Transcript: Evidence in Action: Learning Together and Growing Change

Antoinette Miller:

I’m pleased to welcome you to our Virtual Learning Session on Evidence in Action: Learning Together and Growing Change. And this session is presented by the California Center for School Climate, which is a California Department of Education initiative operated by WestEd that provides free support and trainings on school climate and data used to local education agencies within California. This session is our last Virtual Learning Session on Using Participatory Approaches to Support School Climate. So throughout this series, we’ve been discussing how to integrate participatory strategies to work collectively with young people, families, and communities to support school climate practices.

Today we have a 60-minute webinar session planned for you. During our time together, we will discuss participatory approaches to continuous improvement, explore considerations of change in learning routines, and have an opportunity to hear from a school district in California and their efforts around learning together and growing change through data. Once again, this session will be recorded and made available to you from the CCSC website.

This is the team presenting today’s session. We’re happy to help you get the most out of your time today. So if you have any questions, any technical questions, please email us the [email protected].

My name is Antoinette Miller, I’m a Program Associate with WestEd and I will be your moderator for this session today. Our presenters today are Erica Boas, Elena Cabrera, and Shazia Hashmi.

Erica Boas serves as a core contributor for the California Center for School Climate. Erica is a Senior Improvement Specialist with the Improvement Science team at WestEd. Using improvement science methods, she supports K-12 schools and districts as well as university-based teacher preparation programs in their equity-centered improvement efforts.

Shazia Hashmi serves as a Technical Assistance Provider for the California Center for School Climate as a Program Associate at WestEd. Shazia translates and applies research on equitable and developmentally appropriate strategies to support state education agencies, district leaders, and educators in serving communities.

And we also have here Elena Cabrera. Elena is the Director of Categorical Programs and Grants for Folsom Cordova Unified School District. You’ll learn more about her and her work throughout our session today.

And now, I’m going to pass it to Shazia.

Shazia Hashmi:

All right, thank you so much, Antoinette. Good morning, everyone. My name is Shazia Hashmi, and I’m excited to introduce you all today to our topic of continuous improvement, which is a key element to our Participatory Systems Change for Equity Framework. As you can see on this screen, we have just a visual representation of how our team at WestEd is thinking about opportunities to transform systems in partnership with communities. And you’ll see that the seven elements are at the core and that orange ring surrounded by principles and other strategies that are really essential to this work, which we will briefly summarize today.

On the next slide, we just like to represent how when we talk about systems change, we think about it at these three levels. So the innermost circle representing individuals in-school communities, students, and the adults who care for them. And then the green interpersonal circle represents how interpersonally between these individuals, there’s also a lot to attend to there. And then throughout the institutions they’re operating in, we also have to think about the policies, procedures, systems in place at that level when we think about how to transform these systems.

And on the next slide, you’ll see our seven elements of participatory systems change. So we always start with connecting and community, and really ensuring that community is embedded in every single one of these elements as we believe that community members are the experts of their own experiences. We ensure that our systems change efforts aren’t done to them but with them.

So our last element that we’re talking about today, Learn Together and Grow Change, is really about making sure that we can assess, measure, evaluate, and really look at feedback throughout these elements in concert with community.

The next slide goes a little bit more in depth about element seven, how it’s rooted in principles of continuous improvement to ensure that community members have those opportunities to adapt and change our system change efforts based on ongoing learnings. So this element, we really see it as so crucial to ensuring that change efforts don’t fizzle out after initial wave of excitement, which I think we probably have all experienced at one point in our lives, whether it’s even a change effort that we’re trying to make personally, we might start out with a real excitement and then it just disappears in the shuffle of things. So system leaders should really be involving community members in the evaluation or improvement process to demonstrate continued transparency, and that can really lead to mutual responsibility, which we see as a key strategy for iterating and scaling over time. And in this description on the right-hand side of the slide, you’ll see that we talk about routines and we’re going to talk a lot about learning routines today, but that really means co-creating meaningful and practical measures of change, and then working together with community members to iterate and scale change approaches over time.

And the next slide goes into a little bit more detail about these strategies or really just highlights these three strategies that we see as core to this element. So co-creating measures of change, implementing learning routines, and working together to iterate and scale. Some questions that we think help make this more vivid are, how are success and evidence defined in partnership with community in your context? Our feedback loops with the community in place in order to inform the continuous improvement of the system. And our change approach is being tested, iterated and scaled over time to inform the iteration and expansion of change efforts. So we recognize that this looks really different depending on your context. If you’re in a school, this is going to be very different from at the state level, for example. But we really see the importance of embedding community members experiences, their assets, their understandings throughout every element of assistance change effort.

