Transcript: The Importance of Alignment and Coherence
Laura Buckner:
I’m pleased to welcome you to our virtual learning session on The Importance of Alignment and Coherence. The session is presented by the California Center for School Climate. It’s a California Department of Education initiative operated by WestEd that provides free support and trainings on school climate and data use to local education agencies in California. It’s part of our virtual learning series on using participatory approaches to support school climate. 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. This is the third of four sessions, and you can find the archives on our webpage and register for the next one coming up also on the CCSC webpage.
Today, we have a 90-minute session planned. The first hour will include a presentation on considerations and resources for improving alignment and coherence, and we’ll also feature a school district example. This portion will be recorded and made available on the CCSC website a couple of weeks after today. And then, we’ll have another 30 minutes for anyone who would like to stay and engage in some peer-to-peer sharing and learning. At that point, as I mentioned, we’ll invite everyone to come off of mute and we can discuss resources, opportunities, and challenges related to your alignment and coherence efforts.
This is our team today presenting this session. We’re happy to help you get the most out of your time with us. If you have technical questions or follow-up questions, you can always send us direct messages or email us at [email protected]. Our presenters today, we’re thrilled to have Natalie Walrond. She serves as the director of the Resilient and Healthy Schools and Communities content area here at WestEd and is the associate director of the Region 15 Comprehensive Center. She’s a national leader of efforts to help public schools, districts, and regional and state education agencies become resilient and healthy places oriented to serving the whole person.
We also have Natalie Romer, who is a senior program associate also in WestEd’s Healthy Schools and Communities team. Her work includes technical assistance, research, evaluation, and training focused on developing effective and efficient systems to support the social and emotional wellbeing of all. Also, Chrissy MacLean is the coordinator of counseling programs at Pajaro Valley Unified School District. We’re going to be highlighting some of the great work that Chrissy and her colleagues have been doing during today’s session and you’ll hear more about her in just a bit.
If you’ve been with us in one of these sessions before, you may know that the entire series is loosely following the elements of our Participatory Systems Change for Equity inquiry guide. We hosted a session last fall that goes through the entire guide. In each of these virtual learning sessions, we dive a little deeper into one or a few of the elements, and especially how to do this work in community with others. Today, we’re focusing on the element of aligning policies, practices, and resources to hold change. Since this is the Center for School Climate, we especially believe that school climate improvement is the perfect place to integrate these concepts. There’s so many opportunities within these domains that you see for working collaboratively with educational partners that’s school staff, community partners, and the students and families that you serve, and lots of opportunity for alignment and coherence across all of the work that you do to improve systems and improve school climate.
Natalie and Natalie are the experts in this, and so I’m going to pass the spotlight to them to really dive in. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today.
Natalie Romer:
Thank you, Laura, and hi, everyone. In this first section… Slide, please. I’m going to be covering some key concepts related to alignment and coherence, why these are important, and frame today’s conversation in a way in which we acknowledge the complexity and variation of what this work looks like from one setting to the next. It’s likely that all of you are engaging in some form of alignment and coherence work, but we have a broad range of examples. Slide, please.
Before we dive in, we want to ask all of you to take a moment and reflect on what do alignment and coherence mean to you. If you would like, we would welcome you to reply in the chat and share with the group which images here are resonating with you. If you want to add a few words on why, that would be great, too. Again, please take a moment to reflect on which images are resonating with you in terms of depicting these concepts of alignment and coherence and share in the chat, if you would like. You can note the image and you can also elaborate a little on why you chose that image.
Thank you, Gabriela. “I like the team rowing, One team, one focus working towards a common goal.” Yes. Oh, another Linda also honed in on the rowers. Oh, concentric circles and triangles, lots of overlap. Absolutely. The rowers are a popular one today. See, Chrissy chose that one as well. Okay, great. Slide, please.
