TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve ... - REL West - WestEd
TRANSCRIPT
Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans SPEAKERS
Susan Loving, Utah State Office of Education Loujeania Bost, National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities Noelle Caskey, REL West at WestEd
EVENT TITLE
Utah SMART Goals Webinar
EVENT DATE
September 19, 2013
MODERATOR
We have three presenters today. Susan Loving from the Utah State Office of Education, Loujeania Bost from the National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities, and Noelle Caskey from REL West at WestEd. I’m going to turn it over now to Susan. SUSAN LOVING
Okay. Thank you very much, Meg, and welcome all of you out there in the ether. This is always so interesting, to be able to talk to people that I am unable to see. Okay. We have four outcomes from the webinar today. Our outcomes today, once we get into this, are to really reconnect the Dropout Prevention Alliance. You are all part of the alliance, and I’ll be talking about that in just a minute. We want to revisit the action plans and the action plan logistics—these are the plans that you developed during the training; review SMART goals and the goal-setting process; and revise SMART goals as needed with your school team. The goal of the alliance—we talk about the alliance a lot. And the alliance is the state office of education, the Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities, REL West, and you as school people. And the goal of the alliance really is to decrease the dropout rate for students with disabilities and prepare them to successfully transition to postsecondary ed or workforce training. We also know that we’re not only working with students with disabilities; we’re working with all of the students in your schools. And the way we provide that assistance is through webinars such as this, training and assistance—you all know Jeanette Milano, who is available to come help; Noelle Caskey, who will be speaking, and Lori Van Houten are also available to come help. We have complementary roles and skill sets in the alliance, and we have them listed here. USOE, we’re . . . I kind of look at us as also being the on-the-ground people. We’re the ones who are here locally, identifying the needs and really tying it into the state context—what are we all about in Utah with dropout prevention, providing some resources, and then providing direct support to schools statewide.
REL West provides the training and support for the Early Warning System, workshops, customized TA. They’re also available to provide research information or to check on any interventions that you’re beginning to implement, saying “Okay, is this research-based? Does this make sense?” They’re the people to contact about that. The Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities—they’re the pros. They’re our “pros from Dover” kind of thing. They’re providing us with the training and the research on dropout prevention strategies and related topics. They’re the ones that are providing the training, and will be continuing to provide the training and booster sessions as we go along throughout the next . . . this year. This is our last year with the Dropout Prevention Center. We will continue to be working with REL West for another year. Now I’d like to turn it over to Loujeania, who will be helping you look at your action plans. LOUJEANIA BOST
Good afternoon. Well, actually, Susan, you do have us for one more year, from January until December of next year, so we do have a year . . . SUSAN LOVING
All right! LOUJEANIA BOST
I’d like to welcome you all from the east coast here today, where it is now 5:17 pm, and wanted to spend . . . and I’ll take this opportunity to sort of shore up our action plans. Just a quick review to refresh your memory because I know you had summer vacation and school’s started back, and you’ve been inundated with trying to get up and running for the last month. Last year your team worked through a process of analyzing your data, so that you could identify your root causes, learning also about your evidence-based practices in dropout prevention— what works . . . what does the research really tell us about what works in dropout prevention, and then how do we contextualize that information so that it can work in our schools— identifying our areas of needs, prioritizing those areas, and deciding upon what our school’s initial focus was, and then drafting your initial action plan. And when we left you, you will recall that, whenever you turned in your plans, we had promised that we’d review those plans and we would provide some feedback for you, and we’d also look at those ways in which we could shore them up. And so the primary purpose of this activity today is to assist you in doing that. We have a quick review on action plans. Action plans—our whole purpose is to shore up as a useful tool to guide schools in implementing their agreed-upon effective practices and support activities. And this becomes extremely important, and particularly for those schools who have changed players since you’ve received training. You may have a new principal, you may have a
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 2 of 8
