Event ID: 2812766 Event Started: 2/17/2016 8:00:00 PM ---------- Please stand by for realtime captions. >> Please stand by for realtime captions. >> This is Robbin Bull with an CDB and we will give just another minute as people come into the room and then we will get started. Sam, your audio was working? >> Can you hear me? >> No. I'm kidding. >> Can you hear me? >> With technology these days, it's a challenge sometimes. As people are experiencing, we have everyone on mute to keep the background noise at a minimum. Please feel free to use the chat if you need to communicate and I am going to start the recording in just a moment and that will be your queue Gail and Sam to go ahead and start when you are ready. >> Welcome everybody. I'm glad you joined us today. For those of you who don't know me I am Sam Morgan and I'm the appropriate -- program director at NCDB and work with Gail on a number of things but the main issue that Gail and I work on together as the network engagement area. Probably everybody knows Gail . She is shaking her head. >> I just know everyone. >> You just know everyone. It's been a pleasure working with Gail this last year and thinking about how we work together better and more closely and more effectively and efficiently at the network. I will kickoffs today and Gail and I will go back and forth with the content. Use the chat pod to ask questions. We have some question pools to engage you and get information from you. That will hopefully be helpful in guiding us as we continue to think about network engagement. >> First of all why is the big question. Why does this matter? There are internal reasons for us as a network why it matters and those are things many of us feel every day in our work and being overwhelmed at times. Also knowing that when we work together we are more effective and efficient. The reality for us as the network is up we're going to accomplish what we want to accomplish we have to do it to gather. That's one of the many internally motivating factors that we have. The other one is the asked her on one. The big external one is OSEP. OS EP at the beginning of the grant cycle made it clear we are to behave as a network and work collaboratively to reduce duplication and to be more effective and more efficient. We have plenty of good reasons why we should be doing this. Why from our own motivations and why from our funder and from externally. The other piece of the puzzle and I don't know if you are aware of this or not, for me it's been interesting having been in a state projects along and now being in NCDB , the part of NCDB that's beautiful with the network are the initiatives, the content-based initiatives and the [ Indiscernible ] family etc. There is an internal peace as well and we have internal goals and our goal number one is networking. That is infused through the work we do. You see the network engagement in many different ways and we will talk about that today. In ways you gauge with each other and engage with NCDB. There are ways that you don't see it which are more internal. Just so you know, it is a major effort even though it's not quite [ Indiscernible ] but we're trying to make it more visible and we will talk about those efforts today. Today is an extension of a conversation that's been going on for a while and our network had a summit this past summer in Salt Lake. We had a Groupon network engagement. It drove our work throughout the year in many different ways. You will get a look at how that has happened. It will continue to inform our work going forward. We want to continue this conversation in a broader way across the network and this is one of our attempts to do that. We will talk about some of the other things as well today. Before we launch into the content I want to take a minute to recognize and acknowledge the people from the projects who have been gracious enough and given their time to serve in our network engagement technical workgroup. They really have in many ways to find this work. We at NCDB had initial ideas but the concrete aspects came out of this TWG group. They been incredibly creative and the conversations are wonderful and built an informed the work. These are your colleagues that have made this happen. So a heartfelt thanks to them for their dedication and ongoing work on that TWG. Gail, anything else to add in terms of introductions? >> I just put it in the chat pod that the networking engagement TWG is coming up on its two-year anniversary. It's been two years of people have been willing to share ideas with us and it's been very helpful. Thank you. >> Sure. Okay. As Sam was saying part of what we want to do it is revisit the buildup of suggestions over the last couple of years in progress we are making on addressing some of those suggestions.@2 successive summit meetings over the last two years and within the TWG there's been lots of discussions about how best to engage states , the kinds of things that states think that we need as a network. We've developed a few tools in a few processes in response to those suggestions. All of them that are here on the list are combined with an the state project portal. I know many of you have received information about the state project portal. I will do fancy footwork here. I have to move from sharing a document to sharing my screen. I'm out here in the state project portal. I think almost everybody has received messaging about this. The state project portal is a new tool that we have developed at NCDB. It's essentially a private workspace for state project [ Indiscernible ]. It's different from what you see in the initiatives space. The initiative group spaces are meant to engage state partners but also broader network