Play-coaching sparks inclusion for social disabilities

Globally, social disabilities like Autism isolate almost 1 billion children, but typical interventions are costly, delivered years too late, or not at all. We are democratizing access to our waitlisted Play-based intervention.  

We’ve captured 25yrs of successful play-coaching in a platform that fast-tracks the point-of-play instincts for educators. Selected Strategies prepare the child’s team for positive social-coaching in the moment, and reveal overlooked opportunities, decreasing cognitive bias and refreshing optimism for difficult behaviors. Our boots-on-the-playground experience shines in a Platform that maintains teacher choice, supports relevant professional learning, and teaches pro-social habits during real peer interactions. 

Users autonomously search our social-motivation-framework to produce a daily plan that is shareable, actionable without prior training, and satisfies documentation mandates.Children can turn any place into a play space. Learning Seeds prepares adults to coach skills that build community, friendship, and independence so everyone can thrive in the teachable moment.

Autism is expected to cost $465 billion/year in the US alone (2019). WHO has recognized that meeting the needs of this vulnerable population and their carers is complex and multifaceted. 

Children who need the most social practice typically get the least because their behavior and habits lead to isolation and exclusion. 1 in 6 children who struggle with social connection have developmental disabilities leading to bullying, disruption, social isolation, and delays in social development. 

The CDC reports costs are cut by 2/3 when interventions like ours facilitate social connections. However, despite being more effective and less costly, most countries substantially separate children with behavior struggles or social-learning disabilities. Technology has rarely been used to capture and share the talents of skilled teachers, and many teachers bemoan the lack of autonomy and voice and potential for promotion when they continue working with children.

Finally, school leaders struggle to monitor the complex social development of children with special needs in a large system. This leaves decision makers disconnected from the daily decisions and biases that impact the moment-to-moment social experience in the classroom.

We provide a 4-tier solution to offer motivational real-world strategies that are effortlessly tracked and shared.

Our core mission and commitment is to young children who struggle with social behavior. We've had decades of success helping young children with social disabilities progress from substantially-separate programs to fully inclusive success in their local neighborhood schools, camps, and playgroups with typically developing peers. We serve students with oppositional-defiant disorder, selective mutism, Attention Deficit, Executive Functioning struggles, and verbal and non-verbal Autism. 

Our methodology has been developed, child by child, to replace negative behaviors that lead to isolation, meltdown, disruption, and exclusion. By tech-enabling this content, we are democratizing access to a global audience of educators and caring adults to help children connect to the play and learning in their communities.

Educators are our second beneficiary; we have engaged deeply to understand their needs and build a tool that invites them to design their own professional learning path, connected to their daily classroom life. We replace 6+hrs/week of documentation paperwork with a tool that effortlessly prepares mandated reporting and graphs changes over time while the educator spends time finding solutions customized to the student so everyone can thrive in the teachable moment.

We have a 4-tier solution for helping children thrive in real-world social interactions. 

At the core our is our innovative play-coaching methodology that rapidly improves a child's social motivation and behavior in group settings. We have a 2yr waitlist for services. We're leveraging our teacher-training experience and new technologies to scale the reach of our life-changing social coaching.

We connect social-emotional learning to daily-life for four connected stakeholders: 

1-For the child: An improvisational social-coaching method for supporting real peer interactions.

Motivation drives change. We take Clayton Christensen's "Jobs to be Done" view of a child's difficult behavior and disrupt the traditional responses to disruption!  We use marketing techniques to draw in a child the way street performers draw a crowd, help children tell us "No!" to advertise the power of speech over physical outbursts. For 25yrs our founder studied the way Magicians, Marketers, Performers, and Coaches change behavior and we've adapted those methods to earn the nickname "The Playground Whisperer". Our innovative, real-time support provides children more positive social practice than their behavior would otherwise elicit. Examples here: https://learningseeds.com/parents-portal-1/f/scaffolding-your-child%E2%80%99s-play-with-peers

2-For the educator: Novel Professional Development Platform

For more than a decade, schools have sought our traditional professional development workshops on responding to difficult behaviors, addressing bullying, and increasing inclusion. While it’s a lucrative business, we sought a better way to rapidly upskill educators interested in our methods.For a decade, we've captured and categorized our advice into a database of just-right strategies for responsive social teaching (not curriculum, instead helpful responses to each behavior the child exhibits). Our platform provides daily support, allowing the educator to customize professional learning around the preparation for a real child. The tool is modeled on a CRM and has been paper prototyped with real teacher/student consultations for the past 3yrs. 