new superintendent, you may have new members of your team that you need to use your action plan as an articulation tool, so that everyone is on board and on page with the plan. Also, some of us may go away. People need to . . . new people coming in need to be able to pick up that plan and figure out “okay, we know what they were doing here” and then carry forth, and to meet the deadlines. Have a clear and comprehensive action plan that helps us to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of our school dropout efforts. We know where we’re going. And, effective action plans also includes indicators of success, and our SMART goals help to get us there. And Noelle is going to tell us some more about SMART goals later. Also, the school action plan serves as a blueprint to improve outcomes for specified risk factors related to school dropout. All of our action plans will not contain all of the indicators that we were trained on, unless we decided that that’s what we’re going to tackle them all simultaneously as a group. Most of us were . . . we encouraged most of you to look at two or three major priority areas, and then enhance your action plans in those areas and then, as you move forward with implementation, to pull in those other areas when you need to. The action plan also serves as a continuous . . . it’s a work in progress. You’re continuously working it, and updating your action plan at least twice a year, so that you can note your progress and move on to your next steps. A lot of your action plans have some prerequisite activities in there that you get to before you really get to running into all of the activities with boots on the ground to get you where you started, and so you need to begin to look at using that as such as a fluid document. It’s composed of those action steps that address all of those proposed changes. What are we going to do here, and how are we going to get it done? It should be clear enough and complete enough so that it answers the following questions: What actions or changes will occur? And a lot of that begins with our SMART goals. What are we going to do? How much will we . . . how well are we going to do it? What do we consider proficiency, and when will we reach where we want to go within this period? Who is going to carry it out? When will it take place, and for how long? We know that we have to have some time limitations because if we wait forever, we’ve lost a couple of classes. When and how will we evaluate our plan, which is extremely important because data will . . . if it’s not data-driven we can never count, we can never quantify our success. So, we really need to make sure that we are evaluating the effectiveness of what we are doing. What makes a good action plan? It’s clear. It’s reasonable and doable. We begin to think about what, and have discussions with our teams about—okay, how much can we reasonably do that we get big bang for bucks in, or for effort in, within this time period? What’s reasonable? How can we do this? Do we need to start small-scale? Do we need to start with a particular risk group? Do we need to start with a particular risk factor and move forward with that? How complete is it, that it delineates without nickeling and diming; it delineates the action steps and the activities that you’re going to accomplish to reach your designated goal and targets. Are we able to accomplish it? Do we have a quantifiable beginning and end point—which is so important, which is why we went through all the copious activities of analyzing our data, in
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 3 of 8
which you will continue to go through looking at your data, telling what that data tell us, what does it tell us about those risk indicators? For those that are interested in your early warning tools, or if you have a data dashboard that will provide that same information for you, how often do we look at that data? How is that progress quantifiable? We begin with where did we start in our baseline, so that we know how far we’ve come at a critical guide post, and critical markers and thresholds within and throughout the year when we take our data points. So, we have to have quantifiable beginnings and ends, and so somewhere on that action plan we need to begin to talk about where we started from, where we want to go, so that we can quantify the progress that we intend to make. It needs to be accountable. Accountability is vital. That’s exactly why we talk about when and who it is that’s going to be performing these actions, because if we don’t specify it then it belongs to everybody, and we know—grandparents have always told us, if it’s everybody’s task, it becomes nobody’s task, because you look at each other and say, “Oh, I thought you were doing that.” So, we begin to know who is accountable for what. And whenever possible, we need to look at how do these structures that exist in our schools, such as committees and departments, how do we align that work so that it’s not parallel infrastructures going on, and we’re not tripping all over each other, and so that the work is aligned and embedded within our overall school improvement activities and plans. And so, during our review of your initial plans, we found a few common issues that were noted that we need to shore up. Shoring is that general term used in construction to describe the process of supporting a structure in order to prevent collapse so that the construction can proceed. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. In our case, we’re shoring up our action plans so that we’ll help our alliance schools make plans more focused and make them more actionable. And we begin that process with SMART goals. And do we have Noelle back with us yet? NOELLE CASKEY
Yes, we do. Only I am disguised as BethAnn Berliner. LOUJEANIA BOST
I am going to turn it over to Noelle, who’s going to talk to us a bit more about getting smart about SMART goals. NOELLE CASKEY
Hi, everybody. I’m disguised today as BethAnn Berliner, but it is still really me, and I’m going to talk a little bit about getting smart about SMART goals. And we’re going to cover three areas in relation to SMART goals this afternoon. First of all, we’ll talk about what are SMART goals. Then, we’ll talk about why we need SMART goals. And, finally, we’re going to talk about how we create SMART goals. Okay. So here’s just a brief reminder of what we’ve said about the three things we’re going to talk today about SMART goals. And the first question we’re going to answer is, “What are SMART goals?” Some of you, like we do here at REL West, like to play with acronyms. For
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 4 of 8
