Kevin: Good morning. Welcome. If you're joining us today, this is the introduction to MCAS-Alt, what we call core concepts, which we've broken up into two different parts. So this is part A that we'll do in the morning, and then part B happens in the afternoon. So it's one continuous training, but to save you the pain of a three plus hour zoom. We break it up into, into two different parts. So let's take a look at what we'll do today. So this is what we'll cover in part A and the core concept session really is a intended for teachers that have never done the MCAS-Alt before. And I will say if you attended our previous core concept session, this is the exact same training and it might already start to look familiar to you. You don't have to do both. You're welcome to stay if you, you want to run through it again, but just know that this wasn't a continuation of that. They are the exact same training. So if you already came to core concepts, this your same slides, we're going to go over the exact same information today. So high level, this is what we'll do. So we'll start with some recruit requirements, then we'll get into what makes up the MCAS, about the forms that go into there. And today we're particularly talking about what goes into doing ELA reading language. And then all of the math strands, the science is a different, there's a separate one just for science and then ELA writing is a little different. And civics all have unique requirements. So they have their, their own training in this series. We won't cover those here today. We'll, we'll lightly mention them, but if you need that content, we'll remind you how to sign up for those if you haven't already. So little housekeeping, if you've never joined a webinar before versus a regular Zoom, you're a little bit different in your participant. You come in and listen only mode. You don't have to worry about your camera or muting yourself. Those are just off, permanently off for you as attendees, we have a break for questions in here and then we'll take questions at the end. And if you have any, I have a student who type questions or policy questions. This really isn't the form for those. You want to send those directly to Desi at the email that you see on your screen at MC a@mass.gov. And then this is being recorded. We'll send out links when they're ready. But these all go up on Desi's YouTube channel. It takes a second for a light edit and then they get professionally captioned and then they'll make their way there. But you will have access to the recording after this. We do shut off the chat so you, we can send you chats and we might send you some links throughout this, but you can't chat back if you have a question. You want to use the q and a button in your zoom toolbar and you'll see that you can ask an answer. You might want to pause on on, you might want to watch the slides as you go. We find that quite often somebody will ask a question that's answered in the, their very next slide. So give us some thought. We do have breaks for questions that you can certainly put them in. But just hold your questions the, the best you can. You might find that it, we get the answer as we go. If you get logged out of this zoom, just you can rejoin right again using the same link and I'll mention it when we break at the end of this section. But when you come back for part B, it's the same link that you used for Part A. It's just one big meeting. So you won't get another link for part B. So however you got here this morning, just do that again this afternoon and it'll take you right back in to join again for part B. So as I mentioned, you are in part A and B of core concepts and you'll see that as I mentioned previously, ELA reading, language and math are really the bulk of the, the content that we'll focus on. The structure of creating those we have writing for ELA, science and civics all have separate. And if you signed up for those, those happen a little bit later this week. And I'll remind you before the day is out of how to sign up for those. If you haven't and suddenly realize that you probably should have, we'll we'll give you the information to to register. It's not too late. So before we get into the kind of content of MCAS Salt, we'll do this, this one slide. It's not a very fun slide, but it's important that we put it out here. So we'll, we'll get it out there and then we'll we'll move on from it. And it's just to say that when you're compiling these, it is important that you adhere to the security of it. And that doesn't just mean protecting the the work. It means that everything that you do should be authentic for this student. It should represent what that student can do and their participation and their true accuracy and independence. Not to fabricate anything. Sometimes teachers will get to the end of the year and they're under a lot of pressure to get these done. They might've got a student late and they're just really struggling and they might put something in there that the student really truly didn't create. And that can be a big issue if it bubbles up at scoring or if it gets reported through a different avenue, it gets reported to desi. There's an investigation. They have been times over the years that a teacher's license has come in to question or, or revoked. So when in doubt, just keep it authentic. Ask for help, ask your supervisor if you feel like you're, you're being under, under too much pressure to get this done. Reach out to DESI if you need to and explain. But just don't, don't fudge anything. Don't make it anything that's not the, the unique participation of the student that that's just a, a, a path that you don't want to go down. So just remember that and, and continue on and just do the best you can, particularly if you get those, those students at the, the end of the year. There are things you can try to do but just don't fabricate anything. So now I will hand it and we'll get that out of the way. I'll hand it over to Deb and she'll start to walk you through the, the components of what goes into the formulation of an MCAS-Alt. So, over to you Deb. 

