Carolyn Zachry: Welcome to the development of your agency's Continuous Improvement Plan for the 2026-27 academic year. This plan represents both a reflection on where you have been and a roadmap for where you want to go.

Grounded in data and focused on improving outcomes for adult learners, the Continuous Improvement Plan is more than a compliance document. It is a strategic tool that helps you identify what is working well, recognizes areas for growth, and set meaningful, achievable goals that will strengthen your program and student outcomes. The planning process is comprised of three important steps for you and your team.

Step one, reflection. Take an honest look at your current plan. What progress have you made toward your existing goals? What challenges did you encounter? What successes can you celebrate and build upon?

Next, analyze. Examine your data with fresh eyes. Look at student enrollment, persistence, completion, and transmission rates. Review program performance metrics. Listen to what the data tells you about your students' needs and your program's effectiveness. Next, plan. Use what you've learned, develop three SMART goals for the 2026-27 year that will drive meaningful Improvement in your program.

There are goal requirements. Your three goals should follow the SMART framework. They should be specific, clearly defined and focused on a particular area of improvement. Your goals should be measurable, including concrete indicators and metrics to track progress. They should be achievable, realistic, given your resources and capacity.

They should be relevant, aligned with your agency's mission and student needs. And they should be time bound, designed to be accomplished within the 2026-27 academic year. These SMART goals should be data informed, rooted in evidence from your program's performance and student outcomes.

One of your three goals must address education technology. In an increasingly digital world, technology is not separate from instruction. It is integral to how we reach students, deliver content, support learning, and prepare adults for workforce success.

Consider how technology can enhance access, improve instruction, strengthen support services, or build staff capacity. As you work through this process, remember that continuous improvement is exactly that-- continuous. This is an opportunity to be thoughtful, strategic, and responsive to your students evolving needs.

Your goals should reflect your agency's unique context while pushing your program toward excellence. The work you do in developing this plan will shape the experiences and outcomes of the adult learners you serve in 2026-27. Approach it with intentionality. Use your data wisely and create a plan that truly drives improvement.

As you develop your 2026-27 CIP, remember that this work aligns seamlessly with your WASC and Council on Occupational Education Accreditation processes. We have been collaborating closely with both WASC and COE to ensure coherence across your planning documents, including CAEP consortia plans.

This integrated approach means you're not creating separate, disconnected plans. You're building a unified strategy that serves your students across all accountability systems. The California Department of Education's focus continues to be minding the gaps, understanding and addressing the critical transition points where we lose students.

Pay particular attention to students with minimal engagement, those who enroll but never attend, or who have approximately one hour of instruction and then disappear. How can we support their transition into active participation? Remember the 12-hour threshold. Moving students from enrollment to participant status by helping them achieve and exceed 12 hours of instruction.

And then persistence. Persistence from pre-test to post-test, ensuring students remain engaged through their educational journey and complete assessments that demonstrate their progress. These gaps represent real students whose educational goals remain unfilled.

As a state, we were close to meeting our goal, and therefore, we will be carrying this goal to the 2026-27 year. Your CIP goals should address how your agency will improve these gaps and improve outcomes.

Our other goal is to continue strengthening collaboration with key partners, particularly Title I and your Local Workforce Development Board and AJCC. These partnerships create pathways and support systems that benefit adult learners and strengthen your community's workforce. Now let's walk through the CIP process. Your first step in developing your 2026-27 CIP is a comprehensive data review.

Assemble a complete picture of your program's performance by examining your data integrity report from TOPSpro Enterprise, your NRS data table, specifically Tables 4, 4A and 4B, as well as Table 5, your employment and earnings follow-up surveys, your teacher assessments, your student technology intake surveys, and any other relevant data that's important to your program.

This should not be a solo endeavor. Like your WASC accreditation, COE accreditation, and CAEP planning processes, your CIP development should be collaborative. Form a team. That includes teachers, support staff, students, and other partners. Your adult education students can and should be part of this process. They bring invaluable perspective on what works and what needs improvement.

So now let's look at our fictitious school, Rolling Hills Adult School. They've began by assembling their team-- administrators, teachers, support staff, students, and community partners. Together, they brainstormed to identify gaps in programming and focus areas.

They examined enrollment patterns, surveyed their community, and then pulled relevant data to inform their thinking. Based on their analysis, Rolling Hills developed this SMART goal. By June 2027, Rolling Hills Adult School will increase the percentage of students who persist from enrollment to 12 plus hours of instruction by 10% through implementation of targeted support strategies, including comprehensive orientation, individualized counseling, and progress monitoring.

