How can becoming an accredited education provider impact your workforce development initiatives? Join us as we chat with Caroline, our curriculum expert and IACET liaison, to uncover the secrets behind the accreditation process and the essential role of privacy policies in protecting student data. You won't want to miss her insights on the international side of accreditation and the crucial relationship between students, managers, and education providers in ensuring employees excel in their courses.
As we explore the latest breakthroughs in online learning technology, Caroline shares how we've adapted our workforce development classes to meet the evolving needs of our students. Discover the game-changing effects of high-definition cameras, voice recognition, and closed captioning in over 130 languages, and learn why it's more important than ever to stay ahead of the educational curve in our rapidly changing world.
Lastly, we delve into the fascinating world of dual streams of learning, where we discuss the varying requirements for academic credits across different states and emphasize the importance of academic integrity in online learning. Caroline walks us through the accreditation process, the evaluations that take place, and the assessments and surveys included in our classes, offering invaluable insights on performance reviews, the California Department of Education's credentialing program, and the overall impact of accreditation on workforce development.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
How can becoming an accredited education provider impact your workforce development initiatives? Join us as we chat with Caroline, our curriculum expert and IACET liaison, to uncover the secrets behind the accreditation process and the essential role of privacy policies in protecting student data. You won't want to miss her insights on the international side of accreditation and the crucial relationship between students, managers, and education providers in ensuring employees excel in their courses.
As we explore the latest breakthroughs in online learning technology, Caroline shares how we've adapted our workforce development classes to meet the evolving needs of our students. Discover the game-changing effects of high-definition cameras, voice recognition, and closed captioning in over 130 languages, and learn why it's more important than ever to stay ahead of the educational curve in our rapidly changing world.
Lastly, we delve into the fascinating world of dual streams of learning, where we discuss the varying requirements for academic credits across different states and emphasize the importance of academic integrity in online learning. Caroline walks us through the accreditation process, the evaluations that take place, and the assessments and surveys included in our classes, offering invaluable insights on performance reviews, the California Department of Education's credentialing program, and the overall impact of accreditation on workforce development.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Aloha and welcome to another candid conversation. Today we're joined by Caroline, who looks after our curriculum happens also to be my daughter, which is wonderful. Good to see you, Caroline.
Speaker 2:Hi dad.
Speaker 1:And we're posting a blog today called Our Art of the Possible. It's one of our classes and it kind of goes backwards on where we've been and how we got here in all of the different steps. And Caroline does all of our curriculum work. She's the communications voice and face for ISCET and keeps us on track, keeps me on track as to what the content has to look like. So good morning, young lady. Good to see you.
Speaker 2:Good morning. I also try to keep myself on track as much as possible.
Speaker 1:So why don't you go backwards and let's just talk about the ISCET piece, if you can? What did we have to do to become an approved provider?
Speaker 2:So ISCET does an overview and evaluation of learning materials that any provider wishing to become accredited uses in their classes. So, looking at our class objectives, the goals for students in public education, k-12, we call that the students will be able to And we turn it into an acronym, so it's SWBAT just to make it confusing. But they look at our objectives, they look at our materials, they look at our file storage, our privacy, our security for student data. They look at what the materials are, how much time the materials take, what opportunities students have for receiving information in different media if they need it. Opportunity.
Speaker 2:Students have to learn from any errors they make in assessments, weighing and measuring each step of the class. And if you are an approved accredited organization, you have compliance that you have to maintain, being. Obviously, you can adapt your classes, change your classes. We have extended hours so ours are longer, but we cannot deviate from that minimum acceptable criteria ISCET has provided to us. Iscet then reviews our policies procedures every single year, with every fifth year being a deep dive into how the course materials have changed, how our delivery systems have changed, how our communications with students have changed, and then they reevaluate to be sure we are still at the appropriate level to be an accredited provider of education And if we're not, they give us the oh, here's where you fell short.