Deb: Thank you Kevin. Good morning everyone. Thanks. I wish I could say I could. Nice to see you, but I'm glad you're here. So let's get started and talk about the purpose of the MCAS alt. So why do we assess the students with the most significant cognitive disabilities? Well, first of all, it is the law and it means that all students who are educated with Massachusetts funds must participate in an annual statewide assessment. There is no opting out. So how they, how they are assessed is up to you whether they are taking the regular MCAS or the alternate assessment, but they must be assessed. We want to make sure that our students are being assessed so that they can be accountable accountability purposes. So we know whether or not they're using the state's curriculum frameworks. We also want to make sure that all of the information that we're using for assessments provides our students with challenging and standards based instruction. And that way we can use that data and evidence for other areas with our students. So now we're going to talk about the requirements for each of the grades. So in grades three through eight and 10 for the English language arts strands, we're going to have one reading strand, one language strand and that's going to include a data chart and two pieces of evidence for each strand. So for reading, you choose either informational text or literary text. And for language you don't even have to worry about it anymore because Kevin has this wonderful program and it'll take you to the cluster heading of vocabulary acquisition and use. So that's what you're going to focus on in that strand is vocabulary. So anybody doing an assessment in grades three, eight or 10 will do this. They will also have to do writing, but as Kevin said, that's a separate presentation because of the unique requirements. And we'll give you that more of that information at the, at the end of this, if you are teaching in grades three through eight, your student will have to do two domains in each grade. And for each domain that's going to have one data chart and two pieces of evidence. So as you can see here, and I'm not going to read them all, but for grade five you would do number and operation fractions and number and operations base 10. So there's two domains in each area. So if you want to go to the educator's manual, you can find the requirements specifically for your grade and you can print that out if you'd like. If you're in high school, if you're teaching grade 10, you have to do three conceptual categories. So it would be one data chart and two pieces of evidence for each of the three conceptual categories. So you have a choice of from five you can see them all here you only have to choose three of those. So you are just going to do three, you don't have to do all five. And again, in that right hand corner you can see where you can find that information. For grades five eight in high school science and tech engineering is, you're responsible for that. But again, you're going to attend a separate presentation if you're in five, eight or high school and you want to know how to put those together, science is the only strand that can be done over two years. If you are grade eight, it's the only grade that only grade that will do civic. And we have a separate presentation for you on that. So let's take a look at these forms. And I always like these forms to talk about these forms because this is something we can get done pretty easily. So if you haven't started your assessment yet, just know that you can do five out of six of these already. Get them out of the way. First is an artistic cover and that can be any kind of drawing the student wants to do computer generated graphics, whatever, whatever the student wants. And that will eventually go in the front part of the binder. It's a really nice way to have the student be invested in their assessment. This is their assessment. So it's really, it's really a nice connection for them. The next is a student's introduction. And this is just what kind of learner they are. They, they can tell us what they like, what their favorite subject is, how they learn if they have any siblings. It's a good time to invite your student, your speech and language person to work with your student and help get that done because it's they, if they take their that student out, you want to make sure that they can do some things for you to get in that portfolio. You don't have to do it all by yourself. Then the school calendar, you can probably go to the office, grab a school calendar and you're going to put that in the left hand pocket of the binder. Next we have something called the MCAS-Alt cover sheet and I, and you can see here what it looks like. And this is for the sample. We have a sample of Alex Keaton. It has a student's name sa the grade and the grade is very important and Kevin's going to show you how to get these forms in a few minutes and talk about them. But this is going to go in the very front of your binder. So make sure that that you have that. And then the verification form is one that you cannot do until it's finished because you want to make sure the parents have an opportunity to view that. And I know that sometimes our parents, they can't come in, they have other obligations or jobs that prevents them from coming in during school hours. So there's two different things you can do. You can send home a copy of the portfolio because there's nothing secure in there. It's student's work, let them review it and then send back that verification form. Or if the you reach out to them by email, telephone, whatever, you can log those attempts. So we know that you did try to reach out to the parents. And last but not least is a photo or video consent form. If you think that you're going to take pictures or video, you must have this separate form and Kevin will show you where to find this. It's a very simple form, but you're going to keep it there at school and that's important because if the parents don't give you permission and you put it in there, they're not going to be happy. So make sure you have their consent before you take pictures and add them to it. Now I'm going to turn this over to Kevin for a moment and he's going to show you where these forms can be found. 

Kevin: Thank you Deb. So everyone, bear with me, I just have to change gears here. I'm going to take down the PowerPoint and bring up a website to start to show you where you can get at all this stuff. So gimme one moment and I'll change that over. Okay, so welcome back. So what you see on the screen now, this is what Deb had alluded to called Forms and Graphs or Profile. It goes by many names. I'll show you where you can get it, but I'll put the disclaimer on this that please don't try to log in right now and create an account and follow along. I have to move a little bit quickly to sort of do this in the time allotted, but I'll, I'll show you where you can get it and it'll remind you throughout. So this is the login page and how you get here. If you've never used the site before, it's already in the chat actually where I put where you can get the educators manual so that DESE link for their resources page is what you see in front of you. And we'll we'll get to this as we go, but just remember the resource guides are here. Here is that educator's manual that Deb had mentioned right on here under manuals. And then down here at the bottom there is this link for MCAS-Alt Forms and Graphs. So if you don't see it, just remember scroll to the bottom, you click that and it'll take you here. So as a new user, the first thing you need to do is to create an account. So to do that you go go to registration page and it's just going to ask you for two pieces of information. So pretty simple web account stuff of a email address that acts as your unique username and then a password. So password of your choosing. It's not looking for something, nothing was mailed to you. This is just an open system that you can go and do. It's not tied to your school, it's not tied to a state database in any way. So any email address that's unique to you. And then choose a password that's at least eight characters, ideally with a nice mix of of numbers letters. And try not to use the same password that you use for everything else in your life. Just a bad habit. But give it those two pieces. Click submit, registration, it'll create your account and log you in for the first time. I've already got a a demo account going, so I'm just going to log into that. So I'll go back here, put in my information and sign in. And the first thing you'll see, so I've done this before, normally this would be blank. All this information you can technically skip by this. It won't make you fill this out. But the nice thing about this, particularly if you're going to do this with multiple students is whenever it needs one piece of information that you've supplied here, it'll automatically populate that for you. So most of your MAS alt cover sheets will all be populated with this information and you don't