CAROLYN ZACHRY: Hello, I'm Dr. Carolyn Zachry, with the Adult Education Office at the California Department of Education. And this is a webinar on the Continuous Improvement Plan, known as the CIP, that all WIOA Title ll grantees will be required to submit on April 30, 2024. 

Today, you're going to hear the vision for the Continuous Improvement Plan, the six steps in your process. We're going to talk about the review and feedback process, and then have a live demonstration of the CIP on the OAR site. 

First of all, let's bust a couple myths. Your progress on your SMART goals and action plan will be evaluated. No, it will not be evaluated. However, if you continually don't achieve your goals, we would probably provide some technical assistance for-- Secondly, what year does the CIP cover? The CIP that is due in April of 24 is covering the next year, 2024-2025. 

So let's talk about the vision of the Continuous Improvement Plan and how it should work with the other plans that you may have at your agency. If you are a state funded agency with CAEP funds, you will likely have a three year plan and an annual plan. And now as WIOA grantee, you have to have a continuous improvement plan. That is a lot of plans. The intent here is that these plans will all work seamlessly together and that you will have goals that are similar in each one so that you're not trying to keep track of separate plans and separate goals. 

Again, if we're really looking at this coordination between all of these plans, if you are receiving both state and federal dollars. Now let's get started on some of your CIP planning. First, you need to gather a team. Your team could include support staff, teachers, students, and administrators. Remember these are only recommendations, but it's important that you have a team while you're writing your Continuous Improvement Plan because this should not be done in isolation. 

Your step one, you need to review your goals. If you are a continuing WIOA agency, you can go back to your 2022 CIP submission and look at your goals that you wrote there as well as your AEFLA grant application. Which goals have you completed so far? What data points provide evidence of that completion? If you are a new WIOA agency, you want to look back at your grant application to help determine what goals you might want to put in your Continuous Improvement Plan. 

All right, now let's look at the next part of step one and that is determining which goals your agency wants to continue to work on. Think about what has been going well and what evidence do you have that demonstrates that. Which areas or goals are not really moving forward as you had expected them? And what changes do you need to put into place to help meet the goals? 

Next, what continuous improvement challenges did your agency experience? And really you're looking at 2022-23 and 23-24, kind of over the last two years, what challenges have you experienced? What activities did you complete on their established timeline? Why didn't you complete them? Really doing an analysis of your goals and whether you met them or not and why you didn't meet them if you weren't able to do so, and what might your agency be able to do to overcome those challenges in the future. 

Step two is data gathering. This is a list of recommended data. It doesn't mean that you have to use all of this data and it also doesn't mean that you can't add other data sources that you have with your own agency. 

You're going to want to use your-- consider using your data integrity report, your NRS federal tables, your WIOA program implementation survey responses, for employment and earnings, follow up survey data, responses to the teacher self-assessment, responses to the student technology intake survey, and priority industry sectors from your local workforce development board plan. 

Again, this isn't an exhaustive list and it is just a recommended list. Step three is to review this data. There are some guiding questions in the CIP document that you can use as you're reviewing your data. We're also going to want to compare your agency's performance to the NRS performance levels. And then you're also going to want to review data regularly. We believe that not just part of your CIP process, but you should always be looking at your data, either every other month or on a quarterly basis. 

New this year. The CIP must have three goals with at least one related to technology. Remember, goals now cause now we're getting ready to talk about goal setting. We ask that you use the SMART goal format for working-- writing your goals. It needs to be specific, measurable, attainable and actionable, relevant, and time bound. 

The next step is your action plan. Once you've developed your SMART goals, you need to have a plan to meet them. This is where you can take advantage of the Department of Education and our state leadership projects, and resources. 

Your action plan should include supporting strategies or key action steps, how you're going to measure your success, which staff are accountable, your due dates for each one of those processes, and whatever support you're going to be doing. And there is a sample action plan in the CIP document. 

Step six, implementation and self-monitoring. You're going to want to set up a schedule to assess your progress. We recommend at least three times within the program year. At those meetings, you should talk about what's going well and what evidence do you have that demonstrates this, which areas aren't moving forward as you had expected, and what changes need to be put in place to help you meet those goals. This is due on April 30, 2024. 

Now that you have turned in your CIP, it's our responsibility to start our review. We use our State Leadership Project staff as well as subject matter experts and CDE staff to review your SMART goals and your action plans. We will determine whether your SMART goals meet or need improvement in order for your CIP to be approved. We will be communicating this information with you during the review process. 

OTAN will provide training on writing SMART goals as well as reviewing data, be it looking out for those training opportunities through the months of January and February. Join us on February the 6, 2024, at noon, for a live Q&A session related to the CIP. We'll have the opportunity to-- you'll have the opportunity to ask questions and get answers from state staff and from OTAN staff. And now I'm going to turn this over to Jong Choi, from OTAN, to walk you through the CIP on the OAR site. 

JONG CHOI: Thank you, Carolyn. My name is Jong Choi, and I'm a programmer with OTAN and I'm going to walk you through the Continuous Improvement Plan on the Cal Adult Ed reporting site. After you've logged in you should see the landing page for the Cal Adult Ed reporting site. 

