 clapping very loudly, I think that it's all going. Yeah, so go ahead and hopefully everyone will be able to find a spot. It's just, it's a thrill to see everyone getting here this afternoon. Here, I'm just gonna make sure this mic's in the right place. So, welcome, welcome everyone. My name is Lisa Guernsey and I'm the deputy director for our education policy program here at New America. It is really amazing to see everybody assembling here. The energy in the room is really quite exciting and it's even more amazing for me and for Michael and Shayna who'll meet in a moment, knowing that this is August 2nd in Washington DC, which is the absolute worst possible time to ever invite anybody to town. Hotel rates are good. So, and for those of you who've walked in, I'm like, oh my god, the humidity. Can I just tell you that this is nothing compared to last weekend? This is nothing. But anyway, welcome, yes, to our swamp. This is a pretty interesting place to be though and we're really thrilled that you're here. So, what we're gonna be doing, we'll be live streaming this. I wanna say that right from the start. We're gonna be live streaming all of today's activities ending at about 5.30 or so. And so, just know that, I mean, many of you, we want this to be as much of a conversation as possible, but there will be some folks who are listening live and that will be also archived for us all to watch again later. We also are using the hashtag early tech fam, early tech fam on Twitter if anybody want to be in that conversation and follow along in that way. And for those of you who are just trying to get a handle on how is this all gonna proceed, at your seat, everybody should have a folder and in that folder is the agenda. So, on the very left hand side, and you'll see it's for the full two days, there's also lots of, there's bio books in there and some reading materials that we will be pointing to throughout the two days here. So, let me just take a very short moment to introduce you to New America for those of you who have never been here before. New America is a nonpartisan think tank and civic enterprise dedicated to the renewal of America's promise, politics and prosperity in the digital age. And this event really encapsulates that I think on a lot of levels, particularly the promise part of the digital age, I think. Many of you may know of New America through our early and elementary education program. There are newsletters that go out every Tuesday. In fact, raise your hand if you happen to receive some of our spam. Okay, great, it's like half the room, so that's wonderful. But we also have a much larger education policy team here. So our early and ed group is just part of a larger ed policy team of about 25 people. We have a higher education group, pre-K-12, analysts of which I'm also a part and I'm directing the Learning Technologies project as well and you'll be hearing more about that later today. So this event itself is, I think, really a perfect example of what New America likes to do, which is to work at the intersections of things. That's where the interesting work often gets done. It's hard, right, but it's interesting. And here today we are at the intersection of early literacy and language development at family engagement and family success and at the intersection of technology and all of the challenges and interesting promise that that brings. So that's all gonna be happening here for the next two days. We really see this as a key moment because technology is rapidly changing the way we work and interact together and the way we learn and also because community leaders, and many of you are among them, community leaders are really becoming more cognizant and at the forefront of working to promote family success in new ways and recognizing how important that is to children's learning and children's outcomes in school and in life. So I'm about to turn it over now to Michael Levine who's gonna explain a little bit more about our goals for the next two days. But I first just wanna take a moment I'll be doing lots of thank yous throughout the next two days but I really want to take a moment right now to thank and acknowledge Shayna Cook. Shayna, can you just raise your hand? So Shayna is a policy analyst here who works in both the early and elementary education program and in our learning technologies project. And she's been the coordinator of this entire two day event and a key mastermind with me and Michael behind the Institute. And you'll be hearing more from her soon. You'll also hear from Jason Chiara of the Joyce Foundation. Where did Jason go? There he is. Thank you, Jason. And Joyce has funded much of this work and he's really the reason that we're able to be here today to bring many of these ideas together. So a big thanks to Jason and Joyce. So now let me introduce Michael, Executive Director and Founder of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Many of you know this, right? That the Cooney Center has been at the forefront of issues related to digital learning since its conception about 10 years ago or so. I consider Michael a real intellectual giant on these issues, an enormous resource and connector for the field. But I'm also lucky enough to call him a collaborator on many projects and co-author of a book that we did together and a good friend. So with that, I now give you Michael Levine. Wow. Thanks. Hey guys. Hello everyone. I'm Michael Levine as Lisa just told you. It's so nice of you to come, especially during a sweltering summer week when you might rather be on a beach with some adult beverages. We children and families, our work focuses much as New America's does on opportunities and challenges that technology poses for learning and healthy development in the digital age. Let me also thank Jason Kiera and also all of our partners. So we wanted to thank a couple of other people. I wanted to thank Christina Rodriguez and Ellen Alpa here at the New America Foundation. No, it's not New America Foundation anymore. And I'm really grateful to Elizabeth McClure, Lily Chotunas, and Catherine G on my staff. Big thanks to all of our co-conveners who've planned this rich development, professional development institute. She's giving me the one minute. So why are we here? You may be asking yourself. My sister asked me this this morning. I'm also delighted that my sister Lori Levine is here. Our main goal is to dig into the rapidly evolving landscape, which is peppered by technological innovation and technological discourse, but which states and communities are just starting to place on their agenda. What are the most effective ways to modernize early learning and family engagement programs? Lisa mentioned some recent research that we've done in a book called Tap, Click, Read, Growing Readers in the World of Screens. And we'll hear later from our colleague, our wonderful colleague, from Temple University. Oh my gosh, Kathy Hirsch-Basek, who's written a brilliant book with Roberta Galankoff. Oh my God. So the question that we're asking is can interactive media, which takes up a growing proportion of young children and families' days, be deployed in promoting language development and vital relationship-based family supports? And I think we're also gonna have to get into the issue of how to build adult capabilities of the parents themselves, as well as the early childhood workforce. So we've designed the Institute to deepen your expertise about the role that technology might play in supporting human-centered innovations who will be exposed to new program designs, have a chance to understand emerging policy opportunities. And you'll see this network-building institute has been designed to explore and promote cross-sector partnerships. We'll be stimulated by Keenell Presentations, by Kathy, co-author of that great book Becoming Brilliant, and Ralph Smith, who's the chief architect of the campaign for grade-level reading. We're gonna share research and emerging best practices. And really, we want to encourage you to plan to take action. We're really well-positioned in this team, in this group, to make a big difference here. We've got leaders from over 15 states and communities, from the Rust Belt, you'll see the Pittsburgh contingent in the middle, to Silicon Valley, just text, as well as pioneers from every critical sector. So we also have a superb cadre, really a really interesting group of leaders in public media, from our allies at PBS and CPB, and my colleagues at Sesame Workshop, whose work reaches millions of children every day, and whose value, I think, is unbelievable. We also have a group of really exciting social entrepreneurs, some of whom are new to the party, but many of whom are pioneering really interesting new community engagement models that are ready, I think, to scale. Groups like Jumpstar, Tools of the Mind, Asselero, Ready Rosie, Avance, the Lena Foundation, and the Parent Leadership Training Institute. We've built in a bunch of time for you to network, so our first priority is for your professional growth and the growing of your understanding of the vital issues. And second, we need your good advice and commitment to grow capacity in the larger field. Our teams have been working on mapping and tracking innovation in the fast-evolving early learning and technology landscape, since we made a commitment to do so at the Clinton Global Initiative. Some of you are there, I see Rick, Noriega here, and so we've been tracking the active experimentation which is underway, and many of you are gaining momentum in finding these digital age solutions, and your background reading is this excellent blue-covered report by Shayna Cook, which takes a deep dive into three dozen innovations, and you'll also find a community action guide in your big packet of materials and a recent report on the components of a digital age architecture, what New America is calling for, which we hope will establish a framework for future planning. So we hope you'll find the Institute for Refreshing and Provocative Learning Experience. There are no silly questions. There are no new mistakes allowed here, only, no old mistakes allowed here, only new ones. And while we won't be passing out novels and beach towels, we will try to give you space to explore new ideas and we plan to provide ample food and drink. I just want to close by saying it's kind of an interesting, tender, poignant moment for many of us who work with children and families. It's a moment of great tumult and discord in the national discourse. And so I think that this is a free zone, a safe space for us over the next couple of days to embrace the incredible wisdom at this Institute, to really reflect on what for me still matters most, and I think for many of you that every child and every family has a fair chance, indeed, the right to succeed in a digital and global age. So thank you for coming. I want to introduce Jason Kiera, who Lisa's introduced before from the Joyce Foundation to share a few remarks before he does. Just mentioned that he leads the Foundation's early education program, which is a really important part of their mission to ensure that all students, especially those who are low-income and minority kids, are prepared for life's success. Jason has guided the development of this Institute and his great ideas and incisive questions have meant so much to us. We're delighted that he and several of his philanthropic partners from other foundations will join us today and tomorrow. Jason, where are you? Jason, we thank you so much for your many contributions. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Michael Saddam, Jason Kiera. I'm the program officer that leads kindergarten readiness for the Joyce Foundation. Michael and Lisa were very generous in giving me a lot of really nice comments about sort of my role in informing this Institute today, but please join me in giving them a round of applause. Michael and Lisa were both very intentional and very thoughtful about making sure that they brought expertise here to bear that would span a bunch of different areas, a bunch of different voices in the field, academics and researchers, folks from policy and advocacy, philanthropy obviously, state leadership, and then also professionals with really deep knowledge on family engagement or literacy, early education and child development, which we think is really important. I'm very much looking forward over the next day and a half from learning from all of you. Admittedly, the Joyce Foundation is much more of sort of a learner in this work than a leader. Back in 2015, we launched a family engagement strategy really looking at how we can explore connections between technology and family engagement in early childhood settings, both formal and informal. And we made a couple of grants last year trying to develop, test and learn from different innovative programs and tools that are engaging families and caregivers in really creative ways to support families and support children's kindergarten readiness. And in fact, many of you back in 2014 were advising me in providing me with counsel when we were undergoing our strategic planning process. And there are a lot of folks in the room today with whom I've spoken over the last year and a half, but I've not actually met in person. So I'm very excited to engage with you all over the next day and a half. Within philanthropy, like the Joyce Foundation, I know there are a lot of funders both in the room today and then also nationally that are investing in the space. Looking at different ways that technology can be leveraged, not to replace what we think is really important and impactful work happening in early childhood programs, but rather to build the capacity for those programs to extend the reach of those services and supports for families and children. And we know there's also burdening interest in policy conversations to try to, again, leverage technology in ways that can be integrated and coordinated with early childhood initiatives and policies. So I'm excited again to learn from all of you. I hope over the next day and a half you're able to take learnings from this conversation during the back to you to inform your work. Thank you, welcome. Thank you so much, Jason, and thank you to the Joyce Foundation. So we had you all complete a survey prior to coming to the institute, and here are the results. So first, let's begin with who's in the room. We have a good number of community leaders, educators, and family engagement specialists. The category marked other encompasses people who may have chosen to categorize themselves under two or more of the above roles. This other category also encompasses many of our funders in the room, such as the Joyce Foundation, the Grable Foundation, the Doug and Maria DeVos Foundation, the Alliance for Early Success, Gary Community Foundation, Bezos Family Foundation, Overdeck Foundation, Baynam Family Foundation, and the new profit Cooney Center Early Learning Fund. All right. On the pre-institute survey, we asked people to rank what topic areas they would like to learn most about. These topic areas are listed in order with one being the most important. The majority of people wanted to know more about how other communities are deploying new strategies for family engagement. They were also interested in what the research says about new methods of family engagement. One of the issues that wasn't ranked as high, but we will be calling out later today and tomorrow, is how we can create policies to drive improvement. Another question on the survey asked city leaders to rank their biggest challenges. It comes to, when it comes to family engagement and the use of new technological tools. These responses were also ranked in order with one being the most pressing issue. As you can see, many city leaders said they struggled with ways to engage the hardest to reach families. Leaders said that they had difficulty building relationships with families to speak a language other than English. And we will be talking more about dual language learners and family engagement in one of the breakout sessions tomorrow to address this. We also asked participants what types of technological tools they are using with families. Some programs are using mobile apps, touchscreen tablets and text messages. Participants were also asked where their technological tool was being used. They said at libraries and through mass media, as well as on the go, that was the most popular answer on the go, mobile. We also asked leaders why they chose certain tools. The most frequently mentioned reasons were that the tools were already being used by families, were engaging and were relatively inexpensive. We then asked all program leaders about the strengths and challenges that they encountered. This first slide shows the strengths that leaders in the room highlighted, such as the ability to provide positive messages to families and the strong interests of families had in receiving support. This next slide shows some of the challenges that program leaders faced, such as limited funding, I'm sure we all can empathize with that, lack of reliable internet access and concerns about using technology with families. One of the last questions we asked, institute participants, was to write their most burning question for this event. This is a word cloud of the most frequently used words in those questions, words like family engagement, obviously, vulnerable families, community and technology were used. This survey will help give us all a sense of what our most interested, what we all are most interested in addressing over the course of these next two days. Now, I'd like to introduce the organizations that have partnered with us to produce this event. They each have two minutes to describe, to describe what they are hoping to learn from these next two days. And with that, I'd like to introduce Yoli Flores from the campaign for grade level reading. First, I just need to say on behalf of Ralph Smith, what an honor it is to partner with New America and the Joan Gans Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. We've had a phenomenal partnership for many years and started our work really in partnership with you when we commissioned you to help us with a report called pioneering literacy in the digital wild west. Just today we convened right before this, a number of you in the room for our own consultative session on navigating the texting landscape for reaching parents. And in that three and a half hour time period, we could come up with 50 challenges. But the challenge that I'm gonna share with you today, on behalf of the campaign for grade level reading is this one. The campaign for grade level reading has a very powerful network of now over 280 communities across 43 states in the nation, all working very hard to implement local plans, collective impact plans, to accelerate three key strategies, school readiness, attendance and summer learning. This all toward more kids from low income families reading proficiently by the end of third grade. To assist communities in accelerating progress for these children and their families, the campaign has proposed that we focus on parents and health through technology and targeting the most vulnerable kids and families through public housing. The challenge is twofold. How do we help this network embed their efforts to reach parents through technology in large scale systems, sectors and existing programs like public housing, like Medicaid, health insurance programs, WIC, SNAP, Head Start and the like. And number two, how do we ensure that these systems balance the use of technology, high tech with the appropriate relational approach so necessary to engage families, high touch. We'd now like to introduce Pam Johnson from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Good afternoon. CPB and PBS are partners in Ready to Learn with the Department of Education. It's a very innovative initiative that uses interactive public media content to support school readiness and I, there we go. So we support school readiness for our nation's children, but especially children from low income backgrounds. And we're really pleased to be at today's institute. We