Public Education Matters

Various student voices 0:08
Public education matters. Public education matters. Public education matters.

Scott DiMauro 0:15
This is Public Education Matters, brought to you by the Ohio Education Association.

Katie Olmsted 0:26
Welcome back to Public Education Matters. I'm Katie Olmsted, and I'm part of the communications team for the nearly 120,000 Ohio Education Association members around the state. In my role in comms, I sometimes work with locals to figure out the best ways to talk about some of the issues they're bringing to the bargaining table, and one of the things I hear pretty frequently is how much educators want professional development opportunities that will help them be the best educators they can possibly be for their students, but that there's a lot of PD that doesn't feel like a valuable use of their time. Think about it. We want to differentiate instruction for students because we know they all have different needs. Too often, though, districts don't differentiate professional development for educators. And too often, educators don't walk away from those opportunities with the skills and knowledge they need to help their students with what they were supposed to have learned. The members of the Ohio Educator Standards Board, including a handful of OEA members who serve on it, set out to change that they've been working on a new set of professional learning standards to replace the state's former professional development standards, so that districts can have a better guide to help better meet the needs of educators and the students they serve. In just a minute, we're going to dig into what that all means and what the new standards include. But first, an important note about what the standards do not include. I recorded this conversation on March 6th. That was one day before the Educator Standards Board was set to vote on the final version of the new professional learning standards to send to the State Board of Education for approval on the day of that meeting, though ESB members found out that the words Equity and Inclusion had been removed from the language of the standards. Given the political climate, some board members argued that the intent of the standards was the same without that language. Others, including the OEA member we interviewed for this episode argued that taking out that language actually means backing down on important principles that these standards should support. Ultimately, a majority of the Educator Standards Board voted to move the Professional Learning Standards forward without that language, despite the objections of several members, but because all of that happened after we recorded this interview, we didn't get into those objections during the conversation. You were about to hear those objections to the changes should be and certainly are noted. And now let's dig into the other really important things we did talk about.

Eugene Mach 3:05
Hi. My name is Eugene Mach and I'm a high school business and entrepreneurship teacher in Warren, Ohio, and I'm also a member of the Ohio Educator Standards Board.

Katie Olmsted 3:15
What is the Ohio Educator Standards Board?

Eugene Mach 3:19
That's a great question. So the Ohio Educator Standards Board is a sub, I guess you'd call it a sub group of the Department of Ed, which is now the Ohio Board of Education. So since the split we went with the Board of Education rather than staying with the Department of Workforce and Development. So the Educator Standards Board is responsible for making recommendations to the State Board of Education on things from licensure policy after the legislature sets new new standards. We write and edit the policy and make recommendations to the board, anything dealing with teacher code of conduct, anything with learning standards we covered that really the things that we don't cover anymore are anything that involves curriculum and instruction. We are also deal, we also deal with the Ohio Teacher of the Year. That's one of our major programs. So there's a lot of things that go on with the Educator Standards Board. It's made up of a lot of different interest groups. We've got K-12 educators. We've got administrators. Charter schools are represented. Private schools are represented, as well as two and four year colleges as well as representative, representatives of elected officials. They get to appoint a couple members of the board. So it's a really diverse group of individuals who make recommendations to the state board.

Katie Olmsted 5:05
And it sounds like a group of individuals who all have a really important and good stake and experience in education to help make those recommendations.

Eugene Mach 5:16
Yeah, it's really a great group of people, because in no other place do you get this group of individuals in the same room talking to each other? When we started working on the standards for learning two years ago, the guy from learning forward said no other state that he's worked with has a group like this. So it's really unique to Ohio to bring these voices together and to be able to have input on the things that are going into law and policy.

Katie Olmsted 5:47
So let's talk about those learning standards you've been working on. You mentioned you started two years ago. What has the process been and what are you trying to accomplish?

Eugene Mach 5:56
Okay, so the educators, or the standards for professional learning used to be called the standards for professional development here in Ohio, we're trying to refocus the standards to be focused on making educators and students better. So rather than have very broad, generalized goals for anything professional development related, we're trying to be very specific. What is it we want educators to be able to do? What are the things that we think they need in professional development? So what we did when we started two years ago is we looked at the old standards, and then we started looking at the national standards put out by learning forward and tried to figure out how to marry the two together. Now, obviously, 2015 to now, we are in a very different political climate, so we have to be cognizant of the constituency here in Ohio. So we didn't want to just take the national standards and just apply them to Ohio. So we we addressed a lot of our own needs here in Ohio based on what the standards board felt was relevant. So when we get into the standards a little more, I will talk specifically about things that we changed, but there's going to be nine of them all together, so we can talk about those as we go forward, but really we wanted to make it user friendly. We wanted it to be clear what administrators roles were, what the educators role was, and how these professional learning standards were going to ultimately impact students. Because that's the goal, is make sure that every teacher, every paraprofessional, every education professional, is prepared to meet the needs of our students.

