our-children-our-future-creating-future-focused-schools-bill-daggett-ebook

• School district’s most successful innovative practices: The School Superintendents Association: The Nation’s Most Success Innovative Districts • Understanding impact on the schools: C

Our Children, Our Future

Creating Future Focused Schools

Dr Bill Dagget, ICLE Founding Partner

Empowering High Performing Teams That

Prepare Future Ready Students

With vision and the tools that support changes in practice, your leadership and instructional teams make continuous improvement that leads to remarkable student achievement Our experienced practitioner thought leaders will help you create a sustainable future- focused vision The outcome? Future-ready students

Your Vision Partner

To drive lasting change, you need a partner who has been there We are former district and school leaders– experts in instructional systems, teaching, and learning

Your vision is ours.

to give you a wealth of expertise from Dr Bill Daggett, Founder and Chairman, ICLE based on his years of experience working in schools, with schools and on the

behalf of schools, just like yours

Part 1

Preparing Kids for their Future, not our Past

What it Means to be Future-focused 4

Five Foundational Characteristics of Rapidly Improving Schools 4

Impact of Technology 7

Rigor and Relevance 8

Part 2 But Kids are in Crisis The Need for SEL 10

Four Factors Lead to Explosive Growth 10

Part 3 The Way to Future-Focused 12

Living in Quadrant D 12

Prioritize Social Emotional Learning 14

In Practice 15

Part 4 A Final Word 16

ESSA Subgroups 16

Post Covid-19 16

Dr Bill Daggett

ICLE Founder Partner

Part 1 |

Preparing Kids for Their Future, not Our Past What it Means to be Future-focused.

The nation’s most rapidly improving schools have thrown aside fear and opened themselves up to having difficult conversations They dare to ask even the most painful questions They have developed the shared vision and team trust to work their way through understanding to solutions They continually work together to improve—with openness, honesty, and respect—and as a result, have been able to drive incredible change and innovation These schools are achieving the ultimate goal: preparing students to be independent and successful adults in the face of an ever-changing career landscape

Dr Daggett’s perspective throughout this eBook is guided by three national studies that lead to five central themes

• School district’s most successful innovative practices: The School Superintendents Association: The Nation’s Most Success Innovative Districts

• Understanding impact on the schools: Council of Chief State Schools Officers:

The Nation’s Most Rapidly Improving Schools

• Understanding the impact on students:

National Dropout Prevention: Research Universities

Five Foundational Characteristics of Rapidly Improving Schools

With a culture of innovation in place there are five central and foundational characteristics that we have observed in the most rapidly improving schools as documented across these studies

1 They are future-focused, not forward-focused Rather than make decisions for a

new school year made around staffing, budget, and curriculum already in place, innovative schools look to the future world where their students will live and work and start planning there They ask “what will our students need to know, need to

do, need to be, to succeed in that future world?” With this answer they backward plan from the intended future outcome to identify what will happen now in school and in their classrooms In doing this fundamental shifts appear In a recent study, McKensie worked with 100 businesses to understand what skills their workers were going to need in the year 2030 and how they differ from today?

They found

• A decline in basic cognitive skills If you can

Google them

• A decline in physical and manual skills, because of

advancing technologies And interestingly these are

the very two things schools have focused on most

over the last decade

• A large increase in social emotional skills They

predicted a 24% increase because you can’t lean

on Google to help develop them

• A significant growth (55%) in the academics

that underpin technological skills, in particular

data analytics

2 They put students first In the most successful

schools content takes a back seat to students

Their educators understand that students

themselves are changing far more rapidly than

the content Meeting students’ needs as their

environment changes is priority number one at

these rapidly improving schools Their leaders

understand that the traditional ways that

schools and teachers are currently regulated,

certified, tenured and contracted around

content acquisition is fast losing relevance They

know that to focus on students first they must

put content last

3 They use a growth model rather than a proficiency

model In a proficiency model, students are

expected to arrive at the exact same place of

proficiency, as measured by one test, at the end

of the school year so that they can start the next

grade from the right place Despite starting at

a wide range of different levels of achievement,

despite differences in how they learn and in their

interests and despite that they will each have

different, unpredictable circumstances arise

during the school year, they are all expected to

arrive to the same end point, at the same time

Rapidly improving schools see the lunacy of the

proficiency model and reject it They understand

that measuring learning by the passage of time

does not work now, if it ever did Rather, these

schools embrace the growth model They start

by analyzing where each student is on day one Then, using their available time and resources effectively, they continually adjust their plan based

on individual development, bringing each student

as far up a learning arc as possible Many of these schools have studied their special education teachers’ expertise in supporting student success using individualized instruction and a growth model, to generalize those practices among all teachers for the benefit of every student