Because if you don’t do that, then we’re only operating on our own assumptions and that won’t give us the full picture of how our change effort is really being experienced by the community members we’re looking to support and ultimately enhance their lives.

So on the next slide, we have a few examples of learning routines that we’re talking about. So cycles of inquiry and reflection can be one example of a learning routine. Feedback loops are something that we talk about a lot. And then adaptive problem solving, we see these three as really good examples of what this might look like in your community, but ultimately all learning routines should be practical, frequent, consistent and in partnership with community. So we like to remind folks to stay grounded in your why, which is if you go through all the elements and really take a look at the participatory systems change guide, we start with connecting community and then we try and understand the system in concert with community to really come together around a shared vision, which can be described as our why.

And then engaging community members always. Learning from our efforts, both wins and mistakes. And then sharing what we’ve learned with our community is another key aspect to this element as we can’t only just report out to funders or those were held accountable to. We really want to make sure that we’re being accountable to the folks that we are trying to support and involve in our efforts.

And on the next slide, we have a video that comes from High Tech High and we think it’s a really great way to think about how to keep equity at the center of continuous improvement. The presenter in this video talks about a model for improvement that really can show you how to involve community members in every phase of a change effort. So we can go ahead and play that.

Brandi Hinnant-Crawford via pre-recorded video:

There’s a lot of conversation about how to improve with equity. Thus far, we’ve made progress in defining aims that have equitable outcomes, but we also have to think about equity within the process of improvement. One way to do that is to think about what I call the two who’s, who’s involved? And who’s impacted? And you can take those questions in the model for improvement and come up with some follow-up questions that’ll help you think about being equitable throughout the improvement process. So let’s look at those three questions.

What am I trying to accomplish? A logical follow-up would be, who benefits from accomplishing this and why is this something we need to accomplish? The second question in the model for improvement is, how will I know a change is an improvement? Who defines what it means to improve and whose values are in what it is to be improved? And then the final question is, what change might I introduce and why? Again, you have to ask whose values and whose ideas were incorporated in that change? And then who also bears the burden for the labor in implementing that change. That’s how we can think about equity throughout the improvement process as well.

Shazia Hashmi:

All right, so we see that those three questions are repeated at the end of that video, which I think is again just key to making sure that our change efforts aren’t just unintelligible. I think a lot of the times we as organizations, as systems try and meet with community members and get on the same page and sometimes it feels like we’re speaking a completely different language. So it really helps to keep these in mind. What are we trying to accomplish together? How will we know? How are we making sure that our metrics aren’t really data heavy and not in the same language that we’re trying to speak with community? And making sure that when we talk about introducing new aspects of change, we are really communicating back with our community members to see how they’re experiencing. What we’ve already introduced is we don’t want to just keep adding without really understanding root causes of the issue.

So with that, I am going to turn it over to my colleague, Erica, to talk a little bit more about PDSA cycles.

Erica Boas:

Okay, thank you so much, Shazia. And I want to share that Brandi Hinnant-Crawford is a rising star in doing equity centered improvement, continuous improvement work. So look out for her. I believe she’s at Clemson College in South Carolina now. And this combination of academic work around continuous improvement and on the ground practice and understanding of how to do continuous improvement is essential to ensuring that we maintain a philosophy around the work that we do that gets codified in research and also in practice, and that those are simultaneous. And I think Brandi Hinnant-Crawford is really a, she’s a trailblazer in this work. So what I have the pleasure of doing today is introducing you to a special guest that we have and who is going to show us. So we’re always asked to show and not tell in these presentations, but to show us how this work, not just PDSA cycles, but how the work to engage community and to learn about change and to learn about what is the evaluation, the assessment side of things, what is actually working in a system, what needs to be changed based on the feedback that Shazia alluded to, the feedback that we get from community members, which is essential to drive change forward.

So if we can go to the next slide, I’m going to introduce our very special guest. And once again, my name is Erica Boas. I work at West Ed as a senior improvement specialist, and I appreciate my partnership with the California Center for School Climate.

I am very pleased to present and converse with our special guest today, who is M. Elena Cabrera. Elena Cabrera is the director of Categorical programs and grants for Folsom Cordova Unified School District. She provides training, technical assistance and up-to-date information to district schools and departments regarding the development and maintenance of local plans including data analysis, goal setting and budget and program evaluation. Elena Cabrera has worked in education for over 30 years. She is passionate about working to eliminate achievement access and opportunity gaps that exist for students, parents and staff to maximize their opportunities for success.

