 Well, I think people are going to keep entering, but I think we'll get started because we've got a ton of great stuff to talk about today. I want to welcome the audience and introduce myself and our panelists. My name is Andrea Minelli, and I'm a senior advisor at Titan Partners, and we're an investment and consulting firm that does work in the education sector. Today we're going to talk about arguably the hottest topic in K-12, which is the effects of COVID on students' social-emotional health. I'm joined today by an exceptional panel, all of whom are founders of really amazing organizations that are working today in schools with educators, students, and parents around these really important topics. We've got Clark McCown, who is the CEO of XSEL Labs, and he's an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Rush University Medical Center. We have Sarah Crachman, who is the CEO and founder of Transforming Education, and we have Maui Askadam, who's the founder, author, and speaker around Maui Learning, which is now part of Mosaic by ACT. I'm going to start by briefly presenting some findings from a research paper that Titan authored earlier this summer called Finding Your Place, the State of K-12 Social Emotional Learning. This work was really timely. It was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it was to look at the social emotional learning sector as a whole, and this was even before COVID. The reason they funded this study was that they have a particular interest in catalyzing the supplier ecosystem and trying to understand what high-quality SEL social emotional learning looks like for students of color, for low-income students, for Latinx students, and for other disadvantaged students. The study, I think, will help frame this for those of you who are new to social emotional learning, and then we're going to use our amazing panel to jump in the topics of the day, which is the effects of COVID and what's going on in schools, districts, or country. I know some of you are from around the world. This is a very U.S.-centric look at it, but I think some of these issues are pretty universal, and it would be interesting if you are from around the world to contribute your views on what your countries and your school systems are doing about it, and I'm sure our panelists would love to hear that as well. So I'll start by just going through a couple of slides. I'll try to keep this pretty quick. This is pretty dense, so if you have questions, throw them in the chat, because one of my colleagues who really was a mastermind behind this will help answer them. And if you want to see these slides bigger, you can double-click on them, and then bring back the beautiful faces of our panelists later. So first, just to talk about the study and what we did. Why were we doing it? I said that the Gates Foundation worked with us on this or asked us to work on it, and what we really wanted to do was to identify what's going on in this incredibly complex landscape in the U.S. Our panelists will be able to tell you, because they've been in this space, it's evolved very rapidly over the last decade. But there's very little baseline information about what's going on. So we wanted to look at two things, what we call the demand side. What are schools and districts doing? What do they want? And what are they adopting with regard to social emotional learning? And on the supply side, what are providers doing in terms of programs, services, and thought leadership to bring out an ecosystem where the buyers and the sellers could meet and hopefully get their needs met? The Gates Foundation was interested in this because they want to see a healthy market develop and they wanted to learn how they could contribute by catalyzing with grant funding. We did five things. First, we developed a market taxonomy. As all good consultants know, you need a vocabulary to think about a system. So sorry to bore you with that, but we'll go through that taxonomy later because it's a way of identifying what's going on. The second thing we did is we scanned the market and we identified suppliers. We identified over 100 suppliers in the United States in this ecosystem. Some of them work globally, but most of them probably are quite domestically focused. We developed and fielded a large-scale survey. We reached over 3,000 pay-12 educators from all different job designations, and we heard what they had to say, and that was pretty important. We also conducted analysis on that survey, and we'll show you some of the results of that. And then finally, because this lasted through when COVID started, we did interviews in March and April around what suppliers and thought leaders were thinking right at that initial hit of COVID, which kind of really threw the whole K-12 education system and much of our life into complete disarray. So we'll go through a little bit of this with you. We had an advisory board. I encourage you to download the paper. There were some really excellent experts that really helped us look at the survey and look at the field and guided the process with us. Just so that for those technical among you, this was some stats regarding the survey, as I said, over 3,000 responses. Really what we wanted to make sure of was that as we were drawing conclusions that they weren't skewed by a bias of selection in the survey. So we did spend quite a bit of time on this to make sure that some of the conclusions we were drawing we thought would be pretty valid across most schools and districts. And again, this is in the full report. So now this is the good stuff. So if you want to pay attention, this is a good time to pay attention. This is what we call a market taxonomy. And it helps describe the landscape. For you folks out there, taxonomy is really just a vocabulary, dictionary, and a way to think about things. We categorized this industry across the spectrum, across the top of curriculum, professional development, measurement, change management, and the fifth category of technical assistance. For K-12 people among you, those will be familiar categories. It kind of describes what goes on in K-12 in the United States. Anyway, down the left, we added another layer to the taxonomy around the way school districts implement social-emotional learning. Some of them do it through standalone skill building. Some do it through embedded learning. And some do it through school-wide programs and practices. So there essentially is a matrix. And we tried to fit suppliers into the matrix. This is a little messy. This is not all really black and white. Clark's Organization, XSEL Labs, is a measurement company. Sarah's Organization Transforming Ed is technical assistance. She might argue with that a little bit. Maybe they fit in another category. And Maui Learning, we have in curriculum, but they actually play in a bunch of different categories. So this is meant to just be a rough guideline for how the system is developing because we might find something from this like, wow, we really need more curriculum companies or we need way more technical assistance, which, by the way, was one of the findings of the study. So I'm gonna stop there. There's a lot we could talk about here, but I wanna keep us moving so we can get to our panelists. I'm gonna focus on two of the key