Okay. You’re hearing us use these terms alignment and coherence. We wanted to take a moment to provide some definitions. When we think about alignment, we’re referring to policies, practices, processes, and roles within a system working together in a similar or consistent way. We like to use the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle, where alignment describes how all the different pieces fit together versus coherence. There, we’re thinking about the integration and that interconnection between all the different parts of the system in a way that’s mutually reinforcing a shared understanding and facilitating that overall progress towards a clear vision or set of goals. Using the above analogy about the jigsaw puzzle here, we’re not thinking about how the pieces fit together, but with coherence, we’re focusing on what does that full picture look like that the puzzle pieces create. Slide, please.
Why is alignment and coherence important? I mean, ultimately we’re striving to not just improve outcomes but make progress towards equitable outcomes as a result of our whole person initiatives. We know that having an aligned and coherent system for this work is critically important. That makes sense, right? When things are aligned and coherent, it makes them more efficient. It provides opportunities to reduce redundancies and contradictions. It also relates to messaging, particularly for those of us that are in the behavioral health or social emotional field. There are so many different ways that we talk about similar concepts, how we message to the groups that we’re working with or supporting. All of these are opportunities to streamline our efforts and be more effective and efficient in our work. Slide, please.
Again, you’re going to hear us use the term complex throughout this presentation, so I’d like to unpack that a little bit more. Slide, please.
Alignment and coherence, we can think about a couple of different ways. One is internal. Here, we’re really talking about alignment and coherence as it applies to within departments, divisions, schools or teams. Vertical alignment… For this, we’re thinking about the continuum from the state level to often the county, district, then we’re moving to the school and classroom and what does alignment and coherence look like across all of those different levels. And then finally, horizontal. I do a lot of work in school mental health. This comes up all the time because I’m really working towards alignment and coherence as it applies to education systems and behavioral health systems. That’s one example, but the idea here with horizontal alignment and coherence is that cross sector piece at the same level of the system. Slide, please.
Okay. The visual that you’re seeing here is a conceptual model that is included in one of our guides focused on SEAs. And you can see that on the outer ring, we have technical and adaptive change. That is there, because especially given the complexity of this work, it requires both. Because there’s so much that’s complex as it relates to alignment and coherence, we can’t solely rely on technical solutions, responding in ways that we’re used to responding, because we don’t know what that end outcome is going to be. A lot of this work involves shifting mindsets and beliefs, being able to reimagine what our system and working together would look like. Then, if you move in one circle, the arrows around the outside essentially depict a continuous improvement process. This work is ongoing and in that SEA guide that was shared, it’s actually organized around these different steps and there’s all sorts of different tips and tools for teams that are engaging in that and this work. And then finally, if you look at the inner circles, we have a number of different domains that really focus on more technical features and practices related to alignment and coherence, so establishing shared goals, working through funding and policies, strategic communication, how we engage with interest holders, capacity building, and data use. Slide, please.
Okay. Again, I think I said before that we’re going to be using the term complex throughout and we want to acknowledge that there is a lot of ongoing alignment and coherence efforts that are happening. Most of you, again, are likely engaging in this process, whether it’s implementing a new initiative, your MTSS work, building new partnerships, really, any work related to building shared leadership and streamlining your communication efforts and so forth. We will be sharing a number of different resources throughout this presentation. At this point, slide, please, we’re going to be transitioning to an example and then continuing our discussion on this topic. I’m going to hand it over to Natalie Walrond.
Natalie Walrond:
Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Natalie. I was just feverishly putting links to the Linktree and the resources in the chat so that you all have them for later. Here’s what we’re going to do now. Natalie gave us a pretty thorough introduction to the concepts and we wanted to take a moment to have those concepts come to life. The next part of the session, we’re going to turn to some storytelling and we are going to draw from the California Center for School Climate Audio Gallery. It is on the website. Hopefully, you all have seen it.
The Audio Gallery curates this trove of stories of effective practice related to participatory equity-centered approaches to school climate. It’s really lovely and the stories are told by school and district leaders that are involved. We’re going to draw from one of the stories told by Pajaro Valley Unified School District and we are thrilled that we have Chrissy MacLean here with us. She’s one of the storytellers in this audiocast and she’s going to be able to talk to us a little bit about her work afterwards. Chrissy, welcome.
