Module 34, Psychological Management, Cognitive Behavior Therapy So when we talk about the psychological management, we discuss the cognitive behavior therapy. Cognitive behavior therapy basically focuses upon how the person can change the thinking pattern so his or her life become more comfortable. They focus more upon the problem-solving techniques. You can understand this very easily in this video. There are certain thoughts which are unhelpful and the cognitive behavior therapist basically trying to alter those unhelpful thoughts into the helpful pattern. They were discussing those unhelpful thoughts as the automatic negative thought pattern. What they said that the human beings in their brain under certain circumstances different types of thoughts automatically generate which can be negative. And since that negative thought process is there, that's why it disturbs any person's behavior pattern and because of which the disturbed behavioral pattern is exhibited. So what they are focusing upon is that if you change your thinking pattern into more helpful thought process and more positive and more helpful things then your life and the problems you are facing in life can change. So they are basically focusing more upon the solution. So that's why we say that this coping strategy helps children at some time. When we talk about cognitive behavior therapy, the most important factor is how to record the thought pattern. Why is it important to record the thought pattern? It's because if you don't record the thought pattern, then how to change it? How to teach the child how to change the thought pattern? The thought pattern has associated feelings as well. Because when the child reports that he is depressed, the child and the parents mostly report first the feelings. So after that you have to dig out the thought pattern. For example, the child's event is that he has failed in one exam. Now because of failing in that exam, the feelings of disappointment are developing in him.  I can't do anything right. Now this thought pattern cannot be known until the child tells you. So it is very important that the feelings related to that event and the thought related to that event are recorded. When you give a chart like this that you have to record the event, you have to record the feeling, you have to record the negative thought. So this will help us guide the child that how to change the thought pattern. You can add dates and time to this. You can also measure the intensity of this thought or the intensity of the feeling. One means that disappointment works and the other means that disappointment is too much. So you can also monitor these things. You can also monitor how many times a day he has got this thought or frequency. One or two or ten times a day. It all depends upon you what things do you really want to be taken. When you have this thought pattern or this record then you have to challenge your thoughts. The automatic negative thoughts of the child you have to challenge them. Now how do you challenge them? What is the procedure that you have to do with the child? You will ask the child is this thought helpful? Is it helpful for the child? So explain it. So for example, the child has said that this thought is not helpful. It does not make me feel good and it is not true. So when he will explain you then this will help the child to change his or her already existing thought pattern. Similarly, another way to challenge his or her thoughts is are my thoughts based on facts or are they just my opinion? So mostly the children absorb things like this without doing any sort of critical thinking. So you need to develop that thing so that they get the idea that what they are thinking is not as it is. In fact, it also has some other factor or other things which they need to be observed. So there are different ways through which you can challenge their thoughts.  What is a cascade off? Your thoughts have started that she or he must be ignoring me because he or she does not like me How did your emotional feelings develop? Low, sad and rejected Physical symptoms may be stomach rampage, low energy level or feel sickness What is the action?  So this is an unhelpful thought procedure which started developing only by ignoring one person. Now what is a helpful thought? If you want not to think like this then the helpful thought might be the other person who ignored you for some work and because of this he or she could not attend you and because of that your emotional feelings will be positive because you are concerned about the other person Physical complaints will not come in this situation and what is the action when you go and get aloof you will try to get in touch with that person So with the help of that you will get to know if the other person had any problem So unhelpful thoughts are changed in helpful thoughts So this is the procedure which we usually have to teach the children so that their unhelpful thoughts do not disturb them and they will alter them in helpful thoughts. Thank you


All right, I guess we've decided that we are not going to go through with things. So the student's gonna hit send, that's it. It is the next day and we have decided to cancel our offer on the house due to what we found in the inspection. And I didn't really get a chance to talk about it yesterday, we were pretty upset. It was a really, really, really hard decision. We were super excited to start this process of getting our own house and it just, I don't know, we chose a house that had more issues than we are willing and financially able to deal with.  Not only is there that creepy weird crawl space down there in the bathroom, but the entire electrical downstairs is not functional. And the bedrooms down there are weird and there's mold down there and yeah. So I just wanted to show you guys the report that we got. So you guys can kind of see what we were talking about or what I am talking about just to get a better idea of like what this all looks like. Please keep in mind that while I will be talking about a lot of the issues that are in this house, there were good things about it as well and things that we really liked going into the offer. So please keep those things in mind as I talk about some of these issues with the house. Okay, so here is the start of the inspection and that is the outside of the house. To the left you can see that big box that we were talking about. That is the septic system and while it's okay looking, it pretty much takes up the entire yard and you can't really do that much with it. So here you can see this is talking about the lot and what it all looks like in terms of the driveway, the concrete, all of that. Basically they said we would have to redo the entire lot to make it all level. So that was a really big expense that we were not expecting. So there's that. We'd have to do a lot of grading in order to get things up to where it needs to be. Then you can see here this is the balcony. Some information about how it wasn't properly installed. So we would have to do some things to fix that up. You can see more issues with the house on the outside that we would have to go through and fix things like woodpecker holes, flashing, wood that needs to be fixed. There were some good things about the house like the roof was in good shape. They said that it was a newer material approximately three to five years old so that was great. So that was something we wouldn't have to worry about. The bathrooms were a big issue. Something that we knew about going into it but aren't very happy about. Just knowing that all three bathrooms were in bad shape and we'd have to basically replace something or multiple things in every bathroom. So there's kind of what you can see there especially with the master drain it was all messed up and would have to be fixed as well. Okay and then we're going to get to the basement and this is where pretty much everything fell apart. They found a lot of staining, a lot of water issues which are to be expected in different houses but was just something that there's a lot of issues in that basement that we weren't ready to or prepared to have to fix it all. So you can see more information about the sump pump here. You can see a moisture location on all of the exposed block walls in the crawl space. Also look how creepy this crawl space is. This is like right in one of the doors in the bathroom it was terrible and they found that the wood was literally like dripping. So basically that whole front foyer area we would have to replace. So here's some more pictures. You can see that dripping there in some of those middle pictures. Like that is so bad and yes we'd have to basically replace all of that. Another good thing about this house though was that a lot of the bigger appliances were in good shape so things like the water heater and the furnace were somewhat newer. So that was really nice that we wouldn't have to worry about replacing those in the next few years as long as they're still in good shape. Okay, then we get into the electrical which is one of the biggest items that really made us upset. And so here you can see in the electrical box there are some heat discrepancies that we would have to deal with. And down at the bottom here you can see that the sticker indicates that there has been no recent inspections. That would be then we'd have to get someone out there to give permits for that basement. Here's some other weird items in the bedroom. Like they just put carpet over a tile and some of the tiles are broken because they, you can see here, so it says carpet is loose in the lower level. This is laid over damaged tiles. This is a sign of amateur workmanship and may affect life and use of the materials. And then other things, damaged drywall in the lower level bedroom. There's a hole in the master bedroom ceiling. Okay, so here is another big thing that really did not make us happy. Basically all of the, okay, I'll just read what they have here. So signs of amateur wiring in the lower level living room, lower outlets were dead and one outlet was covered by a solid faceplate. The outlet that is GFCI that did not trip when tested should be in one of those pictures there that you can see. So there's recessed and covered wiring and basically they would recommend an electrician coming out because this is a real big safety issue that can cause a lot of problems and a fire.  This is a major, major issue that could kill one of our dogs if there was a fire could kill one of us. So that's really scary that we would be getting ourselves into that. So I hope that gave a better explanation of why we decided to cancel our offer on the house while there's going to be issues with every house, most likely, especially one built in the 70s. I think this just shows our maturity or we feel or hope that we don't need to rush into something. We do have time to, to say no and to not get into something that we feel is going to have a lot of issues. And so I think it's for the best. It's really hard to say that because we want a house and we want to, we want to move and have our own space. But I just don't think this was the one. And as sucky as that is, I think we can find something better suited for us and give us the things that we want and need out of a house. So I hope that was a good explanation for you guys.  Hopefully there'll be better quality. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye guys!


OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. I want to give a shout out to Ryan De La Vega. I haven't seen him in a long time, but he is also an OTAN SME, and he was actually one of my first mentors on how to present. And so because of him, I have been able to do a lot of presentations and really become kind of successful at it. So thank you, Ryan. I'm super excited to see you here today. All right, so let us get started because I really want to try to make room at the end of this presentation to do a live demonstration on OWL. If you were at the CASA session a little while ago, then I was able to do it for about a minute or two, but I really wanted to share with you how we use the OWL in our classrooms. I've done this presentation, this particular topic, probably this is probably my 10th one in about six months, and it has evolved in time because our system has also changed and we've really kind of taken what has been working and what hasn't been working and moving with that, but also because of the feedback from the field, from all of you, the participants, about what you wanted to hear more about, what you really didn't want to hear too much about and things like that. So I've actually more for this presentation quite a few times. And so one of the big things was about the OWL. What is at the beginning, nobody really wanted to hear about the OWL. And if you're listening to me and you're having no idea what I'm saying right now, an OWL is a 360 camera that has a built-in speaker and microphone in our classroom. And so I can talk about it a little bit and then demonstrate it as time has been going on. More and more agencies tend to have been interested in more about it. So I do want to make sure that I include some of it but not take up too much time. So let me go ahead and get started. So my name is Elisa Takeuchi. I am an ESL instructor for Garden Grove Adult Education. And we have been very fortunate in a couple of aspects is that our district has really opened up the school, our school quite early. We started, we were online remote during the pandemic for one year exactly. So I was teaching remotely for 367 days. And then we actually were able to open our school back up again in March one year ago recently. So we have been one of the first schools to actually open up its doors for students. And I'll tell you about the challenges and successes of that. I also do work for OTAN with Debbie Ryan and I am a subject matter expert. So I think this is how the agenda is going to go depending on time. I'll do a quick introduction and some background about my school. And then we'll talk a little bit about pandemic because I really want to use that as an opportunity to show how the transition went. So for some of you here, this is actually going to be kind of an interactive. So if you're thinking about multitasking, you might want to stop because I'm going to be asking you some questions and having you reply in the chat because I really do like to get a feel for the room and then just kind of get some information about where people are at. I will talk about how we as an agency prepared for what we call High Flex, which is a simultaneous instruction. And then from there, I will talk about how do I do the instruction that engages both the in-class and the online students and then successes and challenges. So a little bit of background. My school is actually called Lincoln Education Center. We're part of the Garden Grove Unified School District, the K through 12 system. We are Southern from, we're South from Los Angeles. We're right probably in between Los Angeles and San Diego. My school is for reference, 1.5 miles away from Disneyland, that kind of gives you an idea of where we are. Our population is primarily Vietnamese right now. We do have a lot of Latinos in our population at school. And then we used to have quite a few Koreans, but they have actually moved on to another city. They've kind of migrated to another city next to us. All right, so if you could in the chat, I'd really like to know what part you take in adult education. Are you an ESL instructor? And if you are, what level do you teach? Are you CTE, HSE, ABE? You know, everything like that. If you could type that in the chat, that would be fantastic. And I actually, let's see here. Let me get my chat up so I can see. Maybe you have multiple hats. You can type that in there too. Admin, yeah, I see admin resources. Wow, we've got a full gamut. Nice. Thank you so much everybody. I really appreciate that. And I usually do this at the very beginning. I thought I had a slide on here, but if you could give me, if you haven't done it yet, if you could give me a favor, if you could put your name and your agency, that would be fantastic too. Usually that's an OTAN thing, but I really do enjoy, I do go back to the chats after my sessions and I read all the chats and I read the questions and things like that in case I missed something during the session. So I appreciate that. Thanks. Whoopsie. Oh, nope. So I'd also like to know kind of what models of instruction, model or models of instruction you're currently using at your agency, whether it be online only still or in class only still, or are you doing some sort of high flex or are you doing some sort of distance learning? I'd like to get to know what types of instruction are being offered at your school. So Carla's doing in person and online, simultaneously or separated? Audrey at Sweetwater is doing in person and distance learning. I know I just had a conversation with her that they are thinking about doing the high flex soon. Still remote, yeah, in person. Yeah, a lot of you are still, you know, it's, yeah, Patrick is still doing in person, online and hybrid. So you're offering a variety of instruction. Great, yeah, I love it. Like I said earlier, Garden Grove, all of our classes, all of our classes and all of our departments are using the high flex model, whether that be just, whether or not they have students in each, in online or in class, because we give the students a choice. So upon online registration, the students will choose whether, you know, which mode of instruction they would like. All right, so this'll be the last one I think for a while. So what are your thoughts when you hear simultaneous instruction? Are you like, huh, what's that? Or, ah, I don't know. Or, hey, I'm okay, or I'm open to it. What are your thoughts when you hear simultaneously?   Oh, nice, Elaine, yeah. First high flex with an owl. Yeah, see, you got it, you got it from the get go, nice. Yes, Clara, that's exactly right. It is a learning curve. That's exactly right, Ryan too. And that's a big issue right now upon, you know, I can't make these flat statements or these, you know, umbrella statements with all of you because we all have different capabilities within our agency, funding, tech, you know, support, things like that. And so all I can do really is give you my perspective from our agency, but I do understand that there are, you know, that we are very lucky here, but I do, for three months, you know, I did have a different situation so I can give you that perspective as well. Nice, Scott, I love the enthusiasm. Good, all right, let's get going. So again, this is what we're talking about. This is straight from our online registration, which we had to create when we went pandemic because we were the traditional students came into our office and filled out, you know, huge long triple kit that had all the wheel, you know, information and stuff on it. And then we just, we developed a Google form and translated all that information onto the Google form. And we added this question, do you want to be in-person or online? So the students have a choice and it wasn't that they were gonna be in-person in one class and online in a totally different class. They were actually gonna be in-person or online in the same class. Yeah, Christina, I hear you because I do beginning students as well. And we'll talk about that. All right, so this might look pretty familiar from March 2020 to March 2021. My class was solely online. Pre-pandemic, I had about 40 students in class. Once March 17th happened, I had 16. So I lost more than half of my class. And you know, no matter what, no matter all the outreach that I did, the texting, the emailing, the calling, having the legs on to call, you know, in their language, I just, some of the students just did not come back. And, you know, for a variety of reasons. As time went on, I gained a lot of new students which was a real surprise to us because we had students that weren't able to come to our school before because they lived far away. So a couple of the students that you see in this picture, they lived in Fullerton, which is about, oh, maybe a 40 minute drive. So of course they weren't going to be driving to our school every day, but having an online class was the perfect solution for them. So we actually gained some other students that we weren't expecting. So in March of 2021, one year after we started remote learn instruction, we got the call saying that our school was going to be opened in April. And so the last week of March, the teachers were allowed to come back to school for the first time and really kind of decide how they wanted their classroom to look. And so I came back, I had a vision in my head of what I thought I wanted in my class, but then I kind of had to see what it would look like. I knew I wasn't going to be behind my desk, which I didn't really take a good picture of it, but it's right