Alan Cheng describes DOE steering committee and professional learning for Portrait
Cheng says NYC already has a head start through Future Ready NYC and affinity partners. He says DOE has brought together superintendents and principals for 45 meetings on the timeline and six essential proficiencies, and is doing asset mapping and planning citywide professional learning.
Good afternoon, Chair.
I'm Alan Chang, Supervising Superintendent for High Schools in District 79.
Really want to start by thanking you for convening this committee and giving us a chance to be able to answer some of these questions because this is such an important part of the direction that we're going in.
I also want to be able to acknowledge that, as you stated, that there's such tremendous work that is already happening in our system.
We have networks of schools that have been deeply committed to career and technical education through Future Ready NYC.
We have many members of our affinity partners and schools that have been doing this work.
And there are so many elements that we are already seeing that are giving us a head start as part of this.
New York State has also recognized that this is a multi-year transition.
They do not expect this to be a switch that gets flipped in overnight.
We will later talk about sort of each of the years and cohorts and exactly what that means.
We're also, of course, committed to working directly with our superintendents, our principals, and our teachers through our existing professional development structures to be able to help them deeply grapple with.
You have journalism students who believe in a free press.
Please don't cut his mic.
Let's use this one.
No, you should be fine.
There we go.
Great.
We're back on.
All right, perfect.
We're back on.
You know, for a while there, you get to your teacher voice, your principal voice, and you can do that.
So I do want to be able to say that we have many professional learning structures that are going to be really important.
So far in the last six months, one of the key things that we can speak to is that we have brought together
every one of our superintendents to be able to go deeply into and understanding what this timeline looks like, what are the six essential proficiencies that are part of a portrait of a graduate, as well as the implications for each of the coming cohorts.
Once we've done that, we then went into our superintendent meetings with their principals.
We held 45 meetings, each with each group and district, so community school districts as well as high school districts, presenting to them, here's the basic information that the state has laid out.
Let's do some asset mapping around what are the key qualities that your schools already have in place?
What is the capacity of your district team to be able to support our schools?
And then what are some practices that you want to be able to grow in and how do we design that?
We took that feedback.
gather that information.
And we're also working very closely with the state to be able to design specific
citywide professional learnings that we will be opening up to our schools and our teachers so that they can really help inform what this process will look like moving forward.