The WIU Pulse
The WIU Pulse features an in-depth look at the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit. Join us to learn about this vibrant educational service agency and the many programs and services it offers!
The WIU Pulse
Curriculum Services at the WIU
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Did you ever wonder about the curriculum services offered at the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit? In this episode, we are going to unpack what the WIU Curriculum Services Team does and how they are making an impact.
00:00:00 Speaker 1
Did you ever wonder about the curriculum services offered at the Westmoreland Intermediate unit? Today, we're going to unpack what they do and how the WIU Curriculum Services Team is making an impact.
00:00:18 Speaker 2
Welcome to the WIU Pulse, the podcast where we focus on the Westmoreland Intermediate Unit, a thriving Educational Service Agency delivering supportive services to schools in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and beyond.
00:00:32 Speaker 2
Join us as we take the pulse of this vibrant organization and explore the many ways it impacts teaching and learning across every facet of education. And now,
00:00:43 Speaker 2
here's your host, Dr. Jason Conway.
00:00:48 Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to the first episode of the WIU Pulse. I'm pleased to serve as the WIU Executive Director and to be with you. Today's conversation is all about curriculum, services and joining me today is Tim Hammill, Director of Curriculum.
00:01:05 Speaker 1
Services.
00:01:05 Speaker 1
Welcome, Tim, to our program.
00:01:08 Speaker 3
Thank you, Doctor Conway. Good to.
00:01:09 Speaker 2
be here. Tell us.
00:01:10 Speaker 1
A little bit about what you do here at the Westmoreland Intermediate unit.
00:01:15 Speaker 3
Well, I have the pleasure of of leading the curriculum services team here at the IU.
00:01:22 Speaker 3
Being director of that particular group is exciting. We have a lot of different things that we do; a lot of different projects; a lot of different things constantly happening - and each team member involved is kind of involved in the different piece or part of it. But we all come together in certain areas as well.
00:01:40 Speaker 3
So I'm sure we'll be talking a little today about some of those projects, but the staff itself, we have, there's we're small staff there is really only a total of six of us on the team, Laurie Andrews, Lauren Cunningham and Diane Fierle are curriculum supervisors. Then we have Sue Soltis
00:02:01 Speaker 3
who is our curriculum support specialist who does a lot of our
00:02:04 Speaker 3
Help desk support for anything curriculum related in terms of any issues or problems. And then Jenny Moore is our secretary. She kind of holds us all together, keeps everything running and really keeps us all organized. So yeah, that's our team and they are all quite hard working.
00:02:22 Speaker 1
It's truly incredible.
00:02:24 Speaker 1
You know the amount of services that you're able to offer with such a small staff and you know today we are going to unpack, you know, some of those services that we offer. Before we get into some of the programs and services that we offer, let's talk a little bit about the positioning
00:02:41 Speaker 1
of the intermediate unit when it comes to the Department of Education, what intermediate units across the state serve as the intermediary between the Department of Ed and its member services when it comes to curriculum services? Tim, talk to us a little bit about the role of the Department of Ed and how we provide services not only to the Department of Ed.
00:03:02 Speaker 1
And also to our member school districts.
00:03:04 Speaker 3
Right. So that's a big part of what we do. We really are that liaison.
00:03:08 Speaker 3
Curriculum Services specifically handles things like school improvement. Any school that has a designation of ATSI or CSI - any of those school improvement designations - we are responsible for helping them navigate that and giving them support in the work they do to improve.
00:03:28 Speaker 3
To build their plans to to move forward anything related to testing, you know, yearly testing all the high stakes testing that happens within the state, we're here to support that as well. That includes the classroom diagnostic testing and things that are available throughout the.
00:03:44 Speaker 3
year.
00:03:45 Speaker 3
Stem is a huge statewide initiative that we support and we do a lot of work with our school districts on that specific area, supporting state mandates. That's really what it's all about. Many of those mandates come through our channel and our school districts most of the time need a little bit of extra support and help in navigating that.
00:04:06 Speaker 3
And getting through.
