July 20, 2008
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Linda A. “Lin” Hanson, Education Division Administrator, Wisconsin Educational Communications Board
Lin Hanson has been in the public television business for 32 years, learning the ropes at WSKG in Binghamton, NY, and moving through the ranks to her current job as Administrator of the Education Division of the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board (WECB) in Madison. Her division of 11 staff develops educational programming for the school districts in the state of Wisconsin, working closely with the Department of Public Instruction to provide necessary materials correlated to state academic standards. Recently, WECB’s reading project, Into the Book, and social studies project, democracy it is! have been recognized for their stellar content and high production quality with seven prestigious awards, including a coveted Parents’ Choice Silver Award. AIT and WECB have a longstanding relationship, going back to the consortium project development days and continuing to the present, with AIT now marketing and distributing WECB’s original materials. Technos visited with Ms. Hanson at the WECB headquarters in January.
Technos: What is WECB’s mission, and how is it fulfilled?
L.A.H.: The Wisconsin Educational Communications Board was formed to provide educational programming to the citizens of Wisconsin, and we deliver ITV/online/multimedia resources. All of our division administrators—myself for Education and the directors of Radio, Television, Engineering, and Administration—sat down with our Executive Director about a year and a half ago to discuss a strategic plan. From that plan, each of the division administrators then determined with our staffs our goals for the coming school year. To keep on track, we have a monthly staff meeting in the Education Division to see how we’re doing in regard to the strategic plan. We decided that for the 2007–08 school year, we’d try to focus on marketing and promotion, because we felt we should do more to get out there with the teachers to really promote our products and services. For instance, we’re focusing on professional organizations’ conferences, including exhibiting at all of the subject-area conferences in the state, as well as presenting workshops at those conferences. Each fall, the Wisconsin Educational Association Council conducts a major, important conference where we will attend and present our resources.
How do you determine what the Wisconsin teachers need and want for their classrooms?
We work very closely with our Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to determine what is appropriate for our state’s classrooms. Our Director of School Programs, talks with the program distributors—like AIT—and throughout the summer she checks new programming by downloading and screening the previews. She then hosts a meeting in the fall with the representatives of our regional education agencies and the various curriculum experts from our DPI — we have 19 curriculum areas that Wisconsin has identified, so there is a specialist for each area. The School Programs director previews programs for them by subject area. For instance, we’ll look at all the new social studies programs, and that subject-area expert will say yes or no, it works or it doesn’t work, according to our state standards and curriculum guidelines for that grade level. There are 12 Cooperative Educational Service Agencies (CESAs) in Wisconsin, grouped under six “utilization” specialists who work with us as liaisons between ECB and the school districts that they serve.
What is the process that you go through to develop new educational programs?
We have a yearly meeting with the DPI folks when we sit down and brainstorm with them—we look at current public broadcast programs and at new curriculum initiatives, and ask what we need to produce. What’s the hot topic that we’re lacking information on? For example, with our new project on State, Local, and Tribal Government, we sat down with the social studies consultant, who said that there really is a need for resources on tribal government and how it relates to our state and local governments. She said it would be great to have an engaging curriculum product for Wisconsin that treated this subject, so we decided to go ahead with this social studies project. We work with DPI, who suggests the teachers to be members of the advisory committee. All of our projects start with an advisory committee made up of the DPI curriculum consultant; the best teachers of the subject area, at various grade levels; our Executive Producer; and our project directors and instructional designers.
What kind of background or experience does your staff have?
Most of our staff has teaching degrees. Not all do, but those folks without the education degree have skills and/or experience appropriate to their positions. I have a bachelor’s degree in education, but I really consider myself more of a Public Television major, having been in the area for 32 years now! I started at WSKG in Binghamton, NY, for 15 years; and then in 1990, I came here. When I say I have a major in Public TV, I mean that I started out at a very small station and did everything—production, camera, membership drive, radio, literally everything—I learned it all and moved up as the jobs came open. My job now is Administrator of the Education Division, so I oversee all the activities of our staff of 11. I may not do it all now, but I know what’s being done and who is doing it.
Let’s go back to how your projects are developed. It sounds like your process is a mini-version of the grand old AIT Consortium process. Is it?
Right. The states needed to take up the funding slack when the federal monies dried up, and we do our own funding through the state of Wisconsin now. We also apply for various grants to supplement the state funds, and we pursue partnerships with other entities as well. We use the same format as the larger consortium projects did, but on a smaller scale and with emphasis on what needs to be done in this particular state. Sometimes we’re approached by the DPI folks saying, for example, that there is a crying need for a particular subject area. Our Into the Book reading programs for K–3 students grew out of the need for something new to replace Storylords, at the request of the DPI reading consultant. The question put to us was: What can we do to develop another reading strategy series? And Into the Book was the answer.
Do you ever do partnerships with other states to produce new programs?
Right now, our state statutes charge us with providing programming for the state of Wisconsin. If something we produce has use beyond our borders, we usually work with an agency like AIT, which is the expert in marketing, distribution, and broadcast rights. We’ll work with AIT to determine first that the program has use beyond our borders, and second to market it for us (and split royalties). The reading series, Into the Book, is a great example of a product that has general application, so we’re happy to make it available elsewhere, but we produced it ourselves after being approached by Wisconsin DPI.
What new projects are you working on?
