Standard 1

Conclusion and Next Steps

Looking across the findings from the self-study conducted by the preliminary administrative services, reading/literacy specialist, school counseling, and school nursing programs highlights that, based on the available data sources, overall, completers of our programs are prepared to perform as professional educators with the capacity to support access for all learners.

Areas of Strength:
As program faculty engaged in self-study in response to the AAQEP standards, they did so with a long history of successful accreditation from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Many of the findings from Standard 1 confirmed that the strengths of the programs aligned with our School’s mission and goals. In particular, given the high percentage of students in our region who are emergent bilinguals and the diverse range of cultural backgrounds they represent, as an educational unit, our mission is to prepare educators to be leaders in diverse communities. Findings from across the QAR highlighted the ways in which all of our programs emphasize the development of culturally sustaining pedagogy. The self-study programs engaged in led to findings of additional program strengths.

For the Preliminary Administrative Services Credential program, the findings from the faculty’s analysis of three cycles of California Administrative Professionals’ Assessment (CalAPA) in response to 1c show just how well the way the program prepares future administrators to engage in culturally responsive practices--and to support the teachers they work with in doing the same.  As the results showed, while in the program, candidates develop the ability to have detailed conversations with teachers about the classroom context, student assets and learning needs, as well as content-specific learning goals and student work to collect as they plan for the teaching and learning observation. These kinds of productive conversations are exactly what we hope our future administrators will be able to facilitate in order to support the learning of students in our region.

In a similar way, the Reading/Literacy Program’s findings in response to 1c highlighted the ways that program prepares its candidates to use culturally responsive practices when working with students on their literacy development, along with the impact of language acquisition and literacy development on learning. Seeing that emphasis play out in the findings from the data analysis helps us to know that our unit-wide goals are being realized.

The findings of the School Counseling program in response to Standard 1d highlight that program’s emphasis on service and support. When analyzing data from the comprehensive exam essays, faculty found that students’ responses demonstrated their ability to set specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time-bound goals based on the data provided within the vignette, which also closely aligns with the particulars of Aspect D. Students’ responses included plans of specific data that they could collect and analyze while engaging in individual and systemic level interventions to support their clients to meet their goals, demonstrating the ways in which the program prepares its candidates to engage in meaningful continuous improvement to support their transition into professional school counselors. 

The results of the School Nursing Program’s analysis demonstrated how the program provides a smooth and meaningful route towards earning a school nursing credential for candidates all over California. The data revealed how effectively we are doing that and how the program’s flexibility allows it to serve geographical areas across the state. As highlighted in the response to Standard 1a, findings from the midterm and final field-based evaluation demonstrated that, upon program completion, candidates demonstrated significant growth in all areas, meaning the School Nurse Credential Program content was effective in meeting the SNSC Program goals and objectives. Given that students enrolled in the program are non-matriculated students who are currently employed full-time as school nurses while taking online classes in the program, we find this to be particularly impressive.

Areas for Growth:
While the findings of our analyses did highlight the success of the work our programs do to prepare our completers for their future roles, we also discovered several areas for improvement, particularly in terms of how we collect data on the work we do.

As we engaged in this self-study, one of the biggest take-aways we had is that we do not have a unit-wide systematic approach to collecting data from any of our key stakeholder groups--completers, K-12 partners, employers. This pertains to our findings from both Standard 1 and Standard 2. Although between the CSU Educator Quality Center and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, surveys are administered to program completers, employers, and year-out professionals, we discovered that their measures do not always align with the analysis we were trying to do in response to the Standard 1 aspects. Another challenge is that, in many cases, we were unable to disaggregate the data in a way that made the findings meaningful to us. While we do plan to advocate for revision both with the CSU survey and the CCTC survey, we also realize that we need to develop a systematic, unit-wide approach to collecting and analyzing data related to our programs. But the result was that, for this QAR, we were not always able to capture the perspectives of each key stakeholder group. More often than not, we relied on the perspectives of our faculty and our candidates.

Moving forward, we intend to develop unit-wide surveys that can be administered annually to each stakeholder group that will include both general programs about the work our institution does as a whole and program-specific questions. The hope is that this will allow us to collect data that will be useful at both levels but that will not lead to survey-fatigue from administering too many surveys, which is already a concern given the administration of both the CCTC and CSU Educator Quality Center surveys. 

On the individual program level, as highlighted in the responses and in the table below, we plan to begin holding annual focus group discussions with key stakeholders as a way to gather additional data. Ideally, these will occur after the administration of the surveys so that survey responses can inform what gets asked in the focus group discussions. We see these discussions as a way to both gather valuable information about how we can improve our program and a way to continue to build relationships with our completers, P12 partners, and employers of our alumni.

Additionally, in order to then make the necessary changes to program practices, program faculty plan to spend time examining current coursework, assessments, and evaluation tools to ensure that coursework aligns with expected outcomes, that assessments provide a valid way for candidates to demonstrate mastery of those outcomes, and to ensure that the tools used for evaluation actually measure what they are intended to measure. As they do so, faculty will also engage in inquiry, examining student work across courses to ensure the validity and reliability of both the assignments used and the tools used to evaluate those assignments. We envision that this work will take time and be ongoing as program faculty will need to try new approaches, examine their effectiveness, make revisions, and then implement those revisions. Related to this work, each of the programs highlighted here is part of a graduate program within the university, which means it also goes through a Program Review that includes designing a Student Outcome Assessment Plan (SOAP) and analyzing student performance on key assignments. Moving forward, we will work with programs to ensure that assignments selected as part of their SOAP also align with AAQEP aspects. For some programs, such as the Reading/Literacy Specialist, this alignment already exists. But for others, this is another way to strengthen the continuous improvement process.

To support faculty in their efforts, as a unit, we will continue holding our Data Summits to further conversations about how to effectively use data to inform program practices.

Standard 1: Candidate and Completer Performance Program Next Steps