Before we get to the story, I just want to share Chrissy’s bio and I’m just going to read this very quickly to you. Currently the coordinator of counseling programs for PVUSD and the district lead for California Community Schools Programs, Ms. MacLean has extensive experience creating systems to increase equity and access for students at every tier and in every domain. Before this position, Ms. MacLean was an assistant principal where she kickstarted the Tier 1 PBIS program at her site, and by the second year began implementing Tier 2 strategies while building school culture on all fronts. In 2019, she was able to present these innovative Tier 2 practices at the California PBIS Conference. In her teaching years, Ms. MacLean was honored as the California League of Schools’ State Educator of the Year for Region 5, which encompasses Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Monterey, and San Benito counties, nominated by her peers for embodying the power relationships can have on student outcomes. In 2021, she was awarded Administrator of the Year from Santa Cruz County.
In her current position, Ms. MacLean is building a continuum of care with community partners and the multi tiers of social emotional support offered throughout the district. She’s also leading district efforts in building wellness centers at each school, ensuring students feel a sense of belonging, stay connected to school, and embrace their learning. Ms. MacLean also supported the implementation of the innovative Pajaro Valley Unified School District Family Engagement and Wellness Center, and that’s the story we’re going to hear in a moment, where families can access a food co-op, multiple partners, Healthy Start, a full-time mental health clinician, parent meetings, and more into the evenings in Saturdays. Lockstep with California initiatives to improve student and wellbeing, Ms. MacLean is a firm believer that schools are places of healing and we do not have any time to waste, which thank you, Chrissy. I love that call to action.
We are going to play this audiocast. As you listen to the audiocast, listen for all of the aspects of alignment and coherence that are mentioned in just this very short two-minute clip. You’re going to hear about technical elements such as bidirectional communications and interest holder engagement, data use policy and funding, and you’ll also hear adaptive elements such as the way the Pajaro Valley leadership sets a strong vision and practical strategies for building and sustaining relational trust. The snippet describes their ecosystem approach to working with partners and the way their bidirectional communication strategies are part of trust building. Okay, Laura. Thank you. I’m ready for you to hit play.
Laura Buckner:
Hold on one second. Let me pull it up. I apologize.
Natalie Walrond:
Oh, you bet. No problem.
Speaker 4:
We use community partners of where our families go. For example, one of our community partners is Salud Para La Gente, so they go there for medical resources. We have partnered with Salud Para La Gente to get our messaging out and our resources out to those families, because they may not ever step foot on our school sites. Actually, our most vulnerable parents, most of the time, won’t. We’ve really used our partner ecosystem to say, “Help us with the messaging. Help us hear the voices of those that are often most vulnerable and fragile.”
Speaker 5:
This commitment to responsiveness in Pajaro Valley means that the district team needs to be available and accessible to families, and it also means that they need to be flexible and think about different ways to get information they can use to improve available supports.
Speaker 4:
First and foremost is we make sure that we’re present and visible within the community so that we can get the voice firsthand and make sure that we’re getting the voice from sometimes those that we wouldn’t access normally. Whether it’s when we’re out in the plaza making sure that we have a table and we’re able to be present and really know or whether it was last night when we were doing an LCAP meeting or tonight when I’m going to be speaking to all of our parent leaders during the DLAC meeting, we try to be present and available so that our families have that access.
We definitely believe in surveying our parents. We currently have two surveys that are going out. We have both Google type surveys, but we also have ThoughtExchange, which allows our families to engage in more of a dialogue with each other, and it can be in any language that’s translatable by Google. It definitely is a way for us to continuously use that data. I think something that’s important and we focus on all the time is that we’re not only asking them for the feedback and asking them for their thoughts, but we’re actually integrating it into our plans. When we had over 18,000 people this year go on to our YouthTruth survey, which is for family, students, and staff, we got 18,000 responses from a 20,000 school district because of the fact that we have proven that their voices will be heard and that will integrate it into the process.