have to type it again and again and again for each student. What catches people sometime and I'll go over this and there's also a lot of questions about this, but when in doubt ask your front office. They can probably tell you people do get caught up on this, what is my district code and school code? As a teacher you probably don't interact with those official codes that much. I will say it's also okay to leave this blank. This isn't how we log them in. This is just kind of a another piece of org information. Nothing bad will happen if you leave. It's better to leave it blank than put something that you're not sure. But how you can find those. If you look up here in this red bar, and I'll point to this bar a lot when I'm doing this, this, this red bar is a navigation bar. So it'll either interact with the feature of the page you're on, so saving or going to a new function or take you to a completely different new page or section of this site. But we do have this little link here called Massachusetts Code. Look up if I click this disclaimer, this isn't always the the most user friendly site to to get at school and district code, but it will take you to the DESI school and district profiles. You can just search the name of your school, you can use this map to click on an area, then it'll kind of narrow in. You can just keep clicking till you see a list of schools as you click. You'll see. So let's say we wanted to do Kelly Day Elementary. Here's where it's not super intuitive, it doesn't spell out school code or district code, but what it's looking for is this number in parentheses here. So that full eight digit code is the school code. Just remember school is always eight digits. So in this case 0 5 1 4 0 0 2 0 is the school code. The district code is always four digits and it's just the first four of that code. So in this case 0 5 1 4. And that's what you would put in these two boxes here, which is why district is a little bit shorter. So remember district four school code eight, most likely anybody that orders MCAS materials in your office or admin probably can just tell you those. So that's always the place to start and where I recommend rather than, but you can use that. Remember that messages, this code lookup is is here if you need it. But we'll leave that as it is and scroll down on this page. If you want to change your password, you can. Where nobody ever scrolls down is all the way to the bottom. I've done several demos, normally you won't have anything here, but what this is doing is if you accidentally delete a student, and I'll show you, it'll make more sense when I show you how to create a student. But if you're just not paying attention, you delete a student. People like to click the wrong button right in March when they're getting ready to submit these things and they panic and they think it's all gone, we're not that cruel. We don't just automatically delete everything you did for an entire year. We're just basically hiding that student from you. Everything is still intact. So in this case, if I clicked restore, it would bring it right back as if it never happened. So if you find yourself in that situation of, of removing a student that you did not mean to delete, just remember from this my account page, scroll right to the bottom and you can bring that right back. There are a few hard deletes in here where you can't restore information that you've deleted. And I'll point those out as we go. But with that whole student, we're just sort of hiding it from your student list and we'll, we'll put it right back as soon as you say restore student. So that's the my account page. Where you need to start is to start building a student and and creating information for it. Is this my student list page? So if I click this and you'll notice nobody's in there, as I mentioned, this is an open system. It's not tied to anything. Even if you tell us what school you're at on my account, it doesn't automatically look at the student population and offer you. These are the students for you to pick from. It's just an open system. It will only put in which you tell it you want to put in there. The nicety of that is you can also just create a testing student. You don't, if you want to try this out and just click around to get to the feel of it, you can create a fake student. So you just would click here to add a student is how you put in a, a new student and you'll get a placeholder. And then, and you can do this multiple times, people like there's, there's no right or wrong way to do it. You can put in as many generic ones to start. If you, you'd like this X is that, that whoopsie, I deleted my student that you, you might accidentally, it does prompt you. It says, are you sure you want to delete this student? And nobody ever reads it. They just say, okay. And boom, it's gone. It's pretty easy to delete them. But just remember we're not really destroying anything that you've done. You can go to that, that restore student and bring it right back. But what you'll do normally is after you've created your student, you can go and select a student and you'll see just like what you saw on Deb's sample in the PowerPoint and we've got the beginnings of an MCAS-Alt cover sheet. You'll find that whenever possible, what you see on the screen mimics the form that you're trying to create. So in this case an MCAS-Alt cover sheet. And we'll just work this from from top to bottom. And I posted it in the chat and it, if you've got the email with the slides and the handout, we're going to build that Alex Keaton sample today, that grade five mathematics number and operations in base 10. So the logical place to start with this site is to give the student a name. So it's everything's going to be this generic new student. So you can just type right over that. And in this case, we're going to start to build out Alex SASID is another one that gets people sometimes where we, we see what I assume is maybe like a school level ID or a district id. Line two is looking for that official DESE student system identification number for the student. And the easy way to remember what this one is, is it's a 10 digit number that begins with one zero. So it begins with 10 and then you have eight more numbers after that. And that's the official SASID. And again, if you, if you don't use that, you probably have it in other files for the student, but I'm sure in this case the, the, the main office or admin can tell you the, the official SASID for the student. So just remember if you're not putting a 10 digit number, you're probably not putting the official SASID. And then we come to grade. So Deb alluded to this, that grade is super important, particularly in this site. So I'll, I'll really drive this home if there's a big red warning here about once you do the grade it's locked and you can't change it. And I'll show you exactly what that's trying to tell you. So when you come to grade the first time you just have a dropdown. Looking at Alex, we see that he's a grade five. If I selected four, even if I saved the page, I can still change it as long as I didn't leave this page. So, but once I select the grade I want and I save notice this is still a dropdown, I can change it. Let's go back to my student list and then I'm going to reselect notice it changed the generic new student to Alex. When I come back to this, when I select a student and I go to the cover sheet again, notice the dropdown is gone. You get one shot at grade. And the reason why it has to do that, which will, I'll point it out as we go is once I'm off this page, a bunch of things happen in the background. It will filter to only offer the appropriate strands for that grade. The learning standards for that grade, the linked skills of where you start are all tied to that grade. So it needs it from the get go in order to appropriately apply that filter. We don't want you mixing and matching strands. And where it becomes most apparent is in math where the two required strands in grades three through eight change from grade to grade to grade. So you don't want to be switching from a four and do one and then hop into a five and do another one because it won't be the appropriate submission for the student in that grade. So it'll stop you from mixing and matching, but it has to have that grade locked in from the start. The question gets asked a lot, well what if I get past that and did the the wrong grade? What do I do then unfortunately the only thing you can do is start over because you can't mix and match your learning standards. You can't mix and match your content. We can't let you just change it and then keep going. So make sure the grade is correct from the start because you won't have an opportunity to just change it once you get going from there, you'll notice these are already populated. So in that my account, I had put this sort of generic information in there and it populated it for me. So if you didn't do that, you could just type in here. But anything you put on that my account, so it put in my school name, my school address, my