Speaker 2:And if we are, they go ahead and recertify us for five full years. All accredited institutions in the United States go through a process similar to this, whether it's Wafke accreditation, western Association of Schools and Colleges, which is one of the more common ones, ic for K-12 and also junior college. There are a few different ones for parochial schools that can be used at times, and I believe there's something entirely different for charter schools. That is optional as well, but an accreditation program makes sure that the curriculum, the content, meets the needs of a student to learn what they are supposed to be learning from the class.
Speaker 1:So how does the international side come into play? ISCET is a US government agency, correct?
Speaker 2:ISCET is an international association.
Speaker 1:Okay. So when I say that we're an approved provider internationally, does that mean that our classes are approved in France or in Japan?
Speaker 2:Yes, it means we have accreditation that would allow for us to go into continuing education in other countries. So the United States doesn't have trying to think of. We have a federal department of education but we do not have a federal system of education. In other words, content, curriculum and objectives in California are entirely different from content, curriculum and objectives in Arizona, kentucky, you name it. Every state here can basically, like European countries, determine what material is necessary for a student to learn. When we take other countries into it, most of them have a federal standard of education. Students should be coming through classes at this level with this knowledge. So when we go with international accreditation, we're bridging the gap between the two so that we have something that would be in line with the American standards that we should meet, but also balance the fact that those standards are a little bit more rigorous. In for not rigorous, i'm looking rigid in foreign countries.
Speaker 1:So let me use that as an example and go to the privacy issue. Isf has concern about the privacy of the student data information correct.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Canada has a law piped, a PIPEDA, that requires a content provider to a school to have their data storage on a platform in Canada. How does ISET deal with that one? Any idea?
Speaker 2:ISET doesn't actually deal with how the data is stored according to foreign countries regulatory policies. What they do require is, on our side, student files have to be kept and maintained for a certain period of time Although, with the way we do things, we keep them for a lifetime Because just because a student completed a basic inventory control class in 2018, that doesn't mean there's not something new they might need in an assessment. They'll want to come in. If I have their data stored and saved, i can reactivate their learner profile very easily, but the privacy aspect of it is, in the case of professional development. Oftentimes managers, supervisors, ceos, are choosing the pathways that their employees are following And in the case of those managers buying the class for the employee, the manager does have a pathway to access to make sure the employee completed the class.
Speaker 2:Did they succeed in the class? Is there something else they might need? And the communication is different between the manager, the employee and us as the education provider. In that circumstance, a student can also come directly and enroll and their manager can call and say hey, bob Smith told us he's enrolled in this class. Can we see how he's doing? Well, if the student enrolled himself directly, he has to be the one to ask. He has to be the one to say hey, do you mind printing this out in a different way, other than my learner dashboard, so I can show my manager?
Speaker 1:Okay, so that takes us to when somebody enrolls in a product from Learning Without Scars online And we go through the enrollment process today, english, french and Spanish And we go to the shopping cart. We are able to have a team leader show for every enrollment, correct?
Speaker 2:Yes, we are.
Speaker 1:Where does that happen And how does that happen?
Speaker 2:So on the learning management software side, the team leader, the person who's chosen to be assigned, gets a different status than learner. There is a team leader assignment.
Speaker 1:Who specifies that The enrollee or the company or both?
Speaker 2:It can be both. So if a company has enrolled several students, they can say our team leader for this group say it's the warehouse guys and they have a supervisor in the warehouse, our team leader is going to be their supervisor, here's his name. So then it would be a manual entry on my part to say here's the supervisor, he's the team leader, and that gives him a portal so he has access to their activity. At the same time, all 10 of those warehouse guys could enroll independently, say they're getting reimbursed later for the class, and they could tell me oh hi, my supervisor so-and-so, wanted all of us to take this. Can you set him up to see what I'm doing? And I can do it that way.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's a manual step on our part, correct?