Natalie Walrond:
Awesome. Thank you so much for playing that, Laura. I know that a two and a half minute clip is sometimes longer than clips we usually play, but there’s so much richness in that story. I really encourage you all to find that audio cast on the CCSC website and listen to the whole story. Chrissy, please come off of mute and turn your camera on. We’re delighted to have you here. I thought we might just spend maybe the next seven or eight minutes. I’ve got three questions for you and then hopefully you can stick around for the Q and A because I know people will want to ask questions as well. The first question I wanted to start with was, tell us a little bit about this work. Where did you start? Think about what was the first thing you decided you wanted to do when you all decided to start the wellness center. Who did you reach out to? What conversations did you have?
Chrissy MacLean:
Thank you for that question. First, I want to make sure that folks know the voice that they were hearing on the podcast was not my voice. I was a part of that podcast with our superintendent at the time, Dr. Michelle Rodriguez. She’s currently the superintendent of Stockton. She was with us for seven years and she was ready for her next challenge over there at Stockton, so I want to make sure folks know that that was her and know her name because she is also a very powerful, focused, directed leader. When we say, “Where did you start,” that work started with her before my position was created and brought on to help bring it to fruition. One of the main places that where Dr. Rodriguez comes from as well… She infused and helped our district operate from a point of ensuring equitable outcomes. Of course, this is where we were all hoping to be at the time, but there were a lot of specific supports and high expectations that helped us stick with alignment and coherence. Actually, one of the first book reads we read was coherence for all the leadership. Some of the first places she started was during COVID. As you heard in the podcast, it was a lot of eliciting information from family. We can’t make these decisions for our families and our students if we’re not finding out actually what do they want, what do they need. We can’t just assume that we know. The efforts were very directed about getting student voice and at all levels. The school level, district team levels, even through… As she’s talked about in the partners, how do we get to our families, especially the Family Engagement Wellness Center was really born out of understanding how do we help our most vulnerable families?
As COVID was happening, there was a lot of intentional effort to find out what do the families need. The things that came up about what families needed were food, mental health services was some of the top, some financial assistance, connections for health. Knowing those things, the first step was to meet with our partners. Actually prior to that, we had to find a space. Where were we going to put this Family Engagement and Wellness Center? Luckily, there was an open four bungalows that were previously occupied by a charter. We quickly revamped, repainted, stepped up all those spaces to incorporate a food co-op. We partnered with our Second-Harvest Food Bank and had that food co-op. We figured out how to find the funding to incorporate a full-time mental health clinician and have a space for them there. We partnered with Pajaro Valley Prevention, PVPSA, which is most of our mental health supports also. So, another secondary level of mental health supports that does a lot of family work, as well as work right into the schools. We also partnered with Community Action Board.
There were four main partners and then a way that we already had existing… I think many people on here, if you work on schools, you know that Healthy Start… Maybe you don’t know, but Healthy Start is a program that helps serve students that are experiencing homelessness or foster youth, some of your most vulnerable students. We already had that in existence, so leveraging the community work that those folks already were doing to bring it to all of our families in need, not just those specific groups. Those were some of our first staffers at that building. And then, we decided to pilot and run one of the first closed-loop referral systems in a school district with a company called NowPow, which was then purchased by Unite Us. Unite Us is a little bigger.
The purpose of that is now we had all of our partners, all of our community partners, the multitude of community partners in a database where not only when a family comes to the Family Engagement and Wellness Center and they won’t need maybe the services we already have there, like the food, the Salud Para La Gente, or PVPSA. But every other partner in our neighborhood, we could sit right there instead of sending the family out to go how to find them. We could make the referral right there. We had access in our closed-loop referral system and where we can follow up with how that appointment went and just meet the family where they’re at and help navigate them straight to the partners.
We still have that closed-loop referral system now across all of our schools, and that was the beginning run of how can we access all these multitude of partners without sending our families all around town has been working successfully. I don’t know if I fully answered this question of where did we start, but it was definitely the main, main point, and Dr. Rodriguez was very good at directing us to this area, was eliciting the family input and we’re still successful at that. We are currently actually running our YouthTruth survey. We do it yearly.
