Suzanne has worked in education for over 25 years. She's currently the acting associate dean of Workforce, Community, and Continuing Education at Palomar College, and the immediate past chair of the Education to Career Network, ETCN, of North San Diego County Consortium. 

State and regional leadership roles include serving as the co-chair for Adult Education, Noncredit, and the Regional Strong Workforce Pathway Mapping Project, representing Palomar College-- sorry, Palomar-- in the State Leadership Institute for Community Colleges, serving formerly incarcerated students. Suzanne is married to John Sebring, a professional photographer, and they have three wonderful children, Michael, who's 24, Danielle, 20, and Jonah, who's 18. 

Also with us today, we have Kathleen Porter, who's been involved with adult education and workforce development in the San Diego area since 1987. We won't say how long that is, but you guys can do the math. Kathleen is currently the executive director of Career Technical Adult and Alternative Education in the Poway Unified School District. She's a former teacher, resource teacher, and a career education specialist. 

Kathleen was formerly the manager of the East County Career Center, part of the San Diego Workforce Partnership's One-Stop Career Center Network. Now, it's known as America's Job Centers of California, or the AJCC. Kathleen serves in a variety of state and regional leadership roles. She's the state president for the California Council of Adult Education, CCAE, and a longtime member of California's Professional Advisory Board, the K12 representative of the South Border Region Strong Workforce Program Work Group, and a representative to the Technical Working Group in the Federal Implementation Study. 

Through the years, Kathleen has written articles and developed and presented a variety of workshops, webinars, and presentations at the local, state, and national conferences on topics pertinent to adult education and career pathways. She and her husband of 29 years, Rush, have two grown children, but no grandchildren yet. 

All right, I'm going to go ahead and pass this over to our presenters. Thank you all so much for being here. And Suzanne, I think you're up first. 

I am. Thank you very much. And thank you all for being with us today. I know your time is valuable, so we're going to jump right in. 

First, we want to go over the webinar objectives for today. So in this one-hour webinar, we're going to discuss the curriculum alignment efforts of our consortium, the Education to Career Network, and we're going to examine how a shared faculty experience across our partner agencies can lead to a deep awareness of curriculum and clear pathways for students. We'll explore several tools and protocols that can be easily adapted for you in your own collaborative curriculum alignment efforts. 

So hello, everyone. This is Kathleen. So I'm also glad to be with you this afternoon. So we were thinking about this title because, as you might have noticed, there's a lot going on in this title. So we're really breaking it down into these three separate chunks. So first, we're going to talk about collaboration. 

Then, we're going to talk about curriculum alignment. And with curriculum alignment, we're going to look at a little of the theory or the process, and then we're going to take a quick look at our own real-life example. And then finally, we're going to talk a little bit about tools and protocols that you might find helpful as you start your own curriculum alignment efforts in your region. 

So to start out, in your handout packet we have a little pod, or you can type here in our chat pod. We wanted you to just think about, in three to five words, what is collaboration? So you might describe a definition or what it achieves, something like that. I see a number of you are typing right now. Thank you. 

So I see a number of you are still typing, which is great. I'm just going to start summarizing some of the responses that we're seeing. So we're going to start seeing some themes here. We're seeing people talk about working cooperatively to achieve a common goal, sharing work and ideas with peers, working together to accomplish goals and tasks, working together for a shared outcome, working together toward a common goal with equitable participation, contribution, benefit, et cetera, getting ideas with other teachers to accomplish a goal, a common objective, working together, sharing toward a common goal, interdependence. 

So interesting one, Tom. To think together and have a common solution, working with someone and creating a goal, aligning curriculum for a common outcome, sharing ideas together as a team, leveraging resources for a common goal, working in a common project for general benefit, collaboration, working together and sharing, and working together toward a common goal. 

So you can hear we all have a good idea of what we think collaboration is. It's relevant, it's job-embedded, ongoing learning, and sharing that benefits instruction and student learning and achievement. OK, thank you, Karen. 

