Speaker 1: Greetings and salutations, students, parents, family members, staff, community members, stakeholders of OPS. This is Craig Steinhoff, your superintendent, and this video is a an overview regarding our LIFT, our initiative to transition from traditional-based education to PCBL, which is personalized competency-based learning. Traditional-based education has been around for decades. Traditional-based education started in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and it was an industrial era factory-based system. And it was created to prepare students at that time to be able to do the same task over and over again with minimal mistakes and have them ready to go out into the world and work in factories due to the large amounts of jobs that were becoming available from the Industrial Revolution. The reality is that education really has not changed much in the last several decades. And now a shift is happening to personalize education and this shift is becoming more and more popular across the nation and also across, you know, across our state in North Dakota. The journey for us began with an invitation that came from the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction and Superintendent Kristen Basler. She sent out an email to superintendents across the state and asked for schools to consider being part of a pilot program and transition to personalized competency-based learning. So what I did here at Oakes is forwarded the email from Kirsten to our staff and to our school board and asked them to review it carefully, look through what this pilot program would entail for us, and at the end I asked them to answer one question which was a vote should Oaks Public Schools entertain the option of applying to be a pilot school with this initiative. The vote was majority in favor of doing so and so the next step for us was that we spent a three-hour time frame together staff and some school board members were part of that and this was in the spring of 2018 and we went through the entire application process and the information that we had the time about what this would look like and what this would entail and after talking about it talking about what this would look like for us what this would look like for our students we had substantial discussions obviously because it is a big change and change is scary. And at the end we re-voted and the vote was even more in favor of OPS applying to be one of the schools. And so after that vote then we sent into our application to be considered as one of the partner schools with North Dakota DPI and a group called KnowledgeWorks. And KnowledgeWorks is a non-profit organization that partners with schools to prepare every student for their future success. You will be able to access the PowerPoint that is attached to this video and any of these places that have links you can click on it and find out more information. So, what really is personalized competency-based learning, or PCBL? Number one, it is instruction that is aligned to rigorous expectations for learning. And this is knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are transparent, explicit, measurable, transferable. Two, it is instruction that is customized in order for learners to actively learn using different pathways and varied pacing. The pace of instruction is varied, ensuring learner progress is based on evidence of mastery, not on seat time. Educators ensure assessment for learning is a a meaningful and positive learning experience for students because it yields timely evidence that is actionable and relevant. PCBL is also agency and equity that is established when learners are empowered to make important decisions about their learning experiences and how they will apply and demonstrate their knowledge and skills on a daily basis. At OPS we have four whys in terms of the reasoning to transition to PCBL. First and foremost we want every one of our students to be at their full potential when they graduate from OPS. We want students that are ready for success upon high school graduation and possess skills and knowledge and also have good character. When students leave our doors we want them to be ready for whatever their post-graduation plans are. That may be college, that may be the workforce, or or that may be a branch of the military. All decisions that we make on PCBL are initiatives that are found within our strategic plan. When our strategic plan was updated in 2019, we reviewed the mission and the vision and the commitments. Our mission and commitments changed a little bit, but they stayed pretty consistent with what we had prior to 2019. In our vision, that had more change than mission and commitments. And we specifically included communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking in our vision and say that we must do this in a community that is safe and conducive to learning. Our strategic plan has five focus areas that are strategic initiatives within the plan that we are tasked with completing in the five-year window that we picked 2019 to 2024. And as you can see here, they range from academic engagement and personalized learning, to culture and climate, to our outreach with you as the community and engagement with you as the community, how we will manage resources, whether that's time, whether that's money, whether that is equipment, supplies, whether that's the resources of staffing we have and also the fact that we will be in a state of continuous improvement and accountability. I believe and talk about this often that Oaks Public Schools will always be committed to continually improving. We should never get to a point where we say that we are here, we've arrived, now we're not going to change anything or now we're not going to try to grow. We don't have that expectations of our children and we surely should not have that expectation of our staff nor our district. OPS is fortunate to have partners in this process. We are not doing this alone and our partnerships include Knowledge Works, which we I talked about before, the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction along with North Dakota DPI, West Fargo, Northern Cass and the North Dakota Youth Correctional Center are on this journey with us together to PCBL. The Bush Foundation is the organization that is funding this initiative. We have a district design team that meets four times a year in Fargo and the district design team for Oakes is made up of 19 different people and like I said any place in the PowerPoint where there are links you can go to and find out more so in this case we have the link to all of our members of the district design team but this design team is helping us lead the process to move from traditional base education to PCBL and it includes parents, it includes board members, it includes community members, it includes staff, it includes partners of higher education and fellows from other organizations that we work with on a regular basis. We are also partnered with with Lindsay Unified School District, which is a school in Lindsay, California. And that partnership with Lindsay is also funded by the Bush Foundation. Lindsay has been doing personalized learning for nearly 13 years and is viewed across the nation as one of the founding schools of personalized learning. We have student ambassadors that are 15 OPS students ranging from fourth to 12th grade that will be instrumental in our shift in this journey. Our ambassadors had training in Valley City with Knowledge Works and ambassadors from the Northern Cass School in December. They will be helping to provide us with a voice from their perspective as a student during and throughout this entire implementation process. Additionally, the ambassadors will help with providing school tours and updates. They'll provide information to our students and parents and they will be partnering with us in our professional development and how we are learning alongside with students on how to personalize learning. The ambassadors had an initial planning meeting that had happened in January just a couple days ago and they are working with Greg Dobitz, he is the leader of the ambassadors for this year, to help guide them and keep them on pace and on task with those things that they are doing to help us as a district move down the path to PCBL. Our focus for this school year was on three main components and those three components are family engagement, learner agency, and our portrait of a graduate. You can click on any one of these and and see more information about it. You can also click on the examples link there, which will take you to a document that shows things that were happening already this school year at OPS regarding these three. But I wanna bring your attention to our Portrait of a Graduate. And our Portrait of a Graduate, we really believe is a North Star for us. It is a visual that helps us understand what it is that we want our students, when they graduate, to be able to do and to be able to know. So in our case, when you look at our portrait, 50% of it is that we want our students to be masters of the content that they've learned, whether that's math, science, English, social studies, or elective courses. The other 50% is a combination of critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. And as you can see, there are explanations that go along with each and every one of these. The next steps for us on this journey is that we plan to continue the partnerships I talked about throughout the next three school years, up to 2022 slash 23. We are working towards full implementation of personalized competency-based learning by that school year of 22-23. We know that we'll be expanding on our portrait of a graduate, on learner agency, and on family engagement. And as we come to a conclusion with this presentation, I invite you to look at frequently asked questions about PCBL. There are a lot of questions there that a lot of people have, that you may have, that you will be able to find answers to. Additionally, if you still have more questions and want to reach out, please call me, please email me, stop in and see me, and I will be more than willing to discuss with you our plans and where we are along this journey of personalized competency-based learning. I appreciate your time in watching this video. As always, I appreciate your support of the Oaks Public Schools, and I look forward to the upcoming years and our partnerships with other schools in the state, with DPI, with Knowledge Works, with Lindsay Unified School District, and you as the community to help us move from traditional-based education to personalized competency-based education. Thank you again and go Tornadoes.