Katie Olmsted 7:47
So let's talk about the standards. You said there are nine of them moving forward. Yes. What does those include?

Eugene Mach 7:53
Okay, so the first standard is on Learning Foundations and Practices. And I know that sounds kind of broad, but we're really focused on what is it that educators need to be able to do, and what practices do they need to have in place to best serve students? So when we look at the elements, first, we want to establish a culture of support and expectations for all staff. So many of us have been in a class or in a professional development where you walk in, the instructor just starts off and you have no idea what you're supposed to get out of this training. We want to make sure that every training has a purpose and that we offer staff the support to be able to meet those expectations. We also want to make sure that they understand the context of what they're doing. So if they're learning a certain skill, how do they apply that for their students? Why is it necessary? Why? How is it going to help their students? We want to make sure that their structure provided in all professional learning. And then we also want to make sure to assess that learning. Again, we've all been in a professional development where they throw a PowerPoint up, they talk to you for half an hour, 45 minutes, but then there's no time to implement what you've learned, no time to practice that. So we want to make sure that every staff member walks away from PD feeling like this has been a productive use of time, rather than wishing that it would have been an email.

Katie Olmsted 9:24
And you know, that's something I hear from educators a lot, is that they want professional development. They want to be the best they can be, but sometimes the professional development that's assigned to them doesn't feel like the most useful use of their time, correct? Will these standards hopefully make it a much more valuable experience for everyone?

Eugene Mach 9:44
So that's the hope. The Standards Board can only put the standards into place. It's really up to the administration and the districts to take these standards and make it valuable for all staff members. What we're hoping doesn't happen is that we continue to see blanket professional development for the entire district, because the needs of the music staff are not going to be the same as the math staff, and we need to make sure that we're diversifying not only our instruction as teachers, but also our professional learning for our teachers and support staff, because, again, the needs of an educational aid aren't going to be the same as for a bus driver. So hopefully, that's what comes out of these standards.

Have you received any feedback yet? Are people generally open to these changes?

So we did receive feedback from our public comment. There were a few things that some people were uncomfortable with. They wanted us to use different language, but nothing major as far as the standards themselves. And we were able to go through that feedback at our last meeting and really be able to narrow it down, make a few last minute changes, and hopefully we'll see in our next agenda that we'll be sending these on to the State Board for approval.

Katie Olmsted 11:09
I'm talking to March 6th. What would that mean for the potential timeline for when districts would be implementing these new standards?

Eugene Mach 11:14
So districts could see these as early as next school year. As soon as we meet and pass them, usually it's about a week in between our meeting and the state board meeting, and once the state board approves it, it would go into, to effect. But being mid March already, we probably wouldn't see these rolled out until at least August.

Katie Olmsted 11:41
So let's talk a little bit more about your experience in professional learning environments. Have you ever been in PD situations that have worked really well, or maybe, maybe they didn't work so well? What's been your experience?

Eugene Mach 11:55
Absolutely so I'm also a union president and very active in OEA, so I've had a lot of professional development. Some has been fantastic, and some has been less. So I'm an elective teacher. I'm a single, what we call a singleton in my district, meaning I'm the only person who teaches what I teach. So it's very hard to create this very specific professional development for me, because when you have 400 staff members in, in the district, you're not going to create a different PD for each person. So yeah, there's been a lot of times I've been into professional development, and you're really thinking, why can't I be grading papers? Why can't I be working on lesson plans or creating assignments for my students? The goal is to move away from that model and really individualize what kind of professional development we can offer our staff, and as we've seen over the last few years, with technology, you really can do that even if you're providing online modules or you're doing zoom meetings with breakout rooms, to really focus on individual staff members. I really think it's possible, but it's going to be up to the leadership of the district to make that happen.

Katie Olmsted 13:10
What would be your message to district leaders who may be a little hesitant about adopting these new standards?

Eugene Mach 13:17
I would say, take it slow. Don't feel like you need to do everything in one go. One thing that, as an educator, I'll advise administrators is, don't feel like you need to do 15 things in one year. If you get better at one of these standards this year, great. We would much rather you dive into one of these standards and do it with fidelity, then try to do all nine in one year. Because what you're going to do is you're going to overwhelm yourself, you're going to overwhelm your staff, and you're going to cause a lot of frustration, because you're not going to give people a chance to get good at what they're learning. You want to not only implement one of the standards, you want to train them. You want to train your staff, you want to practice. You want to be able to provide feedback to your staff. And this really fits in well to the OTES model for walk throughs and things like that. And we're hoping that districts will take their time with each part. I know we're expected to do a lot of things at one time as educators, but really, if you, if you take it piece by piece, or even have specific groups that focus on certain things based on the needs of the department or the particular building, I really think that's the best way to go about it. If you tried to implement all nine of these in one year, nobody's going to be successful.