Speaker 1:It is at this point, yes, but keep in mind, lms is always updating and improving their approaches, so we're working with a company called Zintoro to create a learning portal for Learning Without Scars, and that portal can be used in a similar manner which doesn't require any manual intervention on our part. Example dealer A. we can have that portal be available to the following managers and they can have their own password. The company has to tell us and that gets put into the portal at the same time. It's a little easier that way, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is a little easier that way. In terms of privacy, both work. But that key component of nothing is done without the student's knowledge.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And approval agreement to it. Even when they are registered and enrolled from a supervisor's decision or manager's decision, there is still that consent that has to come through with it.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's go back to the beginning And you remember the days and we talked about this the other day actually where you have pictures of your daughter making binders of books And you remember doing binders of books when you were a little girl. We started I think it was 1992 where I started talking to the computer, when everybody walked away from management training in the industry, the manufacturers, the associations, everybody because it was too expensive. And that was the beginning of when employee development, in my view, became a discretionary expense, which in my mind is absolute lunacy. And I sat talking to a computer with really rudimentary software voice recognition and I would talk for an hour and then go away because the computer was busy for the next two hours translating it.
Speaker 1:And we built three books, one for parts, one for service, one for selling and marketing, and we had dealers come in and we proofed the classes with them. they were consultant clients of mine in those days and they were gracious enough to come in at their expense and listen to us and help us put the classes together. And that took us to what we had was a two day format, 15 hours, four, four hour blocks of learning, tying it to selling, operations, finance and leadership, and in each four hour block we did two subject specific classes which we built, and then we morphed it into three years progress what it looks like when it's right. first, performance excellence. second, reaching market potential. third, so that we had three two day eight hour programs, 24 classes.
Speaker 1:Then in the early 2000s everybody wanted to go to webinars. So we built a bunch of webinars 45 to 60 minutes and I hated those damn things. but it was a slide, text on the slide and then me talking To the internet couldn't see anybody. and we morph that into a situation where I used to have high definition camera and a projector and we broke it up and I'd walk in front of the camera and talk to people for a while. That was a bit of a better deal.
Speaker 2:And, if I may interject there, i had a favorite part of that because I was helping proctor those webinars When you and mom would be in Hawaii in the Ilekei. The screen that you stood in front of took up an entire space in your apartment there, because the first apartment was right on the beach, right where all the tourists wanted to be, and mom would have to army crawl to get around in the apartment when you were doing your webinars. So I'd be proctoring and she'd send me a text message just to tell me she's trying to move about the country.
Speaker 1:What was also funny in those days, i started wearing Hawaiian shirts and that seemed to be one of the drawing cards that go I wonder what shirt the guy's wearing today, or this, this, this month. And we did that for three or four years. But it became clear that the front of class because I was doing it internationally Europe, asia, south America, middle East, everywhere And that got old real quick. So I started looking at how do we put it up on the internet. One of the things that I'd like to say or like to think Is we've always been kind of looking at technology and trying to be on the leading edge.
Speaker 1:I was on the internet in 1972 when, when the data speeds were 30 characters, a second 30 bot which are ridiculous And with the voice recognition via voice. It was a pretty rudimentary thing, but it worked. Today, dragon is what I use and it's pretty darn accurate. Everybody's got some kind of voice recognition, including your phone, but we keep doing that. We keep using software. Our closed captioning is a software business called Veeds and we can do that in 130 language. Or our Word document audio tracks, we use a package called SpeechAlow and that can be done in 130 different languages. We have film clips that I'd like to be able to do with an avatar and emulate our voice and our faces Anybody who puts on a class.
Speaker 1:So I'd like to think that we're showing the way with technology as well, and also that we keep ahead of the educational world That you know. As an example, you've segmented all of our classes now to be, you know, eight to 15 minute segments, and we have little quizzes at the end of every segment so that it becomes chunked learning, which has been found to improve learning and retention by as much as 50%, makes sense. But all the way along the line we've been doing this, trying to create a current product That's easy for people to follow. And our latest example is all of our workforce development classes are five or six hours long. People found that long. They're working all day long And they've asked that we try and find a way to make it easier for them. And you came up with the idea We're going to set chapters and we'll have breaks about every hour in the reading list and the video program, et cetera, so that all the way down the line, our internet based learning is really seemingly where the education world is going to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are. Historically, we're the early adopters. So when applying for accreditation, one of the questions they asked in the learning about the business oh so did you find a way to get everything online because of the pandemic? No, We were online well before the pandemic, which left public education in the US scrambling to figure out how do we make everything online accessible for students.