So Elena will be speaking with us today about an excellent community engagement activity that she has been running for many years now called data walks. We’re really fortunate to have an on the ground practitioner of data use for student family and community engagement here to share with us today. And to describe how we can learn together and grow change together as a community. And something that I think we need more and more models for if we are to do this well. So we really appreciate your time with us today, Elena, and thank you for sharing with us.

I’m going to start by presenting the three questions that I hope you’ll share with us on today. And then I will allow you to flow with the presentation and we can converse as needed. So the first question that we’d love for you to just explain to us is what is a data walk? Second is, how do you work to best ensure community participation when you organize a data walk? And third, with the input you collect from data walks, how do you drive change forward with your community? So take your time working through your presentation as needed. I’ll come back and prompt if necessary. But I would also welcome if you would like to have more of a conversation with me, we can do that after your presentation.

Elena Cabrera:

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for that introduction, Erica and team. What a data walk is, I’ll certainly dive right in, is an opportunity to engage your partners and your educational partners. And that of course begins with the students. And the most obvious, your teachers, the whole team, including the community. Depending on where you are as a district, you could be in the middle of a city or connecting a couple of cities like we do. And getting those partners engaged and getting their voices heard is a critical next step to doing anything as a district, I think. And that of course doesn’t… I’m sorry. Let me try. And that of course includes the learning in the classroom. We know that the learning comes from the teachers and all of us as educators, but we want to balance it with making sure that we’re being equitable in the outcomes with children and being intentional when we look at data, so that we don’t leave any students with an achievement gap.

So this is what the data walk is. It’s really bringing us together, having us see the same things that the data’s showing us, and then asking ourselves who we’re involving and how this is impacting our kids.

So what I do, and you can see that it says February 2024, I do take the month of February. And in that time, and you’ll see later in a slide in this presentation, that has the number of dates, I go to an average of anywhere between 10 or 15 depending on the expectation or the groups that have asked me to come along. And then we do a data walk, an actual physical exercise where we’re in a room together, it might be a gym or a multi-purpose room. And we literally look at data and have discussion. So I’m going to walk us through that in a little bit.

And again, this is how we do it, how I’ve done it in our district for a number of years over 10. And it was really born out of the LCAP and making sure that we were intentional about who we were involving so that the impact on those students was seen and felt. So if you can go Antoinette to the next slide.

We start off with an inclusive welcome. On here, you’ll see a quote by Pedro Noguera. As a district or as an agency, an inclusive welcome allows us to really highlight or shed light on what we’re focusing on. And in our district is making sure that we all see that we have achievement gaps that we need to address. And I believe this quote, and I’ll find another one for next year, definitely looks at the core of equity. Next slide. In our district, we do something called the roadmap.

Our priorities align with the LCAP. We have four goals. We start with the students in mind, we move to engagement as a goal, and then we look at fostering that diversity not only in how we hire, but really how we train, really trying to improve our practices constantly on being culturally responsive. And then last but not least, we have systems in place. All districts do. And ensuring that we’re optimizing those systems so that they’re, number one, effective and accessible to everyone. And two, that it’s a culture of innovation. That we’re really looking at, is this the best way? So those are our priority equity.

But one thing that’s cool on this roadmap that we share in these data walks is we always start with the students and we end with the students. And for us in education, it ends with graduation, but we know that that’s just the beginning of their continued success. And it’s really up to us as a team to include all of the support along the way so that students walk away, obviously not only ready to graduate, but college and career ready. So next slide.

That’s our vision statement as an example, to bring everybody together and center us. And next slide.

We do our best. We’re a work in progress too, and very intentional about looking at equity and equitable practices. So we try to run decisions. We are intentional about really looking at these questions and asking ourselves, who are the specific groups impacted by this decision or this policy or this practice we’re about to implement? And then you can see the rest of those equity questions, they really are a way to center us. You can be in a large group, it could be teachers, it could be parents, it could be students, and they might have an idea. And it’s really important to go through that learning together and seeing what works. But it’s tough. It’s tougher when you see when something doesn’t work, I think.

And so, really running it through why doesn’t it work or why do we think it doesn’t? And walking through this helps us center ourselves and see where there may be some missed opportunities with students, especially our underserved populations. We have a historical achievement gap and we want to address that.

