pattern. Okay. Okay, now we're going to return real briefly to the critical thinking definition just because it leads into the next topic on this um part of the presentation so we can move ahead and that is the degree to which critical thinking overlaps with our IER reading comprehension dimension. And so here are just a few of the assessed skills and reading comprehension. And um again, I'm always pleasantly surprised to see how much of our critical thinking work is actually identified by our reading comprehension work. Uh it's a relationship that I think we need to spend some time unpacking, but I think the easiest way to understand this
024is if you're not effective at reading comprehension, you are probably not you don't have a foundation for critical thinking. Um, in the spirit of time, we won't read this whole thing, which means I probably shouldn't have put it in there, but I like claim trees so much and the arguments about um, analyzing claims and evidence are so instrumental to critical thinking. It was good to highlight that here in terms of its relationship to go for and then so here we have our reading comprehension scores. This is reading comprehension non-fictional text and it's so the results are really going to be pretty consistent with what you see in the overall reading scores that we've gone over in goal one and goal three. Uh particularly the ones in goal three because as students progress their scores are
025more dictated by reading comprehension. So there's going to be a lot of overlap, but because reading comprehension is specifically the facet of overall reading that relates to critical thinking, it made sense to pull it out here. And then here you see in terms of critical thinking, this suggests something that's a lot more concerning, which is having students in grade 8 only um being assessed at grade level standard 50% of the time. One thing that I am certain of is if we improve this score, we're improving critical thinking. They're not the exact same dimension, but I have absolutely no doubt that if we improve this, we're improving critical thinking. Uh here I took the time to break it out by um the five level placement in terms of where they are relative to their u current
026grades. And I feel like this is really important in this discussion because you get this really strong polarization effect that's occurring in grade 8. So it isn't as simple as okay, you have a fair number of students who are just below grade level standard. You have these students that are way ahead. I bet the students in grades six, seven, and eight there, they I bet they've been at that standard for years. And then we have another group of students that really needs a lot more support. That polarization is an an unfortunate but important part of how we have to address this issue. >> I think that's to me. >> So I wanted to just briefly talk about some of the things that we're doing to support this goal. One is ethnic studies framework and we've
027u talked about that around parameter work. I think this really does support in that it helps our students across grade levels starting at preschool all the way through 12th to start thinking about identity different perspectives and then look at opportunities to find out more about that person to be curious. Um one of the ways is through culturally responsive text or our novels adoption and then thinking about how do we embed it even into other content areas. So a good example is a science teacher that was doing the work around ethnic studies thinking about who uh who was involved in the creation of some of the concepts and bringing that in as a part of the work in the class. Another thing I wanted to mention is that we are being supported by this through the
028adoption of the new OSPI ELA standards. Uh that's something that's heavy on their mind throughout the state. our middle school teachers for uh ELA got to really dive into that as they were thinking about criterion for the middle school ELA pilot and eventual adoption. Uh what's really nice to see with those new standards as our teachers were digging in we were thinking about across sixth seventh and eighth in particular how do we emphasize the uh argumentation evidencebased reasoning and then unique to these standards and it's really again uh good to see that media literacy is embedded in the work and source credibility and that's got to be a part of it. So that's our first two measures. If there's questions or around those the data we shared or what was talked about here, we'll be
029happy to talk about it. Now >> I'll go even though my name tag fell down. Um, on slide for me it was slide 27 where it shows the eighth grade reading or grade reading. There you go. That one. Um, what year did we switch over to our new reading curriculum? And our eighth graders didn't start the different curriculum until they were in what, fourth or fifth grade, do we think >> reading? Yeah, the new the new curriculum. >> Dr. Butler, you agree with that? >> You're you're doing math. Good job. Right. um >> when it started. Yeah. So, I'm wondering as we, you know, move through having that and then as we're, you know, adding elements to that reading curriculum, my hope and expectation would be that we're addressing this when kids are learning to
030read so that they're getting sort of different access to fundamentals of reading, which should hopefully make reading easier when they're getting to the learn reading to learn rather than just learning to read. Um >> yeah, so the new reading curriculum um or inter reading curriculum had a greater emphasis on the early learning early reading skills, phonics, phame awareness. So our students um who didn't get that in kindergarten, first and second grade really didn't have an opportunity to benefit from the curriculum in that way. So that is one part is kids as that moves through the system and kids hopefully then they can access text better. The other is and we could recognize here and particularly when we talk about our middle school students um but even with our fourth and fifth graders and a need
