2021-03-01 PPS School Board Study Session

From SunshinePPS Wiki
District Portland Public Schools
Date 2021-03-01
Time 12:00:00
Venue Virtual/Online
Meeting Type study
Directors Present missing


Documents / Media

Notices/Agendas

Materials

Minutes

None

Transcripts

Event 1: PPS Board of Education Study Session - 3/01/21

00h 00m 00s
happy lunchtime uh for everybody um board director superintendent um what we're going to be talking about is transformative social emotional learning in portland public schools myself along with chandra cooper who is the senior director over our mtss systems along with jill bryant our assistant director adrian briones and liz tracy our ptosis for sel what's been wonderful is we have been able to grow our social emotional learning uh program under the department of mtss over the past couple of years uh due to the the superintendent's priority on social emotional learning in pbs and how we really braid this transformative sel approach into everything that we do through a racial equity and social justice lens we partner that with uh sell trauma-informed practices and restorative uh justice and we really work on uh not only providing those proactive supports but also the supports when students are struggling and we do it through a tiered support system so i just want to thank you all uh for being here today we are going to um talk to you a little bit about seo we will go through an activity uh just like our students do and um and hopefully it just uh gives you a better understanding of sel and pps so with that i'm going to go ahead and turn the time over to jill bryant okay thank you hey uh roseanne i'm not seeing the chat option is that going to be an option for us or we could probably do a chat on this one if we keep it if it's visible i it's in my settings to disable it in advance i don't think i can enable it from here without the meetings okay sorry okay and there's one of the exercises calls for us to use the chat at some point so maybe there's an alternative if we can't if we don't have access to that yeah we can we can adjust we'll adapt um well let's just i'll take 10 seconds here to um introduce myself i'm jill bryant my pronouns are she her and i'm the assistant director of sel adrian hi everyone i'm adrienne brienes my pronouns are she her and i am an scl tosa with the team liz hi i'm liz tracy my pronouns are she her and i'm another tosa on the team chandra does everybody know you already are you already famous i don't know about that but i can introduce myself um i'm chandra cooper pronoun she her and i am the senior director for mtss and as brenda said thank you so much for having us and being able to reschedule this i really appreciate this yeah we're super excited to have the opportunity so we'll um we'll just get started since uh it's already nine after so we're gonna just take we're just gonna start by taking one minute to watch this video here so and we have a lot of evidence that social emotional learning has made a difference we had a graduation rate of 62 last year we put up a record breaking 84 over the last five years our expulsions have been cut in half we were suspending about 13 000 days of out of school suspension we were 10 times the average for any school district in ohio and within that first year alone we were able to reduce our suspensions by 55 attendance rates went up we know that attendance is directly correlated to academic improvement and achievement but it also had other outcomes that were extremely important which is students feeling more connected to schools educators having to think outside the box helping students overcome some of the challenges that are in their life there's an 11 to 1 return on investment so for every dollar invested in programming around social emotional learning we're seeing that they're saving 11 on remedial programs dropout prevention there's lots of reasons that people are coming to the conclusion that this is something that we need to be prioritizing okay um so we are going to start with a warm welcome
00h 05m 00s
and we'll talk a little bit more about the three signature practices and the warm welcome is one of them and this is something that we are pushing out district wide for really is our easy district-wide implementation of sel so the first signature practice is the warm welcome and some of you may or may not have experienced that yet but this is our opportunity to just uh get present in the room make a connection uh essentially what it says a warm welcome but what we'd like you to do and we don't have a chat so people could just unmute and share what's when you think of sel and pps what's what's one or two words that come to mind i'd say forward thinking one or two words how about intention around the wellness and health of health health mental wellness mental well-being of all of our students how about crucial when we've got basically a mental health crisis amongst children in this country caring communities sorry what was that sorry caring communities and i said comprehensive okay great thank you okay so today we've got a few goals in a short period of time but we're gonna just start by spending a few minutes at the beginning to look at explore how sel is already embedded in pps through our theory of action and our vision and we're going to just take a really quick high level um overview of the implementation plan and then already started becoming familiar with the three signature practices and we know that you uh we heard that we should prioritize on you experiencing uh sel lessons so that will be the majority of our time today so first what we're really excited and love that we have the support from the superintendent is we have our have been in a partnership now with castle which is the collaborative for academic social emotional learning it's uh really the um the leader in the national leader in helping districts to implement district-wide sel they've been doing this work for 20 plus years and building their research base and we meet with them it's like having a whole nother team we get four to six of them once a week sometimes twice a week we probably work