Part of the data walk when we come together is, of course understanding why we’re even in the room together. And the most important reason, of course, is that feedback matters. Whether it’s teachers, and I know when I was a principal, they want to be heard. You might have a new curriculum or a new schedule, you need to change something change, maybe it wasn’t something we could control. We really need to help people understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. And the data walk is no exception.

Why are we doing this? Because we want to gather feedback, but not just feedback, informed feedback. We want it to be an interactive experience where they’re really looking at data together and seeing what they see and what it brings for them. In that experience, we look at district data, but we also have done data walks for the sites, and so we look at site data. Next slide.

And so oftentimes in our agenda, I talk a little bit about the LCAP process because there’s this thing, this plan that for some folks we know it’s publicly available, but let’s be honest, not everybody’s opening it up and reading it. So just do a little quick background on the LCAP and what its intention is. I also go over our district demographics, I look at ethnicity, I share all of that. So when we really are thinking about the students that we have, and in our district it’s 22,000, when we look at that, we want to have a real picture of that they’re preschoolers through high school. We have adult ed. That we also have English learners in our district, or 13%, that one out of four students are Hispanic students, etc. Really give them a picture. So we think about everybody in the space. So we go over those items, then we do the data overview and this data walks. And then during that time, we’re gathering feedback. Next slide.

So what happens, and this is just a little for your reference, our schedule and how we walk it, but you can go ahead and go to the next slide. What happens at the data walk? First, it’s the data that we’re pulling is from the dashboard. I have been not even torn. I’m very intentional. I want to use publicly available data. I know that schools have other data, their local assessments, teachers have other data. But when we’re working with the public or we’re working, in my opinion, with mixed groups, we really need to use data that they can find later, whether it’s from data quest, from dashboard. So in this case, much of the data and you know that, as I mentioned, I do these generally in February, they’ll spill over to March.

But why am I doing the data walks? Because I’m actively gathering feedback based on data so that I can incorporate that into the LCAP. So we of course have to wait until dashboard and then we know generally it’s out in December. So that gives us that window of opportunity to share that together form so that we’re seeing things together and having discussions around that. So this video, we’re not going to play it. You’re welcome. You might’ve already seen it. It’s from CDE. Every year they have a short and quick little video of helping people understand how to access the dashboard and what it has to share. Next slide. There, I mentioned the demographics. You can see it can be represented in many ways, but this is a snapshot of our district. It says 20, but to be honest, we’re up to 22,000. We have about 3000 employees. We’re at 37 schools, and you can see that data.

What I like to highlight, because this is the LCAP. And the LCAP, the Local Control Accountability Plan is the supplemental dollars. In our district, we’re a supplemental district. We are not a concentration district. Concentration dollars are for 55% poverty and higher. You can see by our number we’re at 36%.

People have impressions of data until they see it, and it really helps them see. So sometimes you’ll see a school, because we have schools that are at 90% poverty, so there’s a feeling like they’re getting shortchanged because they didn’t get concentration dollars. And I help them see what the real data is for our district, and that we’re not even close to being concentration. We’re a pure supplemental district. And with that, there’s other information here that they can access. Okay? Next slide.

So once we’ve build up what the LCAP is, what our data looks like, why we’re here, then we talk a little about how important is their feedback. We have who are ready to speak up and say things right away. They see the injustice where there’s inequity or maybe there’s an achievement gap for our African American or English learners, and they’re ready to say something. And so we want to build understanding. We want people to have the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings about where they see data and what it makes them feel like. So we want them to share their ideas and ask questions. This is really about reflecting on what we’re seeing. And then at the end of the day of this opportunity, we respond to some feedback when it’s available. Okay? Next slide.

Throughout the session and throughout, if you can imagine in the rooms we have posters around for the different stations that the dashboard represents. We also include Cal schools data. We also include our panorama connectedness data. But throughout that time, we have a QR code, which is really, it takes us to a thought exchange and it’s a survey collection system. That’s what I’ll call it. It’s been effective for us. And essentially what we want them to do is as they’re looking at the different data, so dashboard, you’ll notice that they’ll have language arts, we’ll show the all group performance, but we’ll also show the subgroups. And one of the things I like to ask is, what do you see? So as a district, we might be in the green and that’s good. And I’ll say, okay, well we’re good. We’re doing great in language arts. Is that true for all students?