031to focus um on some comprehension strategies. So that's work that's being done within the system um thinking about for next year as well. >> Um I wanted to start by just pointing out for anybody watching um that the Panorama questions in the beginning didn't have any low-income data because Panorama does not have any low-income data. So, just in case anyone's wondering why there's nothing there, legal reasons preclude that from happening. So, that's why it's not reflected. Um, I had a wondering if there was a way to look at SBA scores to figure out another data point for uh reading comprehension. I wasn't sure if it separates it into um categories in a way that we could actually access that. um mostly because even from my own children I've heard a lot of frustrating frustration with
032I Ready and I wonder to a small extent if a little bit of it is I'm tired of this I just want to be done with it and so maybe are they always doing their best effort whereas I feel like SBA feels like a heavier thing to students most of the time and so maybe if we had different data there that might be worth looking at. It's just a thought. Yeah, unfortunately SBA doesn't provide facet data anymore. So you only have the overall score. The other um concern I would have about SBA is it's one time a year instead of multi- time or three times a year. And so then you have the error of summer and the challenge of tracking down students as they um move through the system. And that really indicates the
033advantages of the I Ready. It's unfortunate that we have the two assessments for many students that come up in spring. But one thing about I Ready that's really advantageous over SBA is the degree to which it's integrated into our learning and how important it is for those assessments to be real time assessments that can help instructors. So those are all the reasons I really isn't useful. It's useful, right? The facets of the measure, they're all they all intercorrelate and I Ready correlates with SBA. So, it's a useful indicator. It's just not going to provide a lot of information above and beyond what we have. Thank you for the report and the presentation. I had a question around um that philosophical point that you brought up at the beginning which is you know if we're satisfied
034or not with what we're seeing. It sounds like that's an unsettled question. Um I don't think we're going to solve that here tonight, but I do want to open it up for conversation around what does it mean to be satisfied with some of the scores that we're looking at? What's the threshold? Are there comparison districts? We can't be the only community that is looking at how do we instill innovative, creative, critical thinking skills in the students. So, I'm wondering if we have a reference. I'm really glad you brought this up. The I think the reason that it's not set well it's not settled because it would be inappropriate for me to decide what's satisfactory and not satisfactory, right? Like I have an opinion and I can talk about the metrics and but that really isn't
035my that isn't my decision to make. I don't govern the school district. My decision my responsibility is to help build alignment. And so when you look at that item and it's not new and the other item and it's not new, the reason that it's not settled is it's on the periphery of our conversations. That's why it isn't settled. We haven't had the space to dig into it and settle it. Now we can create that space, but it's going to take time from something else. So it's really an illustration of the challenges that we experience as a district more broadly. all the discussion that's occurred around reading comprehension that is smooth as silk. All these things happen already and I don't have to lift a finger. We all know we want reading comprehension scores to go
036up. We all know we want students to grow a year every year, but these other two items, they're honestly they're odd ducks in the overall evaluation system that we've created. And more to the point, it's not really concerning to me that they haven't been settled because the thing that I've learned in my time here, and it took me a while because school districts are much more complicated than I think um people sometimes think from the outside, but are we really going to as an administrative center try to coordinate a through line from us through the principles down to the educ educational level itself about turning to experts. Is that something that is going to help Northshore move forward right now or is it going to set us back? And I'm not the expert here either,
037which is a good thing because it would look ironic if I pretended to be with about that item. But from where I sit, it's really difficult for me to imagine those conversations happening with principles right now. there's too many other conversations and there's so much care that has to be taken with how stressful their jobs are. Now, I could let that go, but this creates a different concern that I have in terms of where I sit and that is it's unhealthy to have evaluation items that you don't do anything with. It signals a level of sloppiness. I'm not I'm not judging us. I know why it's there. It's I totally understand. It's a wonderful goal. I'm super excited by it. I'm committed to it. And so I came into the school district and I said,
038if we have this goal, we're going to have to try to measure it. But if you measure it and you don't do something with it, it signals something unhealthy to the organization. And that's where I think the work is where you all have to do over the next year, which is are we going to measure it and be serious about it or not? And if we're not going to respond to it at an administrative level, then it needs to go because it just sends a bad signal. People look at it, they look at Panorama, they're like, "What is this?" Like, "Why is administration doing this?" And they they don't understand. And it's not their fault they don't understand. It's just it's just a lot for a school district to process. I will limit myself to