here. My desk, my teacher desk is here and I have a desktop computer on there, but I knew I didn't want to be stuck behind my desk because then I wouldn't really be able to engage well with the in-class students. So I moved my workstation to the front of the class. And so then at the time, we really did have restrictions about how many students can be, we can only have 18 students in the classroom, which was not a problem and I'll tell you about in a minute, but we had the plexiglass, I had to wear the double masks. This was at the very beginning of opening things back up. And then as you can see in the picture, I have my Zoom students. So I was still teaching my class in my classroom with my Zoom students where we were preparing to open the doors and that was going to happen in April. So here's another viewpoint of my teacher workstation. I have my laptop on a podium at the time because I needed my computer to be up high because I was gonna be standing or at least sitting in a high chair and because on the desk, it was too low. So I had this podium in my classroom from before. So I was just using that. Sometimes I would put it on the table on a stack of books. And so again, I really wanted my computer to be up higher and so I would just put it on a pile of books. And this is another, now you can see that I have my laptop computer. And then in the back, you can also see that I have an electronic whiteboard with a projector and that we had prior to the pandemic. We had just upgraded and we had smartboards, but they were antiquated. And so we had actually just started the process of getting the classrooms upgraded. And one of my, my classroom just happened to be one of them. And then school shut down and we didn't use them for over a year. So this was my Zoom class and I was all excited. We knew in March, I mean, in April, we were gonna be open. And I said, okay, who wants to come back to class? I had four students who raised their hand. And so looking back, we didn't force anybody. There was no question. If they wanted to stay online, that was great. If they wanted to come to school, that was great too. The four that are circled, I'm actually really glad that they actually chose to come back to class because they were kind of the ones that were struggling online. They were very consistent and very loyal and they came to school all the time. But it wasn't easy for them, whether they had distractions at home or their internet was not so good or they still struggled with their devices. So I was actually kind of glad that they chose to come back to school. And I think they were too. They were very happy when they found out that school was going to reopen. So April 3rd, we opened up our doors. Welcome, welcome, welcome. We had to do a whole orientation. We had two different orientations.  So the in-class orientation was for all of these students who were going to be leaving Zoom and coming into the class because we had so many health restrictions. I didn't add any of those slides as I had before in previous presentations because that stuff is over now. Most of you who are going to open your schools up again probably won't have to go through the same structures that we had to go through at that time. So I didn't include those slides in there. But we did do a whole orientation on what was expected of the students. So here's my new classroom now. I have my four students. That's that they wanted to come back. As you can see, I have my workstation and then on the far right on my electronic whiteboard you'll see that those are my Zoom students. So my in-class students could see my Zoom students but my Zoom students couldn't see my in-class students unless I physically took my laptop and I flipped it around and showed the camera to them. And I did that every once in a while so that they could wave high because they really missed each other for a whole year. They were in class together on Zoom and they really formed this bond and now some of them has separated from that. And so the Zoom students kind of missed them. So at the beginning of class I would turn my laptop sometimes. Now as my progress is moving along and I did this presentation I had a lot of teachers go, oh, you could put an external camera on your laptop facing toward the students. And I went, genius. At the time I was just surviving. I was just trying to figure out how I could do this and I didn't have a lot of ideas in front of me to take from, but as time has gone by I had gotten a lot of suggestions and I thought, oh man, I wish I would have known this three months ago. So here comes curriculum. So we at Garner Grove for the ESL department we all use ventures from beginning literacy all the way through academic. And so ventures from Cambridge they offer, they have the whole book, everything is digital. I have access to the digital textbook and things like that, resources, worksheets, everything. We had, that was available digitally which really helped during the remote sessions because we were able to get all those resources and put them in Google classrooms. So now that I'm in the class and teaching online at the same time I could just project anything that I was teaching in that particular unit on the whiteboard share my screen. So now both the in-class students and the online students could see it at the same time. I also use Oxford, I usually use Oxford picture dictionary, OPD. And so again, I use the old version because we hadn't adopted the new edition. So I've been using the second edition for a long time. And so I still had the presentation tools. And so even though it's kind of a little bit on the older side of stuff, it really helped. And again, I was able to project it onto my whiteboard and I shared my screen and everybody could see it at the same time. My in-class students had access to the books as well because we still had the classroom sets of books that students could use that hadn't been touched for a year, they had access to that. And then the online students, a lot of them, they bought the book, both of the books. They thought that it was a good investment for them to actually have the book with them. We did do a little check out if some of my students couldn't afford it or they really just didn't wanna buy it, they could come to, I checked some of the textbooks out to them and so that they could have that book but of course they couldn't write and use it like that. For EL Civics, we had to really kind of upgrade our EL Civics in that we took all of the tasks and things like that as much as we could, we made them digital, whether it was a Google form or a doc or some sort of digital tool for the materials and for the tasks. And so like with CASA's test, we had to do everything online remotely and it was a big learning curve. It was really difficult when we were remote only as we were opening up the doors, then we were doing both at the same time. So my in-class students were doing it on paper and my online students were doing it online. So when I was in the classroom full-time, we used the little mini whiteboards for formative assessment. I would prompt something, I would ask them a question, they would write furiously on their whiteboards, they would show it to me and I could tell very, real quick who got it and who didn't I can do some feedback right away. When we went remote, I used the chat for this. And so we used a Zoom, but almost every virtual meeting platform has some sort of chat and we did this every single day. So one of the benefits of the online instruction is that the students' typing skills, whether it was texting or typing, man, it increased exponentially. Of course at first it was awful and it was suffering and they were so slow, not a problem. We just kept doing it every day, every day, every day and they just took off with it. It was incredible how fast they became in a very short amount of time. So as you can see on the left, I use the chat for everything, for everything. So this was particularly, it was dictation. So I would say the word and the online student would type the word. And then in this particular unit, we also learned about proper nouns. So as you see at the bottom of that left chat, now we're going from the regular library and we're going on to the names of places. So Main Street, Costco gas station. So again, these are like typing skills now. I'm having to teach them shift and whatever letter is. Shift whatever letter to make it a capital. I really was emphatic about not having them use cap blocks because a lot of times it was cap blocks, type one letter, uncap block. And so I wanted to teach them the proper way of typing even though if they were still doing one finger typing or texting, it was still important to me to show them how to do it properly. Up at the top, you can see that we practiced our alphabet. And so this was really good. Chat was really good because I was still getting new students. It wasn't like my same set of students all the time. So I always continually had to go back and teach the alphabet and we went over the alphabet many, many times so that those new students could get those skills that they had missed when they weren't in class. And so as you can see on the second line, Rokeya, she wrote the alphabet, but she was missing one letter. And I tell her, I said, oh, Rokeya, you have 25, we need 26. I wouldn't tell her what letter was missing. So she had to go back and look and see. And then you can see that she retyped it with the missing letter. Also in the bottom for the chat, we did sentences. We