And if not, let’s talk about it. And then they’ll rotate during that time. So in that time, I want them to think about as we see this data, what services to support student learning do we want to continue doing? For instance, there might be an intervention teacher and they’re like, we definitely need the intervention teachers, that needs to continue. They might see, oh, we need to increase and improve our services to English learners. I know that they’re getting X or Y. And so you hear this dialogue around… This frames our conversation around those projects that people want to keep. It’s our opportunity to say, I think we’d like to maintain that it’s showing or maybe we need to increase or improve it or have we thought about adding or doing something different? And so this goes on and we do a carousel walk during that data walk. Essentially they’re physically moving around talking around this data. Next slide.

And I mentioned that it’s from dashboard. Go ahead and go on to the next slide. Once we have done, and it’s generally seven stations that they’re working around, and this can take us, the whole coming together is about two hours start to finish. And I’m not saying that you have to do two hours, but when people stand at data and want to have a dialogue, you want to give them some time to do that. And so, if you were to put a data walk together, you want to consider the dialogue around the data I think is the most beneficial outcome of a data walk. They’re seeing something together, they’re asking questions together, they’re learning together and seeing what’s working, and they’re also discussing what they think needs to improve. And having that thought partner next to you, whether it’s another parent or another student or another teacher. And we do in these data walks, have mixed groups.

One of our intentional design, by design is to have school site council teams come in and as you know, school site council have the parents, the certificated staff, the classified staff, and so they come together and look at that. What we have them do with the data is to what does it make them wonder? And what questions might come up? And those things we encourage them to add to the thought exchange. They’re welcome to put it on a post-it just really, or we pass the microphone around and you can see if they want more information. A lot of the times they’ll say, what do we know about? I don’t see data here. You’ll notice that some schools that have smaller numbers, I don’t see data here for this group. And we have an opportunity to work with their principal on how that can be shared.

And that’s why it’s important to use public data. Folks want to be able to find it later. And then of course, what I think is a really great way to balance the data walk is what ideas do they have? They might’ve already come in with an idea that they wanted us to hear, whether it’s the students or like I said, the teachers that the parents, they might have already wanted us to do something. And after looking at the data, they might go, oh, I see. I could see why that’s not a priority. Or they might decide, now I’m really going to ask for this particular thing. So I love hearing their ideas because you know that they had usually those come out of their own experience that they see something’s missing. For instance, I’ll give you an example. We recently had a land acknowledgement come to the board by groups of students, and it wasn’t something we had thought. Now that’s not data-driven, but it could be. It could be very much about representing the population of our students. So it’s interesting what comes out from these data walks besides just looking at achievement or attendance and suspension and what we could do to continue to improve or correct where we have it. Next slide.

So we do this too because sometimes you’re in a mixed crowd and you want to make sure that we have some collective agreements. You can look at these, you can make your own. I think the big one for me, the most important is that we’re here to listen and understand and experience shared experiences. Next slide.

This is just my way of explaining what they’re seeing. I want to make no assumptions about data. For those of us who spend a lot of time in data, we can get too in the weeds. And so this is just a reminder that just helping people see what they’re seeing, what am I seeing, what’s in front of me? Just an example of something you might include in yours. Next slide. Here’s another example of what you’ll see is we literally take, write what’s in the dashboard, as I mentioned. Our district, for example, in this year’s dashboard in language arts was green. And then you can see that that isn’t true for all groups of students. And so then encouraging each other to see why is that and what are we going to do about it? And so this helps our engagement, our educational partners really back off of pet projects, if you will. They don’t entirely do that. But when you see that you’ve got a couple of groups in red, and we’re really focusing our efforts on improving and providing training for teachers and maybe even looking at supplemental materials for African American Foster Youth and homes and really asking ourselves, why are we not reaching these students? What can we do?

These are the students impacted. And this is what we want to direct not only dollars but resources. And so that really helps begin that conversation and helps bring clarity to why resources might be directed at groups of students. Okay, next slide.

Again, just a little bit more of those helpful tips to help them understand. We know with language arts and math, an increase score is good, but we know with such as chronic absenteeism, we want to decrease, we want to decrease. It’s just helping them know how to read that data. Next slide.

This is an example of that. We’ve had, I don’t know, I looked at the data in the state too. We have all been struggling with absenteeism, we have improved that. But having discussions around that and how some things just again, dashboard has that for us to see.

Next slide. This is our Cal schools data. We share that. We have discussions around that. One of the things I failed to tell you, and you can go on to the next slide, this is all for you to share.

