YES! for Stress-free, Violence-free Schools

In many disadvantaged areas students are exposed to stress on a daily basis. YES! for Schools has made tools to self-regulate, reduce reactivity and maintain calm focus available in classrooms since 2009. Now, we seek to develop apps, bots, and interactive tools that augment the teachings.

The expectations of the modern world are ever increasing for our young people, with academic, professional and social pressures, and amidst relentless media input. With this comes never-before encountered levels of stress. As our economy changes, many of the jobs currently filled by low-skilled workers will be eliminated and replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). Tomorrow’s students need to learn new skill sets that will advance them in a new economy and help them deal with environmental, social and economic stresses of the future.  

For students in disadvantaged areas, as well as the developing world, perhaps the greatest skill-set to predict success in academia and in life is resilience, or "grit," at the core of which is “growth mindset,” understanding our capacity to learn new things.  Educational research shows increasingly the value of "pro-social education," integrating school-wide a culture of compassion, emphasis on learning, and restorative approaches to conflict resolution.

YES! for Schools is more than just another social-emotional learning curriculum or mindfulness program. YES! is a means of addressing the crisis of school stress for the entire school community. By teaching an evidence-based approach to self-monitoring and restorative practices, along with pro-social games and school-wide community building, compassion and cooperation, YES! for Schools supports individual self-efficacy to deliver on its promise to decrease infractions, promote learning and creativity, and make the entire school culture more calm, focused, happy and centered on learning.

With the help of SOLVE and our technology partners, we intend to develop web-based tools for measurement and data collection, made up of brief, online performance tasks and interactive tools to promote pro-social learning on the YES! model to a broader sample of schools. Thus the tools are reaching more students while simultaneously a body of data is collected to provide proof of concept for scalability, and improvements.

In the future AI will replace many low-skilled jobs.  A critical need is emerging in the area of “happiness.”  In a world dominated by technology, how do we give young people the skills they will need to live happy, fulfilled lives, and build successful relationships?

Stress impairs executive function, and reduces academic success. YES! for Schools, promotes growth-mindset, a key component in "grit," the greatest predictor of success in academia and in life.  To reach more students with our curriculum, YES! for Schools will develop interactive enhancements that engage the mind in positive, stress-reduction exercises and promote daily meditation.  

Dr. Dara Ghahremani of UCLA lead a study to measure the impact of YES! on executive function and emotional well-being.  YES! students who completed our course were found to have greater attentional focus, decreased anxiety and increased self-efficacy. Evidence-based practices promote self-control, grit, growth mindset, emotional intelligence, social belonging, and other non-cognitive aspects of academic success.  The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University calls for development of web-based non-cognitive measurements for success-predictors, and the tools we are developing will contribute to this body of research.

Targeting schools with a limited knowledge of contemplative practice, our web modules will provide baseline data collection on readiness, urgency and program needs prior to beginning the YES! for Schools program.  Using Milwaukee Public Schools as our pilot project, where YES! currently serves only two schools, we will begin to move 20 additional schools at a time to a state of readiness for school-wide YES! programming.

Collect contact information, interest levels, and next step registrations through sign in and survey screen - 5,000 School Staff, administrators and teachers, view our introductory webinar.

Data feedback to central collection system. - 50,000 students begin data assessment using stress measurement apps.

Track registrations, personal practice progress, and lesson completion via on-line/app classroom. - 200 educators from those schools sign on to become trained YES! Instructors.

YES! for Schools seeks ways to encourage young people, ages 8-18, to practice a routine of rhythmic breathing and meditation on a daily basis to combat stress and promote emotional self-regulation.  Left unaddressed, chronic stress can lead to self-harm, violence and poor academic performance.  This generation uses technology integrally in almost everything they do.  By making a meditation and self-regulation coaching tool part of our pro-social empathy and self-care training we know we can deepen the impact and probability of daily practice and in doing so, make stress and violence in schools a thing of the past.

The technology addresses stress by measuring heart rate, serum cortisol and MRI by remote using simple apps.  It allows participants in early-stage programs to interact with researchers who will carry out ongoing monitoring of the success of the YES! program in schools by biometric research, complementing anecdotal survey-based feedback.  Success will be measured by the number of new schools opting into the programs, reduction of serum cortisol levels over time, school data on violent incidents and infractions, and self-report feedback surveys completed by participants indicating positive effects on stress outputs, improved sleep, mood, concentration and focus.

We are in the early research stage, but our technology partners include Johann Berlin of TLEX Institute, http://tlexinstitute.com; Louis Gagnon, CEO of MyBrainSolutions, www.totalbrain.com; and Rajesh Ramana of Vivensity, www.mindvalley.com; and Archana Patcharajan, Owner of go4Web2, developer of Sattva meditation app.

We anticipate an easily downloadable interface to be made available for free as part of the YES! for Schools curriculum.  

Nonprofit fundraising through annual appeals, major gifts, sustained support, designated contributions and foundation grants. Seeking social impact investment for early research and pilot studies on the technology.

Our Model Schools program is based on direct interaction between dedicated and highly-trained YES! for Schools instructors deployed on a school-by-school basis for a 7-Phase program implementation period lasting up to four years. The curriculum is finding significant impact and based on early research findings can provide needed self-regulation skills for students that increase academic success while reducing infractions and the need for disciplinary interventions. Translating these relational skills, including warmth, interpersonal connectivity, and teacher-student relationship to an app is challenging. The biggest challenge is developing an app/bot that will encourage continued practice in the absence of a teacher.

http://youthempowermentseminar.org

https://vimeo.com/18990300

https://www.facebook.com/YESforSchoolsUSA

Our work has been primarily focused on giving tools directly to students in classroom through teacher administered curriculum designed based on neuroscientific research.  For students in high needs areas, where poverty, crime and violence are highly prevalent, mental-emotional learning is a critical need.  Through the SOLVE community, we hope to reach beyond the limitations of our current processes to bring these highly successful competencies to more students using technology still in development to promote happy, healthy, stress-free school environments.

Mr. Louis Gagnon, CEO, Total Brain.  TPG (Ride) , Amazon, Yodle HEC-Montreal, MSc in Marketing; Laval Univ., BBA 

Mr. Rajesh Ramana, INSEAD, Singapore

Elan Gepner-Dales, Director, YES! for Schools, USA

Johann Berlin, CEO, TLEX

Filiz Odabas-Geldiay, Executive Director, IAHV

Robynn James, CFRE, MS-NDR, Chief Generosity Officer, YES! for Schools

Quiet Time, School-based program of the David Lynch Foundation.