have a number of colleagues from our local public media stations here. We also have national representatives through CPB and PBS here. And a goal for us as we work on Ready to Learn is to develop evidence-based high quality content that serves as a catalyst for what children can do independently. But more importantly, what also children can do with families and with educators in all sorts of settings. And the idea is to pursue literacy, pursue early science through that. And as we move on Ready to Learn going forward, we're also gonna be instrumenting or having this content be supported by personalized and adaptive learning experiences that come through very sophisticated learning analytics. And so as we do this, we have one other goal which is really important. It's the idea of community and content working together through collaboration. So we are asking our stations to form or join with their partners, community collaboratives for early learning and the media. So as we begin this work, we're trying to figure out how can our content best integrate into the larger landscape, the larger learning ecosystem. And what you see here is sort of the content ecosystem that we have and then how also it works through an iterative process, but then works with and through community. So this is a big priority for us. And you know the kind of like ingenuity and creativity that would go into making high-performing content. We want the same focus and attention to go into how we use content in the community. So we want that to be just as amplified. So our challenge, our opportunity and the things that we wanna learn about are, we wanna be a good partner. We wanna be genuine in terms of how we serve children and families. We really wanna be need-based. And what we're hoping to learn today is, how best to join with communities in this work and how to join with families themselves in this work. And what does this ecosystem look like when it's up and running, when it's running smoothly? What are the features of it? Are others in this room working on personalized and adaptive learning? And also ideas that you have for us related to how we can study these collaboratives. Especially if we were to pursue longitudinal study work. So anyway, thank you. Next, we would like to welcome Katie Whitehouse from the National League of Cities. Thank you. You guys already previewed my cool animation. So I'm Katie Whitehouse. I'm with the National League of Cities on the early childhood team. And we are just so excited to have been included in this event today. And you know, we're really lucky that a lot of cities already see their role in engaging families to improve early literacy. But they don't yet see technology as a tool to further engage those families. Cities already use technology in a number of ways, including monitoring infrastructure, improving city service delivery, and identifying trends and crime data. But they don't see technology as a tool to really engage families in talking and reading to their children in encouraging vital serve and return interactions and in using everyday brain-building moments. So our challenge as we work with mayors and city staff is to help them first, see early literacy, family engagement, and technology as connected. Yay. And second, to help them see their role in all of this. You know, families interact with the city all day long, every day, whether that's from trash pickup to just dropping off their children at the pool. They're really engaging their families. I'm seeing I'm done with my time. So we're trying to help them see and use their natural platform to really look beyond the classroom and see their role in literacy. So that's what we're hoping to learn more from you guys and see where their opportunities are. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. We'd now like to welcome up Sheetal Singh from the Early Learning Lab. And thank you to Michael and Lisa for putting this together. I cheated, I have three slides, but I'm only gonna take two minutes. So this, we're talking about family engagement technology and literacy. I actually drew this with my daughter's crayons on a piece of paper and my ed stuck her head into my office and she was like, oh, that's very pretty. And I said, yes, it is. That's why it's going in every deck that I have. But really what I wanted to show you that I highlighted, this is our strategy on kindergarten ready kids and working to influence them. And technology, this red stripe here, very thin stripe, but very powerful and important. And so what we're trying to understand and learn is how we might identify and build but the demand for and supply of early learning technology solutions that advance child outcomes. So what does this really mean? It means that we're looking to surface the innovative use of technology in the field. So we're looking at what everyone else is doing and really highlighting opportunities and understanding gaps that could be filled. We're working to build demand for technology in programs that maybe aren't currently using technology to engage families. And we're also working to build the supply of products that really meet the need of the field. So that's what I'm gonna be trying to assess over the next couple of days. But we're also working on this on a couple of levels. So we're surveying the field on technology needs. We've been partnering with the CUNY Center in New America and FOI out of Harvard and a bunch of other, the Harvard Family Research. What is that, Harvard Family? Yeah, you guys all know. We're partnering with a bunch of really smart people to bring some webinars to the field. And then we're also working with the campaign for grade level reading on these texting convenings that they've been holding. So we're learning a lot from everyone and we hope to return everything back to you very shortly. Thank you. Thank you. Next, we would like to introduce Tony Raiden from the Ounce of Prevention Fund. Very low tech, it's just, whoa! I hope that's not a metaphor of some kind. So first, I too wanna thank New America Junk and CUNY Joys Foundation for their terrific support. We're just really excited to be partnering on this institute. We just know there's gonna be two days of great learning. For those of you less familiar with the Ounce of Prevention, our mission is to give children in poverty the best chance for success in school and life through by advocating for and providing the highest quality early care and education programs for the five. And we do this through an integrated focus on program implementation innovation, national and local advocacy, and research, which I oversee. So about the last four or five years, we've been very interested in the potential of the new technologies and digital media to support and optimize quality early learning experiences. And we've begun to initiate some of our own tech-related initiatives and experiments. But we're particularly interested in something Yoli mentioned in hybrid, high-touch, high-tech models that will strategically integrate technology and digital media in evidence-based, center-based, or home-based programs to deepen connections with parents and to deepen connections between school and home. We have in a partnership now with PBS Kids and the National Head Start Association to create a new model that'll use this high-touch, high-touch platform to help parents support their kids' social-emotional development. Okay, so one of the problems and challenges that we think a lot about at the ounce is how do you take a successful pilot to scale? Particularly in systems where we know so many of the workforce, early childhood leaders, educators, but also family support staff, social workers, may just not have had sufficient training or familiarity to optimize the use of new technologies. So within these systems, how do you take these really promising pilots to scale? So we're really looking forward to having discussions over the next couple of days and talking to those who are dealing with similar types of challenges and really thinking about effective strategies for scaling practices, models, and platforms. Stop, I'm off. Okay. Okay. We'd like to welcome up Aaron Ramsey from Vroom and Mind in the Making. Well, good afternoon. And first I wanna thank Michael and Lisa for this fabulous invitation and Ellen Glinsky, my fabulous boss and friend who will be on a panel tomorrow afternoon. So the Bezos Family Foundation is creating and is well underway on a national movement to bring developmental science to families, professionals, and communities in a really high touch way and in a really low touch way. So the two initiatives that are under the Bezos Family Foundation, we're actually, it's national, but it's actually worldwide. Mind the Making will be in Singapore at the end of the month and Vroom is actually being used in over 100 countries around the world. So we could say worldwide movement and that fun. And no, I don't have fancy slides and I'm not gonna do a jig, but I will tell you a little bit about what we're facing, his challenges is, so Vroom, if you don't know, and I don't only have two minutes, so I can't tell you, but Vroom is a community mobilization effort to bring science into families' homes through text messages, through marketing campaign, through community partners that are trusted by families. And that's our low touch, widespread effort to bring in tips, how to build a brain builder basically for all families. And then Mind the Making is a really personal, in-depth learning journey to bring developmental science to professionals and to families where they actually learn together. We create a learning journey for communities which is our very high touch, also text and other materials. But our major challenges that we really hope will come up, and I'm sure they will, is one is the notion that teaching and learning is too didactic in our country, that real teaching and learning is a reciprocal journey between teacher and learner and it's a continual cycle. And we are trying to figure out ways successfully and through experimentation of how do we do