039one thought because I have so many but I will save them uh throughout the the evening. Um I I had a thought about table 12, a wondering um some of you know that I I used to teach adults and I taught reading comprehension to adults and it was all non-fiction and one of the things that I would teach is that when you're reading non-fiction, you have to be much more active in your reading. Um fiction is designed to pull the reader in, right? They want you to turn the page and it's descriptive and it describes the characters and the setting and the action and so it gets you moving through it. That is not the intent or the purpose of non-fiction. Um it there is a different purpose and so you have to come at
040it with a different lens and know why you're reading, right? Why am I reading this article? Why did the author write this article? And be active. Um, and the other thing I learned and I will come back to that whole concept later in the evening, but that with non-fiction because it's not written in a way for you to visualize, but that's what happens in our brain. You visualize what you're reading, you have to draw, you either know something already about the subject and you can picture what's happening or you draw analogies to other things. And so when I look at this disparity particularly at 8th grade, I have a wondering if part of the issue is in addition to skill set that lack of content to draw either to be able to say yes, I
041know what they're talking about or oh this is similar to X and I can get there to understanding what's happening. >> Yeah, I I believe so. There are some particular instructional practices that kind of emphasize both of those. One is and then the other thing that I think you're alluding around also is just thinking about as we get into sixth and seventh grade. People often think well ELA is my reading class but it's actually not my reading class. My science class, my math class, my social studies class, all of those are reading classes. And all of them also have heavy academic vocabulary that in order for you to be able to visualize something, you need to you need care to take into how you unpack that academic vocabulary. That certainly has been an area of
042emphasis that principles been working with Dr. Riley, who's not here tonight, but has Dr. Riley on, and it is going to be work with staff next year around the very concept you're talking about. And with that, we have uh Assistant Director Reynolds. Making sure I'm on the right slide here. Um so I'll be talking about measure three which is the increased percentage of students who access technology or digital tools and digital tools in innovative learning spaces to enhance student learning and expand personalization such as adaptive technology, collaborative learning and critical thinking projects. Uh the first item uh that we will look at is from Panorama. Uh the item is school is helping me learn how to work with technology. And we used this item in grades 3 through 5 and 6 through 12. And you
043should um see a familiar scale here. We have the liyker scale of disagree to strongly agree. We've seen this scale before. So five being strongly agree. Uh in this table you can see again something we've seen before. Uh so we have two years of results here um by grade level and um the scores are fairly consistent um across those those years. Uh one way to frame this is sort of a satisfaction survey. So student perceptions about uh access to technology and understanding how to use technology uh to to learn. Um these are sort of average. they sort of fall a little bit above neutral. So students generally feeling like um they're being able to access technology for their learning. Um you know just echoing some of the things that Dr. Foster was talking about, we
044can decide how satisfied we are with these scores or uh in essence how satisfied students are with these scores um and decide how uh satisfied we are with those scores. But generally scores are staying fairly consistent and staying fairly consistent across grade levels as well. Uh the next few slides will show a breakdown by um various student groups. Um again where you don't see numbers are n sizes are too small. Not anything super remarkable here. Um scores staying fairly consistent across demographic groups. Again, not super differentiated uh by grade levels across those demographic groups. Staying fairly consistent. When we look by gender, um again, our N size for um those lower grades are, um students who don't identify in the binary, our end size is a little too small. We do see a little drop
045in, um we'll call it satisfaction rates for uh non-binary students uh at the secondary grade levels. I wouldn't want to necessarily speculate what that's about. Um, we do see, um, in our ELLL group, um, in grades three through five, and I think we'll see it again at grades six through eight, we do see a little bit of a peak in scores. Um, and I think we saw this last year as well. um we tend to see um generally speaking a little higher use of uh adaptive technology in particular with our ELELLL students particularly around translation and um some additional technology based supports for our um EL students. So um not necessarily surprising that we see um a little more what we'll call satisfaction in those groups. Uh the next measure is um one of my