have now grown and we've done some dictation sentences. So I would say the sentence, my teacher is Alisa. And I would repeat that, repeat that, repeat that. And then the in-class students are typing in chat. And again, you can see Rokeya, I said, oh, Rokeya, we're missing our, remember, a period, remember period. And so then she went back and she corrected herself. And I can see the chat right away. I can give her some feedback right away and that she can correct herself right away. So if you haven't been using, if you're still online or you still have online students, I highly, highly recommend that you start using that chat all the time. And it's for any level. You can do it for anything, for any level. So here are my four wonderful students in class. And again, like I said, all of it, they were doing the exact same instruction, but they are now showing me their little whiteboards and I can go back and I can see who's got it and who doesn't. So I'm engaging both the in-class students and the online students at the exact same time. All right, so for about a week, I just had my laptop in my home office when I was doing the remote things. I had a second monitor, an external monitor, and when I came back into the classroom, for whatever reason, I didn't, I don't know, I didn't bring it or I didn't think about it. And after about a week of just having my laptop, I said, nope, and I brought my external monitor from home into the classroom. Again, fortunately, because there was kind of a need for it, our director, she actually was able to order more external monitors for anybody who wanted them. So I really enjoy using external monitor. There is a little learning curve on that as well. You have to navigate between two screens. It's like having two separate commuter computers. What you can do on your computer, you can also do on your second monitor. So as you can see, I have my Zoom students on my laptop. I have my Google Doc on the external monitor. And then if you look in the very back, it has a mirror of what it is on the monitor. So my external monitor, my monitor number two is extended. And then from number two to my projector, it's mirrored. So everything that I want to showcase, whether it's a Google presentation or Ventures or Google Docs, whatever it is, I put it on my big monitor and then that mirrors onto the electronic whiteboard. So everybody, and I share my screen so everybody can see it at the same time. All right, so here's another interactive portion. How comfortable are you currently with a second monitor? Are you like, huh, what's that?  Audrey needs a third monitor. Okay, let's just not get crazy here. I remember that Anthony Burek one time I did this presentation and he offered that too. Oh, Patricia never used it. Yeah, again, it's one of those things where if you feel very comfortable with your laptop only, that's great. But if you're able to really kind of vision that you can extend this now to another monitor, I think it's going to be very, very helpful for you. I'm just gonna go up real fast because I did see a question but it went too, you guys are chatting so fast. I mean, you're typing so fast, I couldn't see it. Yep, no problem, David, I will try to do it. Did you get Claire's question? I'm pretty comfortable with it. So when you went to group activities, did you show the other students then to each other? So when you went to group activities, did you show the other students then to each other? I'm not sure if I'm understanding the question but with my second monitor, yeah, a lot of times. So, okay, so I think I'm gonna answer it but I'm not sure. So Claire, if you want to read, if I don't answer it, come back into the chat. So every single morning before we start class, I put the Zoom students on my big monitor which projects to the electronic board and every morning my in-class students and my Zoom students, they say hi to each other. So they're having a little morning conversation with each other. And the reason I could do this now is because I have the owl. Before I had an owl, I would again, have to turn my laptop around so that the camera was facing the students but again, I could do that. I could have this little like morning meet and greet type thing so that the students could see each other before I had the other technology. Oh, right, yeah. So Ryan brings up a really good point about losing stuff. That's what was happening with me that first week when I had only my laptop is that I lost everything. My Zoom was here but then my presentation was back here and then where's this? And I was searching around, I was wasting a lot of time just looking for stuff because they were buried in these layers that now that I can separate it, I can keep certain things on one monitor and other things on the other monitor. So when we first opened the school, I always kept my Zoom students on my laptop because I wanted to face the camera. I wanted to face them and the camera so they can see me. If I put it on my other monitor, like now you can notice I'm looking away. So it was kind of disengaging. Once I got the owl, that solved a lot of problems but I will get to that later. Oopsie, sorry. See even now with the second monitor. All right, so we did it. We finished the full, the first kind of school year was only a few months. So it was April through June of 2021. We were in school, we were open, we were accepting new students in class or online and we really kind of worked out some of the kinks that were happening. Now, I will just kind of give you a disclaimer. In my beginning literacy class, you saw I had those four in-class students from that transferred over from Zoom. I ended up reaching out to some of my students that had been in my class pre-pandemic and I gave it one last go. I'm like, hey, school is open again. I really want you to come back to class. I got two more students. So now I had six students in my class and I had 24 online. And that's pretty much how I ended the school year. And so I wanted to just let you know that I kind of lost my train of thought but I did want to let you know that yeah, I did not have very, oh, so that's what it was. I had six in-class students and I was the highest attending in-class class at our school. So a lot of teachers had zero students in class. We offered it but nobody took it. So we had a lot of classes, a lot of teachers who had zero in-class students and still remained only teaching online in their classroom. So they had not experienced the high flex yet. So for three months, there were only a few of us that had actual in-class. Some of them had one, some had two. I had six and the other beginning literacy teacher at night had four. And he was also the highest attending in-class in-class class at night. So the two beginning literacy classes had the most in-class attendance. And I did read in the comments earlier about how the beginning level students tended to kind of want to come back into the classroom. And I agree with that. So now what? We did three months of kind of experimentation. You know, what worked, what didn't. And so now in June, before we started the next school year, we really sat down. There was a group of us that sat down and said, let's think about what we want our next school year to look like. We knew we were gonna do high flex. That was very emphatic on our director's view.  We were gonna offer both. And there was a little pushback from the district but we explained to them about how adults are different than K through 12 because K through 12 were solely in-class. There was no more virtual learning. And so we just said the needs of our adult students were different than the K through 12 and they agreed. So then we said, okay, now that we know we're gonna be high flexed still, what are our goals? And so we created some smart goals. We needed to decide which personnel, which office staff or which teachers or which whomevers were going to be kind of delegated these tasks or in charge of certain things. And that was a big deal for us because we really use the strengths of our support staff to further broaden their job skills and really help us with some of the other tasks that needed to get done. And that was really great for everybody. Our director had to decide what, take inventory of everything. What do we have already that we can still use? What do we need? How much is it gonna cost and when's it gonna come? So she had to go through all of that with, of course our budget and things like that. We, that was when we, she and our counselor went to a presentation at Huntington Beach Adult School who's our adult ed cohort in our consortium and they introduced us to the owl and my director was blown away and she was like, we need those. And so she realized that with the owls that we were already doing high flex in a way that this was only going to make our experiences better for everybody. So she purchased the owls and we ended up getting eight right away. I think she purchased maybe 16 and the other ones were out in a cargo ship on the shore of Long Beach for months and months and months. So we only got eight at the initial run through. And it was a really good thing that we did because she was actually able to get them at a cheaper price than they are now. And I'm going to talk a little bit about owl later, but I mean, they are expensive. They're about a thousand bucks a piece.  