Natalie Walrond:
Thank you so much. That, actually, was a really thorough answer. What I heard you talk about was starting with engaging with young people and their families through a multitude of ways, including surveys, but also in terms of including just being really proximate and speaking with them. I heard you talk about then once you had that vision, leveraging all of your partners. That was really helpful. I want to maybe just squeeze in one more question. I know that we want to move forward to other pieces, but I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about where the challenges were. There’s so many beautiful successes that you’re painting really vividly, but because as an athlete said, “This work is complex,” I know that it’s not a straight line. Challenges may have come up that you had to navigate. Can you tell us maybe one or two examples of a challenge and how you surmounted it?
Chrissy MacLean:
I definitely have two challenges I could address. When I think about how did I surmount it, I guess it’s just resilience and you keep going. Number one challenge is when we had realized families needed us on the weekends and families needed us after the hours of the schools. We already knew families trusted us. Our community trusts schools and the school district as a source of everything in a lot of ways. But when they’re closed, where do they go? That’s the Family Engagement Center being open on Saturdays and later. It is understanding that staffing can be a challenge.
If you’re fortunate to hire new people, then making it very clear like this needs to be a flexible, we’re meeting families where they’re at. We’re putting our hours toward when the families need us is a little different than traditional schooling hours and schooling hours expectations. That was a minor challenge, but I think it’s just finding the right staff that understand that and are dedicated to that. If you have to change current staff, that is more challenging, because usually you have unions and all this, and so having people suddenly agree to work 10 to 7, that could be a challenge. So, think about that if you are going to embark on something like this.
And then, when we suddenly having all of the partners together and having our very clear vision and our goals and now you have to navigate that very well established organizations, Salud Para La Gente, Second-Harvest Food Bank, they have their vision, mission, and understandings. When we all get together, yes, we all, of course, want to make things better for our communities and our families, but it can be in different ways and with a few different priorities, so really spending the time… We had some clashing in different ideas about what… Not big question but definitely, “Oh, well, maybe they wanted every single person in the community to come to this center during the school day,” and we had a different idea of, “No, we want every single family member.” Little things like that. That, again, just takes more time of really sitting down and talking about, “Okay, here’s the vision of this space. How does that fit in with your vision,” and having those important conversations to get coherent, to get aligned, and make sure that you are all clear in all how you’re going to make it come to fruition.
Sometimes, even there’s just logistical things like the fingerprinting. There was a surprise when they realized they had to do an extra level of fingerprinting to be near a school campus. Things like that, just knowing all those things prior. Some of the logistics could really save maybe bumps. Nonetheless, we definitely were not wasting time when we found out what the families needed. And coming out of COVID, we wanted to make sure we could serve right away. We learned together and we made it through and we have a very successful Family Engagement and Wellness Center that serves all the families throughout our 32 schools.
Natalie Walrond:
Awesome. Thank you so much. I think maybe we can just squeeze in one final question. I’d love to just hear, what’s the next mountain you’re going to climb? What’s next?
Chrissy MacLean:
Well, we are in the process of… There’s a couple of things. Let me try to be quick. As we are part of the statewide fee schedule, we’re figuring out how to blend that also with our community schools. We’re embarking on community schools for 25 of our schools, which if you don’t know what community schools are, it’s pretty much the idea of what our Family Engagement and Wellness Center. Is each individual school really addressing the whole child, whole family, a whole community? Which was the phrase that Dr. Rodriguez came up with back in 2019 when we opened the Family Engagement and Wellness Center. So, merging that with all of our MTSS efforts and building the wellness centers, the mental health wellness centers, the school-based wellness centers that are focused on behavioral health and wellness at the same time. Weaving all those, getting all their learning in our closed-loop referral systems from the Family Engagement and Wellness Center and having a miniature version of that at each school site to ensure that we really are reaching all the families, especially our most vulnerable families from each school site.
Natalie Walrond:
Awesome. Thank you. I feel like this was a very quick conversation and I could chat with you about this for another hour. I’m going to keep us moving, but, Chrissy, I want to thank you so much for being so generous with this story. If you can, I hope you’re sticking around, because I know there’s going to be an opportunity for us all to engage with each other. I imagine people would love to talk with you about your work. But I’m going to ask that we put the slides back up.