findings. We had 10 major findings in the study. Two key ones. The first related to why districts are adopting and what they're adopting. So if we look at the why, that's the right-hand side. When asked the question, why are you adopting social-emotional learning in your school? The answer was to work on student social-emotional development. The second highest answer was for student mental health. And this is a distinction we're really gonna get into today, which is the intersection, but the real distinction between mental health and social-emotional learning. The second thing we ask them is, are you implementing? And if you are, what are you implementing? So 95% of the districts and schools that we surveyed said they were implementing some kind of social-emotional learning. That is an indication of how far the field has come in 10 years or even 15 years ago when Maui started, when people didn't know what social-emotional learning was. And the reason it has advanced will come out when our panelists talk. It's because people realize social-emotional health is essential to a well-functioning young person, old person, really for all of us. You can see that curriculum is mostly what people are adopting, but they are adopting all different kinds of approaches to SEL. The last slide, and then we're gonna move on. Really talks about funding. Whenever we look at an ecosystem of suppliers, we're always looking at their sustainability and their revenue model. And in 2018, when we looked at the data, we saw that 42% of the organizations in this industry had revenue models where they were getting paid for their services, which generally is a good thing for sustainability. Grant revenues was 58%. We weren't surprised to see that because this is an emerging and a new industry, but we would hope that over time, more would be revenues sustaining. Now COVID hits, money is short, school districts are kind of freaking out about their funding and about the impacts of the recession. And all of a sudden, possibly what could happen is that those companies that are sustained by revenue might get hurt the worst, because philanthropic dollars generally have a tail of a few years. If a school district turns off the spigot on an organization where they were getting paid revenue, that's not a good thing. So one of the things where I hope we talk about at the end here is the call to action to philanthropists around helping to fill possibly some of these funding gaps. I'm gonna pause. We may have some questions that came up, but I'm gonna let our panelists introduce themselves and take us through what they do so that we can start hearing from them about real time what's going on the ground. I'm gonna start with Clark. Clark, you have such an interesting background as a clinical psychologist and your work started by studying children and social emotional health many years ago and it morphed into sparking and interest to form a company. Can you tell us really what SEL is and how that intersects with mental health? Absolutely. So I'm glad that you use the term social emotional health at the beginning of the presentation, Andrea, because I think that's the term a lot of people are using social emotional health or social and emotional wellness. And as I've talked with folks and listened to people, I really think that they mean two different things when they're talking about social and emotional wellness. The most pressing thing is they're talking about children's mental health. And by that, I mean they're talking about the burden of symptoms that kids are bringing back to school with them from the difficult experiences that we've all been through lately, the anxiety, the depression, the things that can get in the way that we wanna, the barriers that we wanna remove so kids can participate fully in school and in life. But the other meaning of social and emotional wellness is social emotional learning or SEL, which is really much more focused on the affirmative competencies that we want kids to be able to develop, to be productive participants in school, to be productive employees later on and to be resilient in the face of challenge. Social emotional learning refers to things like social awareness, how well do you understand other thoughts and feelings, self-awareness, how much do you understand your own feelings and strengths and weaknesses, relationship skills like the ability to resolve conflicts and self-management such as the ability to, you know, deal with really difficult emotions that come up in everyday life. They're the kinds of things that an organization called the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning or CASEL has described and their model and definition of SEL is the one that's most widely used. So I'd encourage people who are in the audience who are interested in learning more about, you know, what is SEL and how do people talk about it to visit the CASEL website early and often. Now, so SEL and mental health are not totally unrelated. The more equipped kids are with social and emotional learning skills, the less likely they are to develop mental health problems. So, you know, kids who are able to connect well with others to develop informed relationships and to participate constructively in collective life tend to have less anxiety, less depression, less disruptive behavior. The other thing about SEL that I think is important, mental health is treatable and the focus is on treatment of kids with mental health problems to remove those barriers. SEL is teachable. We know from, it's not, you know, it's a fad, but it's an evidence-based fad. That is, there have been hundreds of studies that have been done that demonstrate that when SEL programs or curricula are implemented well, when it's taught well, it leads to a measurable benefit in terms of children's social behavior, their emotional well-being, and their academic outcomes. So it's a value add, not that that's a replacement for academics. We know it's consequential, we know it's teachable. I think, you know, I have some ideas about some of the challenges and opportunities in the field, but I don't want to haunt too much time, but I will just say one of the things that I think is a real opportunity, a real challenge for the field is, am I, am I, am I staticky right now or is that just a hallucination? I'm okay, all right. So one of the challenges for the field is, you know, as it gets big, as 95% of schools adopt SEL programs, maintaining quality is really hard. You know, the kinds of quality that researchers are able to support schools to maintain in the context of an evaluation study, that's a lot of resources, and I can't tell you how many school leaders I've talked to say, we bought program X and it's sitting on the shelf in its shrink wrap, essentially. So how do you get systems change so that people are using programs, using them well, and can see that they're having an impact? We have an assessment company, so we provide competence assessments for K and 12 SEL competence assessments and implementation assessments and climate assessments. I actually think it's gonna be really important for the field to maintain a commitment to data as it goes big, because otherwise, you know, everybody and their sisters coming up with a program and calling it SEL, some of them are great, some of them probably won't work, but if we're lumping them all under the banner of SEL, what we're gonna find is that the impact becomes weaker and then people say SEL doesn't work. So integrating assessment data collection and continuous improvement is, it seems like a nice to have, but I think for the field, it's a must have to maintain, you know, protect the investment that we've made in SEL so far. That's more than you wanted, Andrea, but those are some thoughts. Oh, it's fantastic, Clark, thank you. And it's a really natural segue to Sarah and what's going on at TransformEd, which provides technical support to school systems around implementing SEL. Tell us about your organization and your work, Sarah, and what motivated you to get into this field. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Andrea and Clark. I appreciate the sort of distinctions that you're drawing out there and your mention of system change, because that's really where we come in at TransformEd. Our lens is always on systems change and in the case of the education system, that's really looking at districts, school districts, at least in the context of the US, as the unit of change. So at Transforming Education, we partner with school districts to support them in fostering the development of the whole child and have a particular emphasis on students who are least well served by our current education system. So that's students of color, students of low income backgrounds, students of a range of social identities that have been marginalized by our society. And as I said, the focus is on systems change. So we're really thinking about how do we change policies and practices within districts and within schools so that we can support young people's holistic development. So in practice, that looks like partnering with a school district to develop a strategy for how they'll ensure that every single young person experiences a positive learning environment where they feel safe and seen and validated and also that they have targeted supports for their own social emotional development. So the types of competencies that Clark mentioned. And I wanted to share kind of a quick snapshot of what it typically looks like when we work with a partner district. I just got that ominous fading sound in my headphones. So I'll put the other one in. So when we partner with a district, we will work with the district leaders to form kind of a whole child leadership team. So typically that's the superintendent, the head of student supports, the head of academics, and then a range of students, community members and educators who are all kind of part of this leadership team. And then we'll work with that team to conduct an assets and needs mapping. So what we're finding, given what Andrea said about 95% of districts are doing some form of SEL, we're not coming into a blank slate, right? Districts and schools have a range of practices, some of which are really phenomenal. And so that's why we tend to start with this asset mapping, right? Let's understand what's working well that might be great, but only happening in pockets and could scale to the rest of your district. What's not working? Where are there gaps? Which students aren't being supported, aren't being reached by the current set of supports that you have in place. So using that kind of assets and needs mapping, what we then do is work with that whole child leadership team to really build out the strategy. What are the evidence-based ways, the research-based ways in which you will integrate social-emotional development opportunities into the day-to-day work of schools, right? How do you build that into the fabric of teaching and learning? And how do you ensure that the disciplinary system is supportive of this type of holistic development? How do you make sure there's a tiered set of supports that really offer young people the supports they need, not just on the social-emotional competency side, but also merging into that mental health piece that Clark mentioned and articulated so clearly? So that's the kind of work we typically would do with districts and then we offer deeper implementation support with a subset of schools in any given district that really goes working hand-in-hand to actually make this vision come to life in what we call sort of champion schools that are gonna bring the vision forward. And then we also, we're doing similar types of work with other entities that support schools and districts as well. So often we'll partner at the state education agency level. And we're working with the State Department of Education within Massachusetts and Delaware, for example. And we're part in the US of a federally funded center to improve SEL and school safety that really provides technical assistance to a range of states around the country. So through those types of mechanisms, we're able to provide similar support, but like through the state instead of just going directly to districts. And sometimes that layering, that stacking of different types of supports at different layers of the system can be really impactful. So happy to talk more about the SEL mental health intersection. I might just, Andrea, should I elaborate now or maybe wait a moment on kind of the SEL and mental health academy work we're doing? Yeah, why don't we let Maui tell us his story and then we'll circle right back because I think we're hitting that good 30,000 foot layer and then let's try to get down to what's going on in the schools, right? And just the day, you know, how do these things get delivered in a time of crisis when everything is remote? But Maui, we have to go to you and just hear your remarkable personal story. The company you founded that's reached so many students. And, you know, as you were just saying before we started 15 years ago when you were talking about this, people were like, what are you talking about social emotional learning? So go ahead and just share with the group your story and where you are today. Thank you, Andrea and Clark and Sarah. Great job. What a way to kick it off. And all, so my story and really what I want to get at is the why, why I'm so passionate about SEL from my story and how that kind of leads into the things we're talking about today. So I'm originally from Ethiopia. I came to this country as a refugee, started about first grade here and after surviving a refugee camp for three years in Sudan. And there were really two, I would say, pivotal experiences I had in K-12 that would give me a lifelong passion for social emotional learning. So one was profoundly negative. That was in middle school. I'm sure a lot of you can relate. But for me as a low income kid whose father was legally blind and just I smell like onions and garlic as an immigrant kid just didn't fit in at all. And it was the feeling invisible, feeling like you weren't valued, feeling that emotional pain. I sometimes felt like that was worse than the three years in a refugee camp because at least you were valued there in some way by your community. And that is a deep pain that I've seen in students all over the country as well, right? When we're talking about the social emotional health that other folks have mentioned. So that was profoundly negative, right? And that was deeply scarring to me. And then I had an other direction, a tremendously positive experience in high school where I was lucky enough to have some mentors, learned about things like goal setting, a lot of the positive kind of skills that both Clark and Sarah were talking about. For example, I have a whole set of journals like this from high school, about 10 of them that I filled up with the help of some mentors where I just wrote my goals, looked at different things. And it transformed my self-concept. I became a much stronger student, became a much stronger athlete, eventually got a scholarship to Harvard University. And after I graduated and I thought, what do I want to do with my life? I said, hey, I had no idea. I just, my journey thus far is giving me this window that our inner journey really matters. And we can go from feeling invisible, feeling like we don't matter to growing confidence and wanting that growth for all students, right? And all students of all races, of all backgrounds to have that positive self-vision, that's why I started Mowry Learning. And you kind of get it to two parts of what SEL really should do. Well, my opinion from my story, one is we want to make sure all students are affirmed, they feel valued, they're visible. On the other hand, we want to bring the thunder. We want to look at every student and say you were meant to grow and you can grow incredibly. So for example, in this time of COVID, I look at my kids and I say, I have four kids. I look at my fifth and sixth grader and I say, we're gonna grow this year. It's not a situation we wanted, we're absolutely gonna grow and here's how we're gonna grow, that's the expectation. I do that for multiple reasons, but one of them is that there's tremendous research that shows that when kids develop skill, when they're better at math, better at reading, better at music, that builds up their self-confidence, that's the opposite of the self-esteem movement where we just tell kids they're great and that gives them some of that resilience to get through the anxiety. And so that skill building and that vision of tremendous growth for students is something that we need to maintain now more than ever before, even though it seems counterintuitive that we would do that now. It's actually educators and parents need to find ways. That's one of the ways we protect our students is continuing to give them authentic growth experiences. And so in terms of what that work looks like now in the school districts, I'll give a closer look at one district that we work closely with and then a couple of quick stories that get at the equity issue and also at the intersection of SEL with our mental health. So a larger case study of how this looks for us in our learning is we got a call from Miami-Dade, fourth largest school district in the country about four or five years ago and they were having a problem where they were just losing a lot of middle school students who were going to charter schools and there was something wrong with the middle school experience and they recognized that. And when they surveyed their students, they found it had nothing to do with the math. It had nothing to do with the reading. It had everything to do with how students felt. The same issues I went through as a kid that so many of us have gone through and kids have continued to go through. And so we partnered with them where, and to Sarah's point, we wanna have systemic impact. It can be tempting to go in and just wanna help the student. But I always say the best way to help the students is to help the adults in the ecosystem first. And to make sure, because the students can only get so far on their own if the adults have created a world that is contrary to what the students actually need, which is the case in many places. And so what we did there was we have an online course that can be taught in a blended format where all 49 schools went through our professional development to learn more about social motion learning and practice can be implemented. Then after that we worked with the students as well where there was dedicated time in the school day where the students learned about things like goal setting, staying organized, how to maintain positive relationships. Maybe some more baseline meant to help kind of things like coping skills. A lot of students don't even know what their coping skills are. We all have them, but you can introduce them to some of those things, right? And that has been tremendously well received by Miami-Dade. We've renewed that for multiple years. They actually saw an increase for the first time in their NAEP scores, which is a really big deal at the eighth grade level. And so that's been really fun work and it really requires Andrea a commitment at the district level to what Clark and Sarah were saying to not cutting corners and really making it a core part of how the district goes to market and what they provide. And that's a fundamental and necessary condition for high quality SEL. It can be easy to check box it. So I'm happy to talk more about that work and in that we're again, we're getting at making sure every student feels like they belong and then also challenge to grow. The other two stories really quickly, one is a story of, we'll give it the equity angle. There's a student who's taken our course, a high school student and a lot of times they'll write into the course different things that happen to review his work, but he wrote about how his big problem is his father was incarcerated and he's gonna be incarcerated for four or five years. And it was a minority student. I gotta tell you, I can't help but think as a black male. Black males are a third of black males get arrested in this country at some point in their lives. I'm six times more likely to be arrested than Clark simply based on the color of my skin and his skin. And so now I have an SEL issue with the student where he has trauma from his father, not being around. And how much of it was an equity issue that could have been prevented if there were been equitable practices around criminal justice in this country. And so we can't just look at one part of the thing and say, well, here's what's happening in this school and that's all that matters. SOCAP really gets into a lot of different topics, but the equity issues go across inequities in healthcare and criminal justice. They show up in the student's lives every day and Sarah's organization has to take that on. Clark's organization has to take that on and it'd be so much easier if those inequities weren't there or reduced in some way so that the less kids, and again, I don't know the story of what that kid's father's situation was, but again, we know what the data tells us, right? And on the intersection with mental health and SEL, I would say that we had a student who was in one of our courses and a lot of his writing turned negative. He would write things like, I wanna die in his feedback loop, teacher identified that in our SEL courses, got to, couldn't reach the mom, but with the principal they called local police, they did a wellness check and the kid had a new setup in the bathroom when they arrived and the mom called that school repeatedly, thanking them for saving her son's life. What happens is SEL can be an early warning system for some of the deeper mental health issues if we're listening and we've trained our staff correctly, the two go hand in hand, but we also have to recognize when something is beyond what we can do and be humble about it and say, hey, I don't have the resource or capacity, I've been trained in SEL, but I'm not a psychiatrist, I don't claim to be a psychiatrist, I need to pull in some help to really solve this problem. So I do think there's a lot of interplay and a lot of it goes back to some of the training we provide our partners and what to do in different situations. Mariah, that's just phenomenal. Thank you so much for sharing at so many different levels and I think it's the honesty and willing to just put your story out there that has obviously had a lot to do with the success of the organization and your passion about spreading the word as with the other founders we have, but I wanna pick up on that last topic and go back, Sarah, maybe talking about the, this would be a good time to talk about the Academy and then Clark, let's go to you afterwards, just think a little bit for us about in this dire time of need, when it's not every school that has a social worker or a school psychologist and whatever, how are people putting their finger in the dike right now with all these issues swirling? I know it's gonna be a tough one, so I'm gonna give you time to think about it. Sarah, tell us about the Academy. Sure, so Andrew's referring to an Academy that we run called the SEL and Mental Health Academy, which is a partnership with the Massachusetts State Department of Education and it's a sort of an Academy that districts can opt into to get support and technical assistance really at this kind of intersection between SEL and mental health. And my team at Transform Ed does not have a deep background in the clinical aspects of mental health, so we've partnered with another organization, Education Development Center, EDC, to really bring that lens. And together, we and EDC support districts in thinking about kind of the tiered systems that they need to address both SEL and mental health. So as Clark mentioned earlier, SEL is really a great preventative support for all young people and it kind of helps create a supportive environment. For example, by emphasizing the importance of relationship building or by developing, helping young people develop a certain set of skills, say around emotion regulation. And all of those things foster well-being, foster mental health, but the distinction between SEL and mental health I think becomes more important at the higher, we call them tiers, like the higher levels of need within the education system. So for example, a student with an acute mental health need may require individualized or group therapy that's beyond what we consider SEL. And so I'll try to give like a concrete example. In the context of SEL, we might focus on teaching young people how to ask for help, right? That's a skill that's crucial to navigating our increasingly complex world. And yet, in the case that Maui was just talking about, right? If you have a student who's actually experiencing suicidal thoughts, then you're sort of SEL training on asking for help is not sufficient, right? That student needs another layer, sort of a clinical level of support. A similar example would be, in the context of SEL, we might help students build social skills, skills for collaborating and teamwork and so on. And those are skills that set us up for success that enable us to form strong relationships. We know from the research that strong relationships mitigate the potential impact of trauma, but that's not sufficient. That sort of SEL relationship skill building course is not gonna be sufficient for a student who is trying to negotiate boundaries after an experience of abuse, for example, right? It's not just the basics of sort of interpersonal communication, you want really clinical support for that student. And so when we think about this academy, this set of supports that we're offering to districts around SEL and mental health, it's really organized around what we talk about as a multi-tiered system of supports, or MTSS system, where there's a strong foundation of strong set of practices that apply to every young person, that promote skills that are important, that help mitigate the potential impact of trauma and so on, but that ultimately, those schools also have systems in place to identify student needs in a systematic way, right? They're looking at data on a regular basis, trying to understand what students need and which supports and acknowledging that that changes over time and then making the referrals as needed so that students who need kind of a clinical level of support or who may need a group level intervention or something in between are able to access that through school-based mental health clinicians or partnerships with local universities and hospitals and so on. So that's really kind of the structure that we look at in terms of setting up this multi-tiered system of supports that acknowledges the foundational role that social-emotional learning can play and that there are often needs above and beyond what SEL can do that really require more clinical levels of support. That's great. And Clark, let's go to you because, I mean, I loved what I was hearing from Sarah, but I'm also sitting here thinking, wow, how does that get executed when everybody's been thrown into this remote learning situation where there's no very little human-to-human in the same room interaction and that budgets are under stress and so I'm gonna land that giant one on your lap, Clark, and tell us what you're seeing and how are people coping? Well, I don't have the answer, obviously, but I do have a couple of thoughts. One is that there's a word, Sarah, that you used that I loved and you said and because you were talking about social-emotional learning and mental health, both of those things being important and integrating those two things into a kind of seamless system of care is important. That is so hard to hold in one's head because I think right now, because of COVID and because of all the social unrest that's going on, the focus is understandably on the crises, on the mental health problems, on the putting out the fires, as it should be in many ways, but if that's at the expense of the long game, nurturing the kinds of capacities that we want students to have to be productive adults, it's not gonna be over the long haul effective. Keeping our eyes on both these things, really important part under any circumstances, particularly hard right now, but I am finding in our partnerships, so we work with school districts who have generally committed to SEL and adopted some form of SEL curriculum or program and engaged in some systemic change and they wanna use assessment data to understand their kids, to inform instruction, to measure progress. And what I'm seeing is that those districts that have made this a big commitment and have where the systemic change has taken root, they're finding a way. They're finding a way to assess kids even though they're doing remote instruction. They're finding a way to use those data to creatively apply the curriculum that they've adopted through Zoom lessons. Is it perfect? I doubt it, but I think it's a heck of a lot better than nothing or than