One we’ve just begun is called Personal Financial Literacy. About a year and a half ago, the DPI came out with its 19th set of state standards, which was Personal Financial Literacy—it’s a huge need, with kids getting out of high school not knowing how to budget their money and college kids getting free credit cards in the mail and not understanding how to manage their credit. When the new standards came out, we sat down with the DPI’s social studies consultant again and asked what we could do to provide curriculum to cover this topic. We’re looking at what professional development teachers will need to teach the new resources, and we’re looking at developing units on banking, credit, entrepreneurship, and other areas at all grade levels.
We don’t embark on any project until we consult with our Department of Public Instruction content person for that area, and that person has validated that the project is needed. It’s a very close relationship that ensures that whatever we produce is going to be used by the teachers. It’s being developed with the input and cooperation of the teachers who will be using it. And, just like in the consortium days, we produce a pilot program, then do formative field testing with an independent evaluator from the university, and get feedback to improve the programs.
How long does this process take?
It depends on the series and how complex it is. We’re not sure how complex the financial program series will be because we just had our second meeting [the second week of January], and we’re still pulling things together to get that rolling. But, we’re trying to turn things around a little faster than we did in the early days. Into the Book, for instance, took about two to three years in production to air—but that was the most complex thing we’ve undertaken in decades.
These days, with digital signals being sent out over the airwaves and programming available on the Internet, teachers probably expect things quickly.
Sure. But we really put the pressure on ourselves to finish so we can get the materials out while the interest is there. Another new project we’re working on is the World Language Assessment series, and we’re hoping to get that completed within 15 months, start to finish. We’re looking at a goal of 15 to 18 months to do a project these days.
How might the marketing of Into the Book be different from the marketing of an earlier product—if your goal is to improve marketing and promotion, how will it change now?
One thing is the Web—we’re able to do so much more there. If you visit the Into the Book Web site, you’ll see some extras, such as program excerpts, bonus footage, teacher blogs, discussion areas and listservs on the topic of reading—and all of this can be accessed from school or home computers. It’s so easy now, too, to email or post .pdfs of materials, and teachers are more and more embracing the Web as a place to find things like hand-outs and posters. Wisconsin schools were wired with T-1 lines about 10 years ago through a government initiative called TEACH Wisconsin,—Technology for Educational Achievement—with the goal of wiring every classroom in the state. And we’re doing more teacher workshops via distance education, on Badgernet2, which is accessible in 350 school districts that are hooked up to the network.
I still think, though, that nothing beats the hands-on workshop, the personal touch with teachers, so we continue to do a fair amount of those through our regional liaisons. We go to the various regions and conduct full-day workshops for teachers, because they like the collegiality of the workshop, being in the same room with other teachers, having the materials available right there.
What can you tell us about WECB’s 21st-Century Skills emphasis?
That is an important initiative from our Department of Public Instruction, which is one of six state education departments that have signed on to the Partnership for 21st-Century Learning. Our State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Elizabeth Burmaster, is the immediate past president of the Council of Chief State School Officers, and in that role was very involved in the Partnership, so anything we do in the state of Wisconsin has to relate to the Partnership initiatives. Our new projects fit right in…for instance, the skill of civic literacy, for which we’re working on the State, Local, and Tribal Governments project; the skill of financial literacy, for which we’re developing the Personal Financial Literacy project; the skill of global awareness, for which we’re working on the World Language Assessment project—and there are always the core subject areas to be concerned with. Wisconsin DPI is very attuned to all of the 21st-Century Student Outcomes, so we certainly are, too.
We’ve covered a lot of ground here, but is there something you’d like to mention that we haven’t talked about?
I’d like to say again that one of the things I appreciated most about working in public television was the on-the-job training I got—the opportunity to try my hand at everything. If you worked at the public TV stations, you worked in the membership department, you worked in television production, you ran camera and audio; I produced the auction. I learned how to do everything, and it’s great being part of the public television family for so long.
The one thing we haven’t talked about is working with public radio. We’re trying to work closer now with Wisconsin Public Radio on getting students aware of what’s on radio and putting projects together that will involve students with radio broadcasting. We’ve been doing a project called “Soundwaves: Wisconsin Youth Radio Festival” for about 20 years, having students produce radio programs, and they’re all on the Web now. Last year, we had an elementary school group do a 60-second PSA on health education called “Cough in Your Sleeve,” a rap version that is just wonderful—and it was a prize winner. If you listen to it, you’ll be humming it all day long! Through this project, we encourage kids to produce a PSA or a short, less than 10-minute, production, and we have judges who pick three winners whose entries will then be professionally produced in the Wisconsin Public Radio studio. The kids just love it, and we get some really quality productions out of it. As our radio director says, it’s growing the next generation of public radio listeners.
Another radio project we’re doing, along with Ken Burns’ “The War,” is digital storytelling. One of the radio producers worked with three high school students last summer to put together a radio program in which they interviewed World War II veterans, called “Wisconsin War Letters.” They interviewed a male soldier, a female nurse, and a man who was held at a Japanese internment camp during the War, complete with sound effects—it’s really a terrific production. We’re looking for ways to work with the family of public radio, as well as TV, and it’s potential that just hasn’t been fully explored yet.
I’d also like to reiterate that whatever we do here, we always start with our schools and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to make sure that our projects are needed and are relevant and will be used. Do your homework—get the buy-in—so you’re not wasting your time.
Lin Hanson can be reached at linda.hanson@wisconsin.gov.