Career-Connected Schools

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How a district team works in the planning space: starting the team, giving each person a seat, and building the career-connected design as a set of planning maps.

This guide is for the district team: the team lead, team members, partners, sponsors, viewers, and the coach. It gives the rule and the step for each part of the planning space. Every view in the maps also has a "Reading this view" panel with the same guidance in short form.

Your district team

1. Finish the readiness assessment on careerconnectedschools.org. It tells you whether the district is ready to start, and it brings you here when you are.
2. Start the team. Sign in with your email, name the district and the team, and you become the team lead. There is no claim code. One person can start up to five teams.
3. Invite people by seat. From "Team and seats," invite each person with their email address and a seat. A partner is also given the maps they belong to and an organization. Invites expire after 14 days; the person accepts by signing in with the invited address.
4. Open the maps from the team's home page. The team's district map is empty until someone opens the first initiative or loads the illustrative composite district.

A team always keeps at least one team lead. The team lead can rename the team, change seats, remove people, and archive the team. Anyone can leave.

What the maps are

The maps hold one district's career-connected design as a set of cards. Each card is one adult action, one student experience, or one decision, named to the role that owns it. Arrows show what makes what possible. The maps are filters over that one set of cards: the district map shows everything, each grade-band map shows the cards that carry its band, and each focus map shows the cards in its domains. A card is written once and appears wherever it belongs.

The maps hold no student data. Participation is a count and a percentage of all students in a band, by subgroup. Any cell with fewer than ten students is hidden and never exported. Adult names may appear in owner fields; student names never do.

Starting a district map

1. Name the district in the header.
2. Open the first initiative. An initiative is one piece of work the district takes through the four phases: a model, a blend, or a pathway. Course 1 opens one initiative for the district's direction. The team lead opens later ones.
3. Add cards to the district map, strategic cards first.

Until you have your own cards, the team lead or a team member can open the illustrative composite district from the start card or the toolbar. It replaces the team's map, including its snapshots, so save the map to a file first if you want to keep it. The illustrative district is labeled on every view and its participation figures are invented. To look at it without touching your team's map, open the sample district maps.

Maps

The map selector in the header lists three kinds of map.

• District map. Every card. Strategic cards are edited here and only here. The Continuum and the district Cycle Review live here.
• Grade-band maps for PK-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-10, and 11-12. Each shows the cards that carry its band, with the student experiences grouped by domain. Owned by the building teams and teachers in that band.
• Focus maps for advising and navigation, partnerships, academic integration, and policy and operations. Each shows the cards in its domains across all bands. The partnerships map adds Employer partners as a default group in its Cycle Review.

Strategic cards appear on band and focus maps as anchors in the top row. They are read-only there. Click "Edit on the district map" to change one.

An arrow to a card on another map ends in a stub at the right edge. Click the stub to open that map at that card.

Views

Each kind of map offers these views as tabs.

The Checks button opens the checks for the current map. The Export menu offers a PNG of the view, a CSV of cards, a CSV of measures with suppressed cells removed, and a print of the review and briefing views.

Phases and initiatives

Every initiative is in one of four phases: Exploration, Planning, Pilot, Scaling. It may also be Stopped. The toolbar's phase selector shows the work as it is, or was planned to be, in a phase. Current shows each initiative at its own phase.

The team lead moves an initiative from the Initiatives dialog. Every move asks for the team lead's name, and a snapshot of every map is recorded as the phase ends. A gate card can offer the move when its decision is to scale or to stop; the team lead still confirms it.

Each card lists the phases it is present in. A card can carry a different owner, status, or note for one phase without becoming a second card. Open the card and use the phase entry section.

Cards

Click "+ Add card" on the Logic Model or Continuum. The card opens in the side panel as a draft. It is saved once the blocking checks pass; until then the panel lists what is missing.

Type and level. An action card is strategic, tactical, or operational. An experience card is a student experience that every student in the band has. A layer card is an experience for some students that sits on an every-student card. A seam card crosses the grades 8-9 seam. A gate card is the graduation gate for an initiative.

Fields every card needs. A title that starts with a verb, up to 80 characters. A domain. At least one band. At least one initiative and one phase. An owner role. Co-owner roles are optional. Partner types fill in from the roles.

Status is proposed, planned, running, scaled, paused, or stopped. On a strategic card, only the team lead changes the status, because it records the governing body's decision.

Attachments on experience cards are the four things an every-student experience needs: a written outcome, protected time, a named owner, and a check that it happened. The Continuum shows a filled mark for each attachment every experience card in the cell has.

Measures on experience cards hold participation: a count and the number enrolled, for all students in the band and by subgroup. A pilot-scope figure for named sites can sit beside it, never in its place. Cells with fewer than ten students are shown as "fewer than 10" and left out of exports.

Changing direction. Experience cards in grades 9-10 and 11-12 answer whether a student who changes direction keeps credit and standing.

