Speaker: OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Elsa Magana: So good morning, everyone. My name is Elsa Magana. I'm the principal of Moreno Valley Community Adult School, part of Moreno Valley Unified School District in Riverside County. A little bit about us, Moreno Valley Middle School-- we offer ESL, ABE, basic adult education, GED classes in Spanish and English, and citizenship. And we offer CTE medical path with EKG, phlebotomy, pharmacy, and medical assistant. The classes are kind of small right now, but our next cohort for phlebotomy is about six already enrolled, and pharmacy we have up to 18. And it's a whole year program.

So prior to COVID we were serving over 1,200 students, but during the distance learning, we went down to 360-ish. And right now, we're up to a little over 560. So it's going up, but enrollment is still low. And a little bit about this-- my amazing team, I joined this team in January of this year. That's when I became the principal. So I'm fairly new, but this team has actually gone through a few changes.

Do the next one.

So not only did they lose the principal, they lost the two night leads also. So out of this right here, there's only two people that are still kind of involved. Well, Ms. Canchola is involved still. She's a pharmacy tech teacher. And we have Ms. Lolita who is the only member from the original team.

Right now, let me introduce them. We have Mr. Fernando Canales-- he's teaching the medical pathway class. Ms. Lolita Anderson-- she is the lead of the group and the only remaining original member.

[laughter]

Ms. Alejandro Lupercio-- she's an ESL teacher. And Ms. Michelle Randall-- she is my night lead. She is my AP.

And without further ado, let me introduce you to Ms. Lolita.

Lolita Anderson: OK, well, this is going to sound a little Dr. Porter-ish.

[laughter]

So raise your hand if you lost a team member. Raise your hand if you lost more than one team member. Raise your hand if you lost a principal. Raise your hand if you're the sole survivor of your original team.

So you know how many times-- you know how many casualties I have to experience? I too should have been a casualty, if it wasn't for our DLAC Coach, Susan Gaer, a.k.a. Dr. Gaer, who would resuscitate me every time I would flatline because I was flatlining left and right. Every time I lost a team member, I would flatline, and she would come with a rapid response and resuscitate me.

And so it was frightening going into the second year as the original team member. And Susan, she would look at me and she would be like, why are you frightened? The foundation has been set. It's there. It's sustainable. And by the way, you're the new lead. So this time, before I flatlined, I fainted. She hit me with the defibrillator. Clear! I'm here.

We can go to the next slide, please.

Thank goodness for OTAN. You guys came at a perfect time, at a time where our students really needed you. It was just a hard time for everyone. Just to give you a little bit of background, before COVID hit, we were face-to-face. And we were face-to-face, and we have this wonderful pharmacy technician, or CTE instructor, Cynthia Canchola.

And what she would do is she would go around the ESL classes, ABE classes, GED classes, and she would just promote the class, promote and build relationships with the instructors and with the students, and she would say, hey, look, after nine months and $600, you could be a pharmacy technician. And you can have that solvency, and you know how good that sounds?

So COVID hit. So then we had to pivot to meet the shifting needs of the students and, of course, we had to make sure that they were safe, and by doing that, we went long distance. And we had to-- so what we started doing is the students that were losing their jobs, and so the CTE course for them was looking better and better. But we wanted to make sure that they were set for success.

And so what I would do is we would get together with the ESL department and we would say, hey, look, I'm going to get together with Cynthia, and we will collaborate. We're diagnosing all these problems that the students were having, or maybe the problems that she was currently having with her students.

And so my students would go up to me and they would say, hey, look this sounds great. But I was like, well, wait a minute. Let me check your CASA score because you want to set them up for success, and analyzing data, that drives instruction. So that's very important. You don't want to give your students a false sense of reality either. You want to make sure that they're set up for success.

And so we would check their CASE score, and if they were like 83-84, scoring more than 221, or tests 85 or 86 advance, it's going-- 235 was ideal, because then they're CASA going into ABE, and so we knew that they were set up, well-prepared.

And then we would ask-- she would express her concerns with her current students, and she would say, well, I wish they were just a little more prepared in the areas of customer service, in the areas of computer skills, medical mathematics, medical terminology, anatomy, and physiology.