abandoning that. I've been just so impressed by the creativity that educators have brought to this really difficult situation. I will say, I also hear from many of our partners and say, you know, we just can't do it this year or we can't do it in the same way that we did it last year. And I completely understand that because you can only do so much, but I've been really impressed by how many bright spots there are where that I on the long game is part of practice still, even in the midst of the pandemic, even when people are doing remote instruction and they're focused on kids' mental health at the same time. I think it's possible. It's not easy, but it's possible and I see evidence that it's happening. Great. Please jump in, you two. Just, you know, what are you seeing at that granular lever on the ground? Maui, what's- Well, what Sarah and Clark had to say, and I think one really interesting point too is a lot of times we think about the mental health of the students, but we really need to care for the mental health of the staff and they're under tremendous pressure. Put yourself in a position even of like, a lot of times people don't think about a school principal. They have to respond to all of the needs of the parents, the students, the school administration that's all around them and they have their own families at home with all those pressures. So our educators and our leaders are under tremendous pressure and that's I think is a tremendous area for funders, for organizations. Again, we can't really help the student and be there for the student, but we're not there for the adults that serve that student. We really need to love the adults as much as we love the students. I was just typing, Maui, I was just typing into the chat like plus one on supporting educators, social, emotional, development and well-being. I mean, that's been one of the things that we've really doubled down on in the time since the pandemic hit months ago now. The way that educators need to be supported in order to then turn and support young people in a very difficult time is just cannot be overstated. We've done a lot on this lately and I'm happy to drop a resource that we recently released into the chat box in a moment on this front. The other thing that we've been working a lot on lately in response to the needs that we're seeing in schools is what it looks like to do trauma-informed social, emotional learning. So what we're hearing is that living through COVID, even if you and your loved ones don't contract the virus, is in of itself a traumatic experience in that it upends our daily routines and our sense of normalcy and so on. And then on top of that, some young people are dealing with the direct health impacts of the virus, the economic impacts of loved ones losing jobs, the impact of personally experiencing racial oppression and or witnessing racialized violence on the news at an incredible rate, at a really depressing rate. And so when you think about all of those things, there's just so much that young people are holding and the impact of that trauma is enormous. I mean, what the brain science tells us is that it affects our prefrontal cortex, it sends us, trauma sends us into kind of a fight, flight, freeze, response that really inhibits our ability to focus our attention to learn, right? When we're talking about schools, trauma inhibits our ability to learn. And yet there are, we know that there are a number of protective factors that can really mitigate the impact of that, including strong supportive relationships with adults, with one's peers and a number of other really important trauma-informed practices related to, you know, creating a safe and reliable and predictable environment in the classroom, for example, related to making sure that young people feel a sense of belonging, that their identities are acknowledged and validated and so on. So that's the second piece that we've been really focused on since COVID hit, and I can drop a link to some of the free resources that we've developed there on this, we're calling it a trauma-informed SEL toolkit because that is such an acute need right now. Yeah, that's just amazing. And I'm really glad you used and brought up that word trauma because I think people have to understand and start to realize, you know, the wide-ranging impacts of that, not just for our students, but the adults and honestly even parents. So, I mean, I don't want to, you know, there are times we talk about COVID silver linings and maybe I'll throw this out there of, you know, you all have been in this field for a while, even though you all look like you're under the age of 28, but I think the reality is, have we now seen an acceleration? Have we now turned a page where possibly social-emotional learning and the importance also of its intersection with mental health will be cemented into our stakeholder ecosystem parents getting a firsthand view, parents know how hard it is to be a parent, but now they know how hard it is to be a teacher, right? Teachers need that support and professional development as much as the students, whereas before schools may have just been, hey, we need the books, we need the curriculum, we need the students, maybe now they're gonna open their eyes and say, we need that three years, not one year, this is not a sprint. And maybe it's not a marathon, but it certainly is a bit of a middle-distance race, right, Clark, where we have to commit to this over time. So do we see some silver linings maybe emerging? I don't know about that. I mean, I think that there are always silver linings. There are always good things that come out of bad things. I think that, you know, over the long haul, I mean, the SEL field has witnessed incredible success and growth over the past few years. I hope it doesn't get cemented in a sense. I don't mean to torture that metaphor, but I think that as the field grows, as districts adopt SEL, as things go to scale, they need to be able to evolve in a way that actually is based in the data about what works in local contexts. And this is just to say that different communities are gonna have slightly different needs and sort of tolerances for different kinds of SEL. So how do we do that in a way that maintains the integrity and impact of SEL while things grow? I think in some ways, the pandemic is just pressure testing the system and saying, you know, if you had to distill it under the head of a pen, which is the same as teaching a class over Zoom, how would you do it in a way that had an impact? So the pressures that educators are under, I wanna acknowledge, Maui, I think you're absolutely right. And that pressure I think is leading to innovation in education. And hopefully that'll spill over to the delivery of effective SEL on mental health services too. Yeah, a couple of, it's hard to think civil linings in this time, right? Cause there's so much pain. And yet, you know, I think it's right. We can look to see if we can create some positives out of all these challenges, right? And I see a couple of potential positives. One is, you know, there's a belief sometimes that to do social-emotional learning well, you always have to be in the same room as somebody, look them in the eye and be able to establish, that's how you establish a relationship, right? And our model