that via technology but also with really high touch efforts. The other challenge that we're facing as many of you are is the silo world of early childhood education and how do we all really come together and capitalize on this time in our country where we can seriously make huge strides, which we are, but even more. And things like this are really, really important to make that happen. The we, they of family engagement, we have intensively for the last four years gone into community after community to figure out how to reinvent family engagement and one of our key strategies is to bring families and professionals together so that the teacher isn't the sage on stage but we learn and set goals together. Are you kicking me off already? Oh my gosh, all my friends in the room know I could go forever. And then there's no silver bullet fix. You know technology's not the answer, high touch isn't the answer, low touch, but all together, all together we'll find the answers. So what we hope to figure out as a foundation here over the next day and a half is where to align our efforts with mind in the making and room and how to figure out how we fit in the puzzle so we know where to focus going forward. Thanks, two minutes is not enough. Thank you, Erin. And we'd now like to welcome up Patty Miller from Too Small to Fail. Thank you so much to Michael, Lisa, Shayna and Jason for including Too Small to Fail and this great convening we're thrilled to be partnering. As many of you know, Too Small to Fail is a joint initiative of the Clinton Foundation and the Opportunity Institute and I just wanted to acknowledge my co-director, Cara Dukakis, who's also here today. We at Too Small to Fail are leading a public awareness and action campaign about the importance of language-rich parenting. We're trying to get information into the hands of parents about how important it is to engage with children from the very beginning and to get tools and resources in their hands so they can talk, read and sing with their infants and toddlers from the earliest moments. One of our key strategies is meeting parents where they are and that includes the use of technology. I wanted to put up this slide just to show you we have two different text message programs and I don't really want to go into the details of the text message programs but I was hoping that this slide could illustrate a challenge that we see in the field. We have a text message program with Text for Baby in Sesame Street. It's for pregnant women and new moms. We have a text message program with Univision which is for parents of zero to three-year-olds and we've heard about all these other really great wonderful programs engaging technology that are for kids at very specific points in time. And what we're really struggling with is how do we think about continuity when it comes to family engagement and how can we use technology to provide tools for parents that might be able to be used throughout the early childhood continuum so that there isn't a drop-off factor. So parents are dropped off and then they're trying to figure out what's the next program or what do I do now with my four-year-old. So we've been thinking about that a lot. As Yoli mentioned, there was a great discussion this morning at the campaign for grade level reading that focused on this and there's some encouraging steps that organizations are taking and I'm really excited to engage in those discussions. And as an interim step, just wanted to propose two other just kind of micro challenges for us to think about as we're thinking about programs that could actually scale the early childhood continuum. One is the idea of a clearinghouse or resource for parents so there could be a place where they could go based on their particular interest or age of their child to get information about programs that might be best for them. And then as Ralph said this morning, can we think about collaboration to do a handoff for parents? So your program ends, but there's this great new program you know about trying to think about ways that we can spread the word about some of the great uses of technology that are out there for parents. Thanks so much. And finally we'd like to thank the Migration Policy Institute. Delia Pompa will be coming up and moderating a panel later on today. Yeah, there were a few folks that were gonna be able to speak a little later and so we're glad to have Delia speaking later and also I just wanna give a shout out to Chip Donahue at the Ericsson Institute in Chicago. He wanted to be here and has been partnering with us on this as well. He's edited a new book on family engagements coming up this fall, so watch for that. So now, well first like holy cow, right? Lots of amazing partners that are a part of this with us. We're really thrilled. We are now already to move into the keynote portion of our event and I'm so excited about this because whenever I hear Kathy Hirschpassek speak, my mind just goes a mile a minute and I have so many new ideas and already we've got some ideas going. So it's just a real pleasure. Let me take a moment to introduce Kathy and then we're gonna turn the microphone over to her. You're in for a real treat. If you don't already know Kathy Hirschpassek, she's an internationally renowned speaker, thought leader, developmental psychologist who has an uncanny ability to communicate findings from research in a very friendly way and to identify the most important factors in language development and early learning generally. She is the Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Temple University and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and she's also the director of Temple University's Infant Language Laboratory which I visited when I was a reporter many, many years ago, it was my first introduction to Kathy and it was one of the richest afternoons that I've spent. I've learned an enormous amount from Kathy over the years and from also her co-author, Roberta Galinkoff of the University of Delaware and a big shout out to Roberta and their achievement in this new book that we'll talk about in a moment. There are other books, one maybe you've heard of, Einstein Never Used Flash Cards, How Children Really Learn and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. That is a book that is still sitting there on my desk in my home office dog-eared. I reference it a lot. Her newest book with Roberta again is Becoming Brilliant while what science tells us about raising successful children. And it was launched and I'm gonna take one moment because I gotta grab the book and show it to you. We've got some more copies too that we'll be passing around. But this book Becoming Brilliant, or what science tells us about raising successful children is really, it's just come out. A lot of us are still digesting, understanding it. But not that it's hard because like I said, Kathy's amazing and Roberta too at making these concepts so easy to understand. But it's just incredibly rich. So we are really in for a treat because I know Kathy's gonna be going into it a lot more. And we'll have copies for our partners here this afternoon and we can also start passing the book around. But I also encourage you to get yourself a copy. It's actually, it's selling out. So it's hard to find right now. So I'm gonna stop right there. I'm gonna let Kathy come to the podium. Please join me in welcoming Kathy Hirsch-Tasic. Well, hi everybody. It is so great to be here. I feel like I'm with all of my friends and that is the greatest place to be. I'm gonna see if this actually works. Yeah, how about that? That's pretty cool. All right, so today I wanna talk about language development and family engagement in the digital age. And everything I'm gonna tell you today, everything I'm gonna tell you will work both if you are monolingual, bilingual, trilingual, and keep on going. So I just wanted you to know since that was one of the key answers to your question is what do we need to do to help raise language scores everywhere, I'm gonna hopefully distill it for you, at least what the science says so that you get that answer for all languages. Before I start though, I do wanna say thank you. It's not just friends here today, it's very good friends here. Michael and Lisa, thanks so much for giving me this opportunity to speak with all of you and to share some of the actual new research that's also come out of our lab, some as recently as when I was on the train on the way down here today. Okay, so everyone's talking about it. I think in this crowd, I don't need to tell you what the 30 million word gap is, right? Everybody's heard it, you're all there. Perfect. All right, then we have the grade-level reading campaign, right, there are people from grade-level reading campaign. Here, bravissimo, and the universal preschool. But when we look at that, right, maybe the only thing left that's bipartisan in the entire country, so hold on to it, guys. So if we look at these three things, I might ask, what unites each of these initiatives? Hmm, well, I will tell you what unites each of these initiatives. And the answer in this presentation is gonna be that at base, they all rest on strong language skills, right? That is the key. And those language skills come from having high-quality language environments which are based themselves on family engagement and conversation. And those social relationships, those conversations that you were talking about, Patty, critically important, we have got to find ways to increase family engagement and conversation. And I'm gonna argue that technology is one of the ways, surely not the only way, that we can use to make this possible. New research from our lab demonstrates. This is a paper that's coming out soon, coming your way. And it demonstrates that language is the single best predictor of all school readiness outcomes. The single best predictor, and yes, we have looked at everything. And we're asking which one accounts for most of the in fancy terms variants, and it turns out to be language. Now the challenge we face today is how do we provide these high-quality language environments in strong family engagement when children and their parents are constantly on devices? I don't know if you have had this situation, but in my house, where I have some 30-somethings and a 20-something, I sometimes go out to dinner, swear to God, I'm sitting at the dinner table and my son's, one of them in particular, sort of is looking down as if he's not really looking down as if I'm not supposed to notice that the eye gaze went away from his mother at the other side of the table. And I decided that the only way to deal with that was to text him during dinner. So I texted him and I said, hi, mom here, other side of table, you might want to look. All right, at any rate, how do we deal with that? Let's look at the reality of the situation right now. The reality is 68% of Americans own a smartphone, 45% have a tablet. By the way, did you see that new paper? It's about 75% of the zero to four-year-olds. Let me say that one again. Okay, 43% of children under age one are playing games daily on a mobile device. 72% of two-year-olds own a mobile device. As of June 2015, over 100 billion apps were downloaded. More than 1.5 million apps have been developed that number is growing and over 82,000, 82,000 are targeted toward young kids. That's unbelievable. And so I strongly encourage you to look at the stuff that the Joan Ganscuni group has put out because it can really help you sift through what's going on out there. And we wrote a piece last year that came out called Putting the Education Back in Educational Apps. When I use educational apps, I usually put a quote around educational apps, because many of these 82,000 aren't really educational. They're just called educational, all right? So in the new digital climate, is it an opportunity for more language growth or is it going to be something that's gonna hamper more language growth? I think that, for me, one of the great challenges is how to turn this into an opportunity. Maybe you all saw the study. Somebody went out and looked at 55 parents in a fast food restaurant. 55 parents in a fast food restaurant. Do you know that 40 of them were hanging out on their cell phone not paying attention to their kids? That is a hindrance, not an opportunity. Even if you're talking about junk food, at least you are talking, okay? And can we get young children not just watching but interacting? And what does it mean to actually be interacting? Well, I'd like to argue it's not whether you're digital or not. This is an argument I think I heard before, maybe from Lisa and Michael. It's not whether you're digital or not. It's how you use it that matters. And so we have to start moving people in a direction so they are using the digital information in ways that are going to encourage growth. So I wanna make the case for creating high quality language environments for young children by offering a talk in two parts. First, I want to distill the science for you. I promised you this, right? Lisa made me promise I would give you edible science. Accessible, digestible, and usable, all right? Edible science. So I'm gonna put the language literature into six basic principles. And then at the end of each principle, I'm gonna suggest to you where it seems to be going if we did a digital take on these principles. Then I wanna talk about implications for the future. My dream is that we can languageize the environment in and out of school, in the community, in the home, and in the classroom. Languageize in the same way we Simonize a car. Let's languageize environments. And we're not doing a good job of that right now. And then I wanna talk to you about what I'm gonna talk called promise and partners. And I'm gonna suggest to you that much of what we are doing now are prompts. We're putting prompts out in the world. But if our prompts don't become partners, we're not going to achieve conversation. And if we don't achieve real conversation, we're not going to get language out of it, all right? And I'm gonna try to give you the evidence. So as I said, I'm gonna distill six principles from thousands and thousands and thousands of papers that now you don't have to read. Okay, so here we go, all right? The six principles. Now these six principles are gonna seem like, oh, is she kidding? They're does, but they're not really does when you dig in, I promise. Each of these are quite rich. Principle one, children learn what they hear most. Ready? Duh. Okay, but it really matters how you present that information and I'll show you some evidence of that in just a minute. Number two, I don't know why the words are no longer in the boxes. They're supposed to be. But at any rate, children learn words for things and events that interest them. And notice we do a lot of stuff that goes against that grain. We're constantly trying to direct our children's attention rather than following our children's attention. That's a really important difference and the data are very, very clear on that. Follow in, follow in, follow in. Number three, this is the one I'm gonna spend the most time on. Interactive and responsive language environments is what counts. That's what builds language learning. Number four, children learn when it's meaningful, not when it's boring. They're just like us, okay? Number five, they need diverse examples of language, not just vocabulary, by the way. And number six takes you to vocabulary and grammar. And we have tons of apps that are trying to teach kids vocabulary. But they're not putting it in sentences and it's not interactive. And so the kids aren't going to learn to have rich language if it's not in a richer environment. Let's start with children, learn what they hear most. Yes, amount matters. Hart and Risley taught us that amount matters. That's why they called it the 30 million word gap. Amount of speech, why is it important? Jenny Saffron tells us. She tells us that if young kids, believe it or not at eight months old, are little statisticians who are listening to the sounds of the words as they go by us and plucking out what sounds start words and what sounds end words. That's how they're learning even where the beginnings and ends of words are. If they're statisticians, if we don't give them the data on which to do their statistics, they're not gonna be able to come out with good language samples. And finally, and importantly, the amount of speech kids here is important for their speed of processing, for how fast they take in language. And if I slow this up, you'll hate me in a little while so I don't want that to happen. But the point is if our machine isn't working quickly enough, it's not gonna be able to chop things off in the right places. You've already seen that. Any of you traveled to a foreign country is sort of kind of know the language, but not really? And you hear a word that you know and you're so excited, just stay on it, okay? But by the time you're staying on it, they're at the end of the sentence. There you are trapped. That's what speed of language does. So I told you about the Saffron results and babies are little statisticians. There's a whole movement in the field of psychology looking at babies as statisticians. This is the Frenal data. It is absolutely stunning data on the speed of processing. Here you see the technique that she uses and I guess you can't really see my little thing here so I'll just tell you. On your left, you see that you have a dog on the one side and a baby on the right. That comes from a procedure that we developed many, many years ago, the Intermodal Preferential Looking Procedure. What did we find from it? Well, when Roberta and I first did it, we were shocked. You know, kids will look at the word you say. Where's the dog? Can you find the dog in your best infant-directed speech? And the kids all look at the dog as opposed to looking at the baby. Well, guess what? They're more accurate at this when they're older rather than when they're younger. Duh. And they're faster to look at the right place. So we have reaction time data and we have accuracy data. And what did we find? What she found is really on the right here. She takes kids at 18 months of age and she asks how quickly and how accurately they are if they were in a group that heard less language or in a group that heard more language. Everyone got it? Okay. The red group heard more language. The blue group heard less language. And you will notice that it takes them longer to get to the answer and they are less accurate if they heard less in their environment. Amount matters. So where are we seeing that? Well, we're seeing prompts. Notice I told you we have to get from prompts to partners. We're seeing prompts with the kinds of things like Lena and Starling that say, count all the words that go in. Now I will admit I have a problem with just counting words. I don't really believe you. The analytic baby movement is the way to go here. I think we really need to prompt conversation. And even looking at turn taking isn't enough. It's part of it. It's moving in the right direction and I applaud Lena for going there. But we have to get to the point of real adaptive conversation. But amount does make a difference. Let's go to number two. For things that interest them. In the literature Lois Bloom has talked about this as the principle of relevance. We know that babies are more likely to attach a word that they hear to an interesting object than they are to a boring object. If they don't look like looking at it, they're not gonna learn the label for it as quickly. And we know from joint attention literature, Lauren Adamson's magnificent work, Mike Tomasello's work, that if you look where the baby is looking and then you label it, the kid is more likely to learn the word for it. It's quite amazing. In fact, there are now interventions out there out of the University of Sheffield and where the looking is saying hey, look at what the baby's looking at and talk about it. How simple is that? And yet when you do things like this, the babies learn more language. Now the digital take. So it seemed obvious. What we need to do is put chips in toys. Put the chips in toys, that'll make it really interesting. And when it's really interesting, the babies will learn more language. But it didn't turn out that way. It turns out that there's two studies, one by Anna Sosa that just came out with two-year-olds and they put the chips in and they wanted to see if it would work but the babies didn't learn as much from the chip toys as they did from the real toys. Why? Because when you're playing with a real toy, you're interactive usually with another person. It doesn't take over for you. And in our own lab, Jen Zosch and we did one with shape sorting toys at ages three through five. What did we find? The toy is constantly trying to interrupt the interaction. Triangle, triangle. You like wanna shoot it, okay? But at any rate, it takes over and even before you shot it and the kid never learns triangle. Okay, number three. I wanna spend more time on this which is the interactive environment is what builds language. Talking with, not talking at. Expanding on what the child says and does. Noticing what the kid finds interesting and commenting. Asking questions, not just making demands. Patty and I have worked a lot on this because some of the prompts that we have put into things like laundromats and things. Some of the first prompts come out and they say, what color is the whatever? If the kid only has to say blue, yeah, you're not starting a conversation. You're making child into robot, right? But if we ask a question that will engage a conversation, it's a principle that can get kids going and I'm happy to say, really, you guys have done an amazing job in Too Small to Fail of putting those questions back in and making partners out of prompts. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Hart and Risley, they gave us an example, right? They talk about, yes, but they also talk about what I'll call conversation closers, discouragements and conversation openers, encouragements. When we encourage our kids, we keep the conversation going and keeping that conversation going is really, really important for later language growth. If you stop them, not now, I can't talk now. That's a blah, then you're done with it. That's the end of the conversation. It's not moving on and the kids don't learn. In our own research, we decided to examine the quality of what we called the foundation for communication during a parent-child interaction. We started and it's very important that you note this with 60 low-income kids. Notice I said all low-income kids. You're not gonna be able to speak now against, oh, the middle class just knows so much more than the poor kids, all right? Low-income kids. And what we did is we had 20 of them who were gonna have high-language outcome scores when they were three years of age and mid-length, 20 who were gonna mid and 20 who were gonna have struggling scores, okay? And when they were three, we used for those of you who know what the renail as our outcome measure. Now what we did is we had that data when they were three years of age, but because we used the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, we had a longitudinal study. So it meant that we could actually go backwards in time to when these kids were two years of age and we could look at the mother-child interactions at age two. And when we did, we decided to look at three component pieces that we called the Communication Foundation. One was what we call, I'm sorry for these, these very academic jargony names, but just bear with me for a sec. Symbol-infused joint engagement. That meant drop a word in there. But it also means drop a gesture, because it's not all about words. Sometimes it's about gesturing to kids and they understand the gestures as well. Number two, was it a fluid exchange? Did it go back and forth? You used to talking about these as serve and return. I'm gonna try to move you along here and say maybe it's more of a conversational duet where you are singing together and it exists for more than just a serve and return. It has to keep on going. And finally, what about playful routines and rituals? When these families pick up a book, do they know what to do with it? Even with my 14-month-old, who you will see a picture of in just a moment, I've been sitting down and I say to her, it's your turn to turn the page. And she turns the page. We have a ritual. We have a routine. So we looked at that. The question was, if we looked at the kinds of interactions that were going on at age two, could we predict the language scores of these groups at age three a year later? Here is the answer. The answer is that quality alone in this communication foundation scores that I just showed you accounted for 16%, which is super high, of what they were gonna look like at age three. If you could account for 16% of what somebody was gonna do in an outcome a year later, you should be pretty happy, all right? Next, what do we get if we put quantity and quality together because we know that some of the quality measure is gonna overlap with the quantity measure, we get another 10%. That means I'm accounting. With the quality measure, which is sapping up some of the quantity stuff, I account for 26% of what you're gonna look like a year later. Now you say, well surely quantity alone is gonna make a huge difference as well. Wow, you must be accounting for everything and here's the answer. An additional 1%. Wow, wow, okay? So the quantity of the input matters, the quality of the input matters and matters more. In our study, it's not about poverty. The parents from low income environments who were doing this stuff ended up with kids who were gonna have better language skills. It's the fluid and connected conversations. And I think of it as not just filling a gap but building a foundation. If you build a foundation on quicksand, then the house is still gonna sink. But if you build the foundation and make it strong, we can build the kind of language skills that are gonna support later literacy skills and later learning. Let's take the digital part number one. We decided to do a study. If it's really about building conversations, then are there things out there that are more digital that build conversations? And we decided to look, there's your first picture of my granddaughter, Ellie. Okay, we decided to look at what happens in a video chat conversation. And in the video chat conversation, we had three different conditions. One was we taught two new words using video chat. Notice in that case, the person on the other end is gonna be responsive and have a conversational duet. Number two, live interaction, where you would have a conversational duet. And the third one was what we called the yoked video training. It's another kid learning the same word, but the timing isn't gonna be right, right? Because it was filmed before. So it's not really contingent on your head nod. It's contingent on somebody else's at another time. So you say, well, what happens here? If it's about the screens don't work, then video chats should be just as bad as television, right? And if it turns out that the video chat is gonna look like the live interaction, then maybe something about that live contingency is what makes it work. And here are the results. What I want you to see is that video chat and live interaction look exactly the same. It's not about the digital. It's about how you use it. This is the second one. This is called the anti-partnering, which is what we're doing with cell phones. I had to know. So Jessica Reed did this wonderful study in my lab where she teaches the same two words you just heard about in the video chat study, but one of them was going to be interrupted by a cell phone call. And the parent was to take the cell phone call and chit chat just for a little bit. And then go back and we give them another 30 seconds to talk on the telephone. The times were completely equated. Now you may think that that parent who gets the cell phone call is gonna make up for it and what she's gonna do is talk a lot more. Well, as it turns out, she does try to talk a lot more, but it doesn't affect what happens at the end. Turns out that the interrupted word, the kid doesn't learn. And when the kid isn't interrupted, the kid does learn it. Contingency matters. If you break the timing, you're dead in the water. In fact, I have to show you this, but I figure out how to show you this. Let's see. This was the interrupted condition. Is it gonna work? Right, didn't you have to see that? That's what happens in the interrupted condition. Okay, so it's not just about the kids using the digital. It's also what they're seeing of us, right? All right, digital take three, hot off the press. I'm gonna show you this in two different of the principles. I'm reading an e-book with a partner or with audio alone or with no audio. All right, this is preliminary data. It's with 97, four and five-year-olds and we decided to see, I mean, it's advertised, right? If you don't have a parent sitting there with you, I mean, wow, the book has an audio component. It's just gonna read to the kid. That should be awesome. Well, I think I mentioned before that the conversation was really important. So here's the answer. How about remembering the details of the story? Our preliminary findings suggest that the parent engaged trumps the audio alone, which trumps the non-audio. How about page by page retail? This really got mucked up, sorry about that. The parent engaged was better than the audio with the book, which was better than just page and through the book alone. And in the other cases where we asked about story comprehension at least for the four and five-year-olds, there's reason to doubt that this is gonna come out with the three-year-olds. But for the comprehension, it looks like the audio and the parent engaged are both pretty good. So it depends what you're asking, what you want of the data, whether the digital's gonna matter or not. Let's move to children learn best in meaningful contexts. We know that when we give them richer vocabulary in playful learning, they actually learn it better. We've done a lot of these studies with studies on shape