partners for understanding systems and service issues. What we realized as time has gone on and our project has worked the last couple of years is that it would be nice to go beyond the listserv for a more robust opportunity to have conversations and share resources and things could happen and maybe greater collaborative conversations can happen in a more organized and purposeful way. That is the intent of the portal. At the same time we have used the portal as a way to break out some of the suggestions that people have had to offer to the network. It is a private group so it works congruently with your profile. If you are logged in, you will always see this for state projects which is your shortcut to the portal. If you are not logged into the NCDB website and you are looking at this menu bar and think you have lost your access to the portal, you haven't. You need to be logged in to get to this group. I hope that hasn't caused confusion for anybody. It's a private group and you need to be logged in to get there. I think one of the things that we are really interested in doing is trying to create conversation that we think will help people problem solve. Some of the issues related to project management and running your project well, better than just a TA effort. One of the things at NCDB we are committed to do is create some conversation around some topics that are important for state projects. We have begun with the information around the TA reference guide. I know most of you have had an opportunity to look at this. This is a draft version that allows you to use the guide in your work and continue to give comments and feedback about its value and ideas for further suggestions for change. >> There will be conversations around the materials related to the TA guide and a continued attempt to organize materials around TA tools and also materials related to other issues we think might be of value for state projects. >> There are a couple of other things that came up in the TWG workgroup this week around questions about were these things appropriate to post to the portal? I think it's important to know that this is not a NCDB effort to create conversation. It's an invitation to you as a state project to come in and ask questions and share ideas. These conversations around our projects don't happen in isolation. They happened when we come together. Whether we are in the same room or an Adobe room and now we have a portal room. Please feel free to ask your colleagues questions and issues or things you are looking for answers on. It's like the listserv but it's a little more organized approach in conversations remain threaded and in context. We hope you will join in and share ideas. >> A couple of other things on the portal, Sam will talk about the mentoring piece. The other thing that came up over and over again is that states were interested in a way to understand what their neighbors across the country are doing. What are other projects doing in particular areas? I think 34 states responded to a survey we sent out. From those results we built a database that is related to state project efforts. The database is really constructed around questions that were asked in that survey and then the content our project responses. I would suggest if you have not had an opportunity to go in and look at your own state and make sure what is in here is what you want to say about your state, you can use keywords or buckets that we used to gather the information. You can do a number of things to get it information. I think in looking at this you will recognize it's a beta version of all the information. As we move forward we might want to reshape what's in there. If you are looking in there and you don't feel you are finding the information that you shop -- thought should be in there, let us know. I think it's important to think about how this fits strategically into our work going forward. If you have the opportunity to check out what various projects have entered into as content for their grant activities, this will make a difference as we move forward into a new grant cycle in which we're all looking to create -- to think more strategically about our common goals and common activities. Sam, do you want to talk about mentoring? >> Sure. The idea of mentoring comes from the network. I think people's thoughts started to coalesce around it when we saw large numbers of people retiring from the network and new people coming on board and thinking about how we could support them to become part of our community which is a community that is very cohesive. Many people have known each other for long periods of time and done significant amounts of work together which is a real strength for our community, but I also think it can make it difficult for new people to enter into our community. So having an organized way to mentor is a way to try to address that. Really into Mac ways. In helping new people to gain the knowledge and skills they need to be successful in their different roles in the projects and also to help them establish relationships with many of the people in the network. I think those things are equally important to be honest with you. Mentoring serves to roles. You see in this part of the portal on mentoring you can request a mentor or become a mentor for us. Certainly we would welcome people to do both. One person asked me a question and said I can be a mentor but I also may need mentoring at some point and I said yes absolutely and I think both are possible. I think there are benefits for both the mentor and mentee and certainly that's reported throughout the literature. If you yourself field you want mentoring in a specific area, you can submit this