Just one note, this is-- I'm doing this demo off our development site, that's why there's this orange banner that indicates that it's the development site and the URL is slightly different. But when you will be filling out the Continuous Improvement Plan it will be on the Cal Adult Ed reporting site. 

So once you've come to this landing page, you're going to click on WIOA, up at the top menu, and it'll take you to the WIOA menu. And here under the WIOA navigation, you're going to click Continuous Improvement Plan. And this is the Continuous Improvement Plan home page with some information about the plan. The first is a link to the Word document. This is the same document that should be available on the CDE website. And second, there's a webinar here that will guide you through, give you some tips on SMART goals and the CIP. 

To start your plan, click this button here that says Start plan. Now if you were funded in the last WIOA of a grant cycle, you should have submitted a 21-22 Continuous Improvement Plan. If this is the case, your previous SMART goals will display first and with this indication that this is a review of your previous CIP SMART goals. 

You're going to answer whether this goal has been completed or not. If you answer, yes, then the goal is complete, no further action is required. If you select, no, there will be some questions here. These do not need answers and to be submitted to CDE, these are just for you to reflect on and to help you guide you to creating your SMART goals for your 23-24 CIP. 

If you do select, no, that your goal has not been completed, the application will automatically carry that forward into your 23-24 CIP. I'm going to select no here and hit Save. Now you're-- here you'll come to the plan summary and this is just an overview of the plan. The top here explains what each of the menu items-- what are involved in each of the menu items. Under here, under the plan summary, it's going to list the items that need to be complete before you're eligible to submit your plan. 

And as you can see, you'll see that you've carried over a goal from last year with no changes, this will require updates to make it relevant for the current year. Number two, you must enter at least three SMART goals. Currently you have one. At least one of these three SMART goals must be technology related and you must fill out the primary contact information, this is who we can contact if we have issues with your CIP. 

OK, now I'm going to move to the surveys, the surveys option in the menu. And this is just going to give you access to the teacher self-assessment and the student technology intake survey. You can see right here this is the URL that you can provide to your staff to allow them to start the teacher self-assessment. This-- the second URL here is the link to the student technology intake survey and this can be provided to students to take the survey. 

Below here is just how you can manage this data and you can click either of these to view your data for the current year. Now I'm going to move over to the SMART goals. OK, you will see up at the top here that SMART goal one was carried over from your previous CIP, but no changes have been made. Please update this goal or action steps for your 23-24 Continuous Improvement Plan. 

You'll notice this little eye information icon here and whenever you click that it's going to indicate this goal was marked as not complete from your 21-22 plan just so that you know. Now it's telling that you must edit this goal prior to actually submitting. So I'm going to come into this goal and just update these dates to be relevant for this year. And I will also indicate that this goal is a technology related goal by selecting this Checkbox. And then I'm going to hit Save. 

OK, now if I return back to the plan summary, you can see that the technology goal that it was asking, that you had to have one technology goal, is no longer there, so now you see that you have-- you must enter three SMART goals, currently you have one. 

Now I'm going to return back to the SMART goals. You will no longer see that notice that the goal was carried over and-- but you needed to make changes to it. You've made the change-- the necessary changes to the goal and now you just need to complete two more goals. 

Now to start your next goal, click this button here, New SMART goal. You're going to enter the narrative of the SMART goal. Right now I'm just going to indicate that this is a test. Hit-- click the Save button, and then below you should see a section to start adding your action steps to this new goal. So start by clicking the Add step to action plan. And you're going to write your narratives for your supporting strategies. Your measure of success, the staff accountable, due dates, and this SOP CD support. And you're going to click Save. 

Now you'll see here below that your action step has been saved in the table. There is no limit to how many action steps you can add. Just ask that you put enough that it explains your SMART goal. 

Now I'm going to click back into SMART-- back into the plan summary and now you'll see that we have entered three SMART goals, currently have-- you must enter three SMART goals, currently you have two. So I'm going to return back to SMART goal, click New SMART goal. Click Save and add the action steps. 

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Now that I have all three SMART goals entered, all I'm missing right now is the primary contact information and you can enter that in the contact information section. 

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Now you'll see that all the items that were required to be filled have been completed and now you can continue to your plan submittal. You can also get to your plan submittal here in the review and submit section, so if you are in the plan summary you can also click Review and Summary, Submit and see the area where you can submit your plan. 

At any given time, you can always go to review and submit and click this button, Review, and print a draft of your continuous improvement plan and this will just generate a PDF copy of your Continuous Improvement Plan, which you can review. 

Now the last thing you need to do is enter your title and click I certify and would like to submit to CDE. Now your plan has been submitted. You can click this button to pull down a copy of your submitted plan. And now when you go return back to the wheel at dashboard and back into the deliverable summary, you'll notice that your plan now shows as submitted, but the review is pending. 

Now if you return back into your Continuous Improvement Plan, you'll see that the start or edit button is no longer available, it's because now your plan has been submitted and now it's sitting in review. And that's all I have on how to complete your Continuous Improvement Plan. Like this-- turn this back over to Carolyn. 

CAROLYN ZACHRY: Thank you so much, Jong. I really appreciate you walking everyone through that process. And just a reminder that your plans will be due April 30, but please join us for the question and answer live session on February 6, 2024, at noon. Also, please look out for further training's to help you with your CIP throughout January and February. Thank you very much, and have a great rest of your day.