from the over the last 10 years at Maui Learning has been using technologies. For example, one of our partners is Florida Virtual School. We've had over 100,000 students take our credit, our course is for credit, not just as a short thing, but for full credit. And a lot of the partnerships we've done use blended learning. For example, our professional development that we developed with Dr. Carol DeWack who pioneered growth mindset out of Stanford. That's a blended solution where people access it online and then they get together in groups and talk and things like that. So I think districts have an opportunity to really experiment and learn about the different ways they can use technology to perhaps access trainings or learn about different tools that they would have never otherwise considered or would have taken them three to five years to get there. Now everyone, look at SOCAP. SOCAP wouldn't have been virtual like this, right? We'd all been the same, but we had no choice. This is how we're doing it and we're making the best of it. We're having a great time, right? And in the same way, there's an opportunity to experiment, I think that is unbelievable that would have happened possible under any other circumstance in my opinion that we should step into and look to see what works, what doesn't work, right? On the equity side, I think that there's a real realization that we can't do things the way we were doing them before. It actually kind of echoes the larger themes of this conference. I've been in a couple of other sessions and there's this theme around SOCAP that capitalism, if it's continued to run the way it is, will basically destroy itself, right? We're gonna destroy the planet. We're gonna destroy each other. It's not sustainable. And there's an understanding now in education that we can no longer ignore the equity issues. We can no longer relegate social-emotional learning to the corner or just a nice checkbox. If we're gonna survive as a system and really have trust along all our stakeholders, we have to address equity. We have to address all the isms that are out there. We have to access, we have to take on this belief that it's not possible to perform at a high level academically unless you're really catering to test all that kind of stuff. A lot of times when they do SEL, there's still some people who do it more for the health angle, but they don't really believe that it drives academic success. And that needs to be, we need to knock that down, right? And so there's an opportunity to reimagine and move forward and accelerate our system change, right? And I think we have an opportunity there. I would love to piggyback on that, Maui, because just a big plus one, first of all, I think that so many of the issues that have been around for quite a long time in our society and in our education system are now just being brought to the fore, right? It's not that, there's a quote that I'm totally blank on, but it's, we're just uncovering, right? It's not that these things are new, we're just uncovering what's happening. And I think two of the dynamics I see shifting right now sort of by virtue of school being virtual or hybrid in a lot of cases are, one, parents are more deeply involved, right? Parents are incredibly important set of stakeholders in the education space. And historically, they have not been given as much voice in schools and districts. I mean, from the basics of it's hard to come in for that parent meeting, if it's in the middle of the day and you're working or parents don't feel welcome in schools for whatever reason, but now school is literally in their living room. And so there's just this kind of, I've heard people use the term like disintermediation, parents are there. And I think that unleashes a new power and a new force for change that I hope we really see come to fruition. And the second piece is that, I think educators are realizing that we can't just force kids to learn X, Y, or Z because we decided it was important. When you're on the other side of a Zoom screen when you might not even have kids on video at all, I mean, kids could be in the other room, kids could be taken a nap. And I think, I don't mean to put that on young people, I think it is a reflection on the fact that what we are teaching, what we're asking students to engage with and learn doesn't feel relevant, doesn't feel salient to their lives, their identities, and so on. And so I feel like there's an important aha in there aligned with the learning science that tells us that connecting to students intrinsic motivation, connecting learning to their identities and their daily lives and what has meaning and salience for them is crucial to the learning process. We've known that for years and I think we've been ignoring it. And now I think it's really in our faces when we're having to teach over these virtual media. Can I shift gears a little bit? I'm seeing in the chat, Alex asked a question about how to measure this stuff because that's kind of my obsession. I just thought I'd take a second to tackle that. So Alex's question is, does SEL include character development such as reliability, personal integrity, diligence, and discipline and how do you measure such behavioral change? I think SEL includes some of those things more than others. Of course, character and integrity are important but they're really hard to measure. Those are difficult things to put in a test to assess but there are competencies that we know are related to people's ability to form positive relationships, to cooperate and collaborate, to be part of a classroom, to be part of a team and to be effective and healthy people. Things like social awareness, how much do kids understand others' feelings? And you can assess those things. Our assessment for younger children, we show them pictures of faces and they have to say as the person that be said angry, scared or just okay. There's actually a right and a wrong answer. So it's not as mushy as you'd think. It's like a math test but instead of math problems or social and emotional problems. And so all of the competencies in the CASEL model, all the competencies that are the targets of instruction and evidence-based SEO programs are measurable and measurable through methods that are more rigorous than just asking kids, hey, are you good at making friends? There are good ways to do this but some of the things that get into more like ethics and deep character and integrity, of course they're important but I don't think they're super measurable or directly teachable. You teach people to learn, you teach them to be good people but I'd shy away from measuring those kinds of things. That's great Clark and there are a lot of questions popping up but I'm gonna direct it a certain way. We've got about eight minutes left and I will say thanks to our higher ed colleagues for being on this panel. I know it was very K-12 focused but there's no doubt that this SDL field is kind of really expanding even into higher ed of course as in terms of a lot of first year advising activities and also even into the workplace. So I think it's just something to watch and we can put some resources for you in the channel. This isn't exclusively the domain of K-12. So I'd like to say that but I wanna just segue to a good question in there