learning and spatial language around, in, through, under, on. When a parent is sitting there playing with the blocks with the kid, you use 10% more spatial terms than you do when the kid is sitting there playing alone. That's introducing spatial language. And the spatial language turns out to have everything to do with STEM readiness, math readiness at the start of school. Here I wanna feature Ze Galinsky. And you can see this really cute picture of him playing with a puzzle. Thanks for sharing that. And we actually have research that suggests that playing with blocks and playing with puzzles, this in case you didn't guess is Ellen's grandson. Is he adorable or what? Okay. And when you're playing with puzzles, again, it turns out to help you learn some of the spatial skills that are going to translate into later mathematical readiness. Well, let's take the digital prompt again. The data are a little bit mixed as I showed you before. And that is, you know, if the storyline is interrupted, the kids don't learn. If the storyline and the meaning are preserved, they do learn. I hear two more cases and I hope whoever is in the back can make these cases work for you. Whoops. I don't seem to know how to do this. I swear to God. I swear to God, right? A lot of this stuff comes right in and say, oh, we've done Cs, we better interrupt it and ask a C thing, okay? So there you go. Here's one that actually, I think does a beautiful job of preserving. How brilliant, right, from Sesame Street, that they are actually, one, engaging the kids in finding a word, but use the phone and you go out into the real world. And by going out in the real world, you're interacting. And of course, you can have people play along with this as well. That makes it pretty meaningful, I think. All right, and as I told you of our hot off the press, sometimes it works, sometimes it wasn't. But if you don't, if we don't build our technology in ways that encourage the conversations, we're not gonna get the kids to really remember what we're talking about. Children need to hear diverse examples of words and language. There is a lot of research to suggest that if you don't have a mount plus diversity, especially diversity in the case of Katherine Snowley's talks about academic words, if you're not using these kinds of words, what's your hypothesis? And believe it even little kids can have a hypothesis. Then the kids will never learn it and won't understand those kinds of concepts. I don't know of any digital take here of anything that is looking on different ways to say the same thing. So if you guys know, tell me and it'll be in the next presentation. Also vocabulary and grammar are both important. And here too, I don't think there's any digital take, but remember that the relationship between vocabulary learning and reading outcomes comes because vocabulary is a proxy for having stronger language skills generally. If you take away the stronger language skills generally and turn a child into a robot who can tell you what scissorgy means and believe me, they could memorize anything, then you've broken that relationship and the kid will not necessarily be a better reader just because you built vocabulary. So what are we doing to build conversational tools and takes in our digital world? I don't see a lot of that out there. Again, if there's anything out there, I'd love to know about it. So these are the six principles. Fairly simple, but fairly profound. Six principles. One page. And if you hit these six principles, you will increase children's language outcomes and then their later reading outcomes. Children learn what they hear most. They learn for things that interest them. They learn best in interactive and responsive environments. They learn best in meaningful, not meaningless contexts. They learn best when they hear diverse examples of language and when we put vocabulary and grammar today. So let's look at the future. How can we begin to languageize our environments? And what is the role of the digital world as either a prompt or a partner or maybe a prompt that can create partners? So I wanna go to a story that I love which was brought to you by the Foundation for Child Development in 2009 where they talked about three mothers and an eggplant. I'm gonna do this real briefly because I know I'm limited in time. But mom one goes through the supermarket. Da-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da. And kid goes, what's that? Okay, and the mom keeps moving on. You won't like it. Think of that as conversation closer, okay? Okay? Number two. Da-dee-da-dee-da-dee-da. Goes through with the, looking at the eggplant. The kid gets all excited to see the purple thing. It goes, what's that? And mom goes, it's an eggplant. You don't like vegetables and moves on. Not much better than mom one. And then there's you. Da-dee-da-dee-da, okay? What's that? Oh, that's an eggplant. Is that the most incredible vegetable you've ever seen? It's purple. Look at the purple color. We should weigh it. Then you weigh it. Would you like to see recipes that use eggplants? We can take it home and make eggplant parmesan. All right, I'm not gonna go on. But you see the difference, all right? Now, let's look at mother three versus mother one when we then break down the principles. Learn what they hear most. Mom three said it a lot more than mom one or mom two. They learned the words for the things and events that interest them. Who started that conversation? That child, okay? You were driving into what the child was interested in. Interactive and responsive? Yeah, she didn't just talk at the kid. She decided she was gonna have a recipe that the kid wanna buy it. Oh my God, you had a whole thing in the supermarket two hours later, you left with the eggplant. All right, now, then we have that they learn in meaningful context. The supermarket is a meaningful context. Kids gotta be there anyway, right? Can't let them stay at home. Children learn to hear diverse examples of words and language structures. Look what I did there. I did a homo-gilla. And then vocabulary and grammatical development are reciprocal. I used heavy vocabulary, but I nested it. I even said the eggplant is a kind of vegetable. Did you notice? I made it super rich. So the question before all of us is whether we can turn mothers like mother one into mothers like mother three. That's the question before us. And I would say yes, I believe that we can do it. And one of the things that we are doing with is the supermarket study, which I think some of you have heard about, it was published last year. And again, I wanna turn to Too Small to Fail for thanking you guys for putting this out there, not just in supermarkets, but laundromats and all kinds of what we're now calling trapped spaces. And at the Brookings Institute, we at Brookings Institution, we are now talking about the other 80%. What can we do in the other 80% of time, of waking time when kids are not in school to enrich or languageize the environments that kids learn in? What did we do here? We had the signs up condition and the signs down condition. And in the signs up condition, we'd have a little things like, did you know there's more in these aisles than just food? And the parents got prompted by these cute little prompts that were actually from the Tulsa experiment. I'm a cow, I do milk. What else comes from a cow? Now, I know it must seem really stupid and in our first presentation of this, I could tell you that we did these signs for all of $60 as an honors project. And in the signs up condition, we had 33% more language between moms and their kids, parents and their kids, than we did in the signs down. That's incredible, right? Surely that was a fluke until somebody said, hey, could I try this same study in Fort Hare, South Africa, where we have super low income families so they put up the signs in the supermarket? Guess what? They got the same results in Fort Hare, South Africa that we got in our low income supermarket in Philly. And yes, we have looked at the middle income supermarkets as well. And guess what? You don't get the bump there. You only get it where the parents haven't been prompted to become partners. Prompts in the digital landscape, there are a lot of them. I think the tax will come out of room. Of course, I'm now cheating because I'm on the advisory board, but I think they're absolutely outstanding and they're trying to make parents partners in better understanding their children and their children's brain development. I think that's exactly the way to go. Text for babies, sending out texts. It's been effective. But again, you want to make sure that those texts become partners, not just prompts and too small to fail, as I suggested, creating a lot of prompts out in the real world so that in the trapped spaces of life, the places everyone goes, we are transforming them. As far as partners, we're also doing a project right now called Urban Thinkscape. And in Urban Thinkscape, we're actually transforming bus stops, all right? So here you see an example of E. Tai Palti, who is actually an architect from Israel, and Brenna Haasinger Das, who's working with me. And it's so darn exciting. What he did is he took the cognitive science and wrote it right into the architecture. So over here, you see it's very small, so squint. You see a picture of our puzzle bench. There are three different puzzles on the back of that bench. What did I tell you before? If you have puzzles there, people will talk about the puzzles in and around through. And when they do talk about the puzzles, they're increasing the kind of STEM language that we know feeds school readiness. We're also creating a new kind of hopscotch, which is actually built off the happy sad task, and it is designed to build executive function skills. So we're building cognitive psychology right into the bus stop. And I'm happy to say our first experiment will be in Philadelphia, where we have a lovely plot of land in the promised zone of West Philadelphia, where we're building the structures right now. And we'll let you know how it all turns out, but it's at a bus