example, you’ve all heard of AYP. Well, our way of describing that is Always Your Problem. So, we fooled around with the SMART goals and came up with Slippery, Mucky, and Really Tough. But actually, the real SMART goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound. So, that’s the WHAT of SMART goals. Now the “Why?” We have some thoughts here about making the intent of the dropout prevention plan clear to everybody; making sure that our baseline data is available and easy to find; using it to set implementation benchmarks, in other words, ways to know how far we’ve gotten in our process; and, finally, to suggest intervals for progress monitoring. What I’d like to do next is give you all a chance to talk about other reasons to use SMART goals, and we suggested you talk with team members, but if you don’t have a team with you today, it would be great if you would just type your responses into the chat area and then we’ll be able to see them. So, Meg, can we make sure that can happen for folks? MODERATOR
Yes. All they need to do is type into the chat area, be sure that you are sending your message to all participants, and we should be able to see your responses there. NOELLE CASKEY
So, my fake ID, BethAnn Berliner, says please post your thoughts here. We’ll give you a couple of minutes for that. Okay. So, we’re going to move on and start talking about what SMART goals look like. So, I’ve put in front of you an example of a SMART goal: From January 2013 to July 2013, decrease the number of middle school students who are suspended for violence-related behaviors by 25%, from 20 to 15 cases, as measured by school records. Let’s take a deeper look and see what makes this a big mouthful a SMART goal. First of all, it’s specific. So, we are talking about a particular student population—the students who have been suspended for violence-related behaviors. So, this is a specific and identifiable student population. The SMART goal is also measureable, and we know that we’re going to measure it by looking at school records. Well, we’re setting a reasonable goal for ourselves. We’re going to reduce the number from 20 to 15 cases, which is pretty manageable. It would be far harder to accomplish if you said it was from 20 to 0, but five cases is a modest, but likely realistic, goal for reduction in the six-month period, and that’s also where it’s timebound. So we’ve given a six-month period to do this. As we can see, there’s a lot of detail that goes into this, and now I’m going to show you what happens when you don’t have SMART goals. First of all, this is a non-specific goal: improvement of students’ grade point average schoolwide. So this goal—how do you know when you’ve reached it? What is the end product going to look like? Is that going to be each student improving somewhat, or every student trying to get to the same level? You really don’t know where to start with this one.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 5 of 8
The next one is more specific—that everybody is going to attain a 98 percent attendance rate— but you don’t know where you’re starting from. When are we going to start to do this? When are we going to stop and look for results? So, these goals really don’t give you a lot of direction in terms of figuring out the rest of your plan. If you have a plan in front of you, take a few moments to take a look at it, and check it out for SMART or not-SMART goals, and I’ll give you a couple of minutes. I don’t know who’s on the call or what plans they have, but if you have a plan with you and you have an example of a goal, please type it into the chat area. And thank you to Deanna for giving us another reason to use SMART goals, and a very good reason it is, too: keeping us focused and on task with a plan. What we’re going to do after this is practice changing a not-SMART goal into a SMART goal. Okay. Let’s move on to just talking about an example of a not-SMART goal and how we might change it into a SMART goal. So here is a goal: Reduce the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. So, you look at this goal. It really doesn’t tell you a lot about where to start, or . . . okay, I see that Lori Van Houten has posted a goal: increase attendance among seniors from 80% to 90% over the course of the 2013-2014 school year. And that looks pretty good as a fairly SMART goal. So, currently, apparently they have an attendance rate of 80%, but we want to get them to increase it to 90%. We’ve given a time, and we know that we’ll measure that by attendance records. So, thanks to Lori Van Houten. Let’s talk right now about this particular goal that we’re looking at: the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. So you look at this, and there are obviously things that you would want to know. What would you want to know? Some questions to ask, and how to proceed. So, what I’m going to share with you are some sample ideas about how to work with this kind of a goal. First of all, make it specific. Right now we don’t know what the goal writers meant when they talked about at-risk behaviors. It could be anything—it could be failing courses; it could be getting into fights on the playground; it could be substance use. We don’t know what the atrisk behaviors are that they are planning to reduce, and we don’t know which particular students they’re talking about. And, they’re also talking about two different groups, the schoolwide group and the specific identified students. So, this already is a lot of stuff we don’t know, and we also have at-risk—we don’t know how to measure it, because we don’t know what the at-risk behaviors are or how they are documented, and where to look to see if we’re getting . . . making some progress. So here are some thoughts about how we might go about answering this. To make it specific, let’s talk about what we mean by at-risk behaviors. So, in this instance we might randomly choose using drugs and alcohol on campus; failing two or more courses. So, once we’ve defined the at-risk behaviors, we can start talking about the specific identified students, and those would be students who use drug and alcohol, drugs and alcohol, and have failed two or more courses. Then, to answer the question about having different goals for specific identified students and schoolwide, it makes sense to reduce drug and alcohol use for both groups. And you’ll see in a minute how we might develop that.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 6 of 8