with them up to five hours a week in addition to lots of other work they're doing for us and they are helping us build our five-year plan implement our five-year plan as well as a continuous improvement we've got their other research department evaluation department working for us so it's really quite exciting and quite a robust and beneficial partnership and um also what's we wanted to just note that um we also have council of great city schools who are also partnering with castle and you can see there are some of the districts that are in both of those partnerships that we're in so like jill said we want to take just a few minutes to talk about scl the big picture and at the end of this you also have links to multiple resources that you can look into to dive deeper into sel if this is just a little bit and you want you want more information so for this for us to really understand how sel is going to support pps let's first look closer at the definition so as you can see here castle provides a couple definitions this there's one that is more of a research based academic definition that isn't this one and then there's the transformative sel definition for today we're going to explore the idea of how transformative sel aligns nicely with portland's graduate portrait our theory of action and our strategic plan what we know is that sel has the power to advance equity and excellence through
00h 10m 00s
authentic partnerships trusting relationships rigorous instruction and ongoing evaluation just to name a few ways this work centers on identity agency and belonging the castle framework is another way to look at the various components of sel and that's that circle that you see on the side there so you can see that there are specific competencies in the center of the wheel and as the outer rings are also equally important because they're about how we implement a solid sel plan part of the work that we're going to be doing this year is creating our own definition of sel that applies to pps and we're in a great starting space but we need some collaboration to make sure that we have a shared understanding of sel in our district so let's take a closer look at how this framework here supports pps's goals on the next slide so we already have an amazing plan in portland through our graduate portrait through our theory of action and our strategic plan and so sel is just one way that we're going to support obtaining our goals and you can see in the visual how each one of these really aligns nicely with the framework and again we're we're rushing through this part because we really want you to be able to experience a lesson but we are happy to come back as much as you want to talk more about sel okay so one of the things that castle helps us with is using their theory of action to implement sel in our district and this visual is just it's just what their theory of action is and i'm going to point out the why first so you see those student outcomes those align really nicely with what we're hoping for in portland as well and the goal or the idea is if we understand what those student outcomes are we can use the framework in the center and the cycle of continuous improvement and those those four areas to help us get to those outcomes and through the five-year plan that we have we're hoping that we're going to actualize this theory of action in our and in pps in the post session materials we have shared there's a draft of the five year plan and a feedback feedback form we're hoping that you'll have a chance to take a look at that five year plan and then access the feedback form to give us your insight or your thoughts on how that applies so again that will be in the post material um that you get afterwards i think from cara okay i feel like i'm rushing but we really want to make sure you have time for the lesson so i'm just going to keep pushing through jill talked a little bit about the three signature practices and what we what's i think really nice to know is that this is one strategy that we're using just district-wide to start implementing sel now without it being rushed or not a thoughtful approach and so the three signature practices like jill said are just these three strategies of a warm welcome engaging strategies and an optimistic closure and the beauty of these is that they can be incorporated into anything that we do they can be incorporated into staff meetings with adults they can be part of our lessons that we do with students they can be in math or in reading they can be in any part of the day and if we center on these three signature practices we'll see the sense of identity agency and belonging start to shine through throughout the school day for our students and for our staff so throughout this time together today you're going to get a chance to see the three signature practices in action just like you saw the warm welcome this morning or this at the beginning of our time so i think we're ready to dive into the lesson and again we'll have lots of information and invite us back as much as you'd like for um some a deeper dive into scl if if that works for you okay the uh tree service decided to come right now and do some shipping of branches so hopefully you can i don't know how loud that is for you okay it's very loud for me you're doing good jill we can't yeah just on the three signature practices those i wanted to say the central office even at the leadership institute um they've been uh using those there and maybe the school board would want to integrate those in some way who knows all right so for the lesson bill just like you made me feel welcome when we started this call that was the opposite sorry
00h 15m 00s