00:04:07 Speaker 3
The daily understanding of how to implement what the state is saying or how to even understand some of what the state is saying. So a lot of times we're interpreters, we're we interpret what's coming down the Pike and help get the message across this, the new STEELS standards that have come out. School districts are adapting and modifying their science.
00:04:27 Speaker 3
Curriculum to support those we are doing a ton of training right now with school districts on how to move those standards into place and how to work with teachers to make it work in the classroom. So a lot of the training we're doing is in that.
00:04:44 Speaker 3
Structured literacy as well is another area where training has to happen, and we're here to deliver it and ready to do
00:04:51 Speaker 1
so. So it sounds like, you know your team really deals with anything that deals with instruction assessment and curriculum, right? And that, that, that triangle of supporting
00:05:03 Speaker 1
school districts and students.
00:05:06 Speaker 1
You know, within our Commonwealth is where curriculum services across the state and all intermediate units really kind of operate in that space, right? And you know, in addition to that intermediate units, all for specialized programs to support curriculum instruction and assessment. And one of the most crowning jewels here at this intermediate
00:05:26 Speaker 1
unit is our eAcademy.
00:05:28 Speaker 1
And it's been an operation for, I believe, 18 years, right? And you were one of the original architects. In addition to working with the member school districts. And it's still running strong and without the Academy districts would have struggled during the pandemic. And so talk a little bit about the Academy.
00:05:46
This.
00:05:48 Speaker 3
It's an exciting program that, as you said, has been around a long time and.
00:05:53 Speaker 3
You know, programs don't.
00:05:55 Speaker 3
Stick around if they don't do a job. If they aren't working and that's it's really exciting to know that the Academy has survived this long and has supported our school districts for this long, and I think the reason why it has been so successful.
00:06:10 Speaker 3
Is that it?
00:06:10 Speaker 3
Really is all about building capacity in our districts.
00:06:14 Speaker 3
To do online learning e-learning any kind of distance learning, it's not just about cyber
00:06:22 Speaker 3
location. That's a major hunk of it, but really it comes down to building their capacity to deliver on their own. Our goal is to kind of empower them to do what they need to do, to be able to offer their own online offerings, you know, to do that, it takes training.
00:06:42 Speaker 3
We have trained over the 18 years, probably close to 1000 teachers in this area, and that's actually one of the reasons why when you say we did so well during the pandemic in this region, part of that is because we had so many teachers who understood online education already.
00:06:59 Speaker 1
Mm-hmm.
00:07:00 Speaker 3
They knew what to do in that realm. They already had some background in training, so it wasn't quite the leap as it was for some other areas. And yes, it was still difficult and we still had, you know, it's still a struggle, no doubt. But I think a little less because of that. You know, we've touched thousands and thousands of students.
00:07:21 Speaker 3
Across the years with this program, we have impacted a number of school districts in.
00:07:28 Speaker 3
That way, and on top of that, just the amount of training that's happened for educators that's out there still. You know, it happens even if they're not teachers for us in the Academy, they're teachers within their districts who have that skill and that capability and that that empowers the districts further.
00:07:44 Speaker 1
Right.podcast Transcript
00:07:47 Speaker 1
So let's.
00:07:48 Speaker 1
We just focus a little bit on the students. You know, when you mentioned, you know, students can take as little as one course for the entire year or they can take a full complement. So talk to us a little bit about, you know how this meets student
00:08:01 Speaker 3
needs, right? It's an extremely flexible situation because.
00:08:05 Speaker 3
As you said, we can offer one single course or if a student needs a full load, we can offer that as well. And it really does serve to give school districts a way to say to a, let's say a student comes to them and says I'm going to leave for cyber education, I'm going to cyber school. We have that.
00:08:21 Speaker 1
MHM.
00:08:25 Speaker 3
Offering we can provide a full load of courses at a fraction of the cost that it costs to send them to a cyber charter.
00:08:35 Speaker 3
And that is a big relief to the districts we have over the 18 years, millions of dollars, millions of taxpayer dollars have been saved with the implementation of the program. It's kind of hard to put a finger on exactly how much, because it's just.
00:08:44 Speaker 1
M.
00:08:51 Speaker 3
There's been so much action over the years that has saved students from leaving that, you know, if we tally that all up and, you know, we are well into the millions of dollars of savings over the years. So that's powerful and but then it's also helpful for that.
00:09:07 Speaker 3
Students who wants to advance wants to move forward, needs that extra
00:09:10 Speaker 1
next
00:09:11 Speaker 3
credit needs to to work a little faster and they can take advanced courses through us. They can take, you know, anything they want to move. Let's say it's a gifted student that needs another level beyond what can be offered in the current school. We can offer that to them.
00:09:28 Speaker 1
This program and those who instruct these courses.
00:09:32 Speaker 1
There are many of them in our county.
00:09:34 Speaker 3
That’s right, they're our local teachers and that's unique. That is very unique to how we deliver our.
00:09:35
1st.
00:09:40 Speaker 3
Program we took the time to train teachers. We took the time to teach them how to teach. We taught them how to do the instructional design components so that they could build courses and build them effectively. That's half the battle is having really good coursework. You know, a lot of times, even the stuff that people
00:10:01 Speaker 3
purchase. You know, of course, work that's purchased isn't necessarily all that great. We are in a constant state of evolving in that content developed.
00:10:11 Speaker 3
And then we train our teachers to do so. And we monitor that on a regular basis. So yeah.
00:10:17 Speaker 1
So let's shift our gears a little bit because you know intermediate units, you know not only support you - here, over 46,000 students within the county you know and statewide just hundreds of thousands of
00:10:32 Speaker 1
Students. Let's talk a little bit about teachers and how intermediate units support professional learning for teachers. And one of the ways in which we do that is all for continuing professional education courses, right? Just a little bit about how that
00:10:47 Speaker 3
works, so continuing professional education or CPE as we call it is.
00:10:53 Speaker 3
Something that we offer - sanctioned courses, they're sanctioned through the Department of Education as credit toward permanent certification.
00:11:02 Speaker 3
And we have quite a selection of courses that we offer and we have people who take those courses all over the state. So, you know, they're online, so they're accessible beyond our border here and they're courses that allow people to achieve that certification, that level 2 certification that they
00:11:23 Speaker 3
Need. They can take a large portion of their credits through that. They qualify as graduate level courses.
00:11:32 Speaker 3
But they do have to be approved by the department, so it's not that we just can't create a bunch of courses and throw them out there. They are submitted for approval by the state and then offered up as sanctioned.
00:11:42 Speaker 1
credit. Well, thank you. I appreciate you sharing that because you know there's many maybe listening
00:11:43
OK. Yeah.
00:11:49 Speaker 1
to us today
00:11:50 Speaker 1
that never even realized the intermediate unit
00:11:52 Speaker 1
offers those courses. And I know that those can be accessed through our website in terms of you know what courses are being offered and so on. And you know one of the best things about working for an intermediate unit is,
00:11:57 Speaker 3
right?
00:12:05 Speaker 1
It’s that we're idea incubators here when it comes to how we better support our school districts and their students. And we always like to joke here at the intermediate unit that we have to consistently look around the corner for our districts to see what's coming so we can better support them.
00:12:25 Speaker 1
You know what their needs are. And one of those areas continues to be professional development and how do we improve the experience for educators and professional learning? We did a lot of research here and part of that research has been
00:12:45 Speaker 1
gamified professional learning. And we've started after many years of research and a new initiative called Professional Learning. And you call this P.L.A.Y., right? So Tim, talk to us about what P.L.A.Y. is and how that's going to impact professional learning
00:13:05 Speaker 1
into the future.