So then we had another diagnosis, which kind of turned out to be a cure, because now we're going to go ahead and Fernando Canales, who is our CTE instructor will talk more about the modules. But right now, I'm going to pass it over to Alejandra Lupercio. She is going to discuss more challenges that we faced and conquered.

Alejandra Lupercio: All right, thank you, Lola. So one of the challenges that we face where technology changes. So around the beginning of year two, which is around the time that we switched a lot of our team members, we decided to switch our LMS. So we started off with Moodle and we switched over to Canvas.

So we were inspired by Cynthia's course. She shared her course with us, and when we're looking through it, we realize, well, she's using Canvas. We should do the same thing. That way, her students have this seamless transition, and that way, they can focus more on their content. They're not going to worry about, oh, how does Canvas work because with our course, they will already know, or they'll be used to the Canvas modules and everything.

Well, this was challenging for us, especially for Lola, because she had already spent year one learning Moodle, spending lots of hours adding content, and now we had to switch over and move all of her content from Moodle to Canvas. Not everything was compatible, so basically, we started from scratch. And we were all new, so we were all learning this new LMS together.

But, thankfully for Susan, she was there to help us and guide us. And she helped us learn how to add assignment, add quizzes, all of that with Canvas, so thank you to Susan.

Switch to the next one.

And another change we made, we changed our name. So we started off with Pharmacy Tech, or Bridge to Pharmacy Tech, and we switched over to Medical Pathways Course. So we realized that, well, we have these other medical courses-- might as well include that too. That way, students have more options. So when they're done with our course, it's not just pharmacy tech, but now they can decide, oh, maybe they want to do phlebotomy, or EKG, medical assistant.

Well, this was also challenging because now we had to change our content. And we made this change around December of year two, so it was a recent change. So now we had to go back to our modules. For example, in the picture right there, medical terminology, we had to include-- we had to make it more general. It was specific to pharmacy tech, and now we had to make it more general, so that way, our students get a little bit of everything.

And this was also challenging because we also decided to pilot our course early. We actually piloted the course in January. So we made the change in December and we had to start the course in January. So we had a little bit of time, but we were able to work through the break and we were able to get it done on time.

And yeah, that's pretty much everything that I'm going to mention. Now I'm going to pass it over to our medical pathway teacher, Mr. Canales.

Fernando Canales: So good morning, everybody. So I'm Mr. Canales. I'm the instructor for the new course we made. And it's funny, because 911, we have an emergency, as you guys heard, we were losing members, right?

[laughter]

So I wasn't in the team originally.

Dr. Brizano, our former principal, came to me one day. He's like, so I hear you're trying to get more hours in the school. I'm like, yeah, am I going to substitute later tonight? And like, oh no, do you want to teach a new class? I'm like, oh sure, what's it going to be about? And they said, it's going to be about a new course about medicine in the health field. And I'm like, yes, this is a perfect role for me.

And the reason why it's a perfect role for me is because I want to be a doctor. I'm trying to go to medical school. And I want to learn more about the health field, and it was awesome because to be honest with you, I did not know every single thing that I was going to teach originally, so I had to learn everything from scratch. And it's great because I'm like I'm going to be learning this in the future, and I'm going to be teaching others about something I'm really passionate about. So it was amazing. So this position was awesome for me.

And as I was learning and learning more, I was teaching my students more about different positions they would be taking. For example, not only the four classes we're going to be offering, but I was also suggesting for them, don't even stop there. You can always keep going, further and further and further. So don't just let this be a place like, OK, I'm going to go to pharmacy tech and then stop there.

I'm always saying, learn more stuff. Learn more general medical terminology, because you never know. You may work in the hospital. You may not just work in the clinic. You may interact with other people in other professions. So it's just going to be perfect. I'm trying to teach a little bit about everything.

And we worked on separate modules. So we each had a separate module we were working on, and it was great because we each separated the work, and once we separated the work, I got all the modules together-- it was a foundation. So I was able to look into this format and see what I needed to adjust. So I was able to come out with a semi-perfect Canvas format.

And next slide, please.