046favorites actually. Uh it's a might might be a little more controversial just because of the scores here, but uh the one that we get the most questions from teachers in particular about is related to uh school helping students learn how to work with artificial intelligence. Um little more interesting I think in terms of data. Again, we see that same scale from one to five in terms of students agreeing uh with school helping me learn how to use uh artificial intelligence. Um here's where scores get a little more interesting. And again, if we think about this in terms of students feeling some sense of um satisfaction in how a school is helping them to learn how to work with artificial intelligence, we see a bit of a drop in scores here. This is not surprising. Uh,
047as as I'm sure you know, we are in the midst of being very thoughtful and and being very intentional about uh how we're working with artificial intelligence. Uh we have taken the slow and steady approach. Uh we do not currently have tools that are available for students to use artificial intelligence. Instead, we've taken the approach uh to work very slowly and carefully on a skills progression. We have an AI work group that is uh very close to um providing a recommended uh skills progression that will be ready for review at the end of June and then we will be looking at tools that will support that recommended skills progression. So right now students don't have access to tools uh that they can use to learn how to uh work with artificial intelligence. Instead teachers are
048modeling the use of those tools and that for some students can be very frustrating like just let me have my hands on it. So um some students have you know figured out how to use those tools on their own or it's wild west out in you know the world where they can get their hands on those things. We have a lot of vibe coding happening out in the world or they have access through um carefully controlled uh you know computer science classes or through um moderated use in just a few environments where their teachers have very close control over some of those tools. And so I think the reason we see some of these scores being low is because there are students that are like I don't have access to any of these things in
049the context of of school. So, it's no surprise to me and I think no surprise to others that um some of these scores are a little on the low side. Um but again, this is a baseline, right? This is where we're starting, not where we're finishing up. So, I would expect as we start to implement a thoughtful approach, we we'll see these scores increase. Um the next few slides will show a breakdown in terms of those demographic groups. Again, we're going to see um some lower scores in terms of uh you know, grade level groups and demographics. Um we see uh ethnicity groups both at uh 35 and then again at 612. The score staying pretty steady. Uh when we look at gender groups, uh you'll see that our uh non-binary uh group at the
050secondary level is very low. Um, again, I wouldn't necessarily want to speculate because I don't have clear, you know, data to prove this, but one idea here is possibly that our um, sort of gender diverse um, students tend to also correlate to neurodeiversity. And sometimes what happens there is we have students that are um, tend to be more on the creative side, tend to also be connected to um, concerns about the environment. And uh those students tend to also understand that AI has a huge impact on the environment, a huge impact on intellectual property issues and uh tend to be more concerned about the impacts of AI on ethics and morality and u these scores could be very low in that particular group because of their connections to those concerns. Uh we also just as
051a side note have a student AI survey going right now and those themes are coming um very strong in the results on that survey. Just met with the student advisory group last week and that those themes are coming out very strong in that group uh in our um demographic groups uh for 35 in terms of 504 ELLL and so on. I think we're also seeing that ELLL trend show up here because we're also seeing the use of artificial intelligence support our ELLL students in terms of translation and adaptive use uh to support their needs. So, we see a little bit of a jump in scores here. We also see it in special ed. We've um heard and seen some demonstrated benefits of artificial intelligence in the way that teachers are using special ed to support
052student learning and personalization for those students. So we could see uh slightly higher scores in those groups because of that reason. Um although there is a little bit of a dip at our secondary levels as well. And then uh as far as um some strategies and supports that we are using um to meet measure three, uh the instructional technology coordinators have really leaned into um professional development to support teachers understanding of how artificial intelligence in particular can support um personalized learning for students. Um we have data privacy agreements with several uh artificial intelligence providers. uh Gemini and co-pilot in particular. Um we've really tried to lean in on those as our supported tools for this year, but we also have a data privacy agreement with colleague AI, which you may know started with the University
053of Washington, but now is its own special entity because of the loss of federal funding for that tool at the University of Washington. Seesaw, which is our elementary learning management system, has also embraced artificial intelligence within their platform and um we do have a data privacy agreement there. So we've been using uh teaching teachers how to use that uh not as an AI tool for students to use but an AI tool for teachers to use to create personalized uh learning for students. Uh that has also led us to um helping develop professional learning related to MTSS and EL for teachers uh related to school um action plans and targeted professional development for teachers related to their goals out at schools. We've also um been doing some work to really focus on student centered learning environments.