While that’s happening, I’ll just share the alignment and coherence work that we’re describing is, as Natalie pointed out, is part of a continuous improvement process. Regardless of whether you’re here today because you and your team are just getting started or whether you’ve been working toward greater alignment and coherence for a long time through other areas of work such as your MTSS framework and things, we know that there’s always room for improvement. There’s always an opportunity to just keep returning to the foundations of the work.
And so, if you go to the next slide we want to offer… There we go. Thank you. We want to offer our initial three foundational areas for alignment and coherence. It’s visionary and collaborative leadership, knowing and valuing your community, and relational trust. You heard all of that with Chrissy and with the story from Pajaro Valley. Together, we think of them as being a really essential cocktail for sustaining shared purpose, sustaining momentum, and for effective collaboration. For this section of the agenda, we really just wanted to share some practical strategies and guidance to support your continuous improvement.
Okay. Antoinette, next slide. Thank you. What we’ve done is we have pulled together some activities from a few of the guides that we’ve created and just wanted to highlight them, and then you can go back into the guides for whichever ones you’re most interested in and dig a little bit deeper. The first piece we wanted to offer is this idea of assessing your readiness to begin the work. I’m going to slow down a little bit on this one, because this is a big effort, assessing your readiness and figuring out how to make sure that you have the strongest possible foundation. You can see below there’s readiness activities in both the SEA and the LEA guide that are in that suite that I mentioned in the chat. But we’re lifting up the chapter in the LEA guide, which is really from pages 7 to 16, I believe, and the activity starts on page 13.
This chapter starts by inviting your team to reflect on your why or to what end, because explicitly stating your focus can help clarify the rationale behind decision making that’s going to happen in the future. Then, it invites you to form a team of diverse interest holders, not only including specialties and different disciplines but also different roles in your community, including young people, including families, and including folks who may work at your agency. And then, once the roles and responsibilities are established and you’ve finalized and reaffirm reaffirmed your why, there is this readiness assessment. The readiness assessment includes the categories that you see here.
There’s a series of questions on your leadership, giving you the opportunity to think about the extent to which your state and regional leaders have affirmed the importance of this work, providing you with the conditions or the cover that you need to be successful at the local level. There are some questions on facilitation, and I really want to underscore the opportunities of thinking about the benefits and trade-offs of having an external facilitator. For example, while having an internal facilitator, one of your colleagues in your agency might be beneficial because they bring institutional knowledge that an external facilitator doesn’t have. An external facilitator can sometimes help with the navigating of different power dynamics and things on the team and an external facilitator can also take the burden off of project management.
The third category you see here is coordination and communications, and this includes two dimensions. First of all, if you’re working across different systems or even if your work is focused on within your agency and you’re working across departments, there are sometimes differences in ways of work, in use of language, priorities may differ or be across purposes. So identifying those really explicitly, those areas of difference can really help smooth your collaboration. Related to this, it’s important for teams to almost over-communicate, especially in the beginning, making agreements about things like avoiding acronyms. I know our mental health colleagues and our ed colleagues sometimes have very similar concepts but use different terms and have acronyms for them. Making sure that you have routines for keeping teams updated on external influencers on the work, connecting dots for each other, and really agreeing on tactical strategies such as, “How frequently are we going to meet? How are we going to communicate?”
The fourth is around shared understanding. There’s a part of assessment that’s simply an invitation for the team to make sure that you’re explicitly connecting the why of different interest holders for the shared purpose of the work. And then finally, team capacity. This is a huge one. This refers to everything from the availability of team members to meet regularly and complete work in between meetings, to having the right skills, experiences, and perspectives on the team. For example, for the work to be data-driven, you may need to have a colleague from your data team to be available. As another example, if everyone agrees that this work is a priority but nobody has the time to do any work in between meetings or is not able to make meetings and meetings are constantly being rescheduled, it makes it really hard to gain momentum.
And then, the chapters both end with a fillable action planning. As you’ve reflected on this with your team, you can go through and think about, “Where are the holes in our Swiss cheese? Where are our gaps and what are going to be our strategies for improving the readiness?” Okay. I know I took a few minutes on that one. The other activities will go a little faster. Antoinette, I’m ready for the next one.