So we all have a common idea. We know a little bit about collaboration, and certainly we have some practice with collaboration. And so these are just two different thoughts that I thought were sort of interesting. The first, collaboration begins with mutual understanding and respect. So this idea of respect. And I think many of us talked about working as a part of a team. And so respect is certainly underlying and part of that. 

The other thing that I think that we want to emphasize is this idea of mutual understanding. And we're going to come back to that idea later this afternoon. I also really like this Doug Reeves definition because I think it just suggests this growth mindset. Collaboration, it turns out, is not a gift from the gods, but a skill that requires effort and practice. 

So when I mean that growth mindset, if you don't have it now, don't give up hope. It's not something that you have or you don't. It's something that we can actually achieve and work at and get better and better at it. So I think that's really good news. It can improve. Yay. 

So we're going to put the thoughts about collaboration right now aside, and we're going to do kind of a deeper dive looking at what curriculum alignment is. And Suzanne's going to take us through this section. So she's going to talk about the curriculum alignment theory, and then, as I said, also share with you our own real-life example. So Suzanne? 

Thank you, Kathleen. So one of the references that we've used in this process is this Significant Discussions guide. Although it was developed for K12 to post-secondary alignment, we found that the concepts are very relevant to our adult education arena, with alignments from basic skills, ESL, ABE, and ASE courses to credit-bearing and/or certificate courses. And the Significant Discussions is something that you have in your handouts. So you can download and take a deeper look into this, as well. 

So why curriculum alignment? Let's take a minute to read these descriptions and how it should work. And kind of think about what things stand out to you. 

All right. So kind of keep that in mind as we move through this. 

So this slide gives a visual on the process of curriculum alignment, from getting started to those circular steps of gap analysis, curriculum alignment and assessment, to next steps. And we're going to break these down in the next few slides. 

First, it's important that the right people are part of the discussion. These decision-makers and implementers of the work need to understand each other's agencies, and their issues and challenges, while they develop trusting relationships and identify the shared goals of the group. 

Next, it's very helpful to have a skilled facilitator to lead this work. For our consortium, we used an external consultant that was familiar with the workings of both the K12, adult schools and the community colleges. And he helped us come up with templates and common tools we would use to identify our gaps. 

So we used these templates to identify the entry and exit points of each course. We aligned our courses and identified the gaps that needed to be addressed. 

When deciding how best to assess, we decided that all the agencies in our consortium would use a common assessment tool. And we chose the CASAS. And that was in order to be on the same page as we had our discussions. We're now going to take that to another level and begin data dialogues as a consortium so we can look at the data together and have informed discussions regarding our progress. 

So now, a few more specifics about our curriculum alignment project. So a little about us. So our consortium is the Education to Career Network of North San Diego County. We have six member districts, three larger adults schools, one community college, and two very small adult schools, Ramona and San Marcos. 

This graphic, it demonstrates our process flow when we embarked on our curriculum alignment project over the summer of 2016. We engaged our stakeholders, including members of administration, faculty senates, instructional planning council, and all impacted areas, such as ESL, English, math, and our career technical education, and the adult schools within our consortium. 

We shared our vision with everyone, and we solicited feedback and ideas for strengthening our implementation plan. We then adjusted our scope of work based on this collaboration, and we considered what time of year would garner the best participation. So what day of the week works best for meetings, et cetera. So we really needed to think about scheduling thoughtfully, and making sure that it worked for everyone involved. 

Why did we do it? We did this because it helps to ensure smooth transitions for students. That is in direct alignment with the mission and vision of our consortium. 

This gives some details on how we did do it. We did it through a series of meetings over the summer. Close to 40 faculty members from five adult schools in Palomar were divided into their discipline teams. And in these teams, they examined their courses in detail. They used uniform templates, and they were able to document which of their courses were similar enough in content, competencies, and skills learned to be declared aligned. And this would allow for an easier transition for all students, either from one adult school to another or from the adult schools into Palomar, as well. 

