[0:06] hello and welcome edina community staff students parents and guardians [0:12] we're excited that you're here this evening and we're here to speak with you about a couple of ideas we have about [0:18] the future of elementary programming we're calling it magnet programming magnet means attract or magnets attract [0:27] and this is programming that we believe will be attractive to [0:32] residents inside of edina public schools and also to be competitive for open enrollment in [0:38] edina public schools my name is randy smalls i'm assistant superintendent here at edina public schools i'll be joined [0:43] by jody d st humert hubert our director of teaching and learning you have on your screen a tiny url and [0:50] that is a hyperlink to the presentation this evening so that's one way that you could get to [0:56] these actual slides monday's presentation was actually recorded on the district youtube channel [1:03] so that would be another way that you could get to these slides into this presentation and then we also have a qr [1:08] code so if you have a camera phone or an ipad you can certainly hold it up with [1:13] your photo app open and you should see a little [1:18] link pop up that you'll be able to click on and that'll take you to the slide deck as well so that's another way to [1:23] get to that we're going to show you a couple of other links and a couple of other qr codes in the presentation to [1:29] access some additional resources but we just want to make sure that you have the slides available too in case you want to [1:36] review those or go over those later thank you for being here this evening uh this is an opportunity for us to share [1:42] some some thinking and work we're doing behind the scenes and get some reactions from different stakeholders we'll talk a [1:48] little bit about how that's going to work with a tool we call thought exchange which is uh is a tool for doing [1:55] crowdsourcing of people's thinking and our intent tonight is to gather your [2:02] input gather your feedback and your ideas as it relates to a couple of programming concepts that we want to [2:08] present to you regarding the future of elementary programming [2:13] so we'll spend a few minutes talking about the purpose of this thought exchange activity specifically [2:21] how the thought exchange is going to work and some of the ideas that are under consideration [2:26] we recognize that you might have some questions along the way and this is right now one way because we presented [2:33] it to the community but this is another link that will take you to [2:38] a document or a form where you can submit a question and we do collect emails on this [2:45] particular form not on the thought exchange activity but just on this particular form because if we can't [2:50] respond tonight or in real time then we'll you know be sure to email you back and respond with an email message and again [2:58] you can use this hyperlink or you can use the qr code off to the right side here and again use your photo app to [3:04] take a to pull that up and identify the link and that'll take you to the form where you [3:10] can submit questions as you go or if there's anything you want us to clarify [3:15] the purpose of this activity is to really crowd source our thinking [3:21] we know from trying this at a at some other times [3:26] that it is a quick and efficient way to identify what is the thinking happening [3:32] with a variety of stakeholders and it also allows you to interact with other [3:37] people's thinking which normally a survey wouldn't allow you to do it capture your thinking but you couldn't [3:42] interact with other people's thinking and so we believe this tool is uh really powerful in its ability to capture some [3:49] of that and we're continuing to try it in some of these different uh situations where we want to capture feedback [3:56] from our community so let's take you back in time to the 1990s it was the 1990s [4:04] when we started multi-age continuous progress programming in edina public schools and of course we [4:12] still have that to this day it was about 30 years ago that we started that and we still offer that at highlands and at [4:18] countryside and we know that that has had a great impact on kids and families for many many years we have very [4:24] dedicated teachers that work inside of that program in the early 90s we also [4:30] added french immersion around 1991 so again about 30 years ago [4:36] since these programs have been developed and again many students many families have been [4:41] through the french immersion program at normandale and many success stories have been shared around the impact that that [4:46] has had on our learners in addition to that we continue to add [4:53] other elements to increase the academic excellence in edina public schools we've added social [4:59] emotional learning curriculum in all of our schools we've also periodically done [5:04] updates to curriculum around math and around literacy and those usually happen when we get new [5:10] state standards from the state of minnesota we continue to update our electives and continue to grow our [5:16] course offerings to meet the variety of needs we have of our learners indiana public schools and then more recently [5:22] we've added some virtual pathway options we have about 100 students at the [5:27] elementary that are participating in the edina virtual pathway this year and that's kind of hosted under the highlands [5:34] umbrella we also have other offerings that happen through our community education partners [5:41] or through other community partners and those include some language offerings with spanish after school through [5:47] community ed and then some of our saturday language programs in japanese and chinese so i just want to refresh [5:53] people