Okay. The second piece we wanted to talk about was really getting proximate to those closest to the work by knowing the strengths, needs, and aspirations of your whole learning community. The activity here really focuses on… When you see it in the guide, it focuses on students, but you can adapt it for families and communities if that’s more appropriate to your alignment and coherence purpose. It invites your team to think together about what you know about your interest holders and, importantly, how you know it. You can see five questions here. For example, what are your students’ aspirations and how do you know? The “how do you know” part of the question is really important, because if you’re answering it by saying, “Well, I just think so, I just see it,” that can raise a red flag because of the implicit biases that we know we all hold.
I know a lot of people have read Street Data by Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan, and this is where your street data strategies come in. The “how do you know” can be answered by, “How are we engaging young people and families to truly know them,” emphasizing their personal strengths, emphasizing cultural wealth, and consider also inviting young people and families to not just share their stories, which can feel extractive, but also be your partners in leading for change. Okay.
Next slide is the third activity, and that is about forming a shared vision. There are so many ways to do this. I think I remember that at your last VLS, you had a speaker from Eureka City Schools who talked about their approach. When you look at the SEA and LEA guides, there are a couple of options that are offered, including launching a listening tour that can include a portfolio of surveys, interviews, focus groups, and convenings, as well as reflecting on the vision that might be implicit in your existing materials, such as your LEA might have a portrait of a graduate, for example.
On this slide, we just wanted to offer some dot-connecting questions, specifically thinking about, “Is your local vision aligned to your state vision or the aim of your bigger sources of funding?” Thinking about what are the themes that are emerging, that sort of thing. And then finally, we just wanted to remind you just as where Laura started, which is of the Participatory Systems Change Guide for Equity, which offers a whole trove of other guiding questions to help you think about not just what work you’re doing but how you’re doing it, making sure that your work is equity-centered.
All right. How am I doing on time? Let’s go to the next slide. I’m just going to be super quick on this. I think, in so many ways, we’ve already hit on these lessons learned. I’ll share that Natalie Romer and I have had the opportunity to work with a variety of different states, regional educational agencies, counties, and districts on this alignment and coherence work. This is just a gathering up of all of some of our lessons learned that we wanted to offer to you here today. Oh, my goodness. I’m super early. Let’s keep going to the next slide.
Okay. Laura, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we still have a few minutes before we end the webinar portion of the event. I’m wondering whether we can just take questions or anything that’s coming up from folks before we go into that last piece. Would that be…
Laura Buckner:
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s go ahead and we’ll pull down the slides and maybe get Natalie, Natalie, and Chrissy spotlighted. Folks, if there’s any questions you have… I know it’s been a lot of information coming at you, so maybe we’ll take a pause to let people process for a moment and see if there are any questions bubbling to the surface. One that I have as I’m listening to all of this… Natalie, I know you’ve worked with lots of local education agencies and state education agencies and, Chrissy, you’ve done this work in your own district. I’m wondering about the connection with participatory strategies and how you see… Natalie, you shared some of those tools and activities that people can really dive in, but how could we really ensure that we’re embedding the participatory piece of it? If you have any thoughts on that, maybe we could start there and then we’ll see where folks are chiming in.
Natalie Walrond:
I love that question and I’m going to tell a little story while people are gathering their questions. What comes up for me when you ask that question, Laura, is… I previously directed a technical assistance center called The Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety. We had a state collaborative called Data for Truth and Action. The states we were working with were trying to address their vertical alignment and coherence. They were thinking about areas of racial and other kinds of inequities in their state and how they could use street data and participatory approaches to begin to co-create solutions with those closer to the issue. The collaborative went for two years and they spent a lot of time really thinking carefully about how to do this work in a participatory, equity-centered way.
I love the question because the question gets answered differently based on your role. One of the lessons learned of these states was that they needed to really start by focusing on relational trust, because they knew they did not want to just use the data that was being collected in their systems at the state level, but that in order to get more proximate, they had to work in partnership with their districts and with schools who had only, in some cases, understood their SEA as being there for compliance purposes and to check and make sure that they were following the rules. They spent a lot of time really working with their districts to build the relationships so that they could go together to more deeply engage with families and communities. That question, for me, is about who do you need to be in relationship with and how do you need to fortify relational trust before you just haul off and start trying to talk to young people and families to ask them a lot of questions?