Speaker 2:So we have not only stayed ahead of the curve, but also and I'm very proud of this part we're very responsive to students, like those students who are saying well, it's a five, six hour chunk, a block.
Speaker 2:So for me, for the way my mind works, I can feel when I'm getting fried, make a note of where I am and walk away. But that's not necessarily intuitive. Many students feel that if they have material in front of them, they must get through all the material in one fell swoop, as if it's a single hour long class, when a five, six hour online course is entirely different. So, responding to that need, yes, we are modifying and adding chapter breaks so that if a student needs a break, here's a good point in time for you to walk away from your computer, Do something else, And if they hit that point and they go. You know, I still feel pretty fresh right now. They can keep going and there will be another approximately one hour later. But making sure that our classes don't just meet the needs in terms of information and skills and goals, but the needs students have to learn comfortably and enjoyably. It's part of the reason we're learning without scars.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's. I'm pretty pleased with that too, caroline And the the adult education. We have two streams of learning. You may mention to the fact that the United States does not have a universal education approach, like many different countries to. The states control that. So each state has a different set of rules for academic credits which would have to be in compliance with, because we're establishing centers of excellence with Steve Johnson across the country. In Canada we're do the same thing for Europe later on. But the workforce development classes consist of five or six hours and I'm going to just briefly talk about the content. It's roughly two hours of reading lists with quizzes. It's roughly two and a half hours of video clips with segments with quizzes, and then it's pre tests and final assessments and surveys for another half an hour to an hour, so that each of the classes is a minimum of five hours. I said I believe allows one academic credit for one C E U and one C E U requires 10 hours of education. Am I saying that properly?
Speaker 2:I believe, so.
Speaker 1:So when they were, when we get the accreditation, when we become the approved provider, once every five years, every year, they come in and evaluate us again. they do a checkpoint Correct.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:At that point, what do they do? do they test drive some of our classes? How do they approach it?
Speaker 2:They always ask me to give them a couple of sample classes that I would like to walk them through. And we do zoom meetings, i do write ups. We have an almost 200 page living document that's our accreditation package where each segment, each content item in a class is presented to them, explain to them and writing the process, the reasoning, everything is presented to them and then they determine okay, yes, so this is when we first became accredited. Our courses were shorter, so we would be looking at moving up to about half of a C E, u for one workforce development class. So they would assess two of the classes to make sure that it's on board with what I'm explaining to them And what's in our document.
Speaker 1:And today we have 100 native those classes.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:We also do. They look at our assessments as well.
Speaker 2:They do look at our assessment methods especially and this was one of the things I overlooked, because I teach middle school during the daytime, during the school year They prefer that adult learners have a Here's where something was incorrect on a multiple choice, so that they can go back not only to review the class but that they can say Oh, i misunderstood this part or I just plain out forgot. For me, with multiple choice in the public education classroom, it's not so much for the students to know what they missed, it's for me to look for the patterns in what they missed. I did that with our classes too. If students were all missing question number three on this one assessment, i did something wrong in the creation of question number three because nobody can get it. But the factor where the students want to see what they got wrong, know where they went wrong with it. That was a new detail for me.
Speaker 1:Now do we show that to the student?
Speaker 2:Students do see their results on their quizzes, their assessments, if they count for credit, and it shows them any questions they were marked incorrect and what the correct answer should have been.
Speaker 1:Okay, so if they take the assessment more than once, for instance, we allow them to take the assessment twice, the final assessment, correct?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So they know what the correct answer is on the questions that they got wrong. Correct? Yes. However, with our learning management software, the order of the answers changes. The order of the questions change each time they do an assessment. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yes. So it's not just a matter of look at question three. It should have been C instead of A. They have to actually look at what the question has asked them for. Read it. Look at what the answer is. Read it because it won't just be in the same order every time, and part of that was in response to a lot of college needs. When students take online tests, they're often in a lab setting where they're sitting one right next to each other, like your elbows could bump. So when I take my assessment on my computer, my information that I'm being asked about needs to be in a different order than, as I said Bob Smith earlier, bob Smith's assessment on the same topic. Next to me. We're answering all the same questions just in a different order so that there's the academic integrity component, which a lot of people were afraid of with online learning.