So that's why I'm saying, you know, it's not equitable for everybody, but it does work if you can, you know, working into your budget. And then we rolled it out. So come August, now our new school year, the school year that we're starting right now is starting, then all the teachers that have an owl are now going to start to use it and we're starting to play with it. We had TOSUS from RK through 12 come and help us. The custodians were integral part of installation. The owls themselves, easy installation. It's two plugs, one to my computer and then one to the outlet. That's it. So in its basic form, the owls are very, very user friendly as far as setup goes. But because we also, yes. We have a question about your smart goals. She, Audrey wants to know, will you please share what your smart goals were? Oh, okay. Let me finish this thought and then I'll go back to it. What was my thought? Oh, because we have our interactive whiteboard, we did have to get some connections, you know, some HTM. So for admins who are thinking about purchases, HTMI cables are gonna be like probably on your list. And also maybe some hubs or some ports because you're gonna use up a lot.   We have the outlet on my wall to connect our electronic whiteboard. That was starting to get plugged up. The outlets, we only have two here and maybe two someplace else. So I had to get a power strip. So those are like kind of the things that we had to think about as far as purchases go to really kind of make everything work. Now, go back to the smart goals. One of the smart goals was that it was about the pilot. We were going to, you know, teachers will pilot the owl and report on its findings by the end of the semester or something like that.  We had kind of a makeshift one because we were desperate and we had to make it out real fast. But then from the experience and the time we revamped that. So that was another one of our goals. And then the third one, I think was in regards to, oh, in regards to getting everybody a Google classroom. All the teachers were going to develop a Google classroom in every department, no matter not just ESL. Every department was going to create a Google classroom and that we were going to become a Google school. And then in addition to that was that our students were now going to start using our school email address. That wasn't available to us earlier. And so the school district actually gave all of our students a.net, a ggusd.net account. And so one of our goals was to start incorporating that. And it's still an ongoing process. We don't have everybody on board just yet, but come the next school year, our goal is to get all the teachers on board with that. So thank you for that question. All right, so that was in June, we did the planning. One of the things that we did change was marketing and we went to postcards. And in July, we sent out postcards and it was a big money saver. And if you go to the session at two, the next session, Melissa, my director and myself, we're going to be with Marjorie and some, some, the IT director stuff from Aquilanus, they're also going to be talking about, we're going to talk about equipment and money. And so we sent out postcards to three years worth of students. Anybody who was enrolled in our class, in our school for the past three years got mailed this postcard. And the postcard referred them to our website. So that was another thing that we did. We really updated our website. We were able to gain control of it because it used to be somebody from our district office. And so we gained control of our website. So that was a big help. So that was another free resource that we could use. So instead of students coming into the office to get all the information to register, we referred everybody to the website and they could do the registration. They can get information. They learned about our course catalog, things like that. About within two weeks of sending those postcards, we got 720 new student registrations. No joke, 720. We were blown away. And the biggest blow away was 80% of those students wanted to be in class. So if you can remember, I had four, right? From transitioning from online to in class, I had four and then I gained two more. I had six. All of a sudden now, every new student, 80% of the new students that wanted to start learning at our school wanted to be in class. So we were just like, what happened? Where did this come from? So restrictions were starting to be more lax. The COVID was kind of going down. This was before Omicron, pre-Omicron, right? And so people were becoming more, they felt safer to come back to class. And we really, really showcased, displayed all of our health safety issues. We really showed students, this is what we are doing to make sure that you feel safe at our school, everything from all the cleanest, just the normal things that schools were going through. And that we were doing health screenings. We were doing temperature checks. We were doing all of that stuff. And so I think the students felt more comfortable about being in class again. Can you go over the online registration process? Yes, I might have a slide. I don't know if I have a slide on it. Anyways, yes. So the students go on to our website and then we have a big banner saying, register here. Look at our course catalog, register here. And so then the students fill out their information with their name, their normal personal information. And then again, that little invitation about whether they want to be in class or online. And then they had the WIOA information and everything was translated into Vietnamese and Spanish because those are two highest languages that we serve. And so then once they click on submit, it goes to our clerk. And then he has the Google sheet that aggregates all that information. And then from there, he schedules, he tells them when our orientation is. So we scheduled our orientations once a week, every Thursday in the morning and at night. And at the very beginning, when you saw those 720, we are actually doing it four days a week, three times a day. So we wanted to get all those students pushed in. And then as it was getting lower and lower, then we made it one day a week. And so then that's when they got all the information about being an in-class student or being an online student and what that means. And then once they finished the orientation, then he was able to, and so then we also incorporated the COSIS test. So the students had to come to school, they had to do the orientation and right away they did the COSIS test. So we got to pre-test all of the students right away, which is a big, big thing for us because it was very difficult during the online part of it. That whole year we were off campus to get the students pre-test and a post-tested because the remote testing was not working on our campus. Like I was able to do it one-on-one, but of course I can't, it takes a long time and I can only do one student at a time. So that was another whole issue. So we were able to incorporate the e-test at the same time. So that really helped us a lot. All right, so as you can see, this is my, this was in October, I took it a little bit late, but you can see, you know, the tide's had turned. So if you notice, or what do you notice? You know, I have far more in-class students. And then if you look on the computer, I have two, I had two Zoom students. So except for those six that carried over from the other semester, everybody else is new. They're all new students that are in that, in my in-class, and then I still had my two Zoom students on my Zoom.  What happened to them? I promoted them. You know, they had been in my class for over a year. Some of them had already been in my class a year before the pandemic. We didn't promote anybody during the pandemic because we really needed students to kind of learn how to be online students. And so we didn't really feel like, we felt like it could be okay staying in the same level. So some of them were in my class for two years. And so now it was finally time for them to promote. So they went on to the next level, beginning low as online students. So that's why my Zoom student ratio went down quite a bit. So I just want to let you know that some of the things, I was thinking about this this morning about what really worked. So, you know, I think all of you have this. Maybe I'm hoping fingers crossed. The last two years are kind of a blur. I kind of get things kind of mixed up between what happened in 2020 versus 2021. And so some of my information might be overlapping or like in the wrong order. But from what I can recall, the things that worked for us for the year that we came back is that on the top for sure, number one, we had a supportive and administrator. She was brand new. She wasn't brand too adult ed. She was one of our ESL teachers at first and then she became a principal throughout our district in the K through 12. And she was still a night administrator once a week. And so she knew our program. She knew it from the teacher's point of view and she knew it from a somewhat pseudo administrative view. And then when our oldest administrator changed positions, she took over and so this was her first year. So, you know, congratulations to her. She started a whole new program under pandemic and she was nothing but supportive for us the whole time. She was learning while we were learning and she understood and she provided so much professional development for us that I can't emphasize enough to you administrators is key. You know, it really, it takes a lot for the teachers to really learn how to be teachers again. We all knew how to do it in class and then we really had to learn how to do it online in a very short amount of time and OTAN was a big part of that. And now it's like bringing the best of both worlds together and teachers are feeling like they're rocking on the, you know, on the boat a little bit. They're not steady yet. Our online orientation really provided a lot of support for our students who were going to be online students. Again, that second monitor really helped and some of our teachers are not on board with it yet. They're kind of interested, but it's just too much. Like just knowing what they know on the laptop is fine for them and we're fine with that. But anybody who was like interested in getting a second monitor, we provide that for them. The digital textbook, like I said, luckily because we had just adopted adventures two years prior to the pandemic. And so we were kind of getting used to the textbook and all of the components and how to use it all. And luckily for us, we were at that point where we weren't new with it anymore. So when we went to remote, it was a somewhat easier transition. And then the flexibility on our administrators, on our support staff, on the teachers, on the students, everybody was very flexible. We didn't know what was gonna happen week by week. We were getting health updates. Are we gonna close? Can we still stay open? Masks, no masks, temperature checks, blah, blah, blah. So everybody was very understanding about all the different changes that were happening at very quick times. We have two questions. Okay. The first one is more about those orientations, the online orientations and how did those work? The question was were orientations online or in person and then more about those? So let's do that question and then I'll ask the second. Okay, so I'm gonna do it real quick because I've got to get stuff done. I really want to do that all if I can. So the online orientation, I developed this online toward orientation so that I met with, the students made an appointment with me to come online and that I checked to make sure did they have a Zoom account? Was their name on the bottom of the Zoom screen? Could they mute? Could they unmute? Stop video, start video, chat, using like capital letters, periods, things like that. Just basic kind of chat. I didn't go very much into it. So they had to type, my name is and their name. They had to type, how are you? They had to type, I am fine or I'm fine, things like that. So the kind of basic things in chat and then I evaluated them. I kind of vetted them to see how is their wifi? I asked them all, what devices are you on so that I could kind of troubleshoot? Again, not everybody can do this because if you are trying to troubleshoot, you need to know a lot of different devices. And that was really, I had to do a lot of homework because I don't use Apple products. So I had to learn, what does the text screen look like on an iPhone? Or what does the keypad look like on an iPad? Things like that. So I had to go back and do some research on my own to help the students who were using Apple products. And then were they on a laptop, a desktop, a Chromebook, things like that. So I was checking to make sure I checked their noise background. And I made some suggestions sometimes.  So cause a lot of times that first, that interaction with me on Zoom was their first time using Zoom. So they were just gonna use to see me on the screen or them with other people on a screen so that they had a good idea of what it was gonna look like in the classroom. The in-class orientation, the students came and I just gave them kind of the, at the time, at the beginning, it was all about the health things, getting a temperature check, doing the health screenings, making sure they had a mask. And then I would take them on a little campus tour and show them where the bathroom was, where the office was, where their classroom was. So we were kind of going on a little field trip and then they were on their way. So then they were prepared and then I would show them which parking lot to park in, depending on where their class was. So that they knew from the first day of their class, they felt a little bit familiar about where things were or who to ask if they needed more information. I'm gonna jump to this slide real quick, Debbie. So hang on. So what didn't work at first? First I called those challenges, but they were kind of things that happened and we realized they weren't gonna work and we changed it. So again, I was telling you about the headset and microphone. I wish I would have known to do the external camera and to use this microphone for my computer instead of wearing a headset all the time. I definitely would have changed that. The workstation angle, if you noticed in those pictures, I was facing directly in front of the students with my workstation, I now angle it. I'm directly like diagonal to them so that I can see the whole broad spectrum instead of just seeing like the front and looking this way. Power outlets and cables, I really went through and decided which power cables do I need? How many do I need? And where are they gonna be plugged in? And I made an inventory list and I gave it to our custodian, our IT guy and our administrator and they were very, very good about getting it all done. And then using non-digital curriculum was a challenge. I didn't know how to do that. So it was either I recreated some worksheets or I figured out how to get the digital, because of copyright, I wasn't going to just scan it and use it in things unless I had permission, which a lot of times we could because of the education, I don't know what it's called right now, but we could use it for educational purposes, but at some point I just had to recreate a lot of that. So that was kind of a bummer in that it took me a little bit more time to do some of my digital lessons. All right, so real quick, I'm gonna talk about the owl. So high tech at high price. So that actual want button, that was my director. She saw them, she wanted them and she hit that little button, she made it happen. So this I would like to introduce is the owl camera. We call him Mr. Hoot.  And so that's how you know it's working. And it's so cute, the design is perfect and things. So as you can see on the top, there is a camera and it is a 360 degree camera. It's almost like a Google Maps camera, you see on top of the cars. The two eyeballs, that's just kind of an indicator that they are working. The whole bottom part is the speaker and then the microphone is set in there. And it's powerful. The speakers and the microphone are very powerful. I can walk around anywhere in my room and I usually speak at a little bit above normal voice just because I'm a little afraid that it wasn't gonna work that well but then that's just what I do anyways. But everybody says that they can hear me just fine or somebody else in the classroom too. So this is what it looks like. The owl sits on a table at the front of the class, front and center. And now the teacher, Ray, who's on the right, he is able to walk away from his laptop, right? The camera that is originally on his laptop, he's able to walk away and now this is the camera. I was sitting in the classroom and I took this picture. So he's able to go to the front of the board and at the top you see a big banner. That's the whole classroom. So people who are looking at the owl view can see the whole classroom on the top and then on the bottom is either a one screen, a split screen or a triplicate screen depending on the motion and the speaking of the particular time. It's not instantaneous. So if I say something, the owl doesn't pick me up right away. It doesn't go purr and it does kind of scan the room and it goes a little bit slowly. So some of the challenges are that if I'm having a conversation with a student and then our conversation ends, by the time it picks up that student, we've already finished our conversation and I've moved on to someone else. So again, it's not 100% perfect, but it is really nice. The Zoom students really benefit from it because they really feel like they're part of the classroom now instead of just the Zoom screen. And so that's been really, really helpful. This is what it looks like as a student on their phones. So as you can see, there's that big banner on the top. You can see the bottom, it's a split screen. It's picking up two different things because the woman on the right is talking as well as the guy in the back is talking. So it's kind of split the screen because it can't discern what's happening. So it will just, so me as the Zoom student on my phone, I can see, oh, this is what's happening in the classroom and I feel engaged with whatever's happening. I can hear what they're saying and then they can also hear me if I decide to talk. In the top right corner, you'll see me. That's the Zoom, no sharing screen. So that's just me with my video off and it's a thumbnail. So the students have to learn how to toggle between the thumbnail and the owl view depending on what's going on in the classroom. So this is the split screen, same thing, it's a phone, it's a split screen, but now I'm actually sharing something. So you can see me, I'm at the front of the class and I'm sharing that document that's in the little thumbnail but for this particular student, it was more important for her to watch me talk about it than to just look at a screen of the screen share. So that was the different areas. All right, so do we feel a little bit better about simultaneous instruction? I don't know, that was a lot of information in a very short amount of time.


