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Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Jaemi Naish: Welcome agencies new to WIOA and the continuous improvement program also known as CIP. My name is Jaemi Naish, and I'm an OTAN subject matter expert and also the director at Tamalpais Adult School in Marin County. Also with us today is.

Penny Pearson: Hi everyone. My name is Penny Pearson. I was formerly a coordinator for distance learning projects with OTAN. Now I'm working as an subject matter expert as well.

And what we're doing today is we're trying to give you a brief introduction to this continuous improvement plan. It really is something that's progressed over the years. But for your intent and purpose, it is really meant to help you plan and find resources to have something in place for you to continuously work toward improvement at your agencies.

Now this has also been around for a long time in some form of or another but for what you are doing, just think of it this way. This is a roadmap for you that's getting you from point A to point B. Yes there will be some challenges but we're here to help you with those. And just remember this as WIOA grant recipient, you are required to fill out this continuous improvement plan.

And we've tried to provide you with all the potential goodies that you need in order to make your work the easiest as possible. And so from here we'll pass it back over to Jaemi and the next section.

Jaemi Naish: So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what the continuous improvement plan or CIP entails. There are several key requirements. First, the creation of a CIP team. Each agency needs to have at least one team, a team of two or more to work on the CIP goals together. You'll designated-- you'll designate your team members, their roles and what support they'll provide with your CIP plan and goal development.

There are three goals that are required. All goals must be smart and at least one must be tech focused. The goals that you create this spring will be implemented and evaluated in the next program year. It's very important you have access to the California Adult Education portal. This is where most of the CIP data and deliverables are housed.

The portal contains the following CIP documents, the student intake survey, the teacher survey, it's also where you'll find and review your agency CIP survey data and results. And finally, the CIP guidance document as well as the CIP plan document are also located in this portal. Make sure you go take a look at the portal when you get a chance.

The biggest change to the CIP for this coming year is that all students are expected to take the intake survey and at least 25% of your teachers are expected to take the teacher survey. With that in mind, it's really not too early to get started. Next Penny will discuss the student technology intake survey.

Penny Pearson: So you may or may not be familiar with this but the student technology intake survey is another one of those things that has morphed over the years. And over the past couple of years when it has been implemented, it has been recommended that students take the technology survey but now it really is highly encouraged. All of your students should take this technology survey and it may be in a couple of different ways.

You may have all of your students when they register take the technology survey or you may have your teachers introduce it at the first class. It doesn't matter, the point is, the more students that you have to take this technology survey, the more information you have to understand the capacity and the technologies available to your learners. You may find that you can provide a greater service because of discoveries that you make through this survey.

Your role in this can take very, very different titles or processes. Do you want to be a distributor of it do? You want to make sure that all of your teachers know where it is? Do you want to be the data analyst? Are you the one that's going to do the deep dive into the survey-- into the survey to see what your students are telling you about their access to different types of technology, broadband capability?

What type of devices do they own? Do they have to be shared, et cetera? As Jaemi mentioned before, you're going to be part of a team and you need to be communicating these efforts whatever form they take into that committee so they understand what's happening with your students. And they can then become a part of your goals in one form or another so you have a better understanding of how you can serve your students.

If you're not familiar with the survey as Jaemi mentioned earlier, it is available on the reporting portal so you can take a look at it there. And there's a small screenshot here that gives you an idea of how it starts. So this is something that I hope that all of you will take advantage of and make sure that it is something that is of value not only to you and your CIP reports but also to your students and your teachers as well.

Now another part of what we're going to be working on is what was mentioned earlier in terms of common challenges and one of them is the SMART goal. This has been something that we have worked with for many years and we really are looking at how you create and define and then can implement the SMART goals. So the reviewers, all of your CIP plans will have two reviewers that look at your goals, how they're written and then also if they're SMART.

Now you may remember what SMART means, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time bound. So when you are looking at creating these SMART goals, they can be done in committee. One of the recommendations that we have seen coming forward now in this day and age is consider the use of AI to verify that your SMART goal does meet all of these requirements.

And again to repeat, there are three goals required this year. One of them must be technology focused. So using your team you write these goals and then perhaps you use a tool to make sure that they are indeed SMART and they meet all of those different pieces of criteria.

Lastly, you must remember to update your agency contacts in the adult education portal. This is where we go to make sure that you receive all of the necessary communications both from the Department of Education or from even your reviewers or us at OTAN if we need to communicate something to you regarding your CIP plan. Now we move on here next to the portal and I'll turn that back over to Jaemi.

Jaemi Naish: So it's important that we talk about some of the resources available to you, especially as new WIOA agencies working on your CIP plans this year. Very important to, again, go into the portal and make sure you have access and look around in the Continuous Improvement tab of the portal. What you're seeing here is just a quick snippet of the actual portal and resources because there's information held in the resources that you can also use.

For one Dr. Zachary's CIP introduction video and portal review is there. And that's a very helpful video to watch as a new WIOA agency. You're going to start gathering your data, you're going to be creating your agency CIP team, you can get started with both of those things now. And make sure that you have a timeline in mind. You don't want to try and do this all before April 30, you want to give yourself a lot of time to make these goals that you're going to create with the team you're going to create them with relevant and useful to you as an agency.

It's not too early to get started, and we'd highly recommend that you get going. Some additional resources, again, besides Dr. Zachary's introduction and going on to the portal, if you want to look at data available school-wide data to help you create your CIP goals, that's great. The CASAS Data Portal is one of those areas where you get a wealth of really good information and data about how your students are doing. Student technology survey results as well as the teacher survey results are both going to be in the portal, once you start implementing those of course.

Extremely helpful is the Department of Ed's CIP guidance document found in that portal. We'd highly recommend that you watch some of the videos that are located in the resources and the adult education portal or you can go out and look at a video on how to create a SMART goal if you need to. We highly recommend that you participate in a training through the California training portal on CIP and just know that there's upcoming webinars and office hours available, especially in support of new agencies who are going to be working on the CIP for the first time.

Thank you for joining us today. We hope this recording has been helpful, especially for you new WIOA agencies. Penny.

Penny Pearson: And I want to encourage all of you to keep those emails handy when you do need help. Both Jaemi and my email address is on this slide but you also can contact support@otan.us and your request will be routed to the correct person. We are here to help you. We understand that there is a lot of stuff going on between now and the end of April, and you really do need to get started now. Don't wait, do it now.

We are here to help you. We're available to you if you want any type of consultation, all you have to do is reach out. Thank you for joining us and good luck on the preparation of your continuous improvement plan.