Evidence. A card may point at one or more model profiles with the claim it rests on, the profile's evidence grade, how the claim was verified, and a label. A card with no evidence is normal.

Comments. Every card has a short thread at the bottom of its panel, visible to everyone on the team. Every seat but the viewer can post. Keep comments to the work; no student information. You can remove your own comment, and the team lead can remove any.

Removing a card removes it and its arrows from every map.

Arrows

Drag from a handle on one card to another to draw an arrow. An arrow means the source enables the target. An arrow between experience cards in different bands is a handoff. Click an arrow to name what passes along it and to set its phases.

The grades 8-9 seam

The dashed line between the 6-8 and 9-10 lanes is the seam. A seam card names one thing that crosses it: the student's plan, a summary of experiences, adviser notes, or a family conversation. It names a sending owner and a receiving owner. Seam cards appear on the 6-8, 9-10, and advising maps.

People and Connections

The spine is the district: leadership, the building, the chartered team, the classroom and advising roles, and students at the base. Partners sit beside it. Each role chip lists the cards it owns or co-owns at the selected phase.

• Click a chip to write what the role does in this work and its next steps for the coming cycle.
• Use "Add a person" to put the actual people at the table on the map by name.
• Drag from one person to another to draw a connection. A connection has a lens: shared work with students, planning and handoffs, or evidence and check-ins. Click an arrowhead to read what moves in that direction.
• Connections drawn on a band or focus map also appear on the district map.

Cycle Plan

On a band or focus map, the cycle plan is the plan for one meeting-to-meeting cycle. Name the cycle and choose its initiative in the toolbar. Add cards to the four bands: cycle focus, coordination, commitments, and student evidence. Drag between cards to show what feeds what. A commitment can link to the logic model card it advances.

Cycle Review

One row per role. The rows start as one per role that owns a card on the map. The left columns hold last cycle's plan so the meeting reviews what was planned against what the adults did and what those they serve experienced. The right columns are the plan for the coming cycle, written at the meeting. Students is always among the dependent groups.

• "Begin next cycle" moves the plan columns into the review columns and clears the plan.
• "For the district review" is the one line the district map's roll-up reads from this map.
• Print makes a hard copy for the table.

On the district map, the top table is the district team's own review: one row per role that owns or co-owns a strategic card, so employer and postsecondary partners hold a row by default. The table below rolls up every band and focus map's line, card statuses, and cycle counts. Those rows are read-only; open the map to change them.

Phase Compare

Choose one initiative in the toolbar. Pick a phase or a recorded snapshot on each side. Cards are marked new in this phase, ended in this phase, owner changed, or scope changed, and a status change is noted. Switch the basis to People and Connections to see who holds what on each side.

Snapshots are recorded when an initiative moves phase. The team lead can also save one from the Initiatives dialog. Snapshots are read-only.

Roles by Phase

One row per role and one column per phase, built from the cards each role owns or co-owns. Print it as a one-page briefing for anyone joining the work mid-stream.

Checks

A check that blocks saving names something a card cannot do without. Every other check is a warning; it never blocks saving. Warnings tell you where the logic is thin:

• A routine with no arrow to a student experience.
• A decision with no arrow downward.
• A domain the partners should hold a decision in but do not.
• A band with no every-student experience in a domain, shown as a gap on the Continuum.
• An initiative in Planning with no graduation gate.
• A pilot counting only its own sites.
• Scaling work still owned by the pilot team.

Click a card name in the checks panel to open it. Click a band under a gap to open that band map at the domain.

Seats and what each can do

Each person on the team holds one seat, set by the team lead on "Team and seats." The maps read the seat when they open; there is nothing to choose on your own device.

When a seat cannot edit something, the button is not shown, the canvas does not drag or connect, and the panel shows its fields read-only with a short note.

Saving and working together

The team's map is saved to the planning space as you work, one card, arrow, or row at a time. Teammates with the map open see each other's changes within a few seconds, with a note saying how many changes arrived. If two people change the same card at the same moment, the later save wins. A change you have made but not yet saved is kept when a teammate's changes arrive.

"Save map" writes the whole map to a file you can keep or share. "Open map" replaces the team's map with a file saved from this tool. When the lists change and a tag your cards used was split, the "Needs a new tag" button on the district map opens a tray where you pick the new tag; nothing is deleted until you do.

Your team's data

A team lead can download everything the planning space holds for the team, as one JSON file, from "Your team's data" on the team's page, and can ask S4IS to delete it. S4IS replies by email to confirm before deleting anything. See the platform's Data & Privacy page.

Rules that never relax

• No student data. Measures are counts and percentages by subgroup, and small cells are hidden.
• Lists are data. Domains, bands, phases, roles, and the rest load from files with stable ids. The tool never hard-codes one.
• One card store. Every map is a filter over it, and a card is written once.
• Every student. Participation always reports against all students in the band.
• Illustrative content is labeled on every view.
• Strategic cards are edited on the district map only.