I'm absolutely delighted that this event, this last event, is Pascal Donahoe, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, speaking on this enormous topic of challenges and opportunities facing the European Union in the light of Brexit. I first came across Pascal when he was chairing the sole Committee on European Affairs in the Eroktas. I had been at her at the time and I had heard him speaking on radio and picked up the phone there and then I rang him. And 15 minutes later we were sitting there and having coffee together in Bagot Street. That's how great friendships develop. I have to say he's an extraordinary man. He's one of those who has dedicated, and it's the only verb that can be used, dedicated his life to the public good. He gave up a very important and successful career in the private sector to enter politics and he had to take enormous risks in so doing with his career. And he became a member of the Shannon, as I've just said, and went on then to be elected as a deputy for this constituency, which we're so happily situated. And his promotion, his rise has been quite rapid since then. And I think in recognition of his very great skills, his intellect and his commitment, as I said earlier to the public good, I'll just say one thing, which is that I heard him speak. I was on the same platform at McGill, McGill Summer School last June, in Glentys. And he gave one of the best speeches I've ever heard on this very topic. And it was clear to what it was he was saying, because it was question and answers as well afterwards, where what it was was in his head and had me written for him by somebody else. It's very important in the world of politics that we have such people, especially now at this stage. He's going to deal with something as profound a challenge as this country has ever faced in peace time. And I think that we are extraordinarily fortunate that we have the Minister to help us think our way to the future. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And I want to thank Brendan for his introduction, much of which is undeserved. But you were all correctly gave a round of applause to welcome Rory into his new role as chairperson. And if I could say as somebody who has been involved in European affairs and the politics of the European Union now here in Ireland for a number of years, that Brendan Halligan has been a hero in the relationship between Ireland, Europe and the European Union. Ambassadors, Senator Neil Richmond, ladies and gentlemen, I am really pleased to be here with you this afternoon to speak to you about Brexit, about the prospects for Europe, the prospects for Ireland. And of course, I'm particularly pleased to be doing us here in my own constituency in Dublin Central, to which you are all very welcome too. We can't trust the evening news. We can't trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life are rigged against us. We can't get jobs. This isn't some libertarian mistrust of government policy. This is a deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. Ladies and gentlemen, this quote is from Hillbilly Energy. It's last year's seminal book by J.D. Vance on American politics and culture. And as it is in America, so too it is in Europe. Because this view is entirely consistent with what we heard from some during the Brexit referendum. And indeed, the Bruegel Institute, the Brussels-based economic think tank, recently published an analysis of the voting trends during the referendum that showed, and I'm quoting, that a 1% higher poverty raise boosted the share of leave votes by 1 percentage point, going on to say the result highlighted poverty as a determinant of leave votes. So our task in not just the months ahead, but the many, many years ahead in this post-Brexit world is nothing less, I believe, than to restore trust in the institutions that underpin our society and our economy, and to show, and to better show, that they can actually work. And I say this because I believe it's imperative that we have to recognise the very stark reality of what is unfolding in front of us. At many points in the last 12 months, many of us, myself included, said that we couldn't believe the things that have actually happened. We couldn't believe the fragmentation of Doyle-Aaron, that at a time looked it might deliver a government. We couldn't believe the decision by a majority of the British people to leave the European Union. And we didn't think it would happen that we would see the election of now President Trump on a policy platform and the campaigning and governing style that is very different to anything we have seen in recent American politics. Now there have been acres and hours of comment on these electoral outcomes. But I think what has been less frequently commented on is the economic context against which these outcomes have happened. Because this context is that national income growth and employment growth are all realities here in Britain, across the European Union and in the United States. It's an empirical fact that more of us are working and fewer of us are on the dole than was the case in 2008 and 2009 when the world economy was so severely derailed and in such crisis. Two million jobs were created in Britain between 2010 and 2015. In the United States 11 million jobs were created under President Obama. And in the EU, Euro stuff estimated last September that there are now over 232 million men and women employed throughout the Union, which is the highest number ever recorded. And these are all economic facts that would have appeared impossible back in 2009 when the economic mood and vista was so, so dark. So this poses, I believe, two crucial political questions. The first question is, if despite the return of economic growth, we are now witnessing a continued and deep mistrust of what some call the establishment, what will happen when the next economic downturn or crisis hits? And the second question is, if the Great Recession asked if our economic institutions could change and adopt, maybe the coming years will ask exactly the same of our political institutions, of our national and our European political institutions. And how Ireland and Europe responds to Brexit may well offer the defining and common element to the answer to both of those questions. So 2016 will probably be remembered as the year in which populism founded its people and the people found it. A research paper from the Harvard School of Government estimates that populist parties captured about one in every eight seats in recent European elections, with a share of the vote rising from 5% in the 1960s to over 13% now. This also disguises the fact that support and influence are two very, very different things. It's arguable that the rise of UKIP, for example, didn't see the party win power but did see the party win the argument. John Judas, who's a former editor of the New Republic and has written a superb book called The Populist Explosion, defines populists as those who assume a basic antagonism between the people and an elite. This is at the heart of their political identity. And he further defines us as an approach that creates demands that will not be satisfied by incremental progress but rather must be delivered now immediately and in their entirety. And this definition has been added to by John Vernon Muller, a professor of politics in Princeton University, who said and I quote, all populists oppose the people to a corrupt self-serving elite. But not everyone who criticizes the powerful is a populist. What really distinguishes the populist is he and he alone believes to represent the people. And this approach is evident in many places across Europe, including, I believe, in our own country. Too often, some in the political arena have claimed a monopoly on authenticity, where the compassion, not just the competence of those of us in the governing centre are challenged on a daily basis. But this challenge is so continuous that it poses not just a challenge for those seeking to lead our parliamentary or our governing institutions, but for the very credibility and functioning of those institutions themselves. And this is a particularly profound challenge for the European Union because, as Jean Monnet rose, nothing is possible without men and nothing is lasting without institutions. So where do we begin? We are now living through the post-Great Recession era, where our economy and our society are healing but not yet healed. Another era where the cause and effect of a growing economy and political incumbency no longer applies. Look at Denmark, for example, where an unemployment rate of less than 5% saw the far-right People's Party double their support and win nearly a fifth of the vote. Similarly, the Democratic Party in the US would point to the huge economic advancement over the last eight years and scratch their heads about the recent eviction from the White House. So these types of electoral outcomes are products of a new political dispensation where economic growth no longer automatically means healing and where governments cannot count on growth to secure a desired outcome at the ballot box. And I believe the greatest danger we now face is one of complacency. The idea that these issues will go away, that ultimately everyone will, for want of a far better phrase, come to their senses and that the huge changes that people are experiencing in their lives, in their careers, in the social interaction they have with their partners, their families and their friends, will not change the institutions in which they operate. But of course it would be incredible if this wasn't the case. It would be incredible if the forces of deindustrialisation, of the digital revolution, of multiculturalism left politics and politics unchanged and unaltered. And where perhaps people like myself have been complacent is the inability of those of us in the political centre to match the passion of non-mainstream politicians, especially as non-mainstream passion is wrapped around false hopes and dangerous ideas that will ultimately hurt the very vulnerable people and those groups that populists claim to represent. What we have been complacent on is missing the due focus on the link between job growth and also income and change in people's living standards. Equally, however, it remains the case that the collapse of growth makes that healing process so much more difficult if not impossible. And this is why it's so important for the politics of the centre to assert itself again, to tell its story, we have to find our voice again. We must make the case for a global, for an interconnected world, for Europe and for an Ireland that opens minds, that addresses poverty, that promotes diversity within society. We must reassert the case that interdependence is a source of strength, not weakness. We must make the case that market economies working hand in hand with a welfare state, with proper regulation, is still the best way to deliver jobs. We must ensure stronger public institutions