um okay so this is the engaging strategies portion of our session together and um we actually adrian we've caught up we're only a minute behind now so we can take a breath um but this is what it said what it says the engaging next activities where we really engage in the work and so what we've decided to share with you is a lesson from uh the unit that the uh mtss sel team developed during cdl for k8 it's about a 10-week lesson and not everybody used it but a lot of people use them so we decided to share this with you um so here we go so this is something that um what we're using is what the middle schoolers use and some of you may or may not have seen this so we're going to start our lessons with a a warm welcome so this is starting the student lesson and um if we had the chat we'd ask you to put a word or two that captures where you are right now so um whoever wants to share out um i might put a little nervous and excited i'm feeling calm and energized i want what scott had for breakfast okay i'm gonna go with scott with what i'm gonna go with what scott said i think those are really um descriptive of where i am i'm feeling stressed but also grateful [Music] i am distracted and annoyed uh mostly because uh comcast is here trying to uh install new wi-fi at my church and it's going swimmingly the guy is great except my laptop has decided it doesn't want to wi-fi anymore so you're on my phone oddly in my pencil holder while we do this that's where i am all right one more person i want to share thank you for sharing yeah i think i'm drained and motivated which are a little bit opposites but yeah that's where i think i am yeah okay thanks um so we'll go on to the next one next slide so a few weeks ago when we were supposed to present um after the board meeting you're you were given the pre-homework of watching this video uh that was probably centuries ago in your your memory so i'm not sure if anybody watched this or remembers it but we we have a plan because we anticipated you probably wouldn't have had time or forgot it um so i won't even put you on the spot like i did director bailey to see if you did your homework or um so basically this video is what it says is is why do we lose control of our emotions and i'll go into that we'll discuss that briefly shortly so this video is what our middle schoolers watched and then this book is what we had for our k5 and uh for our unit we tried really hard to find books we had to find books that were read aloud read alouds already created and then read alouds that had a spanish version as well quite a challenge but we we did a pretty good job of bringing that together so flip your lid and this is the video did has anybody heard the concept of flipping your lid anybody care what they know about it i think they know what comes to mind i think about the um fails i see on facebook of like a pressure cooker lid embedded in the ceiling um for me flip your lid means to be like upset or like bubbling up um chaotic in emotions that's kind of what i think of when i hear that yeah thank you what else could think about if we say you know we
00h 20m 00s
all say oh don't flip your lid so what what what does that mean emotionally or physically what else comes up to me it's like at the point at which you just kind of lose control over your emotions and and you emote or you um like the picture says the kids got steam blowing up out of his ears um it's at the point where you lose control of your self yeah yeah okay great both both of those are all true and and has anybody seen the um the hand model that dr siegel does to to show that i see director moore nodding so so i'll use the hand model here this is what the video is to show and we use this um as adapted but even when i was working with head start even with the four-year-olds it was really fun to see them understand this concept but basically the concept that you have um an upstairs brain and a downstairs brain and the upstairs brain is our frontal cortex where we're able to think critically and solve problems and our upstairs brain is uh more it moves slowly and it's conscious and evolutionarily speaking it's the last it's the last thing that's been developed and then also developmentally you probably probably all have heard what's been in you know the science lately about this really has developed uh fully not until we're 24 or 26 and then our downstairs brain the brain stem is where is unconscious it's instantaneous and it's really where the fight flight or freeze happens and so basically and then here in the midbrain is where our hippocampus is is our memory is stored and so what happens is when we flip our lids literally the reason this is a great model is our lid get flipped lids get flipped which means that this upstairs brain is no longer talking to the downstairs brain and the downstairs brain the fight flight or freeze has taken over and so no matter like we try to tell teachers but with with children too no matter how hard we try to reason our way out with others so maybe you with partners you might have said just calm down just calm down they you can't because they're they're no longer talking so we could offer a five-year-old 50 oreos to calm down and think rationally but that it doesn't matter because our ability to reason and problem solve is disconnected and so it's not until then our system our cortisol and our nervous system calms down till they're back to connected that then we can uh begin to slowly reason and think critically does that resonate with people makes sense that that bit of information can be very very powerful for for for many especially for our adults but in in head start the the parents would come and they'd say my four-year-old told me not to flip my lid um so it was very sweet okay adrian think you're up thanks still i know you're up so this unit this resilience unit there were lots of strategies that we were hoping students could take away with and that one of those would be one that would work for them or maybe there would be multiple but at least there would be one strategy that they could see as something that empowers them to be able to have that resilience through the difficult times that we're experiencing especially right now in previous lessons of the unit we've we've talked about these different strategies and on this slide right here you can see the resilience toolkit handout and so this is a list of the strategies that if you had experienced all of the other lessons you would know these and you would know which ones worked for you one of them is a helper tool and that's something that was brought up in the video as well who is that person who is that adult that you can go to that that can support you when you're feeling escalated for whatever reason and at this point in