One of the things IN working with all of these groups is that I bring a team that will stand at the posters that has background on that data. And so coordinating these dates is really critical. So they know that February, I’m going to be… So some of these are on Saturdays. And I’ve been doing parents summits. It’s a concept I brought from my former years as a classroom teacher and actually as an English learner myself, my mom and reformed laborers and many things that I was learning or trying to explain my parents, it was coming from my perspective. They weren’t getting the benefit of being parents who had information about what something was.

And so I look at parent summits as a way to inform them about the school culture, school programs, school data so that when something comes to them, our parents, our underserved parents, have at least some background knowledge. And so at our parents summits, February is always our data walk month, and that’s on a Saturday. It’s a three-hour day. I always ask myself, who wants to spend three hours on a Saturday morning? Well, at least a hundred parents do in our district, and I couldn’t be more proud of them. And they really want to understand our school systems, and I think it’s our duty to engage them in a meaningful way. And so that’s really where these data walks, to be honest with you. We’re born is so that we give the opportunity to really inform our partners.

When you’re talking data, our teachers are really good at that. Our administrators, that’s our jobs. But when we’re working with students and parents, they don’t always have that background. And it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with access and experience. And so creating spaces like a data walk provides that experience, provides that place where we can learn together and work together on what we want to improve.

So you can see that those are the precursor. I engage the partners in that month leading up to, I’m in that crisis month of March, April, and even May of getting that LCAP done. And so in that time, we then share the feedback from the thought exchange and a culmination of the different groups that have participated. And there’s no surprises to be honest with you on the feedback because we’ve had dialogue at these data walks, and so none of us are caught off guard. So anyway, this is one way one district does I.t and it’s worked for us. I think there’s always room for improvement. So I embrace your questions. Next slide. And that’s it.

Antoinette Miller:

Well, thank you so much to all of our presenters. Now we’re going to have an opportunity some time for Q&A. And so we just want to give you a moment to please add any questions that you have for our presenters using the Q&A function of the Zoom toolbar, and we will get started with that.

Let’s see here what we have. Okay, so for our presenters, I believe I did see a question that was in the Q&A, and so I’m going to start off with, and maybe this is for you specifically Elena, but how does the LCAP development process involve community members and what does that look like in your context?

Elena Cabrera:

Oh, that’s a good question. So it doesn’t begin with the data walk, but it certainly becomes more active during the data walks because at that point, we’ve had a plan in place where we have goals in place and we’re monitoring to see if we’re achieving our goals or reaching our goals. And the data walk is a place where we see that data and we said we were going to increase, say, language arts or something. And it might be true for some kids, but not for all. And so that data walk allows us to have that dialogue around it and questions like, parents might say, what are we doing about this? I see African-American or this population is not. And so that’s where we might as a district say, well, we’ve got this in place and training in place. And so you’re really starting to have conversations about the actions that are included in the LCAP.

And so for example, for us, a couple of years back, we were really talking about attendance. And so, one of the things that came out is an attendance campaign and really just being more personable and not just, Hey, you’re out and getting the robo call, but really going and visiting someone. So looking at investing in some time to do some home visits, to have some conversations that are not punitive but informative. Maybe there’s a health issue, maybe there’s an access issue, just to really become that warm relation, that warm handoff with the family. And we know that that’s the right thing to do. And until you start seeing a trend and you have to respond accordingly, let’s see.

Like I said, it doesn’t begin with the data walk, but it certainly does give that voice during that. It really is the place where people get to speak up. We’ve had enough time to see how things have been going and where they feel like things are good and they want to continue, they speak to that. But let me tell you, they’ll speak when it doesn’t work. They’ll say, “Well, that didn’t work.” And that’s what we’re ready to hear, because change is hard. So from there, we provide that survey, it’s accessible, they can rate, they can communicate, they can come to meetings.

On one of my slides, I had a timeline and I have so many acronyms, I failed to tell you that I work with the Black Families United, I work with our district English learners. I work with our district advisory committee, which is a representation of the school site council. So every school site has a representative. So if there’s an issue at one school, and we know that some schools have higher achievement than others, and it’s so personal, I don’t believe any administrator or teacher goes to school thinking, “Well, some kids aren’t going to learn from me.” We want all of them to be successful. And so questions come up like that school’s doing really well, but that’s not, what are we going to do? And to be really open about, we need to direct resources and support. And maybe that school has a hard time getting teachers or that sort of thing is we all encountered. So that data walk and then using that feedback to create our actions, to strengthen our actions and to direct dollars where we can to provide those services.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Elena Cabrera:

Sorry, keep it going.