name, my email address, most of this middle section it'll just do for you. And then down at the bottom it's just asking what the last nine line of number nine is asking what's included in this assessment for the student. So you just check off what's your, this is a grade five, so likely we're going to have ELA math and science in here. I'm going to do save and I'll go to table of contents. So you might have noticed that when I, let me go to my student list first. When I do select students, so if I add in another fake student the first time you go to a student, it'll take you directly to the mc a cover sheet to do that. But once you've filled that out, now you'll notice if I do select student for Alex of we've already completed that cover sheet, it'll take me to table of contents instead. So this is where you'll go most of the time to start to do work for the student. So we were just in that cover sheet, we'll come back to these. So this is where you start to build strands. But I just wanted to point out that at the bottom half of this, so most of your time will be sent up here at the top of what we call core content. But down here a lot of this will be maybe a little over your head. We've got some additional information in here of stuff for, for science or required checklists and checking for completeness. Just remember they're here because once you start to do this and build content and understand what goes into an MCAS-Alt, these are nice tools for you to come and kind of add to your knowledge. But I just wanted to point out that form that Deb was talking about, that verification form to get the parent sign off. You can generate that right from here. So you just click verification form, it'll fill out the student's name, the school if you already given that information. And that's really it. It's, it's kind of here to give you an opportunity to print it out and get the parents sign off on it. Or you can, if you made an attempt to contact the parent of email sent or made a call or they were a no-show, you can just put this in this text box here. But that's the intent of that is, is really not a whole lot to do. It's just there for you to, to generate the form. And I'll point out just one more, same sort of thing that consent to photo or video, basically just a straight print it out and then you can get a signature down at the bottom. And again, this doesn't go in the actual binder of work, this just stays on record at the school. So, but this is where you get it, but it's not like the other forms where you're incorporating it into the binder. This is just to keep on record at your school if you find that you're going to photo or video to the student. So that's where we'll do leave this off for now. We'll come back to this. Deb's going to start to tell you about the different components of what goes into selecting skills and creating entry points and creating strain cover sheets. So once you have that knowledge, we'll come back here and I'll show you how to do it on this site. So I will kick it back over to you Deb, and I'll bring up the PowerPoint once again. 

Deb: Thank you. And for those of you that may not know everything is going to go in one binder. So even though we're doing ELA language reading, writing, science, everything goes in one binder. So I always forget to point that out. And then some people don't know and I assume they did. Excuse me. So let's talk about how, how are we going to assess these students, right? This is what are our tools? What do we have? So we have this guide, we call, its official name is the Alternate Academic Achievement Standards to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks for Students with Disabilities. We just call it the resource guide. The resource guide is just a co a compilation of all the curriculum content standards from ELA, math, civics, science and Tech. All those frameworks are together. And what happens is we use this as a guide for any student who's met that criteria to participate in the alternate assessment. And in a minute I'll show you how it works. So this is a page from the resource guide. In the past we used to give out these huge gigantic resource guides and they were, they would, you know, weigh 50 pounds because they had so much in them. Now it's very nice because it's digital, but we still have the same information on it. So the first thing you're going to see is the content area. So this is for math, and as Kevin said, we're focusing on that for the, the strand that we're going to complete. The domain is number and operations fraction. So that's where we are. And then we have the strand. Those are just what this whole thing is being focused on. What's that central idea or theme? And that's what we call the standard or the domain. Next we have these cluster headings. And the cluster headings are just a smaller group of standards. So you can see on the left where it says extend understanding of fraction, and then there's two standards grouped with that. So those are, that cluster heading is just related to those standards. And then as you know, the standard is just a statement of what all students should know and be able to do by the time they leave a specific grade. So you're very familiar with those I'm sure, but, but here is where the real magic happens. You notice this page, you see at the top there's, it has the term entry points and access skills. And this is for students in grade three. And then we're going to look over on the right, these are what we call entry points. So if you're a person who likes to take notes or you've already printed out the PowerPoint, you might want to highlight this. This is an important piece of information, not that all of what we're saying, but some, some are going to be more important than others. The entry point is an outcome that we've come up with at a lower level of complexity. Working with the content people, the people who actually understand the standards, they have helped us break them down to a lower level of complexity. So we've kind of unpacked those standards that we just looked at and we start at a more complex and then we go to a less complex. So you are as a teacher, able to find a entry point that your student can do. And entry points, this is something you might want to highlight or circle entry points form the basis of a measurable outcome for each portfolio strand. So remember we're talking about ELA language, ELA, reading, talking about math. That's what we're looking at here. So that's what an entry point is. Then we have something called access skill, and we'll talk a little bit more about those in a moment. But so you understand it, it's a developmental, there's students that are working on developmental skills and they're still going to address their communication or motor skills during a standards-based academic activity. And it's going to be in the content area that's being assessed by their peers. It's the access skills will be found at the lowest grade level in each strand or domain unless we tell you differently. So let's take a look at this to help you understand what our resource guide does. On the far right, you see the standard as written, it talks about rational numbers extending the number line diagrams, coordinating accesses. Okay? Our students can't do that standard as written, correct? That's why we're doing the alternate assessment. So as a teacher, you get to go to another level. So let's take a look at that first box. Could my student determine the coordinates of points plotted on a coordinate grid? And you can see it's can be from any quadrant. I think my students a little bit, that's that's a little too high. So I'm going to keep going down, I'm going to keep looking in those entry points. I find one that says add and subtract numbers. One in two digit hole numbers. Hmm, I think my student could do that, but I have another student that can't. I'm going to go down one more, I'm going to keep looking to find something that my student can do. The next one down for an entry point would be to match visual representations of simple fractions. Who the fraction itself, I think that I could work on that. So you see that you have choices. I have gone down from complexity. Those are entry points. If I have a student who is just working on developmental skills, we call those access skills. That last one says to track object as it is added or subtracted from a set. Now the student is not adding or subtracting the student is tracking the object. So there's something for all of my students within this resource cup. So access skills are those students who only have emerging symbolic communication skills. They're going to be addressing those early developmental milestones like things we just talked about, tracking, responding to stimuli, grasping or releasing objects. Access skills, however, must be addressed in the context of a standards based activity. So let me just give you an example here. Student activates a device with a prerecorded word for classmates during an antonym naming game. The student is not