on a bit of the elementary programming that's happening on a daily and weekly [5:59] basis inside of edina public schools we take a look at our vision for each [6:05] and every student to discover their possibilities and thrive and really think about what that means in the world [6:12] today which is becoming increasingly globally connected and that's the world that students are [6:17] headed into so it really makes us pause and think about what skills and attributes and [6:24] dispositions will help students be successful in that kind of environment in a really globally connected [6:30] environment and our question is what kind of programming will best prepare them with [6:36] those skills and attributes and dispositions we know that we want our learners to [6:42] develop their curiosity we want them to develop and grow passions and interests [6:48] and to to we want to generate innovators because the world has a complex set of [6:55] problems to work on and solve and this next generation is is going to have to [7:00] be more innovative than ever to be able to tackle some of the complex problems that our society is facing [7:08] so we have been on a journey for a while in 2015 we conducted what was called a [7:13] birth to grade five study and we looked at what some programming recommendations [7:21] what what some recommendations should be for the future of programming in edina public school and we narrowed it down to [7:27] growing stem or steam and also incorporating more language and [7:33] we've been working on this for a while so this hasn't started yesterday or last week or last month this has been behind [7:40] the scenes work for quite a while we did present that back to the board [7:45] back in 2015 and 2016. in 2019 we conducted a morris leatherman phone [7:52] survey with the community a scientifically random sample of community members and [7:58] what we learned from that survey is that our community really values and wants to grow steam [8:05] opportunities they want to grow talent development opportunities and they want to grow [8:10] language programming opportunities since then we've conducted a community strategic plan we've had a demographer [8:18] hazel reinhardt contracted to look at the future of our enrollment and what [8:24] that looks like and and one of the things we learned from that is that we have more competitive programming in [8:30] the within the bounds of the city of edina than we've ever had before and what that really speaks to is the demand [8:37] that families have for the type of programming they would like to see at the elementary level [8:42] we've been doing school visits we've been doing research we've been looking at [8:48] a lot of information behind the scenes to start narrowing down what are the the benefits of some of [8:55] these different programs and what are the impacts and we'll share a little bit more about [9:00] that um this evening one of the pieces of research that we found was about the the future skills [9:09] that are highly valued for uh employers and so for our employees to [9:14] be successful in the future our edina learners to be competitive in the job market of the future [9:21] these are skills that are going to be highly valued as students move forward into that world so the top 10 job skills [9:28] for 2025 this was published by the world economic forum in their future of jobs [9:33] report last year and i just want to point out a few of these um critical thinking of course is [9:39] always going to be highly valued in life we need critical thinkers but look at creativity and originality [9:46] and initiative and those deal with how you come up with innovative solutions to complex problems the world is going to [9:53] need that but leadership and social influence and definitely our edina learners are going to be leaders and [10:00] they are going to influence society so our programming has to prepare them [10:05] for those skills and those attributes to be successful in that work world [10:11] look at technology use and monitoring and control technology design and technology [10:17] programming and think about what those mean so technology skills are going to be highly valued so that's the [10:23] technology the t in steam and programming refers to [10:30] how systems work and how technology works and we could interpret that as something like coding and teaching [10:35] coding in our programming in edina public schools certainly reasoning problem [10:40] solving ideation being able to again generate ideas to solve problems all of those are going to be super value so the [10:47] point of this slide is that if we are going to put our learners in [10:53] the best positions to be competitive in the job market to create solutions for a [10:58] complex world and make the world a better place our programming has to be designed in [11:03] such a way that it builds and augments these skills and attributes [11:08] that's why we are looking at steam and language immersion as a couple of new options for or a couple of options for [11:16] how we expand and advance some of that programming so we'll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes [11:22] i'm going to turn it over to jody for a minute to talk about the k-12 comprehensive literacy plan [11:29] which is still our top priority that came out of our community strategic plan [11:34] work and we're not replacing that we're not forgetting about that that is prioritized [11:40] this presentation this evening is going to be about what comes next but to just [11:45] reassure our community that this is priority number one uh jody i'm going to [11:50] turn it over to you to share a few words about this thank you dr smuzzle we have identified literacy as dr [11:57] smuzzle pointed out as a priority across the district in june our school board approved our early learning through five [12:04] comprehensive literacy plan and immediately following approval we started to put important action steps [12:09] into place for implementation two key areas of the [12:15] clp the comprehensive literacy plan are ensuring that our early learners that all of our learners have the early [12:21] literacy skills that are foundational and that we are learning to teach them [12:27] through the science of reading and how the brain works while learning to read in addition to that we are working [12:34] especially hard on supporting teachers in understanding more deeply what students need when they aren't at grade [12:41] level with reading and how they know that and then create instructional matches in order to help students [12:49] accelerate their learning so those are two key areas you do see that there are um [12:55] on the slide in front of you there are six priority action steps and within those action steps there are many many [13:01] other things going on as we move our clp into action i also want to point out that last year [13:08] we did a beginning dive into six through 12 comprehensive literacy plan and this [13:14] year we'll be continuing to build out the six through 12 comprehensive literacy plan and have that approved by [13:20] our board in the spring as well thank you jody um and so [13:26] again just reiterating the importance of this priority and this presentation is [13:32] really then thinking about okay what is the next step and what are some of the future steps around the elementary [13:38] programming that we have to be thinking about now because this is a long runway of development [13:44] this is going to take a long time to develop it doesn't happen overnight it won't be complete by next year [13:50] we have to start small and grow it from there so again the the two ideas that we are [13:56] talking about this evening are about steam and about adding more language in [14:02] edina public schools and so steam again is science technology engineering art [14:07] and math and we'll dive a little bit deeper into [14:12] why these two areas and what this is about but first i want to explain a little bit more about how the thought [14:19] exchange is going to work so that you understand that and you have that context before we dive a little bit [14:25] deeper into these two programming ideas so again thought exchange is [14:31] a crowdsourcing digital tool that allows us to capture your feedback and gain the perspective [14:38] that each of you have on these ideas so this is a screenshot example of a [14:43] thought exchange that i see on the back side so you can see that we can track how many people have participated how [14:51] many thoughts have been generated and then those thoughts get rated by those [14:56] that participate so again it's a way of capturing lots of different thoughts you can continue to come back and put [15:02] additional thoughts in you can just watch how the conversation is evolving and then we can see which of these [15:08] thoughts are being valued the greatest and are starting to migrate or percolate to the top [15:15] of the of the list of thoughts if you will so a couple of quick tips for how it [15:21] works and how to use this so when you go to the link for the thought exchange at the end of this [15:27] presentation you're going to have a few minutes to respond to a few demographic questions [15:33] and a couple of questions to prime your thinking and then you're going to be presented with one general overarching [15:40] question about how to how to grow and advance our elementary programming [15:46] you'll have about five to ten minutes to generate and post your initial thoughts and then once you're done and you feel [15:53] like okay i don't have any more thoughts then you can take the next step and click that on your screen to go to [15:59] rating thoughts and you can rate thoughts that other people have generated now you don't need to rate all [16:05] the thoughts that are in the exchange i just counted up the number of thoughts in our exchange currently and we're at [16:12] 443 since we started it but if you could rate 20 or 30 thoughts [16:18] that would be fantastic if you want to do more you can certainly do more if you want to do all 443 you can do that as [16:25] well but we just want to get as much of your thinking and as much of your feedback and your perspective as you're [16:32] willing to generate and share with us there is actually no time limit to this [16:37] you can come back later on if you have additional thoughts and you can go back in the program and you can add those if [16:43] you see new thoughts you can rate those new thoughts or again you can just simply follow along with the conversation as long as the thought [16:50] exchange is open which will be through the end of next week you'll be able to do that once we close it then we'll [16:56] generate our reports and then that'll all be done when you're in the exchange and you're sharing these ideas this is all um [17:04] confidential it's anonymous the only thing we captured your email is if you had a question for us but this is all [17:10] anonymous there's no emails or there's no attachment to any single individual [17:15] and your your thoughts are shared with everybody but your identity is not so i do need to remind you that when you're [17:23] doing that it's really important that we we maintain this as an edina [17:29] professional dialogue which means we're polite we're respectful we're really just sharing people's thinking because [17:37] if we get our best thinking in here that's what makes this a successful activity [17:43] when you see thoughts that are generated if you see something that you feel like hey this is rude or this is hurtful or [17:50] maybe it identifies a person we don't want to use names but if it identifies a person or a group [17:56] there's a way to go to the upper right hand corner of the thought there's a couple little dots you can click on that [18:01] and then you can just report that thought that thought then comes to me as the moderator i'll review the thought [18:09] i have to determine if it was rude hurtful or identified as a person if it does we'll just delete it if it doesn't [18:15] i'll turn it back into the pool so that's how we moderate some of the thoughts in there [18:20] so again in summary you're going to get a few survey questions to get you started [18:26] you'll enter your thoughts and then you get to rate other people's thoughts so those are the three things that happen [18:32] when you enter into the thought exchange we started this process last week with our staff on [18:38] last week monday the 27th and then we had a presentation to the community on the 4th [18:45] there is a video for recording from monday that's linked into the thought exchange introduction and background [18:52] information so those that aren't able to attend could just simply take the link and watch the video and then go through [18:58] the process so it's just a recording of this presentation and then what's what's also fun is we [19:04] get to um we get to go to students starting tomorrow we're over at valley view [19:11] middle school with some middle school students and then next week we'll be at southview with southview students and [19:16] then we'll also be at the high school because we want to get student perspectives in here as well as an important part of our [19:22] stakeholder group and then at the end of next week um so i needed to update this slide so i [19:29] apologize at the end of next week not the 10th but at the end of next week the week of the 11th the thought exchange [19:34] will close so it's going to be open about a week longer than we thought and at that point then we'll close it [19:41] we will collect our summary reports and and get all of our feedback and we [19:48] will build out our administrative recommendations and we'll be presenting that to the board later in the month of [19:54] october so if you're wondering where does all of this go it will all be publicly available when we're done and we'll be [20:01] excited to be able to present people's thinking again back to our school board [20:06] so now let's go back to these two programs that we're talking about and talk a little bit more about them [20:12] and so you have a little bit more background a little bit more detail about this and again you can certainly send us questions if you're unclear [20:18] about any of this but so what is steam and what is a steam pathway so again steam represents science technology [20:25] engineering arts and mathematics and steam is really a it's really a framework or an adaptive system for how [20:32] we incorporate these different disciplines or how we integrate [20:37] these different disciplines so it's science and technology interpreted through engineering and the [20:44] arts all based in mathematical elements what this does [20:51] from the literature is that it makes learning more engaging it makes it more authentic and it makes [20:57] it more meaningful to learners it makes it more exciting to teach it to [21:02] administer to uh teachers it makes it more exciting for teachers to teach it as well [21:08] but it's very important that teachers have had the support for training uh for curriculum development and that [21:15] we've had a thorough process for growing this and building this as a school district [21:21] many of you know that the elementary curricular day is very crowded there's a heavy focus on literacy and numeracy [21:28] mathematics and sometimes science is challenging to teach just both from a preparation [21:35] standpoint and from a time standpoint so if things get pruned or get left out [21:40] it can often be things like science or other content areas what this framework does is it helps us [21:48] ensure that that science is integrated with these other disciplines it helps ensure that it gets taught and it helps [21:54] make sure that students get those experiences which are going to develop both hard skills [22:00] and soft skills which are going to help kids be successful no matter what they're doing in life [22:05] whether they're they leave high school going right into a career where they go into college wherever they go into next [22:11] so that's the that's the purpose of the steam framework we see steam as something that we want [22:17] to advance across all six of our elementary schools we know that each of these schools have unique facilities [22:24] they have unique staff and staff talents they have unique communities and community interests [22:31] and part of what we're doing through this process is we're learning about that we're learning about those uniquenesses [22:37] and what we want to identify is what elements of steam are consistent across [22:43] all the schools and then if there are any elements that have a specific flavor or a uniqueness [22:49] to a school or a set of schools that's part of our process that we're trying to vet out as we go through this [22:56] conversation so let's talk about a couple of different steam pathways and try and give you some examples so in some of the [23:02] schools that we reviewed in the upper left corner there's a picture of kids coding and working on programming [23:10] computers and that looks very different at different ages young kids can do it on ipads older kids [23:17] might do do that on laptops or desktops but they're coding to solve [23:22] problems so many of you are probably familiar with what coding is some schools very few in minnesota but we're [23:29] seeing that there definitely are