Going on to the question of making it measureable: once we’ve again defined the at-risk behaviors, instances of drug and alcohol use on campus tend to be documented as office disciplinary referrals. So when we want to know how much difference we’ve been able to make in reducing those behaviors, that’s where we will look. We will look at the ODR records. Now we need to know how to make our goal attainable and realistic. So, what’s the baseline? How much of a reduction are we looking for? And we saw in that first example—for example, we were going to try to reduce the instances of the problematic behavior from 20 to 15, which is attainable and realistic. So, let’s look at some possible ways of answering those questions. So making it realistic and attainable—remember, we have two groups—the at-risk students, and they’re the ones who are cited for drug or alcohol abuse on campus and are failing two or more courses. So apparently right now, our office disciplinary referrals show that we have 30. And we’d like to get that down to 20; so, reduce it by a third. And we also know from our office disciplinary referrals that the percentage of students schoolwide who’ve been cited for drug or alcohol use on campus is currently at 17%, and we’d like to reduce that to 12%. So we’ve found some way of making it realistic and attainable; now we need to start thinking about the time frame. When were these data collected that we’ve been looking at? When do we want to take a second look? And what’s the outside limit? By when do we really want to have reached our goal? So again looking at some sample answers—let’s say the baseline data is collected in December of this, the current school year. So once we’ve looked at our December data, then we might want to check in in March, just to see what the trends are, and then finally again in June. So we’ve given ourselves, overall, six months to accomplish these goals of reducing the drug and alcohol use, the student at-risk behavior, from 30 students to 20 students; and the percentage of alcohol and drug use on campus from 17% to 12%. So, we’ll put this all together—and it really looks like a mouthful, but we’ve talked about each of the components. So: from December 2013 to June 2014 (and there’s your timebound), the number of at-risk students (and here’s the definition that makes it specific); that is, students that are failing two or more courses and have been cited for drugs or alcohol two or more times—that number of at-risk students will decrease from 30 to 20, and the percentage of all students cited for using drugs or alcohol will decrease from 17% to 12%. So these goals are attainable, realistic, and they will be measured by office disciplinary referrals. So you can see that is just hugely expanded from what we started from. You see it’s still up here at the top: reduce the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. And now all of a sudden, we have a program that goes from December to June of this current school year. We know how many students we’re talking about, what their at-risk behaviors are, and we also have a program for all students that will address schoolwide issues. The key points that my colleague Loujeania and I have covered today are about putting together a clear and comprehensive plan in order to make sure that dropout prevention efforts are successful. And, successful plans are plans that are focused and actionable, and I think Deanna reminded us of that in the chat box. And, SMART goals are critical to developing focused and actionable plans. It looks, to begin with, as though developing SMART goals is a lot of work. It’s much easier to just write reduce at-risk and schoolwide behaviors, or something
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 7 of 8
like the goal that we just revised. But once you have put together a very, very specific goal, the kind we have here, it’s much easier to actually make a plan. So now we know we’re talking about just 10 students, and we know that we’re talking about a schoolwide decrease of 5%. Then, it makes . . . you can just start thinking more clearly about your program, what is going to address the needs of these particular at-risk kids, and what is going to help the school as a whole reduce their alcohol and drug use. At this point I’d like to turn it back to our fearless leader, Susan Loving, from the Utah State Office of Education, and she will go into with you what are the next steps. Thank you. MODERATOR
Before we do that, I am wondering if anyone has any questions or comments? If so, let’s take just a minute and you can type those into the chat area. SUSAN LOVING
Okay, so after all of that, what comes next? First of all, I’d like you to review the goals from your plan and change them into SMART goals if they’re not already written as SMART goals. This might mean that you’re looking at the data collection and saying, “Right, do we have a data collection system to actually have some baseline data to address the goals that we’ve identified.” Set a time to review the material with other team members if they could not participate today. As we said earlier, this will be archived and I will be sending you the information on how you can access that archived webinar. I will be sending it to all the people, even those who did not participate today. If you have any questions, please send them to me. You can see my email address here. You could also call me at the office. And then please submit your revised goals to me. Once you have created them in SMART goal fashion, I would like to have them submitted so that I can help you follow along with that.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 8 of 8
Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans SPEAKERS
Susan Loving, Utah State Office of Education Loujeania Bost, National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities Noelle Caskey, REL West at WestEd
EVENT TITLE
Utah SMART Goals Webinar
EVENT DATE
September 19, 2013
MODERATOR
We have three presenters today. Susan Loving from the Utah State Office of Education, Loujeania Bost from the National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities, and Noelle Caskey from REL West at WestEd. I’m going to turn it over now to Susan. SUSAN LOVING
Okay. Thank you very much, Meg, and welcome all of you out there in the ether. This is always so interesting, to be able to talk to people that I am unable to see. Okay. We have four outcomes from the webinar today. Our outcomes today, once we get into this, are to really reconnect the Dropout Prevention Alliance. You are all part of the alliance, and I’ll be talking about that in just a minute. We want to revisit the action plans and the action plan logistics—these are the plans that you developed during the training; review SMART goals and the goal-setting process; and revise SMART goals as needed with your school team. The goal of the alliance—we talk about the alliance a lot. And the alliance is the state office of education, the Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities, REL West, and you as school people. And the goal of the alliance really is to decrease the dropout rate for students with disabilities and prepare them to successfully transition to postsecondary ed or workforce training. We also know that we’re not only working with students with disabilities; we’re working with all of the students in your schools. And the way we provide that assistance is through webinars such as this, training and assistance—you all know Jeanette Milano, who is available to come help; Noelle Caskey, who will be speaking, and Lori Van Houten are also available to come help. We have complementary roles and skill sets in the alliance, and we have them listed here. USOE, we’re . . . I kind of look at us as also being the on-the-ground people. We’re the ones who are here locally, identifying the needs and really tying it into the state context—what are we all about in Utah with dropout prevention, providing some resources, and then providing direct support to schools statewide.
REL West provides the training and support for the Early Warning System, workshops, customized TA. They’re also available to provide research information or to check on any interventions that you’re beginning to implement, saying “Okay, is this research-based? Does this make sense?” They’re the people to contact about that. The Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities—they’re the pros. They’re our “pros from Dover” kind of thing. They’re providing us with the training and the research on dropout prevention strategies and related topics. They’re the ones that are providing the training, and will be continuing to provide the training and booster sessions as we go along throughout the next . . . this year. This is our last year with the Dropout Prevention Center. We will continue to be working with REL West for another year. Now I’d like to turn it over to Loujeania, who will be helping you look at your action plans. LOUJEANIA BOST
Good afternoon. Well, actually, Susan, you do have us for one more year, from January until December of next year, so we do have a year . . . SUSAN LOVING
All right! LOUJEANIA BOST
I’d like to welcome you all from the east coast here today, where it is now 5:17 pm, and wanted to spend . . . and I’ll take this opportunity to sort of shore up our action plans. Just a quick review to refresh your memory because I know you had summer vacation and school’s started back, and you’ve been inundated with trying to get up and running for the last month. Last year your team worked through a process of analyzing your data, so that you could identify your root causes, learning also about your evidence-based practices in dropout prevention— what works . . . what does the research really tell us about what works in dropout prevention, and then how do we contextualize that information so that it can work in our schools— identifying our areas of needs, prioritizing those areas, and deciding upon what our school’s initial focus was, and then drafting your initial action plan. And when we left you, you will recall that, whenever you turned in your plans, we had promised that we’d review those plans and we would provide some feedback for you, and we’d also look at those ways in which we could shore them up. And so the primary purpose of this activity today is to assist you in doing that. We have a quick review on action plans. Action plans—our whole purpose is to shore up as a useful tool to guide schools in implementing their agreed-upon effective practices and support activities. And this becomes extremely important, and particularly for those schools who have changed players since you’ve received training. You may have a new principal, you may have a
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 2 of 8
new superintendent, you may have new members of your team that you need to use your action plan as an articulation tool, so that everyone is on board and on page with the plan. Also, some of us may go away. People need to . . . new people coming in need to be able to pick up that plan and figure out “okay, we know what they were doing here” and then carry forth, and to meet the deadlines. Have a clear and comprehensive action plan that helps us to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of our school dropout efforts. We know where we’re going. And, effective action plans also includes indicators of success, and our SMART goals help to get us there. And Noelle is going to tell us some more about SMART goals later. Also, the school action plan serves as a blueprint to improve outcomes for specified risk factors related to school dropout. All of our action plans will not contain all of the indicators that we were trained on, unless we decided that that’s what we’re going to tackle them all simultaneously as a group. Most of us were . . . we encouraged most of you to look at two or three major priority areas, and then enhance your action plans in those areas and then, as you move forward with implementation, to pull in those other areas when you need to. The action plan also serves as a continuous . . . it’s a work in progress. You’re continuously working it, and updating your action plan at least twice a year, so that you can note your progress and move on to your next steps. A lot of your action plans have some prerequisite activities in there that you get to before you really get to running into all of the activities with boots on the ground to get you where you started, and so you need to begin to look at using that as such as a fluid document. It’s composed of those action steps that address all of those proposed changes. What are we going to do here, and how are we going to get it done? It should be clear enough and complete enough so that it answers the following questions: What actions or changes will occur? And a lot of that begins with our SMART goals. What are we going to do? How much will we . . . how well are we going to do it? What do we consider proficiency, and when will we reach where we want to go within this period? Who is going to carry it out? When will it take place, and for how long? We know that we have to have some time limitations because if we wait forever, we’ve lost a couple of classes. When and how will we evaluate our plan, which is extremely important because data will . . . if it’s not data-driven we can never count, we can never quantify our success. So, we really need to make sure that we are evaluating the effectiveness of what we are doing. What makes a good action plan? It’s clear. It’s reasonable and doable. We begin to think about what, and have discussions with our teams about—okay, how much can we reasonably do that we get big bang for bucks in, or for effort in, within this time period? What’s reasonable? How can we do this? Do we need to start small-scale? Do we need to start with a particular risk group? Do we need to start with a particular risk factor and move forward with that? How complete is it, that it delineates without nickeling and diming; it delineates the action steps and the activities that you’re going to accomplish to reach your designated goal and targets. Are we able to accomplish it? Do we have a quantifiable beginning and end point—which is so important, which is why we went through all the copious activities of analyzing our data, in
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 3 of 8
which you will continue to go through looking at your data, telling what that data tell us, what does it tell us about those risk indicators? For those that are interested in your early warning tools, or if you have a data dashboard that will provide that same information for you, how often do we look at that data? How is that progress quantifiable? We begin with where did we start in our baseline, so that we know how far we’ve come at a critical guide post, and critical markers and thresholds within and throughout the year when we take our data points. So, we have to have quantifiable beginnings and ends, and so somewhere on that action plan we need to begin to talk about where we started from, where we want to go, so that we can quantify the progress that we intend to make. It needs to be accountable. Accountability is vital. That’s exactly why we talk about when and who it is that’s going to be performing these actions, because if we don’t specify it then it belongs to everybody, and we know—grandparents have always told us, if it’s everybody’s task, it becomes nobody’s task, because you look at each other and say, “Oh, I thought you were doing that.” So, we begin to know who is accountable for what. And whenever possible, we need to look at how do these structures that exist in our schools, such as committees and departments, how do we align that work so that it’s not parallel infrastructures going on, and we’re not tripping all over each other, and so that the work is aligned and embedded within our overall school improvement activities and plans. And so, during our review of your initial plans, we found a few common issues that were noted that we need to shore up. Shoring is that general term used in construction to describe the process of supporting a structure in order to prevent collapse so that the construction can proceed. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. In our case, we’re shoring up our action plans so that we’ll help our alliance schools make plans more focused and make them more actionable. And we begin that process with SMART goals. And do we have Noelle back with us yet? NOELLE CASKEY
Yes, we do. Only I am disguised as BethAnn Berliner. LOUJEANIA BOST
I am going to turn it over to Noelle, who’s going to talk to us a bit more about getting smart about SMART goals. NOELLE CASKEY
Hi, everybody. I’m disguised today as BethAnn Berliner, but it is still really me, and I’m going to talk a little bit about getting smart about SMART goals. And we’re going to cover three areas in relation to SMART goals this afternoon. First of all, we’ll talk about what are SMART goals. Then, we’ll talk about why we need SMART goals. And, finally, we’re going to talk about how we create SMART goals. Okay. So here’s just a brief reminder of what we’ve said about the three things we’re going to talk today about SMART goals. And the first question we’re going to answer is, “What are SMART goals?” Some of you, like we do here at REL West, like to play with acronyms. For
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 4 of 8