from Megan about what you all have found are effective ways to attract and communicate with funders to get them to invest. And we'd love to hear that because I think, if there isn't any call to action here, I think for sure I'm gonna make it on your behalf is that this is a tough time and pocket books are getting tight and as our firms start, we're tracking K-12 funding and there's a lot of uncertainty on the horizon and what the tail of this recession is gonna be and we just don't wanna see a deceleration of the funding of this field. So I'll let you guys speak to that because you all have been out talking whether it was to investors to invest in your company or philanthropy to help you with grants or to help your schools with grants. Anybody wanna take that first? I can share a couple of thoughts. We just put out a paper recently in partnership with ANET achievement network called Head and Heart and I think that's like a helpful frame to use here. So Head and Heart is what strikes me in terms of like the way to motivate people to invest here in the sense that there is really compelling research showing the impact of social emotional development not only on students' academic outcomes but on lifelong health, wealth and wellbeing outcomes. And a lot of that was well-synthesized and curated in the work of the Aspen Social Emotional and Academic Development Commission. So I think the website for their report that synthesizes all of that is nationathope.org. So like one, on the head, look at the research. It's incredibly compelling. Two, on the heart, I think really tapping into the human stories that make this work come alive for us is so crucial as well. I think Maui, really grateful for you to have shared some of your personal story and I think hearing what this has meant to individual people in the context of their own lives and why it matters I think is the other part of that human motivation that's needed. So I'm always trying to think about how do you pair those two aspects together? Yeah, so I would just say that in terms of what is attracting investors, I'm a weird guy. I come from the academic world and that's where the assessment development work started. So we've gotten a lot of federal funding to develop our assessments and validate them. And so federal funders, the Institute of Education Sciences, they're interested in the science. So we lead with science and the potential impact of the science on the field and they're really interested in that as long as there's a certain level of rigor and a certain level of potential impact on the field. And then the other investors we have are our customers, our school district customers and research partners who use our assessment as an outcome measure. And I think that for school districts, the big thing is they often feel like they're flying blind. We're doing this stuff, but are we doing it right? And is it making a difference? We want to rigorously assess to understand how to direct our energies and to measure progress. That's the thing that they come to us with and that motivates them to invest in assessment. For our research partners, they want a cost-effective way to measure outcomes in the context of large field trials of their SEL programs. So they're trying to demonstrate the efficacy of their nascent initiatives and they want a way to rigorously and fairly inexpensively measure whether it's working. So they're different motivators that lead to buying decisions. We haven't actually taken outside investment as a company. So I'd let others speak to that and what sells and what people are interested in. Maui, we've got a couple of minutes. So bring us home here. This has just been too exciting. We could really go on much longer, but tell us your thoughts on that funding topic. Yes, definitely. I'll share a couple of thoughts on funding and I'll share hopefully one inspirational call to action here that we can get inspired by. So our approach in Maui Learning from when I started the company was we went directly to districts and had them fund our work. And so I've fallen that code. A lot of our work has fallen to that category that you described which may be at risk. Andrea, my approach has always been to really make a compelling evidence-based case to have a strong set of partners that are happy with one's work and can be strong references. And to always the other thing that I think is so critical for anyone doing this work to seek funders or work with districts is, I always say if it hasn't been implemented well, then we wasted everybody's time and money, right? And it has to be implemented well. We're not, if one doesn't care about that, then you might as well be selling blades of grass or sand or nails or just get into any industry to make whatever margin you can. But you have to be deeply passionate about the implementation and take it personally that every single student, every single educator, every single person with that partner district really gets something positive out of partnering with your organization. And the other thing I always say is if it's not applied, SEL is useless. All this training is useless. So we have to be application-based and people have to know how do I put this into practice? And so that's kind of how I'll bring us home as well too is that's actually, I'd say probably the most, the metaphor we came up with at Maui Learning, that's our clients love the most is one I'll share with everybody and it's around this concept of locus of control. The fact that there's many things in life that we don't control, that's the actual locus of control. It leaves us powerless when we focus on that, things like the weather, you know, who's a lot of things out there, right? And then where we have power is our internal locus of control, things that we can do right now, every day. And Maui Learning, we call that hitting your triple button. Everyone's got a triple button in their heart and when we look at the world and we act like we have no power, we're not hitting that triple button, but when we hit it, we find out we're a lot more powerful than we ever thought we were. And that applies to any, so we always say, how can we apply this this week? How can you hit your triple button today? And now I would say that, you know, that applies to everything that's been said today. How do we hit our triple buttons for everything we've heard from Clark, from Sarah, from you, from myself? How does that person who asked the question about funding not take what we just said and go try to get some of that funding? And now all the funders out there, Clark and Sarah might be too polite to say this, but yes, please fund us, okay? We're doing incredible work. We can't scale this work just solely on our own. These are incredible organizations that can speak for these two, having observed them who work tirelessly and do tremendous work. And yes, we deserve to get some of that impact funding. We deserve to get some of that funding out of SOCAP. So come talk to our organizations. I can be reached at Maui and Maui.com. I'm sure they'll put their addresses in the chat, but we do need that funding. So please come through for us on that. Maui, thank you so much. Sarah, Clark, way to bring us home. Everybody get that turbo button and hit it hard. Thanks everyone. Take care.