Speaker 1:One of the things that's interesting in different states across the country State of Florida, as an example requires that there be a proctor somebody present when the final exam is conducted. The final assessment is conducted. We have found software businesses, different learning institutions that do this differently and you can pay for a proctor. But part of that is interesting because cell phones, watches, those types of things have to be left out of the classroom anymore. Because of Google, you can find out on your phone or on your watch even what the answer to that question is. It's quite interesting. So we have a time limit on our final assessment. Is that true that they have only one hour to do it?
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:What happens if they run out of time?
Speaker 2:They have to retake the test, so that goes down as one of their two opportunities. they had to take the test.
Speaker 1:So do they have to complete all 96 multiple choice questions to have a gradable final assessment.
Speaker 2:For the CSAs yes, It will give them a grade on what they completed, but everything they skipped would be marked incorrect.
Speaker 1:So if somebody did of the 96, if they got 100 percent right on 80 percent of the questions and didn't do the final 20, they still passed correct.
Speaker 2:I believe for the comprehensive skills assessment that counts because with those it's a little different from the traditional class final test. For one, the final test in the class is shorter, right It's 20 questions.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But with the comprehensive skills assessment you don't get locked out of it in terms of oh, you didn't pass twice. Instead, you have that point that we look at the 76 percent. If you're scoring above the 76 percent, the professional development you need in your particular job function is going to be maintenance and new details. If you score below that 76 percent, you might need a little bit more onboarding. Why do we do this the way we do this? in your job function, you might need the big picture. So the comprehensive skills assessment. It wouldn't be an accurate result for their knowledge if they didn't finish the whole thing, but they wouldn't be frozen in time, unable to move forward, if they didn't finish the whole thing.
Speaker 1:I got you. So that opens up the other discussion. We have technical schools that are putting our classes up as general education credits And in those cases we have to comply with not the ISF 10 hours for one CEU, but what the state indicates is face-to-face time and homework time. So we've redrawn, based on requests from schools, 14 of our classes for service and 14 of our classes for parts to each be six and a half hours of face-to-face and 13 hours of homework so that we can meet the 13 hours of face-to-face and 26 hours of homework for one academic credit at the state level. So we have two tracks right One's workforce development, which is ISF, CEU based, and the other technical school academic credit, which is state compliance available, correct.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So that's a pretty complicated world, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It gets complicated on the creation and compliance side as the curriculum designer, making sure each class, workforce development, all follow their similar format, their similar structure And the centers of excellence follow really the state guidelines for the number of hours that have to be spent. And I don't think, in my opinion, we were prepared for the fact that the technical colleges were going to have different requirements for course hours. I think what we didn't anticipate was how much more time they required for a continuing education unit compared to the accreditation providers.
Speaker 1:What's interesting to me is the in dealing with the different states and talking to different schools and saying, okay, fine, you know 13 hours, face-to-face, 26 hours of homework. how do you know they've done the homework? And they said, well, technically we don't. And they said, well, all of our reading lists that comprise two hours of our class have a quiz, three-question quiz. They've got to get 60% on that before they can go to the next segment. All of our homework, which is for the academic credit side, has a quiz as well. So every piece of our class has a determination, whether the student learned or not. One of the schools actually said to me you're shaming us because we can't do that. We don't do that whereas we do. I think that's important.
Speaker 1:The example that I'd like to quote is Eric Lauder at MIT. He teaches a class called The Secret of Life. He's a brilliant guy with PhDs. He was the US government's head of the genome study, where they broke down the DNA, But he also is an unbelievably good teacher. That's what got my attention, because I believe the internet is allowing for the democratization of learning. You no longer have to have $50,000 to $100,000 to attend a university on an annual basis. You can go to your corner library.