Katie Olmsted 14:41
It's going to be more about checking the boxes than actually getting the learning out of it, right?

Eugene Mach 14:45
Correct and we've seen enough of that, and that's why we've made the changes that we have over the last few years to the standards. We want to make this a valuable piece for educators. Educators go into the field knowing t

hat they're always going to be learning new things. They're always going to be expected to get better. We don't want to overwhelm people, and we want to give them a chance to get really good at this. We see it with state testing. The minute you get really good at doing something, it seems like everything changes, and we don't want that to be the case with the standards. So if you read through the new standards, they're going to reflect a lot of what was in the standards before, but hopefully with a clear explanation of what's expected.

Katie Olmsted 15:28
Yeah, you mentioned that the previous standards just felt very academic, and the new standards are user friendly and actually meant to be used, right?

Eugene Mach 15:39
Yes, yes. So if you look at the previous standards, I don't have it in front of me at the moment, but one of them talked about, so we'll go with the first one. It talked about professional learning, increases educator effectiveness and results for all students. Okay, that's great, but again, it's a very broad statement. We want to be more specific, and that's why, when we when we edited for this year, we looked at it and we said that, sorry. Let me get back to it. So the first one we talked about professional learning enhances educator effectiveness. Effectiveness is evidence based and results in transformative outcomes for all students when so that's the stem that we put on every one of the standards, because that's our goal. We want to increase outcomes for students. Then we added a culture of support structure is structured to create and sustain expectations for all students to understand the contextual elements of student assets provide all students with access to learning, and fosters relationships with students, families and communities. So we've listed out the things there that we expect you to do. We want to have students understand the context of what they're learning. We want to build relationships with families, community members as well as students, and we really want to provide support systems for our students. So when we talked about being more specific, that's what we did, we went in and listed very specific things. What is it that we should be doing for creating a foundation for learning and best practices.

Katie Olmsted 17:25
How are you feeling now that it's getting close to getting across the finish line, all this work that you've put into it?

Eugene Mach 17:31
It's a really good feeling, because when we started, I was newer to the Educator Standards Board. I had only been on the board for a year at that point, and they told us, okay, now we're going to take on the educators, professional learning standards. I had no idea what that meant. So once we started looking at it, I was like, Okay, this is a lot of information to take in. And once we dug into it and really broke it down, okay, what is it we want to do with this? It really became a process of just breaking things into smaller pieces. What do we want this to say? What do we want the outcome to be? And we wanted to make it clear as possible. So when, when we looked at last month, we looked at the final draft before we were going to put something to the board, it was a little intimidating. You're like, okay, is this good? Is this bad? But once we got a chance to look at the the public comment feedback, it was really encouraging, because the feedback we did get was over vocabulary, it wasn't over content, and that was really encouraging. So I'm kind of excited about it, but at the same time, I know there's another big project coming forward, so there's no rest for those of us on the board, we're going to just jump right into the next thing, and that's going to be the code of conduct for teachers. So.

Katie Olmsted 18:57
Oh, just small bites. It's, it's fine. Everything's, everything's fine. It doesn't seem like a lot. Are you anticipating a similar sort of process by which you are looking at what's there and figuring out what needs to happen to make it make more sense?

Eugene Mach 19:12
Absoluelty, I knowing the standards. As an educator, you really look at it and you're like, okay, this is what we do every day. This is the standard we're held to. And there's going to be some points of contention where you have administrators on one side of the argument saying, yes, we need to hold teachers and educators to a high standard, but at the same time, we need to remember that teachers and educational aids, these are real people. They live in the real world, and we need to make sure that we're not setting a standard that people can't rise to. I know when social media became a big thing, that was a big change in the educator standards, and a lot of teachers feel hesitant to even have social media accounts, and rightfully so. So I'm excited to dig into that, but at the same time, it's like nothing like sticking your head in the lion's mouth.

Katie Olmsted 20:10
Well, Eugene, thank you for sharing more with us about the process of coming up with these professional learning standards, and I'm sure we will want to check in with you again in the future as the other standards come more into focus.

Eugene Mach 20:23
All right, thanks for having me.

Katie Olmsted 20:24
again. After we talked to Eugene a few weeks ago, the Educator Standards Board got the finalized version of what they had been working on and saw the changes to remove the mentions of the words Equity and Inclusion. Eugene and several other Educator Standards Board members voted not to accept those changes, but ultimately, with 11 votes in favor, the new professional learning standards moved forward to the State Board of Education to consider without those two words anywhere in the guidance. You can learn more about these professional learning standards in the show notes for this episode, and while you're there, subscribe to the public Education Matters podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss an episode in the future. New Episodes continue to drop every Thursday this school year, as we continue to sit down with the people shaping Ohio's public education landscape every day. Because in Ohio, public education matters.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai