Instructions for ACSD VI Morning Activities
Looking Back, Looking Forward
In this activity, teams will review their community school vision and the activities that are
already underway. Based on this information, they will then fill in the “Activities” and
“Outcomes” sections of the morning planning template.
1. As a team, review past thinking about your site’s vision of a community school.
Identify the key medium-term (1-2 years) outcomes that you hoped to achieve.
2. Quickly survey the breadth of your activities.
a. For Coastside, see if you had goals within each of the Five Conditions for
Learning. Use these categories for color coding your cards in step 3.
(1) academic learning
(2) youth development
(3) health and well-being
(4) family-engagement
(5) community engagement.
b. Redwood City has selected the categories listed below.
3. Write your chosen outcomes on the blank, color-coded cards, and place them in
the appropriate boxes on the planning template.
Color 1 = Academic Learning
Color 2 = Youth Development
Color 3 = Health and Well-being/Comprehensive Integrated Services
Color 4 = Family & Community Engagement (Shared Leadership here)
Color 5 = Extended Day Programming
4. As a team, identify the activities that are in place to address each category of
outcomes. Write them on the color-coded cards and place them in the
appropriate boxes on the planning template.
Prioritizing Outcomes
In this activity, teams will consider their existing outcomes, as well as other community
school outcomes that have been adopted nationally. They will then identify high priority
outcomes that will serve as the focus for their evaluation planning this morning.
1. Add national outcomes cards to existing outcomes on the planning template
(they have the same color coding by category). Review them. Remove national
cards that overlap with existing outcomes.
2. Each team member places a sticker on his/her 3 highest priority outcomes.
3. Remove lower priority cards from each category.
4. Note which three cards have the most stickers. These outcomes will be the
focus of the next activity.
“Evaluate what you want to occur
- because what gets measured gets produced.”
James A. Belasco
Business Consultant
CCSP, UC Davis
What’s the Evidence?
In this activity, teams will explore indicators for the outcomes identified as “high priority”
in the previous activity. They will discuss how they’ll know that outcome is occurring.
They will then identify data sources for each indicator, and begin to determine next steps
for collecting the information.
1. Teams break into small groups, one for each “high priority” outcome.
2. Each group discusses:
 How will we know this outcome is occurring?
 What will be different?
 What could we measure now and later?
 What is already being measured that we could use as a proxy?
3. Each group looks through the sample indicator cards to see if any of those measures
might provide evidence of how well you are achieving the desired outcome.
4. Assess whether these indicators are adequate. Do they really help you learn how
well you are doing with respect to the outcome? Do they reflect the focus of
activities? Will they be convincing to key audiences?
5. Consider whether to adopt additional indicators. Work towards having 2 indicators
for each outcome. Create a card for each new indicator and note the possible
source(s) of related data at the bottom if you have that information [existing indicator
cards have data sources on the bottom].
6. After (15) minutes come back together. Each small group presents their indicators
and their rationale for them to the rest of the team. If necessary, presenters can
ask other team-members for help identifying data sources.
“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure,
passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.”
William James
American philosopher and psychologist, leader of the philosophical movement of Pragmatism, 1842-1910
CCSP, UC Davis