054Um, you may know that, uh, as of June 30th, for example, uh, YouTube will be blocked for all of our elementary students. So, really trying to hone in on, uh, making sure that teachers are making very, uh, distinct and intentional decisions about access to video-based content instead of just, you know, hey kids, go be out in the world looking for video. but really helping teachers to make those intentional, thoughtful decisions about the use of media in particular. Um, and again leveraging AI to personalize learning. Uh, as I mentioned before, we have an artificial intelligence workg group that's been meeting since January to be very thoughtful about the place that artificial intelligence has in our district and in our teaching and learning um to develop that skills progression. And this is very much in alignment with
055our goals around critical thinking. Um, and to be clear, this is not uh how do kindergarteners use chat GPT or how how does a first grader use co-pilot. Our goals uh around that skills progression are very much rooted in critical thinking and developing critical thinking skills and being very thoughtful about the uh intentional integration of tools at the appropriate time for students. So really building up that uh those cognitive muscles and those critical thinking skills before kids are ever putting their hands on keyboards and putting them in front of screens. We're being very thoughtful and intentional about um those skills that we're trying to develop for students. Uh part of that recommendation will also include moderated tools um for students to build those skills so that teachers um feel confident and comfortable in those interactions
056with uh students and tools and not just again flinging the doors open and saying go for it kids. Enjoy your time with Gemini. We wish you well. Hope it goes well. Won't be like that. Um and then um lastly uh our continued focus on making sure that students have access to those interdisciplinary and problem based um challenges through things like um national history day. Uh for the second year we're also going to have our inspirit AI immersive. Uh we started advertising that a couple of months ago. We already have more interest and registrations than we did uh last year. So definitely continued interest in that and we are continuing to offer scholarships for students for whom um financial uh options are a barrier. So uh questions. Um, I will say that when you were talking
057about increased access to um tools on computers that are helping kids to do things like if they have a test question where they don't need to be working on their reading skills, but they need to work on comprehension and having like an audio option um I think is is something that is really exciting for kids who struggle with um being able to do that reading and comprehension piece, but when they are accessing information differently. Um and I think that speaks to our English language learners as well as kids who have different ways that they need to access information, kids with or without IEPs. Um, so I it's to me thinking about ways that we're accessing what kids actually know versus accessing how they're responding to barriers that are present in our testing environments. It's um
058a really exciting use of technology to help support our learners in being able to show what they actually know. And um so yay yay for access. >> Yeah, >> I don't have any questions, but I just had a comment that I'm glad we're being intentional about our planning around technology, specifically AI access to the students as we're hearing from community members on the use of screens and screen time in schools. This isn't so much a question maybe as a wondering um but referring back to the first question, school is helping me learn to work with technology. Um I was wondering how students interpret this question and that perhaps since they are digital natives and we are not so much there is a different understanding from their perspective that is guiding this or guiding their thoughts
059about how they answer this. And so, are we quite getting what we think we want out of it? Yeah. I mean, I'm not the panorama expert, so I might ask Dr. Foster to weigh in on this a little bit. I I will say in my conversations with students um as part of our work with you know AI implementation with um the student advisory board I think that anecdotally um especially with our students that are getting ready to graduate. I think their expectations around preparation to use technology in the world is very different than what we mean when we say uh for example in measure three you know accessing technology and digital tools and innovative learning spaces to enhance student learning and expand personalization. I think I think our intention is that they have the skills
060necessary to leverage the tools we give them to be able to accomplish the things that we set out for them in terms of goals to write the five paragraph essay and to do the things in schooly and to accomplish the the things that we want them to do as a part of the the goals of school. I think the students, for example, that I met with last week as part of Superintendent Irish's student advisory board, those those students if they were sitting at this table, I think would be thinking about the the vibe coding, the building of apps, the preparation to go work in industry and be able to, you know, work through complex workflows to be able to I mean, honestly, to be able to analyze a a budget to do financial planning for
061saving up for a car, like those sorts of things. And so I think you're wondering is valid in terms of is their interpretation of using technology to do something related to something they think is important. I think their answer to the question might be slightly different and that could explain why their scores are the threes, the sort of average things. I think that's a valid question. >> Yeah. I also think that there are two philosophies of education that are warring here. Um, I went to a university that did not necessarily teach you how to use the latest software to develop a thing. They were very theoretical >> and so you understood how a thing worked and assumed that like technology moves so quickly that like it may be different by the time you get to
062industry. So, we're going to rely on industry to teach you the technology and we're going to teach you the background so you can understand almost anything. Um, and then there are other schools where they work with an industry directly and they build those students to be exactly what that industry wants when they graduate. And so there's a philosophical question here of who do we want to be? Do we want to be teaching the general theory so that you can move forward and figure things out or do we want to be doing more of the we're going to assume that you're going to be able to learn those things because we've prepared you? And there's some of both. Like it doesn't have to be either or, but like you tend to fall more to one side
063than the other. >> Great. We're going to move into measure four, which is talking about breadth of coursework. Um, and this measure states increased equitable access and enrollment across student subgroups in the arts, social sciences, sciences, and technology classes. Uh we start in middle school and this shows the past three years worth of our middle school electives wheel and as you can see from this table uh it's remained pretty consistent over time. Uh we may see a little bit of change as we have a new arts uh requirement but otherwise things have remained pretty constant. lots of offerings at our middle schools. On the next slide, uh you will see in this one, um we have a lot of courses and a lot of titles. We were discussing whether we're actually calling courses what we
064think they are. uh when we were discussing the number of titles that we have. So a course may have been created for a smaller number of students which is why we have multiple titles for some of these courses. But otherwise over time um this is where we landed. Uh and table 29 demonstrates our IB courses, their titles and enrollments as well. It demonstrates that our students are taking a breadth of courses under our IB um courses coursework at Inglemore High School and the past three. And after this one, we will spend most of our time on AP because we have a lot more students involved in AP and so we will do the breakdown within our AP coursework. So this one looks across student subgroups and we're looking at how our subgroups are selecting advanced
065academic experiences. And in this table we are looking at the percentage of the course enrollments in AP by uh disagregated by ethnicity. Can I ask quickly? Um, Wanik is listed there. Are there AP classes within Wanik? That kind of confused me. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Good question. And then the next slide shows by um school department disagregated by gender which is always to me fairly fascinating and I think over time to see what our students have chosen um traditionally or not traditionally Um, I think our science courses, we still have a few, our percentiles are a little bit lower in our females to males, but they are not horribly different, which I find very nice. And our math is within a few percentiles, too. And English is still a little bit higher.
066So it is a little bit traditional in our percentage of representation and in this one um AP computer science principles is what I think the wanic is representing on this table. And then on the next slide we have um our AP coursework by disagregated demographics. Um our EL students are not typically selecting English. I got a a chuckle. Just one two. Okay. But otherwise um pretty pretty holding steady in our students who are participating. It is nice to see that we have a number of students participating across our courses. And in our next slide, um, this one is a representation of our middle and high school students in the least restrictive environment over time over the past three years. And I'm I'm going to honor um the work that um our executive director of special
067education did this afternoon for me uh because I asked, okay, why are we down from 68.5% last year to 64.7%. And uh because we had all been trying to figure out what it might be. However, uh we have 87 more students in the system. uh and the majority of them have entered in about the 40 to 79% category for least restrictive environment and they looked school by school to see and the number of students in the 80 to 100% LE did not decrease uh but if a student even takes one academic lab and their schedule they fall into a different LRE And so um we really are doing pretty well still. Uh sometimes it's scheduling as they enter into the system and uh so we are really proud still of the work that our schools
068are doing. Uh sometimes it's a scheduling issue as they enter into our district. And so we just I wanted to honor the work that uh Darin did for me today to answer that question maybe because it would be a question that might come up. So we wanted to let you know what that drop would be because it's something we've been working really hard on. And then for the final strategies and supports, we really do have an expansive course offering um for our students. And if anybody's ever come from a smaller district, you would really be impressed with the number of offerings that our kids have. Uh there are all kinds of interdisciplinary uh settings that our kids get to experience that bridge the content areas. those kinds of experiences with Wanik and our CTE offerings
069and the um options that they have both at middle and then again at high school um are impressive. We are working very hard for in our culturally responsive um behaviors in our classrooms to uh support our students from all kinds of demographics and uh to make them feel welcome so that they can take all kinds of courses and I think we're really being proactive. One of the things is the annual family symposium which last year we just had on the most beautiful day of the year and this year we're going to have on a a rainy day so that everyone comes um so that we can really make sure that our families are aware of all the offerings that we have. Uh, I think just getting the word out so that our families are aware
070of all the choices that their students really do have in the Northshore School District. So, I had one more question about this and I was wondering where college and the high school gets reflected in all of this because I know there are some differences in what are AP courses at some schools. um like the uh pre-calc um is an AP course at Woodenville, but it's college and the high school at North Creek. And so that would affect like possible percentages in AP classes, but not necessarily in a way that says that students aren't taking the hard classes. The data, I believe, Craig, you pull the data by um AP courses and the course codes that align with AP. So a college and the high school if it was only a college and the high school
071it would not be reflected in this data. >> It it would be another way to slice the data. Some of our courses are college in the high school and AAP courses. So um there's probably I'm sure Craig would figure out a way to sort it out but there um likely would then be reflected um some courses would be end up being reflected twice also. Um, and I think broadly speaking, what we see in our college and high school courses in terms of percentages and representation is very similar to what we see in our AP courses. I think here we have another opportunity to refine our thinking in terms of how all this is assessed in a strategic plan. Um, notice when we started to speak about college and high school, we started to speak about
072difficult courses. Um, and we talk about advanced courses in a different part of the strategic plan. These courses are supposed to be courses about critical thinking. And I think strategically a lot of people had raised the question, well, just because it's an AP class or it's an IB class or a college and high school class, does that mean it's really teaching more critical thinking than the other courses? And until we sort that out, this is sort of um a um not ideal alignment in terms of the measure and the overall goal. There was one more thing where it talked about there was um more foreign language done in IB and I was wondering if that might be due to a difference in IB diplomas versus what uh students who are not in an IB program
073might face. the the IB program is very culture and language um heavy and so that's why you see that uh it's that sequence is only at Inglemore I happen to know it up close and personal so that's why um you see the higher proportion of world languages there All right. So, with that, for our last measure, we're going to turn to Executive Director Miller. >> Measure five, get my um addressing social issues, uh increase percentage of students who apply learning to solve real world culturally relevant challenges in imaginative ways. Um this is our social problem solving measure and we measure that um and this is new to the fall 2024 survey. So we have two years of data share to share. Um school is helping me learn how to address issues in society and it's
074the same fivepoint scale that you've seen in prior measures as well. The first table shows the uh statistics for addressing social issues by grade and time. So you're looking at two years of data there from grades 6 through 12. One could make an assumption or interpret that the seniors in grade 12 might be higher due to their courses they take that are required in civics and contemporary world issues where the uh scope and sequence is dressed is focused largely on social problem solving issues and global challenges. The next table breaks it down by ethnicity and then by gender. There's nothing substantial to report. And then number table 37 by our demographic groups. There was an little uptick with our English language learner population. Um Dr. Foster and I discussed this a little bit. It could
