Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Research shows that inclusive learning greatly exceeds impact for young children as well as improving the academic progress of their peers. Yet inclusion is rarely delivered, and often requires a knowledgeable parent to battle for years to get an IDD student access to the supports that make inclusive placements successful. In after school and camp programs we have collaborated with institutions that believed have a special needs camp in the same location the week following the usual camp offerings was 'inclusion'. Learning Seeds understands that inclusion is NOT a place. It's a rich tapestry of connections woven between the child and their peers, adults, activities, and environment. By getting therapies out of the clinic and on to the playground, Learning Seeds is delivering the real world social and communication skills that children need and deserve. Without scalable means to expand these services, families and children are routinely told that 'greetings' or 'conversational skills' have been mastered despite the child still not having any successful conversations or spontaneous group play. We provide IDD students with expert 1-1 coaching by leaders in the field who would ordinarily promoted away from children to sit in moderate-effective trainer roles. We additionally are thought leaders on inclusive programming, playgrounds, and school goals. We believe that for children with IDD, schools need to once again affirm that separate is rarely equal and with our affordable, scalable, daily training tools we believe schools can and will adopt more inclusive practices so every child can expand their social motivation as well as their group behavior skills and teams can thrive in the teachable moment.
Schools are additionally expected to now provide meaningful social progress for students and our field needs ways of promoting practitioner voice without promoting caring professionals away from children.
We additionally understand the need for measurements to drive large public educational institutions, but most experts agree that standardized tests are failing to capture the mathematical thinking skills we care about so how will they measure social emotional growth in a way that captures the true joy, indpendence, and leanring to learn skills that set children up for lifetime success? In addition to our tools, we have research partnerships exploring sociometric badging and ambient smart-classroom sensors that could effortlessly track a child's improved duration at a task, an increase in the social back-and-forth conversation between a student and peers, so the data on social growth will track tightly with the real conversations, connections, endurance, and engagement we care about when we scaffold a child with IDD to connect to their inclusive learning and play opportunities.
We have a four-tier solution to serve our students, our teaching colleagues, our early childhood field, and the Edtech industry; We believe in: Teaching social skills, not by changing minds, but by changing social habits. Designing ed-tech tools that serve, not replace, teachers. Keeping data connected to real and complex learning.Making data 'grocery store easy' by capturing a footprint of the teacher's dayScaling teacher talent without promoting teachers away from children.