4 They use rigorous and relevant instructional practices When you spend less time focused

on the tests and instead focus on growth for every child the test scores improve To achieve this growth for all students, instructional practice must be rigorous and relevant They get students

to think deeply They assign learning tasks that are tied to the real world and student interests so that students gain skills and insights valuable to future careers If you are familiar with the Rigor/Relevance Framework , rapidly improving schools ensure much of their instruction falls within Quadrant D—high rigor, high relevance

5 Executive coaching anchors professional learning These

schools realize that it is not enough to bring together teachers and administrators for just two professional development days a year To successfully implement and sustain improvement in the four preceding points, they learned how other professions manage organizational change The most rapidly improving schools have incorporated an executive coaching model into their professional development They have adopted a mix of formal and informal professional learning programs that engage them throughout the year, with executive coaching as the anchor From classroom to boardroom, they supplement scheduled professional development opportunities with executive coaches to provide

“just-in-time,” individually tailored support to staff at every level and members of their board

of education

Our schools are working to be future-focused but not because they are failing Kids are better educated than ever before but less prepared for the future than ever before It’s because we are faced with the challenge of preparing kids for a world we can’t comprehend, not just for an individual job, but for entire job clusters, entire industries

The world outside of school is pushed by technology

and is changing 4-5 x faster than schools are

changing The biggest area of expected change is

in the American workplace In 2000, approximately

12% of the jobs in the country were low wage, about

20% were upper work wage and the vast majority of

workers in America, more than 65%, were middle wage

workers Since the year 2000, consider how many

people have lost a job because of an ATM or a kiosk

Then in 2018, the last date hard data was available,

the actual number of lower wage jobs increased

How is that possible when technology eliminated so

many of those jobs? Because technology created

more jobs at the top and this higher wage level group

had more help with childcare, house cleaning, lawn

maintenance, etc This created and expanded a lower

wage service sector

The US Department of Labor data projects that

by the year 2030, there will be an increase in

lower wage jobs, they’re about 25% of the US

workforce An increase in upper level jobs, close

to 40% Leaving only about 25% in the middle But

American public education was always designed

to prepare people for the middle

What’s more, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics

predicts that 65% of today’s elementary children will

hold jobs that haven’t yet been created yet We have

been and remain in need of a critical time of change

Drawing from experience working to turn around the lowest performing schools in over 300 school districts we see that in order for schools to be future focused they are also changed forever The new normal for American schools requires us to look at things quite differently We need future-focused models that define what students need to know,

do and be like to be successful as a generation of future-ready students in the near and long term

We need to understand the impact of technology, recognize the fundamental shift that occurs and embrace the new skills that are emerging

Impact of Technology

In our current Covid-19 crisis we see an expanding and changing role that technology will play in how we organize teaching and learning in the

ever-US There are three phases or shifts in technology

Phase 1: Passive Technology

This is most familiar as we all live it If you have googled something in the last 24 hours you have experienced passive technology Nothing happens with Google until you ask it a question

Phase 2: Generative IT

In this phase, you find information and compare and contrast it Think of your GPS and how when you hit traffic it reroutes you This use of predictive analysis

is how the GPS uses information that is monitored and gathered to redirect you Think about Facebook and how it tracks what you are doing The data it collects forms your profile that is then matched with others They track what they purchase and do and sell that information back to advertisers who then target you with relevant ads Predictive analytics Another, more dramatic example of this is in the medical field Unlike how it used to be, doctors do check ups using technology to capture answers to questions as their systems build a profile of you as

part of large medical databases against which they

can compare and contrast you with similar profiles

as they use data analytics to guide medications,

treatments, etc The medical field has seen a

shift from providing medical care to managing/

facilitating patient care Now think about this as it

relates to education, the same kind of shift is needed

in education In the districts profiled in the earlier

national studies mentioned, they are already doing

with teachers what the medical field has done Their

teachers are not simply providing instruction and

delivering content to students They’re managing

student learning Changing the role and providing

instruction, delivering content and managing student

learning becomes the requirement in post Covid-19

teaching and learning

Phase 3: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

With AI technology, we no longer just find and

compare information Now it begins to make

assumptions and learns and predicts As an example

there is a project debater from IBM It gives you a

topic and then researches the topic and provides

an argument back for the time you have available It

currently provides it as a verbal debate but is moving

toward delivering it as a written debate It provides

you with the best argument you can provide if you

have twenty seconds, 45 seconds, 3 minutes, etc to

describe an issue or if in writing, one paragraph or ten

pages It can read millions of articles, simultaneously

on any topic and quickly provide you an argument

for whatever side you want it to take, instantaneously

How will that impact students writing papers? It’s a

shift from just finding information to finding, analyzing

and creating something from that information Not

only will this impact every industry, from medical, retail,

automotive, and finance to transportation, agriculture,

food service, manufacturing and education but it will

lead to a redistribution of jobs in America as we have

described throughout this eBook

Rigor and Relevance

A Framework for Learning

A New Set of Required Skills

Schools that are future-focused are preparing kids for

an emerging set of skills rather than simply focusing on the old curriculum They put that stake in the ground three to five years out and say what will our kids need

to know? There are ten central skills leading the way:

Complex problem solving Critical thinkingCreativity People management

Coordination with others Emotional intelligenceActive listening Service orientationNegotiation Cognitive flexibility

Application Model

To teach these skills, many future-focused schools around the country use the curriculum design and leadership models developed by ICLE The curriculum design model begins with the application model that has five levels of learning

1 I simply have knowledge in a discipline

2 I apply knowledge in my discipline area In math I can do word problems

3 I apply knowledge across disciplines What I learn in math I use in science

4 I can apply my knowledge to real world predictable situations

5 I apply knowledge to a real world unpredictable problem or situation

Knowledge Taxonomy

This is then married with the knowledge taxonomy,

I call it the rigor taxonomy, also known as Bloom’s

Taxonomy to educators

We bring them together into a framework of teaching

and learning we call Rigor/Relevance Framework®

Looking at the Rigor/Relevance Framework in

terms of the school preparing for life and work,

in quadrant A is low level knowledge with no

application That’s what state tests measure You

need quadrant A to get to B C and D A is essential,

but alone, it is not adequate C is higher level skills,

it’s college preparation B is the application of

basic knowledge and that is career and technical

education programs, getting kids job ready The problem is the B jobs are being eliminated by the advancing technology

Career ready is D Future focused schools understand

we have to be anchored in quadrant D Academic rigor, today, is a

synthesis of the levels with real world application

of that knowledge It’s the ten required skills Here’s our challenge In the world that most of us grew up

in, in the pre-internet age, schools had to teach

in quadrant level A and C because you couldn’t Google it You either had to have knowledge or you had to know where to go get knowledge In the post-internet age however, we have to teach

in quadrant B and D because you can Google

A and C And, increasingly, you have to teach in quadrant D because B is being eliminated by fast-growing technology

The real challenge at the school is that we are regulated, certified, tenured, contracted and tested

at A and C while quadrant D is most essential

Part 2 |

But Kids are in Crisis

The Need for SEL

In addition to quadrant D, we have exploding numbers of kids in crisis The data

is crystal clear Mental health and behavioral disorders are diagnosed in 1 out of 7 children ages 2-8, most commonly in non-Hispanic white boys

• 1 in 12 high school students have cut themselves

• 16% of high school students have thought seriously about suicide

• 18% of college students have thought seriously about suicide

Since 2010, among teen girls:

• Suicide rates increased 65%

• Severe depression increased 58%

• Feelings of hopelessness increased 12%

According to the World Health Organization, 21% of girls ages 13 to 18 suffer a serious mental/behavioral health condition during the developmental years

Four factors lead to Explosive Growth

1 Technology

In 2007, the first iPhone came out; in 2008, the Facebook app on the iPhone showed the iPhone could do much more than originally thought In 2009 we saw the introduction of like/dislike/retweet While at the same time we see the incredible acceleration in the use of technology for kids There are several factors that contribute to the crisis

• Lack of deferred gratification Our children’s constant use of technology has

created an expectation of immediate feedback Deferred gratification, an important skill for good behavioral health, is not being adequately developed

• Lack of deep relationships While our children are developing relationships, they are

not deep, personal relationships needed for good behavioral health

• Prevalence of online bullying Bullying via social media has become too common of

an occurrence

• Exposure to inappropriate material A simple internet search can lead to explicit

content—including unexpected traumatic events and graphic images—that kids do not yet have the emotional capability to deal with

• Digital citizenship Understanding the impact of plagiarism, one’s reputation, and

one’s digital footprint including internet searches, social media posts, and more

2 Medical

Drug Use From 2000-2012, we’ve experienced a 383% increase in children born addicted to a substance,

often due to legal medication the mother is on for pain or depression

• 12th graders who have drivers licenses,

• the amount of kids who have tried alcohol before they graduated from high school,

• the number of kids that have had a date before they’re graduating from high school

• the number of kids who have part time jobs

And while the number of kids consuming alcohol illegally being down is good there is still another

consideration drivers licenses, drinking, dating, part time jobs, you make mistakes and you learn from

them When do you learn best? You learn by doing, experiencing If you think about the ten required skills we described above that are so critical, they are all learned by experiencing them What is happening is kids

are having less and less face-to-face life experiences, less social-emotional learning in schools and are not less prepared with the skills they need to be future-ready but they are in crisis