Allowing faculty to opt in was so important. The people at the table, they wanted to be there. As I mentioned, hiring a neutral facilitator was also really important, one of kind of the key factors that we felt helped ensure our success. The conversations and camaraderie among the discipline faculty, that was one of the greatest successes. 

These relationships, they continued as we addressed gaps as a region, and it's enabled us to continue to work together to address basic skills, needs prompted by AB-705. And for those of you that don't know about AB-705, that is something put out new from the Chancellor's Office saying that students need to be through college-level English and math within the first year. So that has allowed us to have more discussions with our adult schools about how we bridge that gap and make sure that students are ready for that college-level English and math once they attend Palomar. 

In the end, over 100 individual courses from eight separate disciplines displayed alignment with one or more similar courses from other schools or with Palomar College. It created 37 multi-course alignments, so two or more courses were aligned across the consortium. Also, Escondido Adult School, Poway Adult School, and Vista Adult School are currently in the process of articulating several of their courses with Palomar College. 

And this is primarily due to the success of the curriculum alignment project. It allowed adult school teachers to discuss their curriculum directly with Palomar faculty, and it kind of broke down some of those barriers or kind of perceptions about what the other had to offer. 

So now I'm going to turn it back over to Kathleen to discuss collaboration. 

Thank you, Suzanne. Yeah, so we're going to go back to this thought about collaboration. And this whole idea of interagency partnerships and collaborations has, really in the last 20 years, become more and more and more a part of the fabric of our work, and expectations for administrators, expectations for agencies, expectations for teachers to collaborate has really increased. 

So we've been joking about these collaborations that are sort of legislated collaborations are kind of like arranged marriages, where you stay together for the children. And in our case, we have these arranged marriages and we're staying together for our students and our learners. 

So of course, one good example of this kind of partnership or arrangement is certainly our adult education program, the California Adult Education Program, and the work that we're doing in our individual consortia up and down the state. And I'm wondering if you have other examples you can just type in the chat pod, other examples that you're seeing right now that are these kinds of interagency partnerships. I'll just take a couple of seconds and let you type in the chat pod with any ideas. 

I don't see anyone typing, and I know you have ideas, so I'm wondering if you're having trouble finding the chat pod. Now I see people typing. I'm feeling better about this. Thank you. WIOA beyond Title II. Exactly, Tom. Good point. 

Industry partnerships for apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship. Yes, good point. 

Adult schools, community colleges, and social services WIOA. Exactly. I see a few more of you typing. Yeah, Nancy brings up WIOA. Ryan talks about collaboration with our local AJCCs or EDD and co-location. Yes, and you know, the most recent one that we're seeing in our region is this Strong Workforce Program implementation, and getting all of the different providers around the table for Strong Workforce. So if you haven't started to see that in your region, I bet it's coming. You'll be seeing more and more of that, too. Collaboration between K12 and adult schools, such as family success initiatives. Yeah, good point, Carla. 

So one of the attributes that we have in your handout pod is this article that was written by Ruth DeHoog. And she's a professor who teaches in a master's of public administration program. And so what Dr. DeHoog started to notice is that the competencies for getting a master's in public administration really hadn't kept up with the time, or the times, in terms of all of these interagency partnerships. 

And so she started to work on redefining what competencies for leadership and community organizations looks like today. And so she kind of broke it down to these three different things that you really need to have competency in organizational structures and values, in interpersonal relationships, and in leadership qualities and skills. 

And so we're going to take a look at what each of those competencies really entails. So in organizational structures and values, DeHoog talks about really understanding the knowledge of the structures, the values, and the processes that partner agencies might have. And if we have a deep awareness of each other, then we're able to design appropriate systems that can reduce conflicts, communication barriers, and competition, and also can promote accountability, trust, and coordination of efforts. 

So one example of this that kind of comes to mind is, when you're working in a partnership, if one group can make a decision and implement it immediately and another agency needs to have board approval before they enter into a partnership, and some agencies might have a queue of things to go to the board of two or three months before it can get on a board agenda. 