3-For the leadership: Effortless daily data about the child’s social motivation captures progress

Most data in education is tangential yet time consuming for daily classroom-life. We took inspiration from the way individual search histories are used to plan marketing campaigns . Instead of the typical  6+hrs/ week teachers spend documenting a child’s struggles, our platform uses search-history to reveal bias, offer suggestions, and document progress.

4-We sustain this work with our profitable social-impact business.

EduTechnology frequently prioritizes compliance from educators and requires documentation that is disconnected from the daily realities in the classroom.  In contrast, our solutions are“job-embedded..This frees the teacher/aide to spend daily time otherwise spent proving or documenting problem behaviors, to instead prepare strategies for helping a child thrive in the “teachable moments”.

We offer children simple techniques to achieve more social experiences than their behaviors would otherwise elicit, enabling them to learn social skills naturally, through interaction with their peers. Explanations of each technique are woven into the daily tasks of teachers. We describe specific techniques for using body language, object placement, tone and pace of speech, and message style to positively influence the child's experiences of social connection.

For example, to encourage avoidant children who may be playing away from their group, we use the techniques street performers use to encourage proximity and draw in a crowd. We help children create a hub of attention that functions to attract peers, so they thereby become gently drawn into the center of the interactions around themselves.

This aligns with best practice in adult training, because it follows the learner's interest, gives the user autonomy for pace and format, and helps the educator set intention which increases the chance that  they will utitlize the strategies they have learned about in both the tense and promising moments of their students day.

We have built a database of play-coaching strategies within a search-driven platform that accepts teacher customization and produces a custom 'tip sheet' composed of a cover grid and subsequent pages of selected strategies. This technology produces a customized  2-8 page booklet of ideas for a struggling child which is refreshed daily with educator inputs and algorithmic collaborative and content based recommendations. 

We layer AI recommendation algorithms within a web-based graphical framework to provide context-appropriate techniques for increasing a child's social.  Our strategy is based on proven technology for real-time training of models for personalizing recommendations, but we innovate the application by creating a graphical ‘heat map’ of solutions most likely to be relevant to the child, time, place, peers, and educator. 

Search history has long been shown to reveal a great deal about a user and is the central data tapped for targetted marketing campaigns. We've invented ‘targeted training campaigns’ by repurposing recommendation technology to derive the next-level educational goals from the educational history, then focus strategy and deliver methods at the right time and place for greatest chance of success. 

Our Platform is built in Python with a Django administrator to facilitate daily contributions from non-technical educator-authors. We are exploring additional features from libraries in Tensor Flow and Bokeh to detect relevant correlations between the geometry of the child's daily grid and social progress over time.

We further innovated our business model as described in later sections.

We've had several children progress from  sub-separate classrooms for children with autism to 1.5 years later being fully integrated in a total inclusion public schooland learning social skills from playing with peers on the neighborhood soccer team.

Our training content has been tested for over 10yrs in our popular school trainings which are booking out into 2021. Teachers rave about the rapid results they see for their students and report feeling "optimistic, playful, and rediscovering the joy of enjoying each child in my classroom" when they use our techniques.

We've done about 10 alpha tests and paper prototyped the tool where we tested how well parents and teachers could relate to our strategies. We've checked if key word tagging through narrowly supervised AI held promise, and found good results from a 'random tip generator' of people retroactively reviewing advice they found helpful.

Most documentation for children with special needs focuses on a negative list of what the child cannot do. This leads to cognitive bias towards pessimism for the child's team. We help educators prepare for positive interventions, creating an optimistic expectation that the child's motivation can be influenced.

We paper prototyped our caseload to test if patterns could be found, and if teachers responded well to information they believed was generated by a computer. In follow-on visits to school sites, we continued to receive ecstatic reports about student's making friends, improving behavior, and increasing  endurance.

Currently 100 direct serve students many with graduated case management

and inclusion training provided to the teachers of approximately 10,000 children in international preschool and elementary school based settings

In One Year, we expect to triple our student serve numbers, hold our teacher training numbers, and additionally serve about 5,000 parent of children with special needs for an online parent training program to further test out the materials. We have lined up 10 interested and diverse schools to beta test our methods by the end of next school year.

In year 5 we expect to be serving over 1,000,000 children, with at least half of those children coming from international inclusion programs. This would be our first growth benchmark, to serve at least .5% of the 200Million children believed to have autism worldwide.

Most edtech doesn't spend enough time enriching the quality of the product. We are educators so we embrace the complexity needed to deliver life changing interventions that make play work for the child.