Breaking down the SMART components of this goal, we can see that it is specific. It's to increase the percentage of students who persist and complete at least 12 hours of instruction. It's measurable. They're going to do the measuring of this through TE, and they will see their percentages as they approach 10%.

It's achievable. The implementation of evidence-based support strategies-- orientation, counseling, progress monitoring-- makes this goal attainable. And it's relevant. It directly addresses the state priority of minding the gaps and enhances student retention, aligning with the school's mission and funding requirements.

And of course, its time bound. They want to achieve this by June 2027. So Rolling Hills staff will now repeat this process to develop the remaining two goals, including one focused on educational technology.

To streamline your planning process, you may adapt the state's SMART goal for your agency. If you choose this option, you'll only need to develop two additional agency-specific goals. And remember, one of those must be in the area of education technology.

California's 2026-27 state SMART goal is as follows-- with the focus on equitable access and support for underserved populations, by June 30, 2027, California Adult Education WIOA Title II agencies will work to increase the percentage of students who qualify as participants, 12 plus hours, from the 2026-27 baseline to a 6% increase as measured by COSAS, TE, NRS Table 4.

Now let's break this one down. It's specific. We are increasing the percentage of students who qualify as participants on NRS Table 4. It's measurable. We have a 6% increase from our baseline. And we're going to track that via our NRS table and through TE. It's achievable. It might be ambitious, which is why we're doing this goal again, but it is attainable through collective effort and targeted strategies.

It's also relevant. This directly supports WIOA Title II's purpose of assisting adults to become literate and obtain the knowledge and skills necessary for employment and self-sufficiency. Improving learner persistence rates contributes fundamentally to this mission.

It's also time bound. June 30, 2027. Remember, a goal without a plan is just a wish. Once you have established your SMART goals, it's time to develop a detailed action plan. Your action plan should include support strategies. These are specific interventions and activities you'll implement.

It should also include a measure of success, how you'll track progress throughout the year. Importantly, it should also say which staff are accountable for which actions. And it should include timeline and due dates for each one of your actions.

Lastly, you might want to include some resources and supports. This can be our state leadership projects of CASAS, CALPRO and OTAN, or certainly us at the California Department of Education. Let's look at a sample action plan for the state goal.

The first piece that we're going to do in our action is that we're going to continuously monitor our NRS Table 4 data through the admin portal. The data review team will track incremental increases in October of 2026, January of 2027, and April of 2027 with technical assistance and support from CASAS.

Second, we're going to investigate barriers for students who enroll but don't reach 12 hours. Through a survey statewide to front office staff and counselors, we will develop a comprehensive list of barriers, and we will also seek student feedback in the fall of 2026 and in the spring of 2027, utilizing CALPRO resources and their research team.

Third, we're going to review our final data and evaluate our goal. We're going to look at our baseline data and our June 2027 data and document our successes and our challenges. Finally, we want to celebrate our successes and learn from our challenges.

In October of 2027, the entire team will hold a reflection meeting to share lessons learned and recognize progress made. Remember, your action plans should be detailed enough that staff can follow them throughout the year, with clear benchmarks for monitoring progress. Whether you fully achieve your goals or make significant progress toward them, take time to celebrate and reflect.

Evaluate both your successes and your struggles. If you aimed at 6% growth and achieved 5%, well, that's worth celebrating, and then you can analyze what prevented you from making that final percentage point. This reflection becomes the foundation for your next planning cycle-- true continuous improvement.

Jong Choi: Hi. My name is Yong Choi and I'm the Lead Application Developer with OTAN. And I'm going to walk you through the Continuous Improvement Plan on the California Adult Education reporting site. From here on out, I'll refer to the Continuous Improvement Plan as the CIP and the California Adult Education Reporting Site as the reporting site. I'll begin by sharing my screen and logging into the Reporting Site.

After you've logged in should see the landing page for the reporting site. You'll notice this orange banner here indicating that this is a development site. And you'll also notice that the URL is slightly different. This is for demo purposes only. However, when you'll be filling out the CIP, it will be on the actual reporting site without the banner. So once you've come to this landing page, you're going to click WIOA at the top menu.

This should take you to the WIOA dashboard. First, I'm going to show you where you can get a copy of your previous CIP from the deliverable summary. You're going to select the fiscal year 24-25 and select Get Deliverable List.

Once the page loads, you're going to scroll down until you see WIOA Title II, AEFLA, Agency-Level Continuous Improvement Plan. To the right of that, you should see a link where you can download a copy of your plan.

Now I'm going to take you to the Continuous Improvement Plan landing page. Under the WIOA navigation, select Continuous Improvement Plan. Here we are on the Continuous Improvement Plan landing page. You'll see some information, some expectations and some resources.

I'd like to draw attention to this reviewer feedback link, which will take you to the bottom of the page and provide you with reviewer feedback from your previous year's CIP. If there was no feedback from your previous CIP, you should see the message, "no reviewer feedback available." To start your plan, click this button here, Start Plan.

Now that you are in the third year of the grant cycle, you should have submitted a previous CIP. Your previous year SMART goals will display first. This is a review of your previous CIP SMART goals.

You're going to answer whether these goals have been completed or not. If you answer yes, the goal is complete. No further action is required. If you select no, you'll be presented with some questions. Your response to these questions do not need to be submitted to CDE with your CIP. Let me repeat that. Answers to these questions do not need to be submitted to CDE with your CIP.

These questions are just for you to reflect on and help guide you in creating your SMART goals for your current plan. If you select no, that your goal has not been completed, the application will automatically carry that forward into your current plan. I'm going to say that this first goal is complete and the other two are not complete, and then I'm going to click the Save button.

After saving, you should arrive at the plan summary. This is just an overview of the plan. Under the plan summary, it's going to list the items that need to be completed before you're eligible to submit your plan.

As you can see, "you've carried over goals from last year with no changes. Please update these goals and action steps to be relevant for your current plan. You must enter three SMART goals. Currently, you have two, since you carry two over from your previous plan. At least one of these three SMART goals must be technology related." And finally, you have to enter some contact information.

Now I'm going to move to the survey options in the menu. This is going to give you access to the Teacher Self-assessment and Student Technology Intake Survey data and URLs. You can see to the right here that you can provide your staff, the URL to the teacher self-assessment where they can begin the survey.

The second URL is for the Student Technology Intake Survey and can be provided to students to take the survey. Below here, you can view a summary of the survey results through these two links. You can also find this data and the URLs under the WIOA navigation under the Survey section.

Now I'm going to move over to SMART goals. OK. You'll see here at the top that SMART goals two and three were carried over from your previous CIP, but no changes have been made. You're going to update this goal and action steps for your current plan. You'll also notice this little I which indicates that this goal was not complete from your previous Continuous Improvement Plan and was carried forward.

So you're going to have to edit this SMART goal to be relevant for your current plan. I'm going to click the Edit button. Now I'm going to update this narrative to be relevant for the current year.

And I'm also going to select that this goal is technology related, and then hit the Save button. I'll also edit and update the action steps to be relevant. And hit the Save button.

Now I'm going to go back to the plan summary. And you'll see here through the validation items that the technology goal requirement has been met. Now you have these three other items that need to be resolved before you can submit your plan. So I'm going to return back to the SMART goals, and I'm going to update the other goal that was carried forward from your previous plan.

Now you just need to enter one more SMART goal. I'm going to do that by clicking New SMART Goal. I'm going to just going to indicate that this is a test and hit the Save button. Once you hit the Save button, you'll see the section to start adding your action steps to this new goal. Start by clicking the Add Step to Action Plan.

You're going to write your supporting strategies, measure of success, the staff accountable, due dates, and the SLP CDE support. Now, if you wish to remain on this page and add additional action steps, click this checkbox here, I Have More Action Steps to Add.

At this time, this will be the only action step that I add to my goal. Now I'm going to return back to the plan summary, and you'll notice all the validation items have been completed except for the primary contact information, which I'll enter now.

Now you notice all the validation items are no longer there, and you can continue to your plan submittal. You can always click the Review and Submit button to go submit your plan if all your requirements have been met. But also in the Review and Submit section, you'll have this option to print a draft copy of your CIP.

This is a good opportunity to review the PDF prior to submitting it to CDE. Now, the last step you need to do is just enter your title here and click I Certify and Would Like to Submit to CDE.

Now that your plan has been submitted, you should receive a confirmation email that your plan was submitted, which should include a PDF copy of your plan. You can also click this link here to download a copy of your submitted plan.

Your submitted plan can also be found under the deliverable summary in the WIOA dashboard, which was shown previously. And you'll see the link here to download your plan, as well as that your plan has been submitted. Now, at this time, your plan is being reviewed and you'll be notified when your plan has been approved or does not meet expectations.

Now you can return back to the Continuous Improvement Plan home page, and you'll notice there's no longer an Edit or Start button. This is because your plan is submitted and is being reviewed. And that's all I have on how to complete your CIP.