naming antonyms, the student is activating a device with prerecorded words. Here's another one. As as a student releases a block from their grasp, the teacher counts as each block drop drops into the bin. What's the student working on releasing? Okay, they're releasing the block. So I just want to remind everyone that this part, what we're doing today, part A and B is focused on language reading and mathematics. So this is something we call the core set of evidence. This is what you, this is the minimum that you need for each strand. You'll have a strand cover sheet, a skill survey, a data chart, and then two pieces of primary evidence. And you can see that those data charts will, can be a bar graph, a line graph, field data chart, and that the evidence can be something the student produced. We'll talk about teacher documented work samples, photos or videos. And just a reminder that there are unique requirements for writing civics and science and tech. And so that's, we're not going to be looking at those today. Now we're going to take each of these apart so that you understand each part of this core set of evidence so that when you're ready to put it all together, you'll know what's required for each one. The first one is an is the skill survey. So this is required, circle this, highlight this for each strand of the MCAS Alt, even the ones we're not talking about today. Every strand in this portfolio will have a skill survey. It's like pre-testing and helping to get that range of skills in each strand or domain. You must complete this before choosing an entry point. And if you, when you're using the program that Kevin just showed you, you can't get into the strand until this is completed. However, if it helps you, you can print out a blank one if you want to share it with your paraprofessionals, your SLP, whoever works with your student and they can fill out their section, but in the, in the end, someone has to fill it out online and that way you can get into your entry points. So you're going to, it really just helps to narrow down the entry points and then you just print it out and you're going to put it behind that strand cover sheet. So we want to make sure that you're familiar with the entry points. We want to make sure that our students are getting something that's challenging and appropriate. We don't want something that's too easy, something that they know that they already know. We want to challenge them so that we can raise that bar and get the most out of our students. Sometimes it doesn't happen too often, but sometimes as you're filling this out, you may realize that the student is working at a much higher level and perhaps this is not the correct assessment. And you need to move on to a standard test with accommodations. So you can use formal informal progress reports classroom, you can design your own tasks based on the survey and you're just going to select the entry points related to those skills in those columns. And we'll look at those columns in a moment. So the rubric area for this is if it's a, they can't perform the skill and if you have students working at access skill level, then you're most likely all A's B and C is whether they can do it rarely or intermittently with without support. So some independence and d and e means that more often than not they can. So you don't want to pick anything from D and e, which is what I just said. So let's take a look at it. So here is Alex Keaton's, right? So here he had, there are 12 different lines there that you're going to complete. They're all a little bit different, some have more, some has have less, but it just helps you to narrow down. It also kind of gives you a good flavor of what your student is able to do, especially if they're new. So you can see here at the bottom you have, you still have choices, you have a few in A and B because they can't perform the skill in in 11 and 12. That might be because you haven't taught the skill. So you know, that's fine. So take a look and see, but you can choose anything from A, B, or C and then go to that area and still choose an entry point that works for you or that student. But we're not going to choose anything from D or E because they already understand that. So how do we select that skill for the measurable outcome? Well, here's Alex's strand cover sheet. And this has been filled out. We see his name and the grade. And remember Kevin said how important that grade was because it connects to everything that the student has to do at grade five. So we have, this is in math, it's number and operations in base 10. This is the measurable outcome. And Alex will round whole numbers to the nearest 100 using place value with 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independence. So now we have this, this new term we call measurable outcome. And this is a goal that you choose, right? You're the teacher, you're going to choose that entry point. We are now going to add criteria to that entry point. The criteria is for mastery. When you believe the student will reach mastery, it is not anything that the state uses for scoring purposes. So if you put 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independent and the student doesn't reach it, that is perfectly fine because you're going to be sending in this portfolio in March and you'll have plenty of time to work on that skill because you want to choose an entry point or access skill that they need that they don't have and that you want to work on. So the evidence in each strand is going to document the student's performance of the measurable outcome. So your, your goal is to always keep in mind the skill that you chose and that's what you're going to do for the whole strand and document that. So again, you want to make sure that that skill that you is not too challenging so that they're so frustrated they're, you know, wiping off the entire table of papers, but you also don't want something that they get in three seconds because that's not challenging enough. So you want to find something that's just right, it's challenging and attainable. Here are some considerations when you are selecting that entry point. Think about the verb that's linked to the skill and there's always a verb linked to the skill where the entry point there'll be describe, identify match, those are the different skills. At what level is your student working on that skill? Be sure to choose the verb that is at that student's skill level. You want to look at examples. We've provided quite well the math and ELA and all of the experts have provided examples for you within those entry points, especially at the math area. So use those and make sure that you understand those pertinent words. And sometimes the concepts, perhaps it's been a while since you had to teach, maybe you switch grades and there's some new concepts that are being taught. Just be sure that you understand those words and if you're not sure, consult with a content expert. Also within our resource guide we have these little boxes, the little notes that kind of remind us. A unit fraction is a fraction with en numerator of one. So use those resource guides as a resource to help you inform you as you teach that skill. Remember to assess the entry point or access skill that you selected. We also have skills that are connected by the word and they are related skills such as multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. They are, they're rare, but you will find them. You can use them as is. That's option one. You don't change anything. So the measurable outcome would read, student will solve multiplication and division word problems with 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independence. That's my measurable outcome. Then I teach it and then I write a brief description and all of my brief descriptions are going to have both of those skills. So the brief description says students solved six multiplication and division word problems on a worksheet. So all the work samples and all the data points, and we'll talk about data points when we get to the data charts. Must document both skills. Okay? So my measurable outcome has two skills. All of my brief descriptions will have two skills. All of the work that I give that the student worked on will have two skills. All of my data points will have two skills. Option two, option two is I can modify it, maybe my student can work on multiplication word problems. They're still not, they're still not quite secure with that. So I don't want to add division yet. So I can modify it, I can take off in the division. Now my measurable outcome reads, student will solve multiplication word problems with 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independence. My brief description after I've taught, after I've done this activity is that the student solved six multiplication word problems on a worksheet. Again, all my work samples, all my data points are just going to document solving the multiplication problem word problems. Okay? So we have come to the points where we have some questions. 