We want to build out the quality of the tools, study the efficacy of some of our most unique methods, such as body positioning to enhance peer invitations, and develop research partnerships that test and vett our content in meaningful units vs. doing overall effectiveness surveys.

We believe to truly impact social learning, we need to impact more public school systems and this requires meeting assessment manadates. We think wearable technologies hold promise for documenting increases in face to face interactions without recording the actual content or personally identifying information from the interaction. Tracking circles of communication can serve as a new mode of assesment for vetting our work, proving our impact, and allowing school systems to replace tangetial assessment systems with an observer-based dyadic assessment+training tool.

We want to open source elements of our design so that other content areas can also build out assessment+training tools which will spark a shift in education towards focusing on teachable moments for young children.

There are few clear incentives and few paths for building practitioner-researcher relationships.

Despite a lot of interest from academics who research body language, play, novel applications of AI, wearable technologies for social interaction tracking, etc it's difficult to forge early partnerships to truly test efficacy of many aspects of our work. 

Small grants will allow us to vett the efficacy of many levels of our program versus raising funds and growing committed to tools. When companies grow in this traditional manner, they are stuck with a software tool and pivot to find new buyers or new applications and this drives most EdTech companies to pivot to becoming an HR product (as most wearables are currently being used). 

We've developed an innovative self funding model so we can stay nimble on adjusting our tools without pivoting away from young children with autism. 

We've developed a four tier business plan that lets us grow layers which market-test our social impact at each stage of growth instead of a traditional growth that grows customer base for the same product.

We have invested hundreds of hours in serving as mentors and networking to build relationships in academia and startup services. As a result of this visibility, we have begun to receive Fellowship and volunteer offers from highly skilled individuals passionate about the novelty and life-changing efficacy of our unique approach to support social skills through play.

We are a For-Profit Social Benefit corporation registered in MA and designed to prioritize social impact and employee well-being over profits.

-Three Co-Founders working pro-Bono for a committed 3 years.

-6 person Advisory team providing monthly supervision and weekly hours of pro-bono support.

-3 Educators providing direct service, documentation and software testing in schools.

-Won a 100hr UX team for expanding our parent outreach this Fall.

-Received more than 12,000 inquiries and 150+ highly qualified candidates for last hiring round who responded enthusiastically to be part of a team focused on choice, voice, and play. We expect this talented pool to support rapid growth in the next two years.

We are passionate practitioner’s with extensive real-world expertise and first-hand success using these methods with children.

Our Early-childhood founder and advisory board have more than 100 years of combined experience working directly with children who struggle with social behavior. We are leaders in our field, experienced in teaching both young children and college education majors. We are engaged daily in mentoring educators, advising parents and school districts, while remaining in the ‘trenches’ delivering results and smiles to young children in inclusive settings.

We've attracted a rock star team of mentors to guide us in scaling our play-coaching without compromising quality. We benefit from an incredible team of dedicated, mission-driven volunteers in UX, learning design, AI, research computing, behavior design, social-impact business modelling, FERPA protections, web design, and video production who want to scale our methodology to reach more children.

Our graphic designer, Gene, has won numerous awards for designs that effectively communicate complex ideas in health and education. He invented the original version of our solutions grid on a dare from our CLO to “collapse all two hundred pages of our training materials into a single image”. He’s overseen hundreds of refinements with educator working-groups and yet he never seems to run out of enthusiasm, creativity, nor printer ink.

Our CTO specializes in design and deployment of high-performance computing systems. He has worked with top research groups to build specialized computing and storage resources, and deploy workflows at scale.

General Assembly granted 200+hrs of UX design to optimize the training in our play coaching techniques.

Early Childhood Consortium provides ongoing mentorship from school leaders, opportunities to pilot in schools, and a teacher working-group that has contributed improvements to our social-motivation-framework.

AWS Education granted free training in Machine Learning and software development and two years of free cloud space for our platform.

We partnered with BU Questrom on a unique market research plan to understand the pain points for entry-level paraprofessionals who are the front-line of support for children with autism in public schools but who receive no formal training.

BU Spark provided 100+ hours of computing team work to build out a database and visualized grid.

As MassChallenge Finalists and winner of ‘Judge’s Choice’ MC Pitch, we continue to receive mentorship and free access to high level programming.

We serve as Education mentors for organizations including Forbes 30Under30, Techstars, Mass Challenge, BU Wheelock, InBound, HUBweek, MIT Ideas, and NAEYC. Thanks to this visibility we have attracted talented Fellows while sharing our vision for sparking connections in the teachable moment.