Speaker 2:It is the beginning of allowing for the democratization. As we know, i have taught in a community that had neither grocery stores, doctors' offices nor libraries. Infrastructure had not brought internet to that community. Yet When we went to pandemic learning for public education, those students were left behind. It wasn't for lack of effort on our part, the teacher's part, it was for the fact that I was teaching a community that, basically, was completely ignored. The roads were terrible, the pipes, the infrastructure, the water delivery systems all awful, along with the air quality. Those students, it wouldn't matter how much free content was available online, they cannot get online. We have the beginning of the democratization, but not the final.
Speaker 1:That's a point really well made where I was trying to go with Eric Lauder as the example. If you want to get a degree from MIT, you've got to take that class. You've got to be into his classroom. However, he has two or three cameras in his classroom. He has millions of people that are taking this class for free online.
Speaker 1:I believe that's what the future of education looks like. We've got a lot of infrastructure to come up to, but students through the pandemic have been really seriously penalized by not going to school. It looks at socioeconomic patterns. If you were well off and you had access to the internet at home, you didn't really lose a lot. But the statistics are coming in now as to what the learning was like at 2022. It's the lowest math and the lowest reading that we've had in 20 years. So there's consequences to how we have dealt with education over the years. But I believe that's important for us, like you say, to make sure that we're not presenting the material incorrectly. That's leading to the wrong answers, that we're not creating the question. That's leading to the wrong answers that we're truly trying to have.
Speaker 1:When they finish with a class and they walk away, they have new knowledge that they didn't have before they started. Everybody that I have on Zoom calls and I've been doing this a lot for the last month after they've taken a class we have a chat about it. We talk about the key learning outcomes that are part of IASET. Example teleselling are three C's using the telephone as a customer service tool, overcoming objections, asking questions, buyers' needs those are the five key learning pieces. When talking with the students about those things, they all learned something, they benefited from it, they were happy about that, but they all said the same thing. Damn, there's a lot here That leads to the fact that learning is hard. It's not easy. We're asking this later generations to get into and bark on a lifelong learning journey. It doesn't stop when you leave school, it just starts there. That's alien to a lot of people's thinking.
Speaker 2:For some students, because I've had the privilege now to see students graduate high school and go off into the world. Usually it's the oddest moment. You're in a grocery store and someone's towering over you going, hey are you? Oh, my gosh. Well, last time I saw you you were eight years old.
Speaker 2:For a lot of students I'm noticing that the time they're spending before they graduate high school is not about learning. It's about other things and for them the learning seems to begin after they graduate high school. I'm wondering if that's just like we talk about learner profiles. If you're visual, if you're auditory, if you're kinesthetic, if you really need to get hands on. I wonder if, for some students, the independence of choosing that path. They go into a job. They say wait a minute, i'm here in this job and I want to be over there in that position. How do I get from where I am to there? That seems to be a bigger motivator for a lot of students than no, seriously, you're here to learn with me Because I'm in a middle school classroom.
Speaker 2:I often joke that my students are learning, sometimes against their will, but they're learning, and with our classes, as much information as it is. Those questions we ask their final assessments. Those are checks for understanding. It's not supposed to be a gotcha. We're not supposed to be asking trick questions. We're supposed to be giving the student a chance to demonstrate if they've learned what they were intended to learn, and they can measure their success as well. We try not to throw any trick questions in there.
Speaker 1:Your comment of seeing somebody in a grocery store that you taught brings me back to my grandmother, who got a master's in 1915, taught in a one-room schoolhouse for years. I'll never forget her 80th birthday. We were all there. It was a celebration, but there was half a dozen of her students who hadn't been with her for 60 years. They still showed up. I'm looking at this and I was younger there. Granny was born in 1890, so I'm 56 years younger. That struck me. That really struck me. So a lot of times I ask people can tell me who your grade three teacher was. And everybody pretty much can tell me. Then I say, okay, who was the Prime Minister of Canada when you were in grade five? Nobody can remember Where's the important person. It's the teacher, the other thing that it takes to.
Speaker 1:And this bothers me end of year performance reviews. About two months ago, when America started going through the interest rate increase, trying to kill inflation etc. I remember a front page article in the Wall Street Journal that said companies are going back to annual performance reviews to determine which people they're going to let go. To me, a performance review is helping the employee learn what they need to do to get better, not to get rid of them. We've got an upside down story here. Like to your point, it's not a gotcha. We truly are concerned that you learn something That's important to me.