Kevin: Actually Deb, I'll, I'll step in there before we get to the questions. 

Deb: Oh, oh, I'm sorry, I can take it 

Kevin: I'm, no, it's okay. I'll take it back to forms and graphs and we can show them how to, to build out that strand that you were just talking about. So, 

Deb: Oh that in a much better way. 

Kevin: So hello again everybody. Give me one moment. I'm going to swap screens again and we'll we'll go back to to forms and graphs. So one second. Okay, so here we are back in forms and graphs and I had logged out log right back in to where we were and it'll take me right to my student list. And here we have Alex again. So we'll jump right back into Alex and I briefly alluded to it before, but where you'll spend most of your time is right here at the top. Most of the secondary information and tools and additional resources are, are down here, but these are the big three. So that cover sheet, you'll remember, this is where we started. So here's Alex's cover sheet where we locked in that grade and filled out any of that kind of demographic level information. And that's table of contents is where we were. So now you, you get to, to where you spend most of your time. So skill surveys and strand cover sheets. So creating skill surveys and strands and content. As Deb mentioned, skill surveys should come first. You want to do the skill survey for whatever content area and strands you're working on before you, you get into to create that strand. So let's do that. Let's click skill survey. And you'll find it kind of looks like when I was building a list of students in my student list, but now I'm building a a list of skill surveys for the student that I am currently in. In this case Alex Keaton, to start building, we go to our big red bar again, add a new skill survey and we get a placeholder and we can go to that skill survey. And this is the first sort of glimpse you get at why grade is so important. We know Alex is a grade five student. So these are just what's appropriate for a grade five. If this was grade four, we'd have different math here and science wouldn't show up at high school. You get a different set of lists. So this is why grade matters because it'll prompt you for what's only appropriate for grade. So let's look at Alex's sample. And we know he's working on a number in operations in base 10. So it's that first one here. We can click and continue. We'll give it a date we'll use today. And now we get an interactive grid. It looks just like what Deb was showing you of the final sample in that, that sample for for Alex. But the idea is for every strand that you do this for, for math and reading and language, the number of lines can change. This one has 12, you'll see 12 different skills here. Sometimes it's less, sometimes it's slightly more, it's usually around 10 or so, somewhere in there. But you have to make a selection for each and every line. So you do that just by, these are all just radio buttons. You just click and it'll select. So we're going to go down and kind of recreate what Alex had. And then if it's a skill that's too high, you always have column A. So it's, that's saying unable 0% can't do this independently. No matter how many times we give this to them, they just, it's a skill that's beyond their, their current ability to do it. So you could select there. You might have noticed, I said you have to fill out every single line. I skipped line nine, you'll notice I didn't do the line nine. I did this for a reason just to show you a little aspect of this site that catches people sometimes if I save this. So up at the top there's always a, there's a lot of hidden saves. So you can always manually save. When I save, you'll notice these all turn green. Ooh, I skipped eight too. So eight and nine are white, which means I didn't make a selection in those. And I'll show you why that matters. I'm going to leave this as is for now, but let's pretend that I thought I completed this. I thought I got every single one done. If I go back to my table of contents and I want to create the strand for this. So not skill survey, that's where we were. Strand cover sheet is where you start to build out strands. Looks just like what we did when we built out our skill survey, but now we're adding a new strand in this case go to cover sheet. It'll ask what content area do you want to create a strand? We know Alex is doing math in the sample and we've got number in operations base 10. And when I click this, it's going to not be happy with me. It's going to say, no, you can't do that. It will not let you get to that strand until you've completed a, a whole skill survey. So a selection for every line. I can go back to my table of contents. It offers you the link here knows, you probably need to go back to your skill survey. So you can click here to go back to your skill surveys here I'm on my skill survey list. Now I can go here and when I come back, if you see that one's not green, it's like, oh, okay, yep, I missed those. So I'll give it a selection and a selection, I can save it again and those should turn green. So now I see all green. I know that I've made a selection of each. So now when I go back to my table of contents, I can go into my strand cover sheet list. Here's the one sitting out here that wouldn't let me in before because I didn't have a complete skill survey. But now when I click go to cover sheet, it'll let me in. It sees that I've completed my skill survey and it unlocks the string cover sheet for me. We will work this from the top to the bottom. Most of the bottom half, we'll cover in this afternoon in part B, where we start going over work description labels and data charts and brief descriptions. But we'll start at the top and we'll we'll get to, to at least show you what Deb is displayed in the the PowerPoint. So notice it's carried over everything it knows, here's the student grade, what strand we're in. And the first thing we come to is this list of learning standards. It is just a dropdown with a learning standard id. You'll find the more that you do this, you might end up just using the same learning standard again and again. So you might just know which one you want, but as a new teacher, I would be shocked if you have every single learning standard memorized in the curriculum frameworks. So there's a couple different ways you can get at this. You can just select a one and then click this big red button and it will drop in the text. So you could just keep doing those and, and check them out to see which one you might. Some some only have a few and maybe that's a good way to, if there's only one or two choices that you're, you're choosing from. But right here, this link to resource guide on that DESI materials page I pointed out earlier today, the this one you can get at this is that, that link that's in the chat, you can open up the whole resource guide for mathematics. It's 200 something pages, it's all the content, but in this case you only care about this specific strand that you're in, in this case number and operations in base 10. So we offer this link here. So when I click resource guide, a new tab will open, and from that couple hundred pages, it'll pluck out at least just the strand that I'm working in. So it'll offer up just number in operations in base 10, which runs from kindergarten to grade five in this case. So it is just a PDF. We can scroll through this and you see there was kindergarten with their entry points. You could look at this and start to think about what skill you want to select for an entry point, but there's, there's a better way to do that that I'll show you in in just a second. But we just want to scroll, scroll, scroll. In this case we're making our way back to grade five. Here's four and here are our grade five learning standards. So you could just come to this page and view all the learning standards and make your selection here. And then also look at the entry points and access skills. But I'll, I'll show you the real power of the the site in just a second