We are receiving mentorship from Harvard's Social Innovation and Change Initiative to innovate a business model that keeps our growth closely aligned with high-quality benefits to our target beneficiary: Young children with social deficits, with particular focus on oppositional-defiant disorder and Autism.

Research from Fuqua school's Social Impact recognized that companies seeking triple bottom lines tend to either lose quality of need to pivot to preserve social impact approximately 4 times as they scale and grow. 

We are innovating a pre-planned 4-stage "Social Impact Pivot" business plan that helps us identify market-facing, fiscally-strong customers for each stage of our build-out so we can be aligned with clients seeking the highest quality and with direct knowledge of the child-benefiaries for each resource we need to build as we scale: The play-interventions, The training materials to teach others, the software to provide daily customized onboarding for the materials, the online platform with robust tools for training and tracking social learning during the teachable moment.

Stage 1: (1999-2005) Develop the Enlightened Shadowing Methodology. Profitable

Stage 2 (2005-2022): Sell professional development to American-facing International schools which have fast buying-cycles and flexible staff-development budgets, yet require the same integrations as American public schools. Profitable

Stage 3( 2016-present): Expand direct services in Boston with a high-quality team that both serves children and contributes to the documentation and beta testing of the next software build out. We are currently hiring Python developers with TensorFlow experience and exploring incorporation of Bokeh to capture more information from the geometry of each child's unique 'grid' of strategies. Expand online presence via Granted UX team, and Fellows. Profitable

Stage 4( 2022)  Software earns a sliding scale SaaS fee from schools, and provides free guidance to individual parents and teachers who also server as product evangelists for new districts. We expand our our free online presence, being expanded by a grant we received for 100 hours of UX and parent user research to begin this Fall. 

We also have potential for a two sided market to charge authors for a custom strategy deck that an be included in our ‘grid’. Preliminary interest with two NYT best selling parenting/teaching authors.

We also have interest from digital-diagnostics company to use our product as an early stage offering for parents with concerns about their toddler’s social behavior. Parents can try our techniques, store progress notes, and connect with diagnosticians if they remain concerned and wish to seek medical advice or a diagnosis such as Autism.

We think educators will not be able to influence our own field if we do not build grassroots connections to research and future-relevant technologies. We hope the SOLVE network and the SOLVE funding will provide resources for small exploratory grants to spark research collaborations that verify and improve our methodology.

We would benefit from access to the CSAIL training in AI. We see many potential connections to MIT's Simons Center for the Social Brain for attracting researchers to explore and verify elements of our methodology

We also believe that practicing educators can contribute to the MIT and SOLVE community with practical wisdom from a professional life spent with children.

MIT's Ideas forum had no education mentors and no educators involved with most of the Education threads design applicants in the years our team has mentored. 

MIT's AR/VR hackathon had 87 "education" entrants but I was unable to find a single practicing educator involved in the process nor with any of the teams.

Experienced teachers are a surprisingly untapped resource of ideas for how to reach students. 

We seek the research partnerships that SOLVE can provide, we value the mentorship in being future-ready for wearable and AR connections to our tool, and value SOLVE's invitation to contribute practitioner voice to the conversation about how to improve early learning.

We are delighted to be living in a time when organizations and institutions are seeking to increase representation for minority-led and female-led organizations. While we are female-founded and led, we also feel we represent an often overlooked and under-represented group: Practitioners.

We find this to be especially true in Educational Technology. Education is a field dominated by women in the entry ranks with men usually appearing at the top levels of leadership. 

The top-down nature of the field leaves little chance for real-world experience to properly balance the initiatives and technologies being built to solve the pain points for upper level leadership.

Most EduTechnologies offer ways to circumvent educators, to gather proof from them for upper-level decisions, to dictate practice to them.

In our last round of hiring, the simple promise to be a part of a company that values "Choice, Voice, and Play for children and their educators" led to 12,000 inquiries and hundreds of cover letters bemoaning the lack of influence practitioners have on the fields of education and edutechnology.

Our play-coaching solution is very well established, but our software is extremely early and we know it's a risk. We hope our application will encourage judges to look-under-the-hood on solutions that promise to gather dictates or supervise teachers without including them in the process of identifying best practice. Teachers change lives. To truly help children, we must aggregate and find a new ways to scale the magic of wonderful teachers without promoting them away from children.