Antoinette Miller:

Oh, no, no worries. How have you braided and blended feedback opportunities for different grants and programs?

Elena Cabrera:

That’s great. I’m a braider. As a categorical person, I love that you use that term. Categoricals are specific dollars and LCAP is no exception, but when you braid feedback, you’re braiding, like I mentioned, school site councils. That is the body that we use because they’re approving their plans. And so through the district advisory committee, many districts have a parent advisory committee, and that is a team. For us, it’s not just parents, it’s also a community and other. So that we’re braiding that feedback and it really centers that individual who might have their own agenda. It doesn’t always solve that, but it centers the thinking so that we’re really looking at it holistically and really being intentional when we do target, say our English learners or our students of poverty. Whatever, the group that is getting more.

And so when we braid, whether it’s I think about learning recovery or I think about educator effectiveness, because those are some other dollars. Those require the training for teachers. But you might have a unique interest in some training, but you really should be looking at not only what your teachers need, but what your students need. Who are we involving again, and how is that impacting the learning in the classroom? There’s a lot of really great training out there, but is that really what’s the next right thing for our school? And so really being so not only braiding that feedback but braiding the data into our school site councils, our DLAC, like I mentioned, we have Black Families United our bargaining groups. It’s really critical. We can come up with a great idea, but if our teachers are going to resist it or our classified staff is not involved, we’ve missed an opportunity and it will flop. And so it’s integral.

In fact, this presentation, the data walk, I do the same one student advisory board to our bargaining groups through our administrators, and we all share the same thought exchange and they can see each other’s comments. And it’s important to be that transparent. What I want to also tell you is that this year compared to other years, we also asked our principals to do what I call their own site data walk so that they’ll use their own data. And that way their parents, their teachers are collectively and we wanted it to be actually funneled through their school site council because ultimately they’re putting this information to their school plan who will be the approval body as well as their ELAC, their English Learner Advisory Committee. So those are the braided groups. Individuals always have the right to make any comment, but we encourage the committees, especially those committees that really represent that feedback.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. I really do appreciate that intentionality and being really purposeful using that data, being data informed. Thinking about all of your efforts, what is the demographics of your participating parents, and then how do you market that data, walk to them?

Elena Cabrera:

That is a great question, and I wish I would’ve stuck my slide in here on one of the things that I got. I’m always anxious as a… Everybody stands in their place and my place is really wanting to see the underserved become more involved, and that includes the students and the parents. That’s where my place is. And I personally just can’t physically move out of that. So when I see an English learner parent at one of our data walks with their school site council team who was elected, I get a real personal tickle and it just warms my heart. So when I look at our thought exchange, and that’s why I encourage us. I’m not saying you need to use thought exchange, but using a system to collect survey information. When we use a microphone and someone communicates, I have someone capturing their thoughts and entering in thought exchange because I want that thought captured.

When I see a Post-it note, we will type that up and enter it in the thought exchange. That Post-it note will say mommy to a third-grader. So that will be from a parent. But most of the 99.9% of the comments come directly from the individuals. And so when you break it down, we saw ELAC parents, school site council parents, we saw teachers, we saw classified staff, administrators and students, and I’ll share that data. I am anxious. Now I want to look up all of that in my Google Drive and get it to you. But we had a nice distribution and I think that because we do make an intentional effort, especially at the parent summit, we had a 33% participation from our English learner parents, and we target them. We don’t have 33% English learners, we have 13%. So to me, that was a victory. It’s not a competition, but I feel like our engagement always can do better, but I feel like we’re at a good place.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. Do you do anything else to try to reach those that don’t come to the data walks?

Elena Cabrera:

Oh, absolutely. Yes. I apologize. Again, our data walks and then their school site and then we provide the links to the survey online. We also, whether it’s at a back to school night, and that’s actually later in the year, throughout the year, we provide that information and ask the public, here’s what we have. Through the principals, we’ll ask them to engage in conversations around the parent-teacher conference time. We’ll have QR codes available. We use our bilingual aids, and then we have community outreach through our community grant and then really encourage our parents’ participation. We also partner with our PTAs. We know that some of our schools have a lot more active engagement and make sure we have that participation. Separately from the data walk, I do, because I am categorical in this, we do an annual feedback survey and we work with our school, what we call parent coordinators.