00:13:06 Speaker 3
So yeah, this has been a lot of our focus here in the last
00:13:12 Speaker 3
four years post pandemic, one of the things that we talked about with our schools and with our districts in general was how do we recover, what do we do, what are the things that we have to do to dig ourselves out of the hole. That was the pandemic we
00:13:32 Speaker 3
identified professional learning as a major component of that recovery because we knew teachers needed to be brought up to speed on how to accelerate learning for students, how to bring things
00:13:45 Speaker 3
forward. We identified barriers to professional learning that have been a part of our existence here for quite some time now. The barriers of time, the barriers of space to do professional learning, the just the focus on it just has not been able to be what it needs to be
00:14:07 Speaker 3
successful, and so we set our sights on what do we need to do programmatically to support that? How do we redesign professional learning, redesign the way we deliver it, the way we build it, the way we offer it.
00:14:24 Speaker 3
So that it's more effective and it has a bigger impact long term, more of an ongoing approach to professional learning. So you know we very early on identified that the one stop shop or one stop professional learning event makes very little impact.
00:14:44 Speaker 3
And that only those things that are ongoing.
00:14:46 Speaker 3
and can be done over a long period of time really have an impact. So, whatever we were going to do needed to be done to offer it up beyond those in-service days, beyond the rigid environment that we've had up until now. So, we looked at what kind of a system do we need to do that.
00:15:07 Speaker 3
So, it was definitely going to need to be an online, asynchronous accessible component on demand for you.
00:15:14 Speaker 3
Then it was how do we build all this content? How do we create all of this? So, we we found a partner in this in a company called Alludo and they built a platform for professional learning that allows us to create content. But what they brought to the table for us was thousands of hours of existing.
00:15:34 Speaker 3
content that allowed us to move things along much faster. We were able to hit the ground running with viable learning activities for our staff.
00:15:44 Speaker 3
Across the districts that was meaningful and that we didn't have to spend five years developing content before we had a library that was worth having since starting, we've developed a lot of our own content. We continue to do that, but the system allows us to keep adding on and building the library as we go.
00:16:05 Speaker 3
What's different about this, and I think what really makes it impactful is that it's delivered in a gamified environment, meaning.
00:16:16 Speaker 3
when you take an activity in this system, you get points awarded to you. You take a certain number of activities. You might earn a badge, you might earn some sort of credential that goes along with it, and all of that is tracked and points add up. In total over time you can see everybody gets their own portfolio
00:16:36 Speaker 3
where they can see their professional learning and what they've done and what they've accomplished in their time in the system. So the way we accomplished that is unique.
00:16:49 Speaker 3
But more importantly, the activities in the way they're structured are done in a micro learning approach.
00:16:56 Speaker 3
And what that basically means is we're not doing activities that last for 1/2 an hour, an hour or longer. We're doing 5 minutes to 15 minutes. We're doing at the most, maybe 2025 minutes at the the longest time frame.
00:17:14 Speaker 3
But by keeping the structure built that way, we give people flexibility so if you have 5 minutes here, I can do this activity before I get started for the day. Or I can at the end of the day tack something on. I can accomplish that and get that done. It's much more digestible. It's much easier for teachers.
00:17:34 Speaker 3
You have such a busy schedule to
00:17:38 Speaker 3
fit it within their day and when they have a moment they can do something of value, and that tallies up. You'd be surprised how fast 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there, 15 minutes there adds up to a valuable collection of learning. So yeah, it's a unique system, one that we're, you know, last.
00:17:39 Speaker 1
MHM.
00:17:58 Speaker 3
Last year, we did over 15,000 hours.
00:18:01 Speaker 1
of professional hours.
00:18:01 Speaker 3
15 and you know, I think our total of educators in the system was around 2000 educators.
00:18:11 Speaker 1
Mm-hmm.
00:18:12 Speaker 3
So yeah, you do the math. That's a lot of time per person in the system and we feel it was extremely successful. And this year has kicked off with the same kind of intensity and we still have, you know, a great level of usage and we’re excited about what's coming, more development of content and more partners.
00:18:16 Speaker 1
Yeah.
00:18:32 Speaker 3
In it, we've actually partnered with
00:18:35 Speaker 3
another educational service agency out of state in Illinois, Kane County Regional Office of Education. They loved what we're doing, that they wanted to try it themselves. And so they've been very successful launching and we continue to work with
00:18:52 Speaker 1
them and I was going to ask, you know what, where do you see this being
00:18:55 Speaker 1
then, five years, like, what's the vision five years from now?