Speaker 2:Obviously, i'm in California and I know a lot of people like to say California has no culture but for yogurt. However, we have one of the toughest teacher credentialing programs Pretty much anywhere My teaching credential. I can go to other countries and take a sit-down test and then I am a licensed teacher there. With that we have some interesting wording. We don't have a gotcha end of year review. Everything we do is a plan. At the beginning of the year you sit down and you say, okay, so we know these are the standards for educators in California. What do you think you do really well in that standard? What do you want to improve in that standard? Then you get observed with that list in front of your administrator. Then, before the cutoff at the end of the year, you do it all over again. you say here's where I think I've improved, here's where I'd like some extra help and is this better? Then they come in and they go yes, i saw this. and they pretty much script your entire hour-long class section.
Speaker 1:So stop there for a second. What you're saying is teachers in California, no matter how many years they've been teaching, have an intervention with somebody in the classroom who evaluates their performance and ties it back to goals that the teacher and the administrator develop. Is that true?
Speaker 2:The California Department of Education sets the standards, the teacher sets their own goals and the administrator will suggest some, if they can think of some. As a teacher becomes more seasoned in California, they can skip a year or two of those observations at a time, but every teacher in California gets observed very frequently. All bets are off when a new administrator comes on board too, because they're going to observe everybody, even if you've been there 10 years, because they don't know you. They need to see. the best place for an administrator leader to be is in the classroom or on the shop floor checking in with their people.
Speaker 1:So for us ISF is our administrator that once a year they review us our performance. Do they go over what our learning outcomes are as well? Do you have a discussion with them every year?
Speaker 2:Every year no. Every fifth year yes.
Speaker 1:So every fifth year it's a very intense. How long does that evaluation period take? Is it hours or is it days?
Speaker 2:We would have a final Zoom meeting. That is hours Like. I will get a substitute teacher that day and I will be on the Zoom call for four hours, five hours, but prior to that it is the. Here are all the changes I've made to our accreditation packet. That's a living document. Every time we make a change, a shift, whether it's by student request or a state saying we need these other things, or our own idea Nobody knows that they've done the homework. How can we put a check in there to see if they're understanding what they're reading? All of that goes into that living document all along, so that gets resubmitted to them.
Speaker 1:Right. With ISET, if I remember right, we can look to see if a company, a school, an association, an entity has ever been approved by them. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:So when I go through and look at ISET to see if manufacturers, caterpillar, john Deere associations, the AED, the NTDA if they've ever been I can find out yes or no, correct.
Speaker 2:Yes, you should be able to find that out. And also when we received our accreditation, they were really thrilled. We were the first in our industry.
Speaker 1:That's where I'm going. I've checked with the manufacturers. None of them have been there before. None of the associations we work with have been there before. We're the first ones. Hopefully there'll be more, but this is a bit of a bone crusher in the amount of work that is required to become approved, isn't it?
Speaker 2:It is. It's also a learning curve And I definitely made use of the fact that I had other teachers on accreditation projects who were willing to talk to me about what they experienced. And it's an uphill journey getting accreditation for the first time. It is a little less as you reaccredit, because you already know the plan, the language And in public education we love our flow charts. However, accreditation does not love flow charts, so that's a learning curve too.
Speaker 1:So what do you see coming that we haven't looked after? We've got all these classes. People give us suggestions as to what they'd like us to add. They critique us on what they don't like or what they were surprised with. What would you like to see us do that you and I haven't talked about yet? If you had a magic wand, what would you do with learning without scars from this point forward?
Speaker 2:I would like to borrow a page from the State of Idaho's plan And I would like to see these courses available with a statewide grant to high school students everywhere.
Speaker 1:So let's talk to that for a second. The State of Idaho offers a $7,500 scholarship to any high school student who wants to take advanced placement or college prep or college classes when they're in high school, and the vice president of workforce development for College of Western Idaho, which is one of our centers of excellence, is excited about embedding that in the high school. So let me just put another little elevator on that. I think there's 400,000 high school students in the State of Idaho And I was just looking at a study across the United States that there's 10 states that have 30% or more of their students in high school at a 3.0 or higher grade. In talking with the workforce development boss in Idaho, she's wanting to embed at least 30% of the high school students that have 3.0 and higher in this program.