So just the timing of things. I remember when we were starting to collaborate under AEBG, we said, hey, we need to have a course that is community college 101 or that is adult school 101 so we can learn each other's lexicon, that we can learn each other's operational kinds of values so that we can work together more effectively. 

So the second thing that DeHoog examines are interpersonal relationships. And so what she really brings up is this concept of trust and trustworthiness. So when we were talking about collaboration and what kind of defines collaboration-- and I think one of the quotes that we looked at really talked about this idea, this underlying idea of trust or respect and value-- so DeHoog kind of looks at, well, how do we develop trust? 

And it's basically something that you can put structures in place that start to build and maintain trust. And one of the key cornerstones there is this idea of reciprocity. And so maybe somebody doesn't always host the meeting here. Maybe you rotate roles of who's the convener. Maybe you rotate roles of who's the chair. It's any kind of reciprocity that you can build into the system that you're creating in order to work together really helps to start to build that trust. 

Expressing mutual commitment. So sometimes, I've seen people develop statements of collective commitment. So a group will say, we all agree to this. Sometimes, it might even be as simple as meeting norms, that everyone signs the meeting norms after they're developed. And so everybody's signature is on there. This is what we mean by a good team member, we all sign it, some way that we're expressing mutual commitment. And of course, there are more formalized ways to do that with memoranda of understanding or memorandum of agreement. 

And then communicating a strong sense of joint ownership and successful outcomes. So sometimes, this is the simplest thing. This is listening to your speech, and are you saying we or are you saying us? Are you using them, those people or those students, or are we saying we? Are we talking about our? And so listening to the language and being cognizant of your language is a good way to start to promote this idea of trust and trustworthiness. 

Leadership qualities and skills were the third area that DeHoog had identified. And so here, it kind of comes back to some of the things we talked about earlier, just being aware of each other's organizational cultures. How are decisions made? How much time does it take for a decision to be made? 

But then it gets in to this idea of communication skills. So being sure that we're listening. And when we talk a little bit about some of the protocols, we'll talk about this idea of listening a little bit more. But developing your own conflict resolution skills, developing an ability to influence and negotiate, social networking skills, being creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial. So that's kind of summed up by just saying thinking outside of the box. 

So what I'm going to do here is ask you to take a little pause. And this is on page five of handout one. And I just want you to think on your own about this. We're not going to ask you to publicly declare in the chat pods, but if you can think about a time when collaboration didn't work as smoothly as you would have liked, what competency area do you think the breakdown might have occurred? 

So was it in this area of organizational structures and values? Was it in interpersonal relationships? Or was it in leadership qualities and skills? So just ponder a less than perfect collaboration. I'm just going to give you a couple seconds. I'm going to mute while I do that so you're not hearing me breath. 

OK, so I've given you a couple seconds to think about-- some of you have gone ahead and let us know where you think the breakdowns occurred-- when you had less than perfect collaboration. So in organizational skills or differing values, lack of knowledge of structures of various agencies, lack of respect, lack of trust. 

So we are going to take a look at some protocols and tools next that I think might give you a framework to address some of those problems. So when we have less than perfect collaboration, what is it that we can do about it? How can we approach these things in a way that helps us move forward? 

So we're going to start out with Suzanne. She's going to just show you some of the tools and templates that we used in our own curriculum alignment process. So Suzanne, I'll mute, and you can take over here. 

Thank you, Kathleen. So this is actually an image of one of the times that we met as a group and had some collaborative time between agencies. 

Now, I realize this is pretty small, but there is a handout packet that shows the sample forms. It's handout two. And that has these forms and more. 

So the first step for faculty was to complete the individual course worksheet, which is what we have here, for each of their courses. We ask that this be done prior to the first meeting, where faculty members were going to split into the discipline teams to review similar courses and determine potential alignments. 

Next, when the districts found aligned courses, they would complete this form, which is the course alignment agreement. 

