Lots of little tweaks to the new reporting functionality this week. It may not be clever to share this info with you, but it may be helpful, so here goes.

In this recent post, we introduced the new district SMART Goal feature with the brief description below. There's a bit to this feature, so we wanted to dedicate a separate post to dive into it a little deeper to help you understand why and how you can start taking advantage of district SMART Goals.

The new district SMART Goal feature helps facilitate a common practice district-wide. For example, say that a STAR Data Collection Report shows that Example School District could work on improving their alignment with Thinking while Example Elementary School sees that they could improve Application. Example SD wants all their schools, at a minimum, to work on improving their alignment with the Thinking indicators. Example ES wants to focus on improving their alignment with the Application indicators. To accomplish this, two SMART Goals can be created at different levels:

1. Example SD creates a district SMART Goal with a focus on the Thinking indicators which Example ES and all the other schools in the district inherit and use in their Powerful Teaching and Learning practices (i.e. go on STAR Learning Walks and create STAR Lesson Plans)
2. Example ES creates a school SMART Goal with a focus on the Application indicators which they independently manage and use
   

The district SMART Goal has the added benefit that the district can view aggregate observation data in order to check district-wide progress on improving their alignment and to reflect on and share their learning. Previously, schools would all have to create their own Thinking SMART Goals and there would be no systematic way of aggregating the data at the district level. Schools would have to provide this manually. Now, schools' users can use the district SMART Goal with no interruption to their current workflow and district administrators get access to real data that they can use to make informed decisions on their improvement efforts.

Now, let's dive into how to actually create these.

The goal of STAR Online, by and through Powerful Teaching and Learning best practices, is to give you an online solution that helps you develop your art.

• No new features last week :(

• SMART Goals: Added a Collect button for School Admins on district SMART Goals
• SMART Goals: Adjusted the width on the district building's SMART Goals panel for a better fit
• SMART Goals: Fixed an issue in which Members were receiving an error message when trying to access the SMART Goals page to view the chart
• Public Site: Fixed the broken Forgot? link that opens the password reset form on the Login page

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress." - Frederick Douglas

It a was a bit of a struggle, a bit, but we released some pretty cool updates last week to the SMART Goal functionality. Progress! See below. We'll post some more details on these updates soon.

• SMART Goals: Schools and districts can now be set up in a Parent <> Child relationship that allows the "District building" to create district-wide SMART Goals that all the district's schools can work from, and they can also view the SMART Goal charts for all the schools which allows them to quickly view progress