form and it submits an online form which emails me and gives me information and then I reach out to you and make a match with the person. Or if you are project director or coordinator and you have a staff member that could use mentoring that you can request them to do it. It's for professionals and for educators and family specialist's. We have a great cadre of family specialist to have agreed to be met toward and we have a lot of family specialists in the network who could use support. Many of them are already getting mentoring from the mastermind group that you might be aware of. It's a form of group mentoring or creative problem-solving. They meet on a monthly basis and use a problem-solving framework to do that. Some of them want individual mentoring as well so this is a way to get that. I would encourage you to think about how mentoring might play a role for you or for some of the people on your project and we will continue to develop that opportunity. I think that's it, Gail I guess I would remind people that I forgot to mention that other than efforts related to the TA implementation guide , some of the other things we will be messaging out through the portal through forms will be related to the NSED symposium and states involvement in some of those efforts. I'm just queuing people to the fact that there is opportunities to join in discussions and you do get updates in your email that will prompt you back here. Hopefully it's a more efficient way to keep up with some of the things going on. I will jump back here. Any other questions before we move on? I am sharing I can't read the chat pod? Is there anything we need to look at here? >> No. It looks okay. >> At this point we have a polling question. Is there anything that has happened in a group, public or private, that has motivated you to participate? It's our way to get at what has grabbed you to prompt you to be interested in engaging in the portal? >> I think it's thinking about the website and some of the conversations that have gone on. It can be in any group. What's the thing that has made you want to post a question? A burning need to have? What made you respond? The reason we are asking this question is that we know and realize that getting people to engage on the website is a deliberate act so we want to know a little bit about what engages you so we can start to think about how we build those things into those discussions to engage people. I'm not sure how many of these answers you can see but if you can scroll through it -- >> ICE 6. It says six. >> -- I see six 6. It says 6. I agree how people have been using the modules is a great example of where people are sharing what they are learning as they are coming at using modules in very different ways. >> People can put this answer in the chat pod if they want and feel free to answer but I'm interested because we made it a private group for a reason and we had our motivations, and clearly it's important to some of you as well so why is it important for you in terms of willingness to share? Go ahead, Gail. >> Someone put a safe place to ask and share . That's probably it. The idea of getting people to participate in public groups has been a challenge. People feel safer. >> All right. Thank you. >> I think those are all great examples of how work has been building relating to collaboration and sharing. Thank you. >> This is an interesting thing when we think about polling questions, but those are things we will use internally to help us to think about our engagement strategies and also it might be worth sharing those with people in some way as well. >> Especially if we go through all four of them and then at the end people might have a better idea how they want to look at that again or share it. >> Okay. This slide came out of our network engagement group at the summit. Some of you may know Susan [ Indiscernible ] facilitative for us in this came out of conversations we had in preparing for that and thinking about some of the different engagement practices, collaboratives, processes and frameworks used in our field and many others. This is an example of some of those. Certainly many of you probably have examples in your head as well of collaboration and teaming practices and engagement practices and all kinds of things. I think as we went through this what was significant to us is regardless of what it's called her how the process is outlined, they really do essentially share many of the same things. Shared goals, shared agreements, mutually beneficial relationships, the group efforts to build things together and build capacity as a group. That was important for us as we started to look at this and realize that we talk about this in a lot of ways but in many ways it's trying to get at the same thing for us. As we started to think about engagement practices, this is how we started to think about it in terms of regardless of what we're calling it, there is a lot of commonality in this process. And Susan I think helped us to realize that. Incredibly helpful. >> Where that led us is what I want to talk about for a few minutes. You start to understand some of our thinking around this, as we started to think about network engagement, collaboration, teaming, some of the workgroup work we are involved in, collaborative work around product development and those types of things. We started to realize we had to have a way to be able to talk about this. We had to have a way to talk about it for internal reasons that I talked about earlier, for ourselves so we can understand it better why it's important for us, and how we improve that because certainly we are seeing great outcomes as a network and have for years in different ways in our collaborative work. We have to be able to talk about if we wanted to make it real and make it stronger and continue to strengthen the network. The other reason we need to be able to talk about it is because we have external influences and forces and it's important to be able to talk to those people on the external site about the fact we're collaborating and here's how we describe it and how we are actually doing it. There's how we can measure it. As we start to engage in this, we started to look at some of the other national technical assistance centers because we're not the only ones engaged in this. It's happening across the TA network. We settled -- this is very much still in development, but we settled on essentially a continuum of engagement or a continuum of collaboration that goes across four levels. We have started to try to apply this to our own work first. You will see on this table there are types of interaction or the depth of engagement or collaboration going from networking to collaboration. Networking being the least collaborative and that sounds negative but that's the best way to describe it, to collaboration being the most engaged and most collaborative. The characteristics are descriptors of that and the right-hand column are examples of how we make those efforts to engage and what level of intensity does are at -- those are at. At the top you see general information, information that informs people what's going on with us and with other projects and within the network. That's considered networking. Down in collaboration, some of you have been involved in this work and that's the deep level of collaboration in the co-creation of products. Whether it be home modules or the deep peer to peer TA in [ Indiscernible ] and agreeing to be a mentor and engage intensely with someone else in the network to help them develop their own skills and be included in our work. This is still a work in process but the effort we're making to talk about our work in meaningful ways and be able to measure the intensity of our engagement and collaboration. Anything else, Gail? >> No. >> Okay. That's the internal thing we're doing. Externally what we're doing with that at some of you may have seen this already and it's available in the portal. It has not been generally launched on the website yet. Some of you probably filled out the survey that was concerning your project and your collaboration with the parent centers. Gail, if you want to share that . >> You did get notification about this through the portal. It isn't public yet. It comes through the family engagement initiative and Peggy and Megan will be doing webinars in March, and of margin beginning of April around this report. The great thing is that there was a survey that one out to talk about collaborations between state projects and TGI and the information that came back, Peggy and Megan organized around those levels of collaboration. So while that last slide that Sam was showing you were largely things the national Center does. This product actually looks at work that state projects are doing and organizes it around those levels of collaboration. My feeling is it really creates a much broader application of what ins look like one state projects engage. This is something that will describe your work. I know Megan and Peggy put this out there for you all to review hoping that maybe people would give feedback. I think there have been a number of people who have served as reviewers. It's a lot of text, but it does aluminate what the activities are and how they shape up in relationship to the types of collaboration. Or the types of engagement. >> Those words being interchangeable in some ways. Not fully, but certainly collaboration is a form of engagement. I think the beauty of this report is it accomplishes a number of things in my mind. One is that will help states think about how they are collaborating with parent centers and what opportunities they might be able to develop in their states. I think it also gives the states a way to start to talk about their collaborative efforts. And to give them ways to describe it a language to use around it so hopefully it will accomplish multiple things. This is the first view of how we will be using some of the organizational framework around collaboration within our work and within the network. >> Also a shout out to Megan for providing us with these great visuals that demonstrate networking. Also cooperation and coordination and collaboration. We have a poll question here, Sam. I will go back. This is a yes or no question. To identify behaviors make the idea of network engagement more understandable? -- Do what -- Do identified make the idea of network engagement more understandable? >> All rights. Clearly we have more explaining to do but I'm glad we got some affirmative's. This is our first time we're starting to talk about this concept trying to put some framework around what we think is important for us and what we are told is important for us. I think we will start to get more fluid and have more opportunities for conversation around this for sure. Hopefully it's helpful to you guys as a network as you think about grants and your work in your state and reporting to OSEP. There are a whole range of ways this can impact our work. >> We keep referencing back to the summit, but one of the activities we did at that summit session was to look at the kinds of things we have in place in order to understand who we are before we try to move forward and we use a model of change that allowed us to look at our aspects -- assets and organize our assets and with the idea that what we didn't have in place was a vision statement. This nice graphic helps to organize the things that we identified in the workgroup at the summit around our resources, our skills, and our incentives largely to demonstrate that we are which in assets for the most part in terms of building towards any sort of collaborative work or becoming more efficient. We have a lot of riches that are already in place. This little honeycomb demonstrates for you what we're articulating. The vision statement, we took a stab at what would be the advantages of creating a vision statement for this work and is it something that we needed. >> In that group it became really apparent that we as a network while we may have many similar and commonly held beliefs, we have never really coalesced around the vision for ourselves and who we are and what our collective goals are. The challenge now is to engage in a process as a network to try to accomplish this. It certainly a big challenge. We've thought about this process quite a bit. Susan has really helped us to do that. She has great skills in this area. We are starting to chart a path forward so we can develop a coherent vision for us and the network. What we have planned so far is that first of all NCDB we're going to be engaging in some strategic planning and vision work in April with Susan facilitating and guiding us. Because it seems like a logical place to start. And then the question is how do we engage the network? In this type of strategic vision process? The challenges are many. We have an immense amount of strength. We are not starting from nothing here. We have an incredible relationships are ready and a history of collaborative work and a lot of already shared beliefs. We have a lot that we start from. Certainly the challenge will be there are many projects across a wide geographic area and how do we do this in a coherent way meeting those challenges, that's the question we're going to hopefully answer over the next few months as we get our own house in order so to speak and start to think about how we engage the network to do this. From our perspective the summit laid out a glaring hole in all the things we have. We have all these things in our collaborative work but we're still missing one thing that can help us to be more coherent especially as we move through the grant cycle and hopefully towards another one. We see this as increasingly important in the process. Anything else, Gail ? >> Eyes still feel like after our session at the summit that this will be really fun work we're doing. >> I think it's an opportunity to show people what we do have and what we share which I think is a lot >> Here is another graphic we developed after summit went back to the drawing board we thought, we were looking for some way to give greater visual interpretation that might show motivation for network engagement. It might help you, all of us, in conceptualizing the value of working together as a network. We have a graphic designer in our Oregon office and Sam and I spent time with him talking about what it was we were trying to do it things that had come up at the summit. Eric came back with something that was really simple but very helpful and compelling in some ways. It begins with deaf-blind this presents national challenges. Is there a way that would help people to see this? We present national challenges and working together we create solutions and the blue dot is your project. The project in each state across the nation serve children to our deaf-blind and their families along with any unlimited resource. Here is your project in the context of other project resources. Here is your project when you are engaged in working together. Working together extends information,'s skills, talents, and incentives to create a network of experience and supports. And then the impact of working together is a collective impact and a bigger impact. Working together and collaboration influences our accomplishments and increases our effectiveness. This isn't anything that is its first public appearance. We haven't used it in any way or decided how to use it. We thought we would show you and maybe you might have ideas for how we might use it or how it might be effective or how you might change it conceptually. >> I guess it would be in official graphic terms it would be considered an info graphic. It's not trying to tell a message and story. It's interesting in that way and a call to action and telling external people that this is the way we think. It probably has some internal function for us but it probably has external function as well in demonstrating some of how we think about ourselves as a network. >> Part of what I like is the ability when we have projects in every state, there are certain qualities about our federally funded group of projects that does lend itself to being a network. I'm sorry I have to keep going back and forth here. Any questions? >> Do we have another polling question before this? >> Polling question number 3. >> Another short answer question. What would a vision statement do for you as a project? >> It would be interesting to know if any projects have a vision statement or anything similar that guides their work. >> As I was looking through things in the state activities database and noticed lots of state projects use advisory boards, if the idea of a vision statement or mission statement comes up in relationship especially working with outside advisory groups. I notice in the chat pod, Linda answered it, there is a summit date in July. >> Can you make that a little bigger so we can see all the answers at once? Thank you. >> It will be interesting to see how we think about using that. Getting it is one part but using it is another. >> True. Okay. Switching gears a little