example, you’ve all heard of AYP. Well, our way of describing that is Always Your Problem. So, we fooled around with the SMART goals and came up with Slippery, Mucky, and Really Tough. But actually, the real SMART goals stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timebound. So, that’s the WHAT of SMART goals. Now the “Why?” We have some thoughts here about making the intent of the dropout prevention plan clear to everybody; making sure that our baseline data is available and easy to find; using it to set implementation benchmarks, in other words, ways to know how far we’ve gotten in our process; and, finally, to suggest intervals for progress monitoring. What I’d like to do next is give you all a chance to talk about other reasons to use SMART goals, and we suggested you talk with team members, but if you don’t have a team with you today, it would be great if you would just type your responses into the chat area and then we’ll be able to see them. So, Meg, can we make sure that can happen for folks? MODERATOR
Yes. All they need to do is type into the chat area, be sure that you are sending your message to all participants, and we should be able to see your responses there. NOELLE CASKEY
So, my fake ID, BethAnn Berliner, says please post your thoughts here. We’ll give you a couple of minutes for that. Okay. So, we’re going to move on and start talking about what SMART goals look like. So, I’ve put in front of you an example of a SMART goal: From January 2013 to July 2013, decrease the number of middle school students who are suspended for violence-related behaviors by 25%, from 20 to 15 cases, as measured by school records. Let’s take a deeper look and see what makes this a big mouthful a SMART goal. First of all, it’s specific. So, we are talking about a particular student population—the students who have been suspended for violence-related behaviors. So, this is a specific and identifiable student population. The SMART goal is also measureable, and we know that we’re going to measure it by looking at school records. Well, we’re setting a reasonable goal for ourselves. We’re going to reduce the number from 20 to 15 cases, which is pretty manageable. It would be far harder to accomplish if you said it was from 20 to 0, but five cases is a modest, but likely realistic, goal for reduction in the six-month period, and that’s also where it’s timebound. So we’ve given a six-month period to do this. As we can see, there’s a lot of detail that goes into this, and now I’m going to show you what happens when you don’t have SMART goals. First of all, this is a non-specific goal: improvement of students’ grade point average schoolwide. So this goal—how do you know when you’ve reached it? What is the end product going to look like? Is that going to be each student improving somewhat, or every student trying to get to the same level? You really don’t know where to start with this one.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 5 of 8
The next one is more specific—that everybody is going to attain a 98 percent attendance rate— but you don’t know where you’re starting from. When are we going to start to do this? When are we going to stop and look for results? So, these goals really don’t give you a lot of direction in terms of figuring out the rest of your plan. If you have a plan in front of you, take a few moments to take a look at it, and check it out for SMART or not-SMART goals, and I’ll give you a couple of minutes. I don’t know who’s on the call or what plans they have, but if you have a plan with you and you have an example of a goal, please type it into the chat area. And thank you to Deanna for giving us another reason to use SMART goals, and a very good reason it is, too: keeping us focused and on task with a plan. What we’re going to do after this is practice changing a not-SMART goal into a SMART goal. Okay. Let’s move on to just talking about an example of a not-SMART goal and how we might change it into a SMART goal. So here is a goal: Reduce the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. So, you look at this goal. It really doesn’t tell you a lot about where to start, or . . . okay, I see that Lori Van Houten has posted a goal: increase attendance among seniors from 80% to 90% over the course of the 2013-2014 school year. And that looks pretty good as a fairly SMART goal. So, currently, apparently they have an attendance rate of 80%, but we want to get them to increase it to 90%. We’ve given a time, and we know that we’ll measure that by attendance records. So, thanks to Lori Van Houten. Let’s talk right now about this particular goal that we’re looking at: the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. So you look at this, and there are obviously things that you would want to know. What would you want to know? Some questions to ask, and how to proceed. So, what I’m going to share with you are some sample ideas about how to work with this kind of a goal. First of all, make it specific. Right now we don’t know what the goal writers meant when they talked about at-risk behaviors. It could be anything—it could be failing courses; it could be getting into fights on the playground; it could be substance use. We don’t know what the atrisk behaviors are that they are planning to reduce, and we don’t know which particular students they’re talking about. And, they’re also talking about two different groups, the schoolwide group and the specific identified students. So, this already is a lot of stuff we don’t know, and we also have at-risk—we don’t know how to measure it, because we don’t know what the at-risk behaviors are or how they are documented, and where to look to see if we’re getting . . . making some progress. So here are some thoughts about how we might go about answering this. To make it specific, let’s talk about what we mean by at-risk behaviors. So, in this instance we might randomly choose using drugs and alcohol on campus; failing two or more courses. So, once we’ve defined the at-risk behaviors, we can start talking about the specific identified students, and those would be students who use drug and alcohol, drugs and alcohol, and have failed two or more courses. Then, to answer the question about having different goals for specific identified students and schoolwide, it makes sense to reduce drug and alcohol use for both groups. And you’ll see in a minute how we might develop that.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 6 of 8