employers and [23:35] companies very interested in the growth of this industry industry is the idea of aviation and aerospace as a theme [23:43] for how we would put the steam curriculum together so many of the schools we investigated have school-wide [23:50] themes that they use to organize the curriculum around the upper right corner we see [23:55] engineering and robotics could be a steam theme graphic arts and design [24:02] arts and health sciences or environmental studies any of those [24:07] are examples of ways in which schools have used themes to organize their [24:13] curriculum and align some of these lessons and some of these opportunities certainly if you have more [24:20] questions or more learning that you want to do around this we have a qr code and a link that you can go to to look at [24:26] other programs that schools have done around steam we certainly have a lot of them around the metro area [24:32] and some of the benefits and some of the research behind why this will be great for kids as we [24:38] continue to expand into that area so in the thought exchange when you go [24:44] in we want you to think about steam and what of the things you heard really [24:51] resonates with you what thoughts do you have or what's spinning in your head what are you thinking about as you hear some of these [24:58] ideas as you hear some of this and that's part of what we're asking you to do in the thought exchange and now we'll [25:05] take you into part two so definitely language [25:10] is a demand in a global world we know that language helps grow the [25:16] brain in really significant ways and we know that language development at an early age can be really beneficial to [25:23] brain development and we know that there's a high demand in our community for languages we see it [25:29] in the unfilled seats or the waiting lists at normandale we see it in the programs [25:35] that are offered through community education through our community partners as we dug into different language [25:40] immersion programming we came across some terms that i think are important for us to define [25:46] there are language programs that are built around a concept of students [25:52] becoming bilingual which really just means bi is two so it really is about [25:57] that they can communicate in two languages we can argue about the fluency they develop in elementary school but [26:03] it's really about this concept that they can communicate in two languages [26:08] trilingual is something that refers to an individual that can communicate in three languages so when we've studied [26:15] different programs and looked at different schools we see that some schools are designed to be bilingual [26:20] and what is emerging are schools that are building programming that actually [26:26] develops trilingual skills in learners so let's talk a little bit about what [26:32] trilingual programming could look like we find schools on the east coast in the south and on the west coast in the [26:38] united states that are offering trilingual programming we also also see these overseas we know that being [26:44] trilingual is something that is is probably more common outside the united states and in some cases being bilingual [26:53] is uh is is probably the norm in the united states but definitely looking at [26:58] trilingual programming is something that really got our language uh design team very interested [27:04] um we would be the first minnesota school that could offer trilingual [27:09] programming and here's a way to think about what that could look like [27:15] so in a trilingual school students would spend about eighty percent of their day in the target language so for example in [27:22] spanish they would spend about 10 percent of their day in english and another 10 percent in the third language [27:29] so that could be mandarin chinese as an example these are just examples [27:35] what that does is it grows their language skills at a very deep level in [27:41] that second language and it begins to introduce that third language at a very young age and we know at a young age [27:48] students are very primed to learn languages so that's the significance of starting early [27:54] but as we looked at schools there's lots of different combinations that schools use for trilingual programming we see [28:01] spanish english and arabic we see we've seen spanish english and french and we've even seen some schools [28:08] that have done something really unique and they've put it together with what some researchers call the [28:14] universal language coding spanish english encoding i'll talk a [28:19] little bit more about that in a moment certainly spanish english and american sign language sign language could be [28:26] another option all of these types of programs they grow academic achievement they grow cultural [28:33] competence they help develop cognitive social and economic skills in our [28:38] students and we know that these are really beneficial for brain development and again we have seen the demand in our [28:45] community for these types of experiences and opportunities so let's dive a little bit deeper into [28:52] coding and what we see around coding is that it has many similar [28:57] brain development effects as learning a language and as doing other disciplines or [29:06] skills in school like during writing what happens in the brain during coding [29:12] and what happens in the brain during writing overlap we also see that coding grows confidence [29:19] it grows resilience it enhances math skills and critical thinking it makes [29:24] kids more innovative it makes them brought better problem solvers and makes them more creative [29:30] could this be a link between steam programming and language development in all of our [29:37] schools that's one of the ideas