Learning Seeds "solution grid" guides the Teachable moment

Job-Embedded Training empowers educators and captures effortless Assessment-footprint for  complex, social learning through motivation-based-grid with just-right strategies for responsive teaching

Great teaching is hard to train and difficult to scale. Educators spend decades, as our founder did, studying various methods to use in real interactions with students. To simplify the complexity, most curriculums and technologies try to dictate a sequence of instruction and limit educator choice. This teacher-proof approach drives smart educators away from the field and limits skill growth for delivering personalized learning. We have successfully trained educators from a variety of backgrounds, including 1-1 aides with minimal education, to achieve big improvements in complex responsive teaching. Now we are scaling that training with a software platform that organizes rich behavior-based social skills coaching for the adult learner. We are committed to solving two pressing educational problems. We go beyond content to support educators in knowing not just WHAT to teach, but how HOW and WHEN to use effective teaching strategies that build learning habits and self-efficacy for students. Secondly, we are building our tool to share with other educational programs to scale responsive teaching. We have found a framework for student observation that guides educators to observe and respond, using behavior-based teaching techniques that overcome cognitive biases and shift behavior for hard-to-reach learners.

How it works: We guide educators through a decision tree of observations of their student based on a framework of motivational levels which we have refined over decades in schools: In this moment, is the child avoidant? seeking interactions but only on their terms? wanting back and forth flow? Next we offer them a variety of strategies based on behavioral economics that respond to the child's social/emotional motivation and increase pro-group behavior. Rather than being overwhelmed by our books-worth of content, the educator sees response choices for the scenario they raised. Teachers report finding solutions in under 4 minutes and rave about the solutions being "relevant", "suprising", "classroom ready", and "game-changing for the toughest students".

Imagine if we could capture learning at the teachable moment; we could generate a new kind of data the way bar codes capture the interactions between the check-out clerk and her customer.  What if we could free teachers from the time spent on PD, lesson plan paperwork, assessment collection and standardized testing and instead achieve all these goals with one tool? After the 5minutes daily planning, our software tracks the types of strategies the educator collects and creates a heat map of the answers to "What does this student need next?" Over time this heat map generates the effortless-footprint-data that reveals training needs for teachers, and documents progress for the child as more sophisticated techniques are sought. We believe this shift in the way we train and assess in education can make our schools content-flexible, personalized, and future ready to empower all teachers to help students make progress on complex skills including social emotional learning.

Our social-skill strategies make rapid improvements for children with autism because we apply cognitive behavior change to train social-habits that apprentice the child in more social interactions than their behavior would otherwise elicit.

Implementation improves as we immerse the educator in a mindset focused on the child’s motivation. Existing professional development comes in full-day trainings and with little consideration for when the teacher should implement. By repurposing the same techniques that drip-marketing campaigns use  to convert-not-overwhelm their customers, we are innovating a new training method by giving teachers frequent small doses of our content right when they need it. 

We are leveraging exisiting technology used in marketing tech to streamline onboarding for teachers so they can fully implement more easily. SaaS model allows us to scale. Our heat-map-style collection of user's data determines patterns, recommends best strategies, and effortlessly documents progress. Current EdTech often curates or distributes currently-available teaching, but fails to innovate the learning. We personalize training-guidance to enhance motivation-based behavior-change. Current personalized-learning solutions are rarely capturing complex learning needs from users. We want enough data by year5 to implement AI strategy for improving observation guidance. Our dyadic tracking will have potential tie-ins to affective computing.

10 presold prototypes serve 1,500 students and full staffs.

Add team member to finalize operations growth.

FInalize UX design and enhance database.

Database custom tip sheets provided to 10,000 families with user feedback.

Data heuristics streamline the gathering of decision-informing data from 100,000 uses.

Site visits to half of schools post-implementation validate our founder's wish to see our tools go beyond 'sellable' and have true impact for inclusive social learning for children with autism and developmental delays.

After our prototype meets educational-outcome-standards of our founder we scale use of this tool in preschool, public and private institutions. We expect to reach 100,000 students by year3 in domestic international-school settings where we already have clients and add additional urban public districts. We will roll out badging for professional growth for paraprofesisonals at year3, and by year5 we will be onboarding other teachers' great ideas in a "when does the child need this?" format. Year5 we lead changes to complex content-agnostic, meaningful assessments in schools. 

We have a two-year wait list for school trainings. Our founder is an invited speaker at the Association of Educational Therapists this Fall. We are working with the CDLT on dates for a 2020 pan European conference. We have an invitation to speak to a large French speaking coalition of 1400 day care centers in France.

 At our last product model in April, a school reported us the most impactful thing they had done and voluntarily sent us 1600 Euro Honorarium. A tool built to Erica's standards of deeply impacting children will delight retain and support school customers.

We reach about 500 school staff members and about 100 trainer/lead educators through 10-15 school trainings per year. We additionally serve about 100 children and their teams through high touch direct training. We are currently running prototypes with additional educators serving large groups of summer school students, rapid iterating the training materials with teams of lead Boston educators including heads of programs in Boston, Sommerville, and Brookline. Erica also guest teaches about 100 education students each year and volunteers and advises superintendents and school leaders on impactful keystone skills related to our approach.

Year1 we expect to reach 1500 educators serving 15,000 International students through pre-sale of our software prototype. The software provides job-embedded training to individual teachers, guiding them to find daily just-right so they plan quick meaningful responses in support of a child's interactions with peers. Year3, the software will grow a community and build the first professional network for 1-1 aides, offer a badging program to encourage and recognize training, and grow the platform with earned content. By year3 we will be helping other fields beyond social emotional learning capture and train complex teaching beyond SocialEmotionalLearning.

Erica guest teaches popular play therapy courses at Wheelock,BU, Harvard attracting high-quality students and interns. Because our  leadership team has all committed to a full year as volunteers, others all volunteer.

Jason has managed Global software teams and his former employees are  freelancing for our prototype sprints.

Through Mass challenge enthusiastic mentors who offer time and resources.Everywhere we go we find people with a personal relationship to a child with autism who recognize our passion and are eager to help us realize our mission of scaling great teaching.

We are currently profitable, being paid 6000-8000 plus expenses per training with a two-year wait list. We've reached out to schools on the wait list and they've all expressed interest in spending the same price point on a pre-sold prototype of our software with ongoing support. The hundreds of volunteer hours from our leadership team and a small investment of our own money in software development, plus loads of supportive quality volunteers let us operate on a shoestring and remain profitable as we grow. Long term we beat Pearson's per student costs and our SaaS model can absorb users without increased total costs.

At a recent MIT IDEAS finals, not a single Education team had received mentorship from an educator and most teams asked me to coach them. This shocked me and started me on a journey to discover how I could lend teacher voice to innovation leaders. Tech must be informed by practice, and Teachers need tools that scale the magic of great teaching so others can master responsive, learner-driven teaching in less time.SOLVE seems genuinely focused on hearing good ideas from “anywhere” and this made us feel welcome to share our “classroom-floor’s-eye-view” solution.

It is rare for high-touch service businesses to scale. Our 2018 low-touch prototypes  were successful, but Solve's mentorship will help us learn from big tech and CRM leaders how to better deliver content so learners get just-right info with great UX. We hope to add a founding team member and we think will find a smart, passionate cofounder within the SOLVE community. Most EdTEchStartups pivot to serve corporate training ends for profitability. We think the SOLVE ethos will guide us in structuring scale to keep young learners at the heart of our work for the long run.