of, of how to do that. So going to go back here and we see in Alex's sample, make it back. His selection was B six. So from our list, the other thing that gets people is just remember to click this big get Ls text button until you see the text attached here. If you don't click that every time you come back to this page, it's going to be stuck on select. It's going to reset itself because you didn't say, I want to use that one. You have to click that button and attach that learning standard. So once you see the text, you know it's in there and locked in and it saves as you click that, that button. So just remember there's lots of big red buttons in this site that you want to use. And this is one of them. Get LS text, get learning standard text and that's what we'll actually pull in and attach the learning standard. So that's learning standard. Let's scroll down. I'm going to skip over this for now and come back to it. Level of complexity. So this is basically asking are you doing access skills or are you doing entry points? And then it wants to know where you found that skill. In the resource guide, the actual page number, which you can just look up, you could open that, that whole resource guide tab and say I found it on page 56, which is down here at the bottom. But the power of the site is, it'll do a lot of this for you. So I'm going to skip over level of complexity for a quick second here and come back to it. Then we come to the all important measurable outcome. This is really the essence of what is the strand for MCAS-Alt. This is the skill that you're selecting from the resource guide to create that measurable outcome. It is just a text box. You can just type in here if you wanted to, if you, you know the skill, but if there's one button that you pay attention to, this is the real powerhouse of of this page and this site in general is this. Find entry points. It says entry points, that also means access skills. But it does start you at, at entry points, this button here between below the text for number five. When I click find entry points, what will happen is we get a bunch of stuff. So we get a representation of the resource guide, but now it's interactive and filtered for me. It starts you at the grade or grade span that's appropriate for your student. In this case, Alex is a grade five. You'll notice here at the top it is preselected this grade five tap. So here are for a number in operations base 10. Here are everything that's appropriate at a grade five. But as Deb mentioned, this is where you, the spiraling down to levels of, of difficulty can come into play. If I look at all these, you always want to try to start at the grade to find something that might be appropriate, but maybe these are all too complex, it's just too high for the student I'm working on. That's fine. Go down to grade four. Here we have slightly lower complexity, grade four. All of these are appropriate. They are all filtered and vetted for use. If you find it here, you can use it. You don't have to worry about is it aligned. It's the only question you have to ask yourself is what is the most appropriate and meaningful entry point that I'm selecting for the student I'm working with? If you see it here, it is okay to use it. I promise you. You can go all the way down to kindergarten and we'll do that in a second. This is where access skills show up. You can also go up, it's a rarely used direction, but you can go to higher if there's just this particular skill that you're after and it only shows up at the higher grades, you can go up. You'll notice if I go to grade five, I'm still in number and operations when I go to grade six, it does change to the number system and that might initially throw you, but that is okay. These have been vetted as appropriate skills along the continuum of, of the, the strands and domains in mathematics that as you go up and down, you might find the name technically changes, but the skill is appropriate for what you are assessing for the selection that you're currently in. So you could go up to grade six all the way up to high school if you wanted to, and at high school you notice it changes again to number and quantities. So that's the continuum and that's okay. Most people start at the grade that they're in and then go down for lower complexity. And if you are doing access skills, just remember left most tab lowest grade. So in this case it's kindergarten, sometimes it's pre-K, sometimes it's even higher than that. It's just whatever the lowest grade that's appropriate for the strand that you're in. And I click kindergarten, you'll notice the access skills show up. So here are the kindergarten, the lowest available entry points, and then access skills get their own column, lengthy column. It scrolls down quite a bit, but you will always find access skills in the leftmost tab. So let's look back at Alex. And the skill that's in his measurable outcome is Alex will round hold numbers to the nearest a hundred, using place value with 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independence. I believe this is at grade four, so I'm going to go to grade four. And here it happens fast. I'm going to pause for a second. You'll see here, this is on this rightmost column is the skill that we're, we're working on. And when I select this, what will happen is, so I'll click this, it'll grab that skill, take me back to the strand cover sheet tack on the student's first name and will put in the skill and then add in XX accuracy and XX independence. So it'll create the shell of that measurable outcome for you. Also notice we'll revisit level of complexity here. It knew it was an entry point, so it checked it off for me and I couldn't tell what page that came from by looking at those tabs, but it knows where it's generating those, those selections from. So it'll put in the page number for you. So if you use this five entry points, you never have to worry about doing level of complexity. It'll just do it for you based on whatever selection you made. You'll notice it puts in a placeholder of XX accuracy and XX independence that's intended for you to update, to give it a meaningful goal for the student in the measurable outcome. There are a few protect you from yourself features built into this where if I save this and anything that's intended to be printed and attached or submitted in the, the binder always has a, a print option or a printer friendly button. So I can go here and do print and we'll come back to this this afternoon of print multiple. But in this case, if I just wanted to print this cover sheet, it's going to say, no, you cannot. It will not let you print this until you overwrite that XX actuate. It knows that's not an appropriate measurable outcome. So it'll stop you from, from finalizing it until you give it a a meaningful goal. So let's go down and, and do just that. It's just a big text box at this point. We can just highlight and delete and type right over it so we know it's 80% accuracy and a hundred percent independence is the goal for Alex. For this strand I'm going to save. And now when I go to print, I'll get a print version of, it'll strip away all the, the banner stuff, all the web stuff, and I get something to print cleanly on an eight and a half by 11 for what I've, I've got at this point. So that's, we'll, we'll leave it there. We'll come back and pick up on this box six this afternoon. And then down at the bottom is where you start to do all that. The stuff we'll talk about this afternoon of building data charts and work description and everything that goes into filling those out. But measurable outcome is the big one. It's the, the, the thing that guides everything you're going to do at this point. And you do that right in here by clicking that find entry points button. So now I will kick it back to Deb and, and she'll go over any questions that, that we might have. But again, we'll come back this afternoon and I'll show you how to, to do the rest of it for that Alex sample that you have. 