So students were eager to learn. So it was great, because all my students would want to learn new stuff. So they were like a sponge. They were getting all this information. So anything I taught them, they were willing to learn. So that was awesome.

So students came at different levels. What I mean by different levels is that some students knew how to use a computer. Other students didn't even know how to search up on Google. So I had to teach different levels according to students' needs. So for example, some students, like I mentioned, weren't able to go onto Google, weren't able to use Canvas. So we had to spend like a whole week on that in the beginning.

And some students already knew how to use a computer. So for example, one of our modules was computer skills, and I didn't want to just teach computer skills for a full three hours, because this is not a computer skills class. So what I did is I would separate it one hour and a half computer skills-- next hour and a half after the break, anatomy, physiology, medical terminology. So they were like, oh, this is different. I'm actually learning something. I'm coming here to learn something that I really like.

So one of the things I had to do was because I had to adapt. The school district Wi-Fi didn't allow Cahoot, didn't allow Quizlet, so certain things like that, for example, I had to tell students take out your phone for Cahoot. You won't be able to use Quizlet here, but you can use it at home. So we had to find different ways to adapt so my students can be able to learn all these different programs, because they're still helpful.

And so, again, students struggled at first. Some students, for example-- we test them with a CASA test-- some of them still had trouble learning English. So, for example, medical terminology is already hard to begin with, so I had to simplify it down, had them go on Google Translate a few times, find websites that would be able to accommodate them for their language. And students are going to be prepared for the next level.

And I'm going to show one video just in case because I feel like we're running out of time. So I'm going to show one video of one of my current students in my class. So the video's not working, but basically, our student that was there, she was really excited to learn about medical terminology. For example, she never knew some of the things like, for example, when she went to the hospital and got this list of certain things of what she was diagnosed, she was able to read some of the terms.

And it was really great because, for example, she was able to help her other friends-- of course, we're not determining what they have. We're not doctors. But it was really good to interpret like, oh, this is what this means, and they can go into further research. So they take their own health into their own hands. So I thought that was really amazing.

And then with that we have another one with pharmacy tech so this is a student from Ms. Canchola's class, and she was just telling us how this class is really important because she struggled at first as well. And she needed that foundation. And, of course, we didn't have it back then. Now we have it, so now she's better prepared for her position and to be a pharmacy tech in the future.

And with that, I'm going to turn it to Ms. Randall.

Michelle Randall: We just want to say, really, thank you so much for the collaboration. Again, being new together when I came-- I started in August myself, and I was like, I have no idea. Like I shared earlier, DLAC to me was District Language Advisory Committee, and I was like, yeah, sure, happy to join. So I got up and I was like, what?

So really, thank you to our DLAC community and everything. Like, Lola keeping us in line-- she really stepped up as a leader, and I'm sure we're a handful, as you probably have noticed as well. But we really pulled together. These three have created a course that we literally implemented at the turn of our semester, and have been rolling with it. Fernando-- typical in education as well, we like to shoulder tap. So don't make eye contact because he was like-- but he came along, did his thing. Ms. Canchola, who couldn't be here today, but she really just reaches out.

Thank you to Dr. Porter for his strength skills, because we came together all new. I mean, we kind of knew each other passing in the hallways, but we were really able to take that strength activity and play on that and move it forward. Susan, again, our greatest cheerleader, always doing the EKG, the defibrillator, and stuff. And there were times where we're like, rah, rah, rah-- just basically arguing on Zoom and stuff like that. And she's like, come back together and move forward. So again, thank you to all of you because it probably wouldn't have happen if it wasn't for you.

And for us, we realize the only constant really is change. So we are continuing to change that. We have learned so much and are continuing to be change makers. As we move forward-- we're going to move on-- we were talking and Ms. Magana with her vision, we're moving forward to use Canvas in all of our courses next year, as we create a pacing guide for our GED, ESL classes just really to streamline things so that we are not only impacting our small community, our medical pathway community, but really across the board at our school.

And we know that, again, that change is always happening and stuff. So don't stand still too long, because we're going to change it. With that, we're going to close, and if there's any questions, we'd be happy to answer those for you.

[applause]