We envision promising partnerships with MIT labs at Sloan, Media lab and in Human Augmentation through Robotics projects. We think the best human-centered leverage of AI is happening at MIT. We seek mentorship and the chance to collaborate on small efficacy studies around 'teachable moment' assessments that use AR and AI to capture depersonalized data during real social interactions and to guide and amplify the instincts of adults who need to react quickly with kindness, patience, and creativity.

We would love to explore partnerships that expand the audience for of our early childhood content by connecting with prior SOLVE winners including TalkingPoints and Education Modified.

We believe the future of educational assessment could greatly benefit from wearable technologies that can capture data in the moment of play. Technologies exist, many being invented in the Human Dynamic labs at MIT, but they typically focus on tracking and coaching the social skills of executives. The support of SOLVE would help provide connections to Wearables labs  and SOLVE funds could be used for exploratory grants which may lay the groundwork for future SBIR funding for wearables to capture depersonalized data that helps verify the efficacy of interventions, and captures patterns during real peer play. 

We agree with Forbes that AI can enhance learning but “the critical presence of teachers is irreplaceable.” 

We see untapped potential to use human-supervised AI to fast-track self-directed professional-learning for teachers. We use our evidence-based social-motivation-grid as a guiding algorithm for tracking teacher choices, seeking patterns of progress over time, and eventually identifying trends in data that could replace traditional/tangential school assessments. Marketing tools track customer’s interests/hover/click times. Surely we can use these tools to understand the educator’s daily concerns and deliver optimized content recommendations.

We are currently using good data hygiene to gather depersonalized information about the educator’s browsing patterns. We’ve delivered coaching for our real school clients by mocking up ‘human powered AI’ to produce customized training which we believe the platform could ultimately produce on it’s own’. Quantitative observations about teacher search behavior have led to helpful recommendations such as detecting the need to balance accommodative and remediative supports.

ML/AI examination of teacher’s choices could provide ‘footprint’ data without requiring time/documentation/reporting from the educator. We envision a recommendation algorithm that values teacher input, finds patterns of solutions to suggest together, and detects progress like a heat-map of movement across the grid over time.Though we’re early in our AI application, we are confident we can use Tensor Flow and AWS applications to execute. We’ve focused on confirming that our framework produces meaningful patterns that capture and support the teachable moment.

Young girls are diagnosed 1/6 as often as  males, but recent research indicates that cultural biases in expectations for girls may lead to under-diagnosing and under-intervening for girls.A recent survey for the Journal of Clinical Psychology noted “cultural factors appear to be contributing to differences in the diagnosis of ASD in women" Cultural biases can cause girls to be under-supported for behaviors that are considered ‘feminine’, and over-disciplined for assertive social behaviors such as persuading, negotiating, or boisterous play.

 While many social skill interventions inadvertently focus on disruptive vs. avoidant behavior, our methodology closely tracks behaviors like withdrawal, non-responsiveness, or perceived "shyness". We further track how often children are supported with accommodations and how often they are stretched by remediations. We quantify and track these complex qualitative interventions by calculating the frequency of each type of strategy and by evaluating the vectors of change in the grid over time. In this way, we help our users see their own biases in responding to behaviors. The system can point out if, for example, boys are supported during avoidant behavior while girls are allowed to remain unengaged. By tracking the interventions, the Learning Seeds Platform helps to overcome biases so that young girls can get the support they deserve. In a recent  Our strategies grid provides solutions and tracking so that all children receive support and stretch to help build social endurance and make social connections.

Recent research shows that children living in lower socioeconomic areas are less statistically likely to be diagnosed with autism in the USA. These children therefore have less access to early intervention, greatly endangering their opportunities. Additionally, carers of children with autism diagnosed later are statistically more likely to experience greater stress. 
Using our software we plan to provide free guidance to individual parents and teachers who will share our methods with their district. As we expand our free online presence, our parent user research begins this Fall.Parents will be able to try our techniques, store progress notes, and connect with diagnosticians if they remain concerned and wish to seek medical advice or a diagnosis such as Autism. We keep parents as the lead user, so they control their child's data, and we use AWS FERPA compliant storage.
Our software democratizes access to incredibly effective and rapidly actionable Play Coaching methods which can cause immediate change in a child's life. Change that does not require a diagnosis, as documentation is based on social behavior observation. It puts immediate training and specialized knowledge in areas which are under-resourced, under-staffed, and often ignored by initiatives seeking profit margin over social impact. We do this through our tech-enabled training, which allows educators to take control of their professional development, and gives them access to 25+ years of Play Coach experience, proven effective for children with difficulty socializing regardless of economic context.