that we're exploring again there's no decisions [29:42] here but those are some of the ideas that we're exploring if you want to learn a little bit more about trilingual programming or language [29:49] development you can certainly click on that link if you have the slide deck or you can capture that qr code [29:56] and you can explore some other resources that we've been organizing and putting together as we've been doing this [30:01] research for a while when we look at schools that have [30:07] implemented programs like this it's interesting to think about well how do you how do you do that how do you how do [30:13] you bring that into a school system and what we often see especially in language programming is they start in the [30:19] earliest grades as a cohort and then they bring that cohort into the next grade and then they [30:26] continue to add a new cohort in that early grade so for example if we started [30:32] next fall in 2022 with some additional language programming we would start in k and we [30:38] would start small and then we would grow that each year so then we would be at two grade levels and 23 [30:46] three grade levels in 24 and we would continue to move and you see this would take a long time for [30:52] students for us to build up this programming inside of an elementary program or an elementary school [30:59] and so why does school start slow like this well it it allows time for training [31:05] for curriculum development for resource accumulation to help support the programming and help support the [31:11] teachers and the learning experience and to really have a quality implementation these things take time [31:18] we cannot rush this it has to be very well thought out very well mapped out and it's just going to take time to do [31:24] but if we start soon we will be able to build and grow these [31:30] quality program elements over the course of the next four five and six years [31:36] also some of these elements are a little challenging with staffing or can be with staffing we know that [31:44] we do have many retirements every year we have at our elementary schools we have about 10 to 15 retirements and so [31:51] that's another way of growing the staffing component is simply through attrition with those that are leaving or [31:56] those that are retiring so it helps us navigate some of our staffing and licensure at the same time [32:03] so when you go into the thought exchange we're going to ask you about [32:09] or ask you to think about what in that presentation about language immersion [32:14] resonated with you what thoughts do you have and what's spinning in your head still about what was presented there so [32:21] again there are two parts the steam and then the language part [32:27] to continue to refresh you again we have current programs in multi-aging and continuous progress french immersion we [32:35] have this edina elementary virtual pathway maybe you have some thoughts about those that you would like to share [32:40] and feel free to enter those into the thought exchange as well we'll certainly [32:46] appreciate or continue thinking about our existing programs [32:52] one of my last slides is to present to you that we're also thinking about well [32:57] where where does all of this go so if we grow these elementary pathways around [33:02] steam and language and expand our language that we're currently offering what we want to make sure is that when [33:08] students move into middle school experiences that they have courses or opportunities to [33:15] i should say courses sorry for the table that they have opportunities to grow [33:20] that interest or grow that skill or grow that experience and then when they migrate to the high [33:26] school they have an opportunity to continue those pathways further so as we define these pathways [33:33] at the elementary level and look at what we're currently offering at middle school and high school we will continue to do the work [33:40] to align those so that we have pathways that naturally grow kids talents and skills and that [33:47] they can they can move forward with as they advance through edina programming [33:52] so that's it those are some of the ideas that we've been working on for a while and [33:57] we are interested in your thoughts and your feedback and your input around some of those ideas [34:04] and so the after you finish the survey questions you're going to see this core question [34:11] and so this is the open-ended question that that centers the thought exchange and it is what are the most powerful [34:16] ideas you have for implementing elementary steam and language programming to prepare students for [34:22] their future and advance academic excellence in edina you also have the [34:29] the qr code that will now take you to the thought exchange and you have a hyperlink here that will take you to the [34:35] thought exchange so if use your photo app that's going to take you into the tool [34:40] and it'll guide you through it's very intuitive it'll guide you through the process [34:46] we appreciate you being here this evening we appreciate the opportunity to partner with our stakeholders we are [34:52] smarter together we need to work together to figure all this out for the benefit of our kids and we're excited to [34:59] review the input and feedback and share it with our board and broader community as we wrap up these thought exchange [35:06] events at this time i'm going to pause and see if any questions came in [35:12] on the back channel spreadsheet to jody that jody feels that we need to address or if jody if you feel that [35:19] we're okay can you share we are okay great great well thank you for that and [35:26] thank you everybody for being here this evening and enjoy the thought exchange experience [35:32] have a good night [35:48] you