Speaker 1:And if you think about the continuum of a career, i don't know how a 17 year old or an 18 year old can determine what they want to do for the rest of their life. There's just too much out there. There's too many choices anymore. But if we start them in high school and give them the opportunity to learn at their pace and in those cases where Elon Musk has hired somebody who's 14 years old the first scientist in his company that is that age who's graduated from university. You know, there are some really, really special people out there intellectually Stephen Hawking is the one that comes to mind, but there's many And what Christie's trying to do is attract the child, the student in high school, and get them pushing themselves to learn more.
Speaker 1:And that leads us to summer employment, that leads us to apprenticeship programs, that leads us to career development for people, and it's not just about helping them get better, but maybe it's you're not in the right application. Maybe you should be working in accounting rather than in sales, or in service rather than in parts, et cetera. And we typically don't do that, nor do we do a good job at that. And we're starting to see stress between the silent generation and the vapor boomers me. You're a millennial, i guess, right. Or are you a Gen X?
Speaker 2:I'm Gen X. I'm the generation that everybody says we're the dangerous ones.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're a smaller group, but we're dangerous.
Speaker 1:Well, the interesting thing is Gen Z and Alpha. the other ones they don't understand cursive. There's a comedy act that I was just watching. They don't understand cursive. They don't know what an envelope is, a paper map. don't do this to me, and this comedian was making the point, it's okay.
Speaker 1:They'll take over the world. But we can easily get it back because we'll do our battle plans in cursive and we'll put it in a letter and they won't know what that is. But this whole thing is changing, it's fluid And that makes it exciting to me. So I think we've done a reasonably good job in communicating here, in our revolution as a learning institution, our position and thinking relative to how we want to proceed. You want to wrap it up with a bow and give me some closing comment. That's an epiphany striker.
Speaker 2:So a lot of times we delineate education and I do it in the way I speak I emphasize if I'm speaking of K through 12 or if I'm talking about adult education or what we also call higher education. I would challenge all of us to look at higher education as something that starts a lot younger, bringing those classes into the high schools. Curriculum and content in public education before students go to college is very structured and doesn't always leave a lot of room for getting out there in the world, and I think that's why I see students who don't really feel like they're starting their actual learning until they're out there in what we think of as the real world, which is really just the grown-up world. You're 18, you can vote, you can drive your car, you can go get a job without getting permission, and I think we need to start bringing the information of jobs, industries, economy to students before they reach college. Maybe I would be better at accounting. That's stuff we reserve for higher education, and higher education should start in lower grades.
Speaker 1:I agree with that. There's a comment 1963 is when I took my SAT exams And 1963 is the high water mark for grades or scores on the SAT. And ever since then, the SAT. Well, today, the SAT and ACT aren't required at many universities because they find it to be discriminatory, for whatever reason. We seem to have been dumbing down education rather than rashing it up, And what you're talking about is taking more skills into lower ages so that people get exposed to more learning more quickly.
Speaker 2:And with students, what I've always found is, if you set a really high bar, they don't get upset. They get excited, even when steps on the way might be frustrating or really challenging, depending on their skill sets, their language abilities, the pandemic gaps that we've seen. When they are treated and challenged to be absolute experts and geniuses because they really are You just have to unlock the door. They tend to try to rise to that occasion, and that's where progress happens. It doesn't happen by saying, ok, you're stuck over here, so let's move by one inch, here's everything that's available to you. Where do you want to go? They have agency too, and we see it with our adults, but they're coming out not necessarily knowing how to use that.
Speaker 1:Yet I agree with you. I think you know, expecting the best, you will get better results, you know. Thank you, caroline, for the time And thank you everybody for listening to another Canada conversation. We hope you enjoyed this and listening to our evolution as a learning platform And look forward to having you at another Canada conversation in the near future. Follow.