00h 25m 00s
this lesson we would ask students to think about who is the adult that you can go to and also honor that sometimes you just need space sometimes you don't need an adult but you need that time to yourself and to know that that's okay too and really the most important piece is that it's important to know that you have choices when you're in that red zone of those emotions that you see on the side that it's up to you to decide what works best for you and that by talking about it now when we're not in the red zone we're going to be more likely to use these strategies when we are feeling those big emotions later so for this lesson we wanted to give students the chance to think about their range of emotions to also think about how their body tells them those warning signs that they're having those emotions and then also what are the things that i can do because i have some control over the situation for myself what are some things that i can do to help myself get back into that green space that calm zone so this is where we're going to dive into another slide deck and i'm wondering kara if you got my email with the link my hope is that you all will get access to this link and then you're going to open it up with me and you each have your own worksheet that you're going to work on so i might be challenged to work on a worksheet um i can open up but i might have a challenge no worries you you will not be graded on this assignment and it's just a chance for you to see what it's like so um you don't take in your head and you don't need to even fill out the worksheet so thank you let's swap over to that slide deck and jill's doing that for us now can you see it yep can you present it sure so um jill go ahead and scroll down to slide six for just a moment this one nope keep going a please more okay this one so the goal would be by the end of this lesson that each student would have their own personal confidential worksheet that they would be doing there's a k5 one that's a little more friendly for younger readers and then there's this one that's for our older students so jill i'm going to ask you to jump back up to slide two to step one and we're gonna give you just a few minutes to think about this on your own and so for step one you're gonna find the slide with your name in the notes and there's one for each of you and step two is that you're going to add pictures or words that describe how your body reacts when you're feeling the corresponding emotion so think about what do you notice for example if i'm in the red my body starts to shake i can feel it shaking if i'm in the yellow i sometimes laugh because i'm just kind of uncomfortable even if it's not a funny situation so what are the things that you notice in your body or where do you notice it do you notice it in your head do you notice it in your stomach or your leg shaking you're going to think about where you notice it so that you know those warning signs that you're starting to go up that escalation and here's an example of what that might look like on your own worksheet so we have three minutes to look at to go through the first one this first step thinking about the emotions where you feel it and what that looks like and you can write it down on the worksheet if you'd like to or on your own and we'll come we'll pause for just a second so you can do that and then come back together uh
00h 30m 00s
go ahead and wrap up the part you're working on now as you're finishing up hopefully in a classroom setting there would be a lot more time for students to explore each of these spaces to have some time to think to reflect to have conversations if it would be helpful but just to really know that this can be fluid as well that it might change as you grow up you might notice the feelings differently and as adults we might notice them and really empowering students to know that this this fluctuates and it can change and it's just the power of knowing it that's important we're going to do step two now and chill if you'll move to the next slide so for step two now we're thinking about all of those those strategies on the resilience toolkit or for all of you it might be strategies you already use that aren't on the resilience toolkit and you're thinking about if you'll move down to the next slide now joe please you're thinking about when i feel each of these emotions what's something that i can do to support myself if i'm in the green what's the thing that i'm going to do to help me stay there but if i'm in yellow orange or red what are the things that are going to bring me back down to the green or if i'm feeling blue what's the thing that's going to help me get back to green so it's not that green is good or i'm happy it's more that it's i'm calm i i feel like my lid is not flipped right that i can make decisions i can communicate i feel in control of myself at that point so take a couple minutes again to think about what is the strategy you would use for each one of these and i'll we'll do two more minutes for that time and you can do that back on your individual worksheets just a couple more seconds to finish what you're thinking about okay so the end goal again is for students to have a more clear picture of how their bodies feel in the continuation continuum of emotions and then also to have strategies that are handy for them that they've already decided might work and like i said earlier by practicing this skill in a calm supportive state students are more likely able to access it independently when they need to thanks for engaging in this part of the lesson with us we're going to switch back over to the main slide deck now for the rest of our time together roseanne is our in time 1245. okay
00h 35m 00s
so as jill switches us back over the last part of any lesson that we would suggest would be the third part of the three signature practices that optimistic closure and the optimistic closure is a way to either wrap up what has been done it might not necessarily be optimistic but it gives us a chance to come to think about what we've learned or to think about what's coming next or to give us a chance to pause to get grounded where we're at to be prepared for that transition one of those examples is a shout out where students can just shout out thanks or things that they appreciated in the middle of the of the lesson and then wrap up with that nicely one other thing we wanted to point out was that part of mtss the rapid response team has been supporting with these at home strategies and this is one of the at-home strategies that corresponds nicely with this lesson and it's a way of helping parents and families use the same idea of this escalation cycle to think about their students to think about how what do i notice in my kid that is telling me that they're getting to that red zone and so it's a strategy that we also linked in the the resources at the end so you can see it but just to know that we've been trying to make sure that the sel stuff is embedded throughout and that we're reaching families as well as our staff and our students we're going to skip the recap for today and do our optimistic closure for our time together so you want to leave that part or would you like me to i can do it but my if my internet is failing and take over i'll go ahead okay so is there um i know that we're going to wrap up really quickly this is board member michelle um is there a place i can um i can submit some questions i have some questions i don't want to take up time here that um i have who who would be the best to address those two i'm wondering if we can stay a little bit later since we got a late start and folks are okay adding in another 10 minutes or so i think we started 10 minutes late and directed you could go ahead and send me any questions you could send them my way and i'll make sure that chandra and jill and uh their team um are able to answer those for you okay thank you of course and can you see the rest of us on the reply would be great happy to do so i would thank you for that reminder there's also i can't i can't stay late i do have a hard stop today at 12 45. we also have a feedback form that we're really hoping to get feedback from all of you on this presentation and how helpful it was and there's a place there that i think you could add some other comments or thoughts as well and so you that's you can see that on the last slide that we're showing so because our time is at an end here is the final question that we have for all of you and we would put it in the chat but because we're not using the chat if you want to popcorn out by unmuting your mic feel free to do that as well here's the question what is one way the sel is connected to your work as a member of the school board well i'll just jump in it's with the obvious answer the easy one which is why i go first um you know it's connected to our goals right and and the more effective we are with social emotional learning the more effective we're going to be achieving the bore goals that that we've laid out for the district and i also need to go but i just want to say thank you um for this it was really helpful overview um and such important work and and you know one of the questions that i'll have i'll just sort of sort of say here is is how do we measure the success of this right and i know that's a challenging thing in anything we do as a district but it is so important for what we do and i guess i guess how do we know we're getting forward movement and and forward movement with the with the um the places where we most need it and you know the thought that came to my mind was um you know i i come from i'm not in any way a therapist or social worker but i come from a family of therapists and social workers and so you know this this this resonates very you know um clearly with things that i've heard and i think people embrace but i also know there are lots of people who don't either think this way or or even think this is sort of legitimate right this this whole sort of you know being in touch with your body it's more of a you know just just just deal with it suck it up move on and my question not for here but sort of
00h 40m 00s
generally is is how how are we effectively reaching some of those kids and frankly some of those families right where the lesson they're getting at home maybe very very different than the lesson that that you just provided us here today and it seems like a real um challenge to reach those kids thank you we're really excited about our plan for those exact things that you talked about and so hopefully we'll be able to share more of those details with you soon thank you appreciate your time today so one way for me this is julia one way for me that it connects with our work is just given where we are in this sort of super unique time point in time and um in our country and that you know what's happening with our students is there's probably never a more important time that we're having conversations about this and helping our students and their families sort of navigate through just an unprecedented situation and just keeping this front and center because it's hard for people to think about the academic work or all the other things that need to happen um when there's lots of other things that are sort of front and front and center that our students and family are dealing with thank you i also think it connects because we have to collaborate and work as a team and there's a lot of intensity and a lot of um you know deep conversation that can be really difficult and so being aware of seo is also good just for us as a board as we work together and work with the staff um so i think it's it's connected like andrew said to our goals and to the work we do with students but it's also for me um doing some social emotional learning as a board together helps us work together more effectively and in a healthier way yeah building out that the more we model the values that are in the graduate portrait the more coherent we are as an organization uh the better i do at listening and instead of reacting i'll be a much better board member we'll