Deb: Thank you, Kevin. Let's get into your questions. There are, so Liz wants to know, is it recommended we attend one of the writing seminars? If you have never done the writing, absolutely. Would a given student have some access skills and some entry points in any one strand or have a mix across strands? Typically, if your student is eligible to be taking the alternate assessment, they're going to have global delays and therefore they would be taking excess skills across the board. Sometimes you may find that the student is able to do some ELA language in entry points and low entry, but not usually PDP certificates are given for once. Once you hand in your submit the assessment, then you get the certificate. And that certificate is for taking into consideration the training and the time that you did. So it's not for the particular webinars. Let's see, so Julie's asking what's due for eighth grade? And again, that's right in our educator's manual, the only thing that a ninth grader can do, Julie, would be science. Everything else is three, eight or 10. Okay? The educator manual is the best thing to have. You might want to download that for yourself. Abby, we wanted to know what NBTB six stands for. It's just the standard number. That's all that's, it's just an abbreviation for the standard number. That's what, when Kevin was showing you where to find the standards or you could just go to that dropdown and choose a standard. We don't spend a lot of time on the standard because all the standards, all the entry points have been aligned to the standards. So it's, it's not something we spend a lot of time with. It's number, number and base 10. Anything for what is required for your grades, that's an easy lookup for you, right? Just go right to that educator manual and each grade is laid out for you. Instead of being bunched together like I did it, each grade will be like grade three and then it has a specific requirements. So Edwards asking, if I have a student who took the high school MCM CA with accommodation but is struggling to pass, would they take an MCAS-Alt? No, you need to keep working with this student and retaking the MCAS And that's definitely a question you could send to mcas@mass.gov and talk to Rob about the accommodations that the student might need. So Daniel's asking, can, can parents refuse to have the child participate in the MCAS fault? No, there isn't any refusal. And especially for MCAS-Alt, it's not like you're keeping them home for a day as the, you know, session one, two or 3 MCAS-Alt is integrated into your daily instruction. So you, unless they're not going to send their student to school, if they're going to public school, then their student is going to be assessed. So Kristen wants to know, will the next session be in person so that we can show our materials to get feedback. I think what you're talking about is the review sessions that are held in January and then late February, early March. That's when you get to bring anything you've been working on and your, the training specialists or the teacher consultants can give you feedback. Thank you for reminding me to say that it's very important to get time, make sure you make your administrator aware that you need that time to work on your, to get everything together to work on it and, and not be interrupted. The state will send out those flyers just like you've got a, a flyer for this. They'll send one out for you to give you those dates. Some of, some of your questions are, you know, basically I have a student who, and those are going to be required to go through the department. They're more specific to your situation. So I'm just going to answer the questions about the training that we did, Christine, for grade five. There are two content areas. Do you pick one or both? For grade five, there's more than two content areas. So you have ELA and then you have math and then you have science. So make sure you go to that educator's manual and look up what is available for what you have to do for grade five requirements. It's right there. Okay. Oh, Doreen, this is a great one. Kevin, you want to answer this one? If two teachers are working on a student's alt, can you both create a Cognia account or do you want to share one or would you like me to Sure, 

Kevin: Yeah, that is, that is a good question and absolutely you can do that. So the, the question is that comes up is, is usually what if they're splitting content? One teacher's doing ELA, another's doing math. How do we do that? You can technically share an account and share the login. The the problem is if you find yourself on the same page at the same time, logged in twice, you're going to overwrite information because all of this turns into a binder at the end. I do recommend just splitting it. You, you can create an account for you. The second teacher can create their own account. You both put the same student in your student list and parse out the content of ELA or math or strands, however you want, and just compile it into that binder at the end. That way you get your own distinct kind of work that you can work on without having to, to share it with somebody. That is what I recommend is it's two separate accounts, same student, and both. 

Deb: Thank you. The question is, how much time should schools be giving teachers to prep and work on alts? That's always a great question. It really depends on, on your, how many students you have. So I think that if you are, you'll have to really look at what you're doing. Sometimes some people like to just gather all their information and then once a week put it in. Sometimes you have to work with your administrator to come go to them with a solution. Like, I have three students, this is what I need to do and I need time to input this information. So just figure out, do it for a couple of weeks and see what it, what it looks like for you. And the best thing is to set up a system for yourself. Like have, we'll talk this afternoon about, you know, how to collect the accuracy and independence and the primary evidence. But the best thing I can tell you, and, and I think that the teacher consultants would agree, is having a system, knowing where everything is, where you're going to put it, and then being able to, to input that information so you don't get too far behind on it. So work with your administrator, tell them you will need time, but I would go with a solution. They always like it when you come with a solution then when you just have a problem. So Erin is asking about using touch math and can she use the numbers that have touch points on them? Yes, you can. That's how they're doing the math. That's what they you should use. So if you're, yeah, go ahead. 

Kevin: So we, we are coming to the, the end of our, our session. So I, I think what we'll do is, is we'll, we'll wrap up now, but we will stay online and, and wrap up the, the, the written responses and the Q&A So feel free to still put your questions in there, but we will end the, the spoken session of this and we'll stay on for the, the Q&A. Thank you. And, and just a reminder that use that same link when you come back this afternoon at one for the session two, part B.