that deliver fairness and deliver better public services and that regardless of the challenges that face us, that face us as citizens, as communities, our countries, no matter how small or how big, that we do so much better together than on our own. And if we don't do this, our political institutions will face the same questions our economic institutions have struggled to answer in recent years. A diverse intellectual framework, which has been capable of being harnessed by the populist sentiment exists, Reiser is from the English philosopher John Gray, the French novelist Michelle Holbeck, the German economist Wolfgang Streck, to the work of only last week of Pankaj Mishra in his new book The Age of Anger, questioned the very viability of our economic, of our political, of our social order. And the fusion, or even the fission, of that thought with political populism is underestimates us as our grave risk. So we must stand over our values, values that are central to European identity and the European Union project. I believe those values are part of our DNA in Ireland, and I also believe they are in our national interest. And that's why our future is in the European Union. It's in asserting our confidence in these values and asserting that we have confidence in Europe. And this is why the government is prepared and continues to prepare for British withdrawal. We have established our headline priorities, which are namely minimising the impact on trade and economy, protecting the Northern Ireland peace process, maintaining the common travel area, and influencing the future of the European Union. We will negotiate from a position of strength as our member states firmly in and committed to the Union. And of course what will also be critical will also be focussed on the future relationship between the UK and EU. And that is why we are engaging extensively with all other member states, with the European institutions, with the Barnier Task Force, and will participate fully in all of the structures of the EU in getting ready for those negotiations, all of which will expand, will intensify when Article 50 is triggered. We will pursue our national interest and we will pursue our priorities fully within the legal and policy framework of those negotiations. And within this what will be vital is our commitment to protecting the integrity of the Good Friday Agreement, its core principles, as well as supporting the stable operation of its interlocking institutions, all of which is particularly important given the current situation in the North. A very practical, real-world example of all of this is the cross-border peace and interreg programs, which I have responsibility for. These are two North-South cross-border programs that are managed and implemented by the special EU programs body, one of which is the cross-borders body established under the Good Friday Agreement. Since the Brexit referendum, we have secured these programs for the short term. The medium term is to ensure the full implementation to 2020, the long term is to make sure they have a successor. And if you ever wanted a tangible example of how important this is, it was in my recent visit that I had to Derry when I walked across the peace bridge, to my left I had a DUP Lord Mayor and to my right I had a Sinn Fein Minister for Finance. On a project, on a bridge, enabled by the European Union. But all that being said, let's be really clear. We cannot be under any illusion about the scale of challenge that's ahead. However, I also believe we cannot assume that the EU we are now planning for will be the same as the EU of today minus the UK. We can't assume that maintenance. And I spoke earlier of how our economic prospects are brighter now than we might have imagined a few years ago, and we now have to have the same conviction, the same attitude to complacency now about our political prospects. Because as we see a new set of values asserting themselves elsewhere, Europe has to assert its values and what we believe in and what we stand over for. And this is why it is right for people like me, and indeed I have a duty, to challenge the new populist orthodoxy that only total immediate change, no matter how unsustainable, is the way to make things better. Incremental change may be slow, but it's not the same as no change. It's solid, it's lasting, it's real. Look at, for example, the change in the Irish national debt. Once larger than our national annual outpost, and in danger of tipping our entire economy into a fiscal tailspin, our national debt is now stable, it's falling, and not through the catastrophe of an unplanned sovereign default, but by steady maintenance of our spending control and by steady reduction of our deficits. Look to a job creation. Our unemployment rate fell by one tenth of one percent every month for four years. No Big Bang, no Silver Bullets, just real, meaningful, sustainable improvements. A tale which is replicated across many parts of Europe. And we achieved these improvements by having the courage of convictions, bywithstanding the lure of the eye-catching headline or the applause of the crowd. As a centrist politician and as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, I have to balance competing principles every hour. But that doesn't mean I don't have any principles. Simple solutions rarely work, but that doesn't mean I believe no solutions can be found. And above all, we in the centre who are saddened by Brexit must adopt a tone that is moderate but needs to be more firm. And this is because the nature of our political discourse has been coarsened. It's as if the need for decency has been replaced by the need for 140 characters or less. It's as if the need for meaningful debate has been replaced by the need to garner the most likes or win the most page impressions. The French philosopher Raymond Aran who fled the Nazi occupation of his country but recognised the dangers of communism as well and knew a thing or two about the need to avoid a political extreme set. Freedom flourishes in temperate zones. It does not survive the burning fate of profits and crowds. And if it was true then, it's true now. So while it is now radical to be moderate, we can't seek to credibly meet the needs of those we represent. But most importantly will now be the need not just to deliver and maintain growth but to deliver inclusive growth. And this means recognising that a job does not necessarily mean security and we need to ensure well-paid jobs, sustainable jobs that engage the intellectual, the artistic, the creative, talents of us all. And this is recognised in the European Commission's Europe 2020 strategy which says that and I'm quoting in a changing world we want the EU to be a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. We recognise it here as a government in Dublin's North Inner City through the Kiran Mulvyn North Inner City initiative or through the government's action plan on rural development. Inclusive growth means investing in infrastructure and in education in people and institutions to help them realise their potential. Look for example at our national and European efforts to build the infrastructure of the future. Our national capital plan which I will review and strengthen this year which sees billions invested in our roads, our public transport, our schools and our hospitals by the start of the next decade and indeed in the coming years. The Junker plan of investment across the EU will see half a billion euro worth of investment by 2020 to benefit 290,000 small, medium enterprises which in turn has been credited with the creation and maintenance of 100,000 new jobs. And as the UK looks to leave the single markets we should seek to deepen us. We should seek to make it better. True for example to digital economy and the EU should now be as ambitious with trade plans as any other country any other country in a changing global economy. And this ambition has to imply to education. Last week for example Minister Bruton published plans to deliver 50,000 apprenticeships and traineeships by 2020. Meanwhile the European Investment Bank over the last five years has provided more than seven billion euro for investment in universities in Europe including 512 million euro in Ireland. Ireland is actually the fifth largest country of operation for the European Investment Bank for funding for universities and only in November agreed loan funding for Trinity College for 70 million euro and UCC and Cork for 100 million euro. That's inclusive growth in action. This in turn has to facilitate a stronger link between job creation and then the maintenance and enhancement of living standards and income. However we can only have this inclusive growth if we have the strength in our public finances to fund us. Which is why our membership of the euro zone is central to realizing our prospects and this is why eliminating the need to borrow from volatile financial markets to pay for day-to-day public services and wages is so vital. It's the economic foundation upon which we build all else. So ladies and gentlemen I want to leave you today not with a vision of dystopia not with a vision of an unfounded utopia but with a vision of something we must strive for. I want to end by talking about the role of Europe of Ireland of the member states of the European Union in a changing world. We must recognize this changing world now. We must recommend that the levels of and the forms of political and economic integration are now changing and that Ireland has to borrow a phrase skin in this game as we have built 40 years of economic development on the stability of that integration. But I remain confident that if as the desiderata tells us we speak our truth quietly and clearly and listen to others we and all who support the shared liberal and democratic values of Europe and the European Union can prevail but we must recognize the political challenges in doing this. In 10 or 20 years time Europe may well be an open trading bloc and continent in a more closed world or it may be that our success is seen in contrast to the failure of the new protectionism and others come back to this way of thinking but mark my words one way or the other the European Union that former communist states saw enthusiastically to join the European Union that secured peace and the absence of bloodshed the European Union that promoted and won the rights of women to equal pay and the rights of workers to fair treatment are achievements and values that we should stand for not shy away from and this is because politics lives in the moment it flows from the past but always has to look to the future it looks to horizons that are bound by uncertainty and that we will never reach because the past to them is always work in progress but to make this work inclusive to make this work sustainable we must recognize the compass that can give this journey direction values values that are european that are irish and values that we must stand by and for thank you