stop. And it's actually on a plot of land, which is where the Freedom March started with Martin Luther King. So we're very excited about it. Using Skype, as I showed you before, and also Plan Siebel, which is a plan that came out of the one laptop per child program in Uruguay and in Argentina, has also shown that if kids have interactive digital environments, that they will interact and they will learn from them. And in the future, or was that the present? A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the MIT Media Lab. You should all go there. It is worth a field trip. Where I met these really funky, wonderful robots and these robots are trying to learn how to be socially interactive. And there's also a lovely plan right now where IBM's Watson team is pairing up with Michael and the Sesame Workshop crowd. And the question, of course, there is, can we create ET? And I don't think we know yet. Because I do think that we know a lot about putting digital in as a prompt, but I'm not as sure that we know as much as we need to know about how to create partners. And that is your challenge. That is the challenge I leave you with today. Don't just prompt it, partner it. So in sum, as I've told you, language is the single best predictor of later outcomes for young kids. It's what gives them school readiness and follows them all the way up. We love literacy, we love math, but believe me, if you start training it without having the language background, you can do all the letter sound correspondence you like. But all you're doing is converting sounds into meaninglessness. It's got to be meaningful. It's learned, I think, through the six principles. And if you keep these six principles on one page in your back pocket, it will help you figure out what we have to be after to languageize our environments. And by the way, to prepare professional development that will help professionals learn how to languageize. Even in our childcare settings and preschool settings today, our best guesstimate is that only 9% of teachers are fully languageizing and taking advantage of strong language environments with the principles that we have shown you today. And it's going to require creating language partners as we use these principles. What I hope I've shown you today is the principle of social interaction and conversation is what matters most. Also, it's not about the digital. And I think we did learn part of that through, Lisa and Michael's wonderful book. You should all have read that book. It's an amazing book that it's about interactions and the way we use those interactions. In our new book, we speak to that as well. And we show that if you want to groom language, learners, it's going to mean that you have to have collaborative, creative, and for competent citizens of tomorrow, you're going to have to have a range of skills. It's not about just pounding in reading and not just sticking on content. Because content itself is derivative from collaboration as the foundation, from building strong communication skills, which then build content on which we can build critical thinking, creative innovation, and yes, the confidence, persistence, and growth mindset that kids are going to need if they are going to grow up to be strong learners. So we would love your comments. The book is really new, but I really, really would love you to all help me think it through, because I think of it as clay to be molded. I want to thank Roberta, who you heard about earlier through Lease. We create a lot of this stuff together. I want to thank all of you guys, because creating the science, as you know, it's about a societal partnership. I'm thrilled to share it with you, and I know that in your hands, we really will have edible science that's accessible, digestible, and usable. Thank you all. And to think that I almost forgot her name. Oh my god. Most embarrassing professional moment of my entire career, right here, right now. Hi. So edible science and the movable feast. I mean, what a treat. We've got a few minutes for questions for Kathy. And then, Kwese is going to. So after Kathy responds to some of the questions that you guys got, we have sort of this pop-up strategy in which folks have sort of been thinking a little bit about our discussions today, and also may want to respond to you a little bit. We're going to come up. So Kwese, come this way. And then, who has a question? Kwese, come on up. And we'll do a question or two, but then I'm going to get you in at serve and return with Kathy for a minute. Anybody have a question about that incredible tour de force? Can I just take out a new book? Thank you. Collaboration, communication, content. They double yours. You only had three. Three Cs. These six Cs are so I really think that so many of us who are trying to really think about how to connect the dots, a lot of it's in this book now with these six Cs. And I hope that it can start being part of the conversation we have here over the next couple of days. So I encourage you to look them up. Chapter 11 is fabulous. Thank you. Well, it is the chapter I'm proud of so. But I just want to say one thing in response, please. Thank you, thank you. Which is one of the ways we started to think of this particular suite of skills is not only that, as I said, Brookings is also talking about skills for a changing world. And I think that we have to take seriously. But we stepped back. And we asked the question, what does success look like? And we worried that the society has really gotten to a point where success looks like a test score. And that maybe we needed to ask, what is it really? Is it really just a test score in reading math and writing? Or is it something more like having a happy, healthy, social, caring, thinking human being who's going to be a creative, collaborative, good, and responsible citizen of tomorrow? So that's where these came from. Let's take your question. I'm this in Illinois. So maybe it was just the resources you pointed out in the presentation. But as we think about building adult capabilities, particularly that concerning stat, about 9% of teachers, what's the, are there any really core, or is it just the book, strategies for bringing the six to both different audiences, teachers, parents, family, friend, and neighbor care, right, the spectrum of providers? Yeah, so that's a great question. Thank you very much. I'll tell you, I sure have tried. I mean, I've done a lot of speaking to teacher groups, et cetera. But I can really use your help in two ways. One is it's not entirely clear to me that I've labeled them in a way that is completely accessible. So help with that. And yeah, we'll go anywhere to try to get these out there to languageize the world. I do think the sixties that we came up with here also gonna be helpful, and here's why. They were also written with an I toward looking at zero to 99, taking you from the sandbox to the boardroom. And I wondered, you know, sometimes schools get in this rut where then they're not really relevant to what's going on outside the school environment. So I think we have to think not only about reaching the teachers, absolutely, but also as room has done and Too Small to Fail has done about reaching the teachers and communities because kids live in communities. Susan Eckhammon with Houghton Middle and Horror Court and also Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute. I just wanted to add, I'm very familiar with the sixties. I've been working with Kathy and Roberta a long time. And also Ellen Galinsky. And I feel like mind in the making the work at the teacher prep work that Mind in the Making has done for teachers and educators and family child care providers and families is a really great connector. I think to your point about instead of creating new solutions, connecting the dots, using Mind in the Making training to share the framework, which are actually quite similar. There's videos of the science, I think could be a really great thing. Yeah, thank you for that. For both of you. You said a lot of provocative things. So, Fraser Rollins, from the Institute of Red Cross and we're just going to do an amazing organizer. Wow. And it turns out I'm just like the baby in the video when people take a phone call during a conversation I want to hit him over the head. Yeah. So I really identified. So first, thank you so much. Well, it's easier when you're two and hit somebody over the head than when you're a big black man hitting somebody over the head. But no, thank you so much because I think the question that immediately came to mind is who needs to know this information and you even reinforce that more when you said 9% of teachers don't really get all of this. And then how do we make this not just more accessible but how do we, what are the natural chains of getting this information out to all that need to know this and interact with this? I think as one who works with a lot of systems people and lately that's folks that are trying to improve family and community engagement, certainly in terms of schools and districts, one of the biggest challenges of taking anything to scale is that folks just don't quite get it. They haven't necessarily made meaning of the research or the best practice examples and they don't quite know how to incorporate it into their toolbox. And so in some respects that's our job to help them do that. And I think part of that is to go where folks are so we clearly have to get it out to teachers. We've got to get it out to parents and community-based organizations that have the ears of parents and families and some non-traditional partners as well. I go, I'm overdue for haircuts so I'm thinking about my barbershop and in the barbershop which is, well it's a high language environment. I don't know if it's always a high quality language environment, but it is interesting to watch when kids are there and what fathers essentially do with their kids while they're waiting to get a haircut and increasingly they are on a phone and they're quiet and everybody's happy. And I think though that what they're doing is not always educational. So we've got