And I know it sounds like heavy on the parent, it’s natural for the educators, the teachers and the administrators to have access to this information. It isn’t always natural for parents to want to or know to respond to a survey or to come to a meeting. And so you have to front load that. And so, one of the things I have to work with is like with our parent coordinators and let them know why the data walk is important and how it’s important that we have them participate. We do provide some virtual options, but really it’s in-person, that’s what we’re looking for.

Antoinette Miller:

Just really want to go all the way back to when you were starting these efforts. And is there anything else you can add as far as how did you begin, anything for attendees to maybe look out for or ways to start?

Elena Cabrera:

Well, I think back then it was called stakeholders, right? People were using that term, and it was because you had to have stakeholder engagement in your LCAP. But I’ve been working in Title I and at Title I schools and I work with FPM, the Federal Program Monitoring. And even when back before our ESSA, no Child Left Behind, I remember being that nerdy person, if you will, and I remember seeing the word engagement and parent engagement in there quite a bit. And I just didn’t see parents as a teacher a lot, and especially the sort of parents I was looking for, because their kiddos were not always succeeding.

And I also mentioned parent summits. That’s something I brought to our district because I used to work on a different district. Butte County used to have these Saturday parent workshops, and I was asked as a Latina to go in and represent and speak to them about my journey as a teacher and then principal at that time. And I started to work with Butte County and not just in Butte County, but throughout the northern California to go to these parent workshops on a Saturday. And I thought, you know what? Folsom Cordova, I think we can do a parent summit so that we can inform our families about our discipline, our math standards, whatever things that we need to help our families understand. So I came about the data walk because A, there was an expectation to engage our partners. And B, I say this subtly, but not all of our schools had a strong school site council.

And I wanted to make sure that in these data walks that we came in as a team from schools and we looked at data together. And so that was my way to say, “Hey folks, get your team onboard, and this is an ask of us in the LCAP in the early days, and we have this dashboard and let’s come together.” And we were surprised at the attendance. And from there, it was no going back. We just had to make it. We had to do it every year. And it’s something that I don’t know that we say we look forward to, but we do look forward to it. It’s really a time to come together, because you can celebrate where you’ve had success and you can go, “Okay, let’s hear it. Let’s see what we’re going to hear about these things where we haven’t shown gains yet.” So that’s really where it came about. One is there was an expectation to engage your partners and have them understand the dashboard. And two, I had already had this parent summit process and I thought, let’s do it. Let’s see what happens. And we did

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you. Throughout your presentation, you really walked us through the how to get, how you started all the way through the end of the process, and I really appreciate that. I’m just wondering if you could speak to some lessons that you learned from working with students.

Elena Cabrera:

Gosh, there’s some videos out there. Some lessons I learned with students, and one quote, this might’ve been five or six years ago, it was way before COVID, this young man gets up and says, “I’m looking at the Cal schools data, and it says that 80% of teachers feel the students are connected, but only 60% of students feel connected. And I’m just thinking, I have teachers who say, ‘Come and see me. My door’s open to you. Come see me anytime.’ But I wonder, why don’t they come see us? Do you know how hard it is to leave your friends in the playground and go see your teacher when you’re having a bad day?” And I thought, oh, that stuck out. Kids will really speak from the heart.

And recently, I was with the student advisory board and there was a lot of advocacy for some of our students who were struggling with social-emotional, just their connections. And really just speaking to that. So our connections with students. I guess I would say that we think we listen to students all the time, but I think we need to listen more. Their voice really, really impacts the work that we do. We don’t just impact them, they impact us.

Antoinette Miller:

Thank you so much for that. There has been an abundance of questions that have come in during our time today, and I know we couldn’t answer all of them, but I do appreciate you taking out the last 10 minutes to really dive deeper into the questions in your work. For the sake of time, we are going to continue along. And so just want to uplift that the team spoke about different resources today, and so just want you all to know that you’ll be able to find links to these resources that are on the screen in the link tree that has been shared with you throughout the session. If you want to just dive a little bit deeper. And we really want you to stay updated. At WestEd, there’s an abundance of resources, webinars, events, resources and toolkits that you can use in your practice. So please sign up for the E-Bulletin through WestEd. This helps to keep you in the know and let you know what we’re providing, what we have. So we hope that you take advantage of all those resources.

And just want to thank everyone. This has been a wonderful session. Appreciate all of our presenters. Appreciate all of the attendees for coming and just taking in all this information. Thank you for your time and have a wonderful rest of your day.