Then, the discipline team filled out a course alignment chart indicating what the current alignments were. And this resulted in a matrix that looks like this. And that matrix could be used by students and faculty and staff to determine where a student stood in their educational sequence when moving from one school to another. For instance, as illustrated here, and I know it's a little small, but it was determining that high beginning ESL at Escondido Adult School and Palomar College is equal to NESL 303 at Poway Adult School. So there's a lot more examples in your handout, but this was the matrix that we came up with for all the different life content areas. 

And this template was used for agencies to track our faculty's participation. It was called their status report. And we did this because we did compensate our faculty for participating in this process. So this just kept track of their hours for that purpose. 

And now Kathleen is going to take you through some of the protocols. 

Thanks, Suzanne. So I'm going to go back to handout one. And if you take a look at page six and seven in handout one, you'll start to see what we're calling these sentence starters for effective communication. So you can see for effective advocacy. So if you have an idea and you're feeling like people aren't hearing your idea, these are some sentence starters that you can use to just kind of introduce your idea. 

Then there are some protocols for effective inquiry. So you can see these. Maybe you need to ask some questions about, like, how did you get to that conclusion? I'm not sure I follow you. Can you help me understand your thinking here? It's even checking for understanding, I hear you saying this. And so all of those kinds of questions, just to try to gain understanding. 

Then you'll see some of the protocols on page seven for maybe how you might look at things in a PLC. So you can give a compliment that's specific, and then say something that you hadn't noticed that's something that you've learned. When you're stating opinions, using your I statements. I have some thoughts about this, if I understand you correctly. And these go back to some of the things we were talking about earlier, just with maybe gently probing for underlying logic, if you're not following how somebody got to that conclusion. 

So those are really a few little sentence starters that you can think about in terms of protocol, but I think the underlying piece of all this, again, is that whole respect piece, and how do you set the framework for how you work together. 

So the next protocol that we're going to take a look at is this data dialogue protocol. And so here, you can use those same sentence starters that we talked about in a data dialogue protocol. Sometimes, it's easier for folks to start with data before they start to build trust or have relationships because you're looking at something that could be very objective. It's data. And now, you can start developing some common understandings. 

So when we talk in my agency about a data dialogue protocol, we really follow some very prescribed, specific steps. And there are a few things that we talk about sort of as ground rules. First of all, the difference between discussion and dialogue. So if you think about a discussion, generally you are trying to assert your point to view. You know what you believe, and you're trying to assert your point of view. 

With a dialogue, what we're really trying to do is suspend our own beliefs and listen for understanding. So we're listening to the opinions of others. And so we use the distinction, in discussion, you might say yes, but, but if it's a dialogue, you might say yes, and. 

So I'm sure all of you have seen those pictures where two different people will see two different things, like one person sees the young woman in a hat and the other person sees the old woman in the witch hat. Both versions of reality can be true. And so you're listening for that larger story, you're listening for a bigger picture, you're listening for the both and, not the yes, but. 

So if you start with data, something outside of yourselves, it's easier to sometimes have those objective conversations and to start sharing understandings. The only thing about looking at data is we are so used, most of us are so used to looking at data and saying, oh, this means this, and jumping to the conclusions. So when you follow this data dialogue protocol, the whole point is for you not to jump to conclusions, that you really make meaning of the data together, and you suspend your own beliefs, and then you get into the steps of trying to make sense of it. 

So the protocol is broken down into these different steps. It starts out with predictions. And that's where everyone in the room kind of goes around. You say, we're going to be looking at our transition rates from our adult schools to our community college. 

So everyone around the table, now make a prediction about what it is that you see, or what you think you're going to see when we show you the data. And so people will go around the room and say I believe this, or I think we're going to see that. And everyone has a chance to make a prediction. 

And the whole point of making the predictions is just to get it out of the way. Get your predictions, what you think you're going to see out of the way. Kind of once you say it, you can put it aside. Then, you tell people I'm going to pass out the evidence. So you're going to pass out the data. 