have much better discussions and get to better solutions when we're grappling with some really complex issues [Music] and it's really interesting i thought andrew had a great question about you know reaching down to families um i think one thing is we we don't have a hugely robust parent involvement program in this district yet um i've done before i was on the board i did a lot of parent engagement stuff and i think we can make the case that empathy you know when we're reaching out to parents to say here's how you can help your child get literacy skills that empathy is just as much an important skill in their child's ability to learn as the the literacy or math or whatever if we're having a family math night we should also have a family empathy night on way back in the day i worked in social services and i trained uh volunteers and listening skills um and it's great to see that just a real correspondence with those specific skills of these are door openers they get the conversation rolling these are how to identify emotions which increases the trust and oh yes you're listening to me uh how to connect those emotions with what's going on the real world and we have this whole skill based step-by-step system of really teaching empathy and problem solving so to see the uh the basics here being rolled out is is really great and what we got a lot of was uh you know we do i think eight nights of training for volunteers and after the third night or on the fourth one people would come in and say wow i just tried this out with my kid and it was amazing so uh these kind of skills just help all the way around both parents and and our students it's great stuff yeah just as we wrap up here um i just wanted to say that last two people mentioned the adult piece and that's really where we are wanting to start is with the adults in
00h 45m 00s
the system and um as opposed to just seeing that there's a set of competencies that we need to give to children and we we know that those competencies have the potential to be used weaponized against kids in particular our our bipoc students and trying to get children to conform to white norms and what we really know is that we as adults you know the sel is a lifetime endeavor and the more that we as adults and we as a system work on the conditions and the environment and the policies and modeling and practicing ourselves that then that can help create that culture to of sel and then help us to actualize um those portions of the graduate portrait and the and the theory of action so it's nice to hear you mention that and and jill you remember when we were building the vision and graduate portrait how often those who participate in that process brought up the word empathy i mean it was one of the number one one of the top ten at least if you did one of those word bubbles in terms of what people wanted to see happening in our classrooms that was that was big yeah i know we need to wrap up brenda did you want us to mention eldp or i would love that if you just want to give them a tiny little snapshot of our partnership with eldp and the national equity project that would be great yeah so what's really exciting is um we've been working with castle to to have resj so sel be in service of racial equity and social justice um seeing sel as a lever for equity and to to really create a way to co-construct a strategy for actually making that happen and we got invited by um castle and the eldp equitable learning and development project which is working with the national equity project university of chicago and the bell institute working in this partnership where we will be one of a very few districts and and thank you superintendent for for bringing this letting having us do this and and helping to lead that um this partnership were great basically going to be co-constructing um our own problem of practice of how do we actually do that there's literature out there that says you can do that and the sel should be in service of equity but there's no field-based data showing this is actually how it's done so we are working with them in a multi-year um commitment really to to have a problem of practice and they will be documenting providing us research support providing us coaching support um to to figure that out and then it will this the learnings from the few districts in the nation then will be published out saying well this is what was tried and hopefully this is how it one way it can be done um to build that body of literature so we are super excited by the potential to actually have resj braid resj and and or sel as a way to help us get to those goals so super exciting okay it's five tail got our 10 extra minutes thank you all so much uh wish we had more time i look forward to being in person and hopefully you all will be interested in getting the foundational sel training as we roll it out here in the next uh by the end of the school year that'd be great thank you so much and by the way uh castle was just blown away that our board was interested in getting the uh foundational training they said this person we work with in her 10 years that's never happened so she's thinks you all are super board members for that so that's great that's the optimistic closing yes yes indeed optimistic uh superintendent do you have anything else i appreciate everyone taking a little time to dedicate to this really important topic for a lot of the reasons that we're already voiced particularly uh at this time when we know our students we're really going to need to attend to not just their academic
00h 50m 00s
uh acceleration but also making sure they're healthy that they're socially emotionally well uh this morning i was in a conversation with many of my peers in the governor's team and as kids are coming back there are a lot of obvious signs of a need uh to put attention uh to to our students so the more we can learn and be equipped and and deepen our understandings uh that'll that'll strengthen our capacity to really meet our students needs so thank you everybody for a commitment to continue to learn more about this important topic bye take care thank you bye everybody


Sources