bit, we talked about things that we put into place and will continue to work on such as the portal. We talked about where we are in the midst of things around measuring behaviors. Talked about collaboration. Talked about the vision piece and the flow we are at their and the last thing we want to talk about is something that came out, it's project management. This topic has been dealt with in a myriad of ways on the network thinking back to the database and the OPI's and different tools that people have developed over the years to do assessments or outcome measures. There are myriads of examples how we have collaborated as a network on this type of work. It came up at summit last year as well again in its own group to try to research some of this and also talked in different groups as well in different conversations about outcomes than those types of things. Out of summit there were many things that came out and we add -- as a project have that -- address them but this has been hanging out there for us. The needs are really broad and not very well-defined. They tend to be all over the place and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just means we need to figure out a way to focus this conversation to build consensus around what those needs actually are. To really establish what the specific needs are and prioritize them to define a path forward for collaborative work in this area. If we don't get it focused it will be really hard for it to be useful for us. Initially as we thought about this, and how we could start having these conversations and address this incredibly large topic in an organized fashion, we started to think about the TA Guide because the TA Guide is potentially an organizing framework for our work, for all of our work. For the states work, our work, how we relate to each other in our work. As a first step we want to drive in some of these conversations or some conversations will be driven around conversations around the TA Guide . The TA Guide is in the portal . Number one is to be aware of that. I encourage all of you to take a little time looking at that if you haven't. Be on the lookout for drop-in webinars that Peggy, of Elizabeth, and myself will be holding and the first one is on March 2 and you will get information soon. It's a 3:00 Eastern talking about the first implementation and the TA Guide which is needs assessment and engaging states about what they do, don't do, and what their needs are. We will try to get definition around that and help in a collective and collaborative way. Just note that is coming and this is the way we thought, I don't want to say easiest because it's not necessarily going to be easy, but the most functional weight to organize the conversation and related to work everyone is doing is I guess the best way to put that. Anything else, did I miss anything on that? We have a question I know. >> We do have a question? I would encourage people to try to create a habit of following along what's going on in the portal. I noticed within the initiatives there are more messages and information coming through for webinars and things that are coming down the road. It's important to pay attention to what's going on. >> There will be more linkages. You will see more linkages between the webinars and materials and conversations related to those webinars will be starting to occur in there and some of it will be coalescing in the portal. That's our goal is to get a private place for discussion. >> I think we have another poll question. What is missing from your knowledge bank as far as project management? >> When you think about project management and when we think about that we think about all the aspects of technical assistance and training and consultation and all those TA practices you engage in as well as outcome measures and evaluations. All those things. >> We look good to go. Are there questions that anyone would like to take themselves off mute and ask or type into the chat pod? >> Albright. -- Hopefully we can lure you into this conversation through the TA Guide. We had initial interesting conversations in our network engagement group. A few conversations developed around a TA provision that was interesting and you will see one of them in the portal already . Tracy posted a question today about project participating in [ Indiscernible ] meetings and how they handle that issue. That's an interesting piece and how it relates to TA provision. It's really important and another big area that we need to take on as a network. And has been work on the practices and there has been good work and there but it hasn't come to fruition or completion yet. >> Percentages of time and numbers of staff, that's an ongoing thing and we talk about here all the time too. >> That's a really interesting one because obviously limited resources, huge need, and a broad array of activities you need to engage in. How do you prioritize that? And dedicating staff time to it. Thank you. So it's 3:58 and we actually ended on time. That's history for Gail and us to and on time. She's laughing because she knows it's true. >> And we got here on time too. >> We arrived on time and ended on time. [ Laughter ] >> Thank you for showing up. And for listening. >> Hopefully it was informative in some ways and gave you food for thought and prepared you for some of what will be coming down the pike. Hopefully you will be able to participate in some of those efforts. Thank you all. >> If it's more clear now than it was two years ago when we're talking about it, if anything is getting clearer, that would be good to know. Thank you. See you soon. >> Goodbye. >> In one room or another. >> Virtual or real. >> [ Event concluded ]