00:18:57
Hmm.
00:18:59 Speaker 3
So, my hope is that we have more
00:19:03 Speaker 3
individuals in the system, across the state, are spread so that we have a greater impact, but more importantly, I want to see content development coming from a larger audience. Right now it's our staff building. It's the Alludo staff building into our environment.
00:19:23 Speaker 3
I would love to see
00:19:24 Speaker 3
the classroom teacher in the school district, somewhere on the other side of the state who has something to offer, have a place to offer that piece. They know the piece they do so well, that classroom strategy, they have to capture it, be able to put it in the
00:19:40 Speaker 1
system and offer it. So if someone's interested in building content,do they just reach out to you and say I want to learn more about
00:19:46 Speaker 1
P.L.A.Y. and how I can contribute content?
00:19:49 Speaker 3
Absolutely. I mean we're at that stage where
00:19:51 Speaker 3
we’re looking at ways to make that happen. We're trying to figure out how we reach those people. How do we get to those people who really want to become content developers, instructional designers, people who really want to share what they know?
00:20:07 Speaker 3
There's a need and we are excited about where that's going. So yeah, if you're out there and you're listening to this, give us a.
00:20:15 Speaker 3
Call, yeah.
00:20:16 Speaker 1
And you know.
00:20:17 Speaker 1
One last question I have, Tim, as we begin to wrap up, you know our session is what, what do you see as a challenge?
00:20:26 Speaker 1
For the intermediate unit. What's the greatest challenge that Curriculum Services faces?
00:20:34 Speaker 3
That's a great question. I think for us it's a challenge to constantly have to
00:20:42 Speaker 3
strive to modify and adapt to the changing environment.
00:20:48 Speaker 3
You know, it's actually part of what's so exciting about working here in an ICU setting is that the work always evolves and changes, but that's a challenge to keep up with. We listen. We listen a lot. We hear our districts talk about what they need. We want them to talk to us.
00:21:07 Speaker 3
More about what they need. We never get enough of that. And the more we know, the more we hear, the more we take in, the more we can build valuable experiences and valuable programs that can support what they do.
00:21:24 Speaker 3
You know, I've said this a number of times to folks out there in the field that if you could hear the conversation around an IU planning table, you would know how much we care.
00:21:35 Speaker 1
So true.
00:21:36 Speaker 3
We say almost always in our conversation - What can we do to help? What can we do to make this better? What can we do to help the districts do this? It's always a part of our conversation. And if there's anything I can leave you with today, it's that you know, we're here to serve and we're here to do whatever it is our districts need us to do.
00:21:56 Speaker 1
Well, Tim, thank you so much for your time today and how many
00:22:00 Speaker 1
Years have you been working here for the Westmoreland Intermediate unit? This
00:22:04 Speaker 3
will be my 19th
00:22:06 Speaker 1
Year. Wow, 19 years. Thank you for your service and your leadership throughout the county as well as throughout the state. You know this intermediate
00:22:07 Speaker 3
unit
00:22:16 Speaker 1
and it has benefited so much from your service and and your leadership and your vision. You epitomize
00:22:27 Speaker 1
an IU employee when it comes to being of service and to be an innovator. Tim, thanks again for joining us today. And if anyone's interested in learning more about Curriculum Services or some of the offerings of how to get involved, how would they get in contact with you, Tim?
00:22:44 Speaker 3
Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Anybody
00:22:46 Speaker 3
interested can drop me an e-mail here at the IU. My e-mail address is
00:22:56 Speaker 3
thammill@wiu7.org.
00:23:00 Speaker 1
Thank you, Tim. And for those who have listened today, thank you so much for joining us to learn more about the Westmoreland Intermediate unit. Please visit wiu7.org. Again, that's wiu.org and follow The WIU.
00:23:16 Speaker 1
Pulse for more great insights, share with friends and join us again as we keep our finger on the pulse of education.