I don’t know. Chrissy and Natalie, do you guys have other thoughts about that question?
Natalie Romer:
Go ahead, Chrissy. I saw you go off mute as well.
Chrissy MacLean:
Well, I was just thinking about some of the… Yes, yes, and yes. Some of the work that we are doing, there’s various places that we’re doing it, but this particular… As I was listening, Natalie, it made me think about right now. We are working in Santa Cruz County. A lot of the partners have been meeting on their own and maybe with the Santa Cruz County Office of Ed. Just in the last maybe six months or so, it’s been realized that the school district that houses 17,000 of these students that they’re all trying to serve should also be a part of that participatory. And it’s-
Natalie Walrond:
Oh, you know what, Chrissy? I don’t know if this is true for others, but your voice got very quiet there.
Laura Buckner:
It’s true. For me too…
Chrissy MacLean:
[inaudible 00:49:54] back off from my camera. Can you hear me now?
Natalie Walrond:
Yes.
Chrissy MacLean:
Okay. I didn’t know which part, but we’re in the process of having a monthly convening with many of the community partners and the county Office of Ed and our PVUSD representatives, myself and a few other people, to really make sure that if there are decisions being made by partners, especially about… A lot of them tend to speak a lot in the Tier 3, the highest, “How can we help all the highest need folks?” But everyone’s realizing we have to start shifting a little more to prevention and early intervention. Since the school district houses the youth and we see them every day, they are with us, that starting to help- to be participating with them, to start looking at how we can support at the prevention and early intervention area for all of our youth, of our community.
We’re in a good start right now. We still have a lot of work to do, but there is the convening where we are all participating together. But then the key is, and hopefully as PVUSD we can help with this, is we need to be getting that input from the families and the students. We are very much a key to that and/or helping them remember they are also a key to that. Sometimes it’s like, “Come and be at our school on registration day. Be at our school as often as you want. Let the families come and meet you and trust you and know you, so then we can actually get the true street data, know really how best to serve them.”
Natalie Walrond:
Chrissy… Sorry, Natalie, I was just going to jump in and say what I love about that story as I was listening to you is that idea of you tier the interventions, not the people. If you’re just focusing on the people that you know have Tier 3 needs at any particular moment in time when someone else needs those services, if you’re not already in relationships… As much as they may be thinking about Tier 3, they’re building relationships with everyone, which feels really important. Thanks, Natalie, I appreciate that.
Natalie Romer:
Yeah, absolutely. The thoughts that came to mind for me are very similar to both what Chrissy and Natalie shared. I immediately felt like a participatory approach, I think, is the foundation to what we’re talking about here. And I think that, for me, has applied to all aspects of the work, including when we worked on some of these guides, finding it really important to start with that vision work and engaging families, communities, students. That applies to whether it’s at the SEA level. I’ve also just seen some amazing examples of students supporting school leadership teams and understanding their data, also particularly as it relates to coming from more of that Tier 1 or preventative efforts that, I think, Chrissy was speaking to as well.
Student groups doing incredible work related to increasing mental health awareness, using all sorts of ways of communicating and leveraging social media in ways that I wouldn’t know how. Again, I think, to engage in this work in a way that’s meaningful and goes beyond just improving outcomes and beyond just all of the pressures that agencies and organizations often feel to be able to check all the boxes and be in compliance… That if we want it to be meaningful, we have to start with a participatory approach.
Laura Buckner:
Thank you so much. I love that and I love the ending note, Natalie. Start with the participatory approach. We mentioned this a lot throughout the webinar. It’s complex and it can be messy, but keeping that at the heart of it feels really important. We are getting close to the top of the hour, so I think at this point we’re going to just take a little bit of a pause to wrap up the webinar portion of today’s session. As I mentioned in the beginning, we have an additional half hour plan to dive deeper into a whole group discussion. We hope that everybody here will stick with us and that’ll be an opportunity to come off of mute, share your own stories, ask questions of each other. We hope you’ll stay and we’ll stop recording and have a more open-ended discussion in the next half hour.