And people are able to ask clarifying questions about what they're seeing, what the data, the evidence is. And at that point, people start to make factual, non-judgemental statements. So you're listening when people are going around the room, you're listening to people saying things like I see, I can count, I notice. 

What they're not saying is I notice this because blah, blah, blah. Oh, that people always want to explain it. That was the year that we did this, we used a new textbook, we changed test forms. But we're saying, no, we're just looking at the data, and we're saying what we see. 

After we have all had this chance to make statements about what the data says, it's at that point that we get into the inferences or the implications. So when we talk about the inferences and implications, what we're really talking about here is additional data, I believe this additional data that might help me confirm my understanding would be this. 

I think that we need to investigate how we're pre- and post-testing. You know, so now you're starting to think about how do we change our practice. We saw this, what do we need to do about it? And then from there, you develop an action plan and you debrief the meeting. 

So I will tell you that we started a data dialogue protocol in our agency, this is our fifth year that we're doing it, and it completely changed our culture. It is the perfect basis to PLCs. It's the perfect basis for any type of collaboration. It is a great way to build trust. But has become a bad word in our agency. We all, like, police each other when we're about to say yes, but. We always say yes, and. 

So I would highly, highly recommend it. And certainly, we can give you more information and resources about that. We actually get a data dialogue protocol webinar that's in the archives that you could take a look at if you were interested in more information about data dialogue. 

At this point, what we wanted you to do is kind of think about that difficult situation, the less than perfect collaboration that you had, and then think about the sentence starters or some of the tools that we talked about, and then say, was there a way that you might have used one of the protocols to address that situation and improve communication and feedback? So again, I'm just going to give you a few minutes to kind of think through that. 

Lillian, you were interested in the data dialogue archive. So it is on the top website under the webinars. You can find the archived webinars. We did it October of last year, so it was from 2018, October. 

OK, I see Karvette talked about finding common ground and clearly defining desired outcomes. That might be something that you could employ to move things forward. And Christine talks about checking understanding at various points throughout discussion. Yeah, absolutely. 

I think the trust piece, because I think when we went back and we were describing, some of you were describing like lack of respect, lack of trust, so some of those things could be defined in meeting norms if you make collective commitments as a group. And again, everyone has an opportunity to sign that. 

We've had groups that have said, OK, I want to describe what we want our effective team to be. Let's describe the qualities of an effective team member. And then everyone signs it. And then when you have meetings with that team, you post those up in the room so everyone is reminded, like, when we have a meeting, I want to be that person. I want to be that team member that we all decided we wanted on our team. So I think those are the kinds of things that you can do. 

So Leanne talks about what resonated with you was the difference between discussion and dialogue. Yeah, the sentence starters are very helpful for protocols. So good, I'm glad. And I think I'm going to turn things over to Suzanne now. We're going to have a chance to kind of pause and reflect, and then you can ask us any questions that you might have. So Suzanne, do you want to take it from here? 

So here's where we would really like you to think about next steps, and take a few minutes to reflect in the chat pods on what your next steps might be in your own collaboration efforts. So we've got the three questions up here, so if you can just take a few minutes and respond. 

So please keep entering your thoughts, but I'll start to kind of summarize a little bit. So what we did today that resonates with you, Tom is discussing that sharing the webinar and handout to this consortium director might be a good next step. Absolutely. I think that discussing this as a consortium is a great way to go. 

Laura talked about the emphasis that was put on supporting interpersonal interaction. And that's really important. You have to have that positive interaction, that trust and respect between the members that are having the discussions so that things aren't taken personally and you can have that open dialogue and keep moving forward. 

I see the data dialogue coming up. That's a great protocol to use, and I am really excited about using it as a consortium. I know some of the agencies have used it independently, but this will be the first year that we've actually adapted that on a consortium-wide level. And I think it's going to be really helpful to us. 

