Some changes to the lesson planner this week, among other things, to better help you light that fire in your students.

You might have noticed that we recently published updated reporting functionality for the Building version of STAR Online. This update enhances the robustness of reporting and makes it available on the Home page. Now, instead of only being able to view a chart and learning walk scores and notes for just one SMART Goal, you can pull from the all the data collected for your building and then filter down by SMART Goal, time range, or STAR Indicators. We've also added a table that shows the n numbers and broken the report up into three modular pieces - Progress, Usage, and Reflections - so that you can view and export any or all of them.

Here are the five key parts:

1. Reports: The Progress report shows the chart and table, and allows you to view comparison groups such as time ranges or STAR Data Collections. The Usage report shows who been conducting STAR Learning Walks and how frequently. The Reflection report shows anonymous observation notes, grouped by score, and overall reflection and commitment data.
2. Observation Filters: Expand the panel to narrow your results set down to a specific SMART Goal, time range, or group of focus Indicators.
3. Set Comparison Ranges: Use this feature to compare your data set with another time range or STAR Data Collection.
4. Chart Views: Toggle between Separate and Combined to view 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s separately or combined results of 1s/2s and 3s/4s.
5. Export to PDF: Download a PDF file of the report once you have the view you like and want to save it or share it with others.
   

Combine this functionality with the district SMART Goal functionality for an extremely powerful look into the progress of your Powerful Teaching and Learning effort.

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
  

We believe there's also much pleasure to be gained from useful knowledge. Hopefully you get a little of that here.

We recently published new Learning Walk forms for the eight criteria of the Washington State Teacher Evaluation System. These forms align the research and experience of Powerful Teaching and Learning with the observable elements of the Washington State Teacher Evaluation criteria. They allow you to focus on improving your instructional practices for the STAR Indicators that directly relate to the eight state criteria.

The new forms are accessible on the Home page and the Documents module. To use,  simply print them out and do offline learning walks. We are in the process of building out the ability to do these digitally through the Learning Walks module as well.

Crosswalk documents that show how the Powerful Teaching and Learning Indicators align with the "State 8" as well as the approved Professional Practices Frameworks (Danielson, Marzano, and 5D+) are also available on the STES Crosswalks page.

Pop Quiz: How many real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. each year?

Hopefully all of you are some of the millions that have bought and decorated a tree by now!

Pop Quiz: What was the first text message ever sent?

Spreading the warm and fuzzies.