075just be that they are maybe exposed to more cultures regularly within the home environment and with society. So when they think about social issues or problem solving um that could be higher due to that. Um the table 38 is just a partial list of some of the student clubs and that have social problem solving built within it. There are many more. We would list a couple pages if we wanted to list everything. I think that our students um are interested in social issues and so they often want to begin a club. So they will request um support from their activity directors or their administrators or teachers to start a club. And it may be something that they're highly interested in or their values support. But we could also think of it in terms of maybe
076it's the school and the instruction and the content that's caused them to be interested in this social issue. Strategies and supports. Um I I fully believe that our teachers continue to integrate students cultural backgrounds and lived experiences into the curriculum and the content they're teaching. Um, I see that more and more when we're out on walkthroughs and principles across the system report that um, they create projects that address local or global challenges. I just was down at Better World Day last week down at Innovation Lab High School where every project is focused on social issues. Um, providing CTE pathways, we continue to increase the number of those that have real world economic value. any of our we've talked about IB our capstone IB theory of knowledge DECA biotech again the list could go on and
077on about the number of courses that our students have access to AP college in the high school and then just our CTE programs that focus on how do we address and solve global and social issues many of you have seen our national history day um presentations those are powerful robotics we have national champions, international champions in some of our schools. And then there's more of a move I uh towards inter interdisciplinary projects across the system. Um when I'm speaking with principles or teachers, I hear them talk more about those and those also lend itself to a different way of analysis and talking about the issues that are present. >> So this is our final measure for the night. We'd be happy to take questions over this measure or or entertain discussion or question over any
078part of the goal for presentation. being the board member who was nominally in charge of this one. Um I just want to thank you guys for the work um at figuring out ways to look at innovative, creative, critical thinkers and find measures of it because those are not necessarily things that we typically look at and go, "Oh, those are easy to measure. We can go look at this and that." Um, and also just our willingness as a system to reiterate um, if we see that something isn't working, trying new questions, trying to get better data to be able to figure this out in better ways. I was just thinking of the irony that we need to be innovative, critical thinker, creative to figure out how to measure innovation. So perhaps we that's the answer to
079your question that we are modeling for our students how uh to the work through things. Um but seriously, we can't stop doing this because it's hard or we haven't found the answers yet. That's we have to keep doing this work. We know this is what our students are going to need as they get to go into the 22nd century hopefully. Um we know these are skills they have to have. And I think I believe that a lot of this work is being done but without intentionality that our work around ethnic studies the novels that we adopted um that there is so much of this happening in our classrooms but bringing it to that metal level and having teachers understand oh I am already teaching critical thinking skills in my work and When you raise that
080awareness for teachers then they can be proactively oh when I do this experiment that is how I'm getting people to trust the experts right the science in the room the math in the room right that I think if we we we have to keep talking about it and we have to keep wrestling with this and be asking the system okay we know you are already teaching this what are some examples that you are doing on a day-to-day basis of this work that if you bring that awareness then the kids start to recognize right if we're unaware that we're teaching it even though we are the kids are ne they're never going to pick up on that if we don't right but once there is a consciousness awareness of the instruction around these I think of
081music right they are very happy to tell you that they are teaching teamwork and listening skills skills. They're very quick to point that out and the kids can all say that. And so we need to bring that to the to the whole system >> again with the idea of um moving into a year where we think about a refresh. I want to point out with the social problems measure. Um, if I were doing a research project and I wanted to investigate whether an intervention created uh better capacity to solve social problems and then I tried to publish that. I sent it to a journal and and I had okay well here's how I measured it. I asked the students whether they learned how to solve social problems. I would create very rare agreement among all
082the reviewers because they would all reject the manuscript and they would all say, "You didn't actually measure whether they solved social problems. You just measured whether they think they solved social problems." It's okay because it's a standin and it's I love this aspect of goal four. Um, and I think our district is very much about this which is why it's a goal. But it's really just the it's just a way to start the conversation with asking students, is your education doing this? There are ways to measure critical thinking, not self-report about whether they think critical thinking's occurred. There are ways to measure whether students are better able to solve social problems, but they're resourceheavy. That's the conflict. um figuring out how to evaluate critical thinking. I mean there's work to be done even in terms
083of the generalist versus specialist definitions that have been mentioned over the last couple of years. Do you have a measure of critical thinking? Does it have to vary by um teacher? So the board can with this work has to span a lot of different people and where it lands again it's not for me to say but we do need to be really mindful about what does the measure look like and do we really have is it really in the overall best interest for Northshore to spend the amount of resources it needs to on that measure and and it can make us an innovative district but Um there's a reason that I think probably every district in this state says we value critical thinking. They don't measure it. It might be every district that does that.
084Um we sort of measure it. So I think we're ahead of a lot of districts, but um it's a really challenging thing to get at. Where where we go, I don't know. The thing is to be mindful about how would you measure it and how much resource does that suck up? Can you give an example of one way to measure critical thinking that you're mentioning sucks up a lot of resources? >> Well, so there are critical thinking measures out there. Um I think most of them cost money to start. It's really when I brought this up, it's really not a financial discussion, but it does come into play. Um you can create your own critical thinking measure. I'd be quite proud to do that at free for the district. Um, but even even then, let's
085say um like the lost on the moon task. I don't know if any of you are familiar with that, but the lost on the moon game is a um it's a fun exercise for kids to do and uh you can use it in terms of measuring something that's beyond kind of rope memorization. But are you going to create a lost on the moon task for all these other the lost on the moon task is you're lost in the moon. You have a b whole bunch of items that you could take with you. Some of you know it, right? And they're um there's actually a NASA approved answer. So you can actually score these things. Um there are things that are seem like great ideas, but they're not like matches. They, you know, they tend to
086need oxygen to work and the only oxygen you have is in your body or on your suit and you're going to die. Um, so and the water will freeze, things like that. So there are ways to assess it, but now you're seeing the problem, right? How do you do that? Now, if you coordinated between teachers and you gave some broad principles that they were all committed to and they had a common language to work with, then you would have a really innovative approach to this. But once you backed it up, you see what that means. That means creating a uh template of critical thinking, distributing it, asking this the principles to be on board with it and those it's really conversations that are the resource that's so precious in all this. Isn't that the purpose
087of the strategic plan is to have those conversations? Isn't that what we're doing for the next year is having those conversations about what are we asking of our system for our students? I'm just rhetorical. >> I agree. Yes, it is that there is an easy answer to that. Yes. Um and then it's prioritizing how you know what are we going to um what how are we again one of the issues that I have that we've talked about with the current strategic plan is that there is um everything is of equal weight um and so as we're thinking about prioritizing how do we then prioritize what is the biggest lever that we think in our system is going to actually create positive outcomes for kids and close opportunity gaps for kids. So then as we're thinking
088through all those levers that we want to see, then that's where we're going to put most of our energy in. And then there's going to be other levers that are also important um that create change but might not be where we put you know 80% or 60% of our resource. Now that's yet to be determined because we have to go through conversations. We have to engage with multiple people. We have to understand we have to dive into research. We have to look and see what have other districts done. Um what have we done that's worked? What do we want to keep maintain? And so yes. So long answer yes. It involves conversations and us socializing that across the organization um and prioritizing of the limited resources we have. Where are we going to bank those
089resources to get the best possible outcome? Um I think the challenge we face now is we are putting equal resources across five goals of multiple strategies and it's um creating um it's been good and we're doing great work as an organization and it's also um in an underresourced world creating a lot of stress and and anxiety across the organization or initianitis um as what some people call across across the organization. So how do we maintain high expectations, high accountability um around the re around the strategies that we need to um implement and creative or innovative, creative and critical thinking is at the end of the day what education is about. And so um how we measure that whether it's through student outcomes through perceptual data um how is it embedded across all of our multiple
090goals is going is going to be the conversation that we have to have. But we can't get rid of the idea that our goal is to create innovative and critical thinking skills across our organization. Um, so all right, President Hayes, absent other questions or discussion, that ends our presentation for the night. Appreciate your guys' attention to this goal as well as the other goals.