Going on to the question of making it measureable: once we’ve again defined the at-risk behaviors, instances of drug and alcohol use on campus tend to be documented as office disciplinary referrals. So when we want to know how much difference we’ve been able to make in reducing those behaviors, that’s where we will look. We will look at the ODR records. Now we need to know how to make our goal attainable and realistic. So, what’s the baseline? How much of a reduction are we looking for? And we saw in that first example—for example, we were going to try to reduce the instances of the problematic behavior from 20 to 15, which is attainable and realistic. So, let’s look at some possible ways of answering those questions. So making it realistic and attainable—remember, we have two groups—the at-risk students, and they’re the ones who are cited for drug or alcohol abuse on campus and are failing two or more courses. So apparently right now, our office disciplinary referrals show that we have 30. And we’d like to get that down to 20; so, reduce it by a third. And we also know from our office disciplinary referrals that the percentage of students schoolwide who’ve been cited for drug or alcohol use on campus is currently at 17%, and we’d like to reduce that to 12%. So we’ve found some way of making it realistic and attainable; now we need to start thinking about the time frame. When were these data collected that we’ve been looking at? When do we want to take a second look? And what’s the outside limit? By when do we really want to have reached our goal? So again looking at some sample answers—let’s say the baseline data is collected in December of this, the current school year. So once we’ve looked at our December data, then we might want to check in in March, just to see what the trends are, and then finally again in June. So we’ve given ourselves, overall, six months to accomplish these goals of reducing the drug and alcohol use, the student at-risk behavior, from 30 students to 20 students; and the percentage of alcohol and drug use on campus from 17% to 12%. So, we’ll put this all together—and it really looks like a mouthful, but we’ve talked about each of the components. So: from December 2013 to June 2014 (and there’s your timebound), the number of at-risk students (and here’s the definition that makes it specific); that is, students that are failing two or more courses and have been cited for drugs or alcohol two or more times—that number of at-risk students will decrease from 30 to 20, and the percentage of all students cited for using drugs or alcohol will decrease from 17% to 12%. So these goals are attainable, realistic, and they will be measured by office disciplinary referrals. So you can see that is just hugely expanded from what we started from. You see it’s still up here at the top: reduce the number of at-risk behaviors schoolwide and with specific identified students. And now all of a sudden, we have a program that goes from December to June of this current school year. We know how many students we’re talking about, what their at-risk behaviors are, and we also have a program for all students that will address schoolwide issues. The key points that my colleague Loujeania and I have covered today are about putting together a clear and comprehensive plan in order to make sure that dropout prevention efforts are successful. And, successful plans are plans that are focused and actionable, and I think Deanna reminded us of that in the chat box. And, SMART goals are critical to developing focused and actionable plans. It looks, to begin with, as though developing SMART goals is a lot of work. It’s much easier to just write reduce at-risk and schoolwide behaviors, or something
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 7 of 8
like the goal that we just revised. But once you have put together a very, very specific goal, the kind we have here, it’s much easier to actually make a plan. So now we know we’re talking about just 10 students, and we know that we’re talking about a schoolwide decrease of 5%. Then, it makes . . . you can just start thinking more clearly about your program, what is going to address the needs of these particular at-risk kids, and what is going to help the school as a whole reduce their alcohol and drug use. At this point I’d like to turn it back to our fearless leader, Susan Loving, from the Utah State Office of Education, and she will go into with you what are the next steps. Thank you. MODERATOR
Before we do that, I am wondering if anyone has any questions or comments? If so, let’s take just a minute and you can type those into the chat area. SUSAN LOVING
Okay, so after all of that, what comes next? First of all, I’d like you to review the goals from your plan and change them into SMART goals if they’re not already written as SMART goals. This might mean that you’re looking at the data collection and saying, “Right, do we have a data collection system to actually have some baseline data to address the goals that we’ve identified.” Set a time to review the material with other team members if they could not participate today. As we said earlier, this will be archived and I will be sending you the information on how you can access that archived webinar. I will be sending it to all the people, even those who did not participate today. If you have any questions, please send them to me. You can see my email address here. You could also call me at the office. And then please submit your revised goals to me. Once you have created them in SMART goal fashion, I would like to have them submitted so that I can help you follow along with that.
TRANSCRIPT: Using SMART Goals to Improve Dropout Prevention Plans
Page 8 of 8