The process, just starting to trying this in a consortium. Yeah, it is a process. It takes time. But it's very beneficial, and I think that you'll find that the conversations that develop and the friendships, even, that develop between discipline peers on an interagency level is really positive. I agree-- again, trust and respect, always important. And not using that but, yes. 

That takes some time, I think, to get used to not using that word, because it's setting yourself up for why it's not going to work. You want to use the and, you know, I understand this, and what if we were to try it this way, not but this is too hard. So I think that's a great thing to focus on, as well. 

Some next best steps-- Estella is mentioning sharing this information. Great idea. Christine says dialogue with consortium members to achieve commitment to the process. And that's really important. There has to be that buy-in to really move forward. Ascilla mentions reviewing and rewatching the webinar. And so that will be certainly available to you once this is over to go ahead and pull it up and look at it yourself or look at it with another group. 

Teresita, talking to my principal, choosing right and committed people. Again, very important. You want those that are involved to be for it. You want to go in with an open dialogue with people that want to be there and want to participate. Nancy's mentioning printing out the handouts, giving them to her team. Great idea. Sharing information. 

Sharing the presentation with ESL teachers or having collaboration or articulation meetings with the college. That's great. That's something that we're doing, as well, and that is really important. We all have ESL, and so that's something that's really important to discuss and see where the need is, see if there is a need in every area of the district for all the levels, or is there some levels that are more in need one place and other levels that might be taught somewhere else, because I know everyone's trying to get away from the duplication of efforts. 

I do think ESL is one of those areas that there's really enough to go around. There's a lot of need out there. But having those discussions is really important, and by aligning the curriculum, you can kind of show your students and your teachers, if a student were at ESL level two at this school, what does that mean if they move to another partner district. 

Things to commit to, we have some great ideas here. Leanne mentions building relationships with constituents and agencies. Relationship's real important. Estella, creating a collaboration and alignment plan. Great first step. Teresita, you're discussing with the school's leadership committee. Very good. Malina mentions reading all the handouts and summarize the key points. 

Join a curriculum alignment committee. Very good. Review the forms and edit them for consortium. So a lot of it's around better collaboration and practice, aligning your objectives and making sure that you have those connections, the right people are in the room, they're starting the discussions from a place of mutual respect and trust. So all really good ideas. Thank you for participating. I think this is a great start. 

All right. The next thing we wanted to do is kind of take a look again at the training objectives, and just revisit them, make sure that we did what we were setting out to do. So we were wanting to become familiar with the curriculum alignment efforts of ETCN, which is our consortium, examine competencies for effective cross-agency collaboration. And I think that was well received. 

There was a lot of feedback in the discussion pods on how you would go about collaborating with your other agencies. Reviewing several tools and the protocols to facilitate effective collaborative curriculum alignment. And we have the protocols for you so you can-- all this information under Handouts is available for you to download. 

Identifying potential obstacles to successful collaboration, and identify strategies to remedy those obstacles. So we hit on that a couple of times during the webinar, where we considered what is an instance where things might not have gone as smoothly as you want in a collaborative effort, and kind of identifying why that might have happened and thinking about ways that you might be able to collaborate more effectively in the future. And then we outlined next steps to move toward more productive collaboration within your agencies or regions. And you all had a lot of great ideas for what your next step might be. 

So thank you, Suzanne. And so we have, it looks like, one minute left. So you have our contact information that's here in the PowerPoint. And I think we're going to turn things-- oh, we also have our references and resources if you wanted to read some other things. As Sudi indicated, most of these articles are in the handout pod. And then I guess we're just turning it back to you, Sudi, to close? 

Yes, ma'am. Thank you both so much, and thank you, everybody, for being so engaged and sharing your thoughts and next steps with us. So we're going to go ahead and close this out. Once we close out the webinar, you will be redirected to an evaluation. I ask that you please take the time to do the evaluation. Your thoughts are important to us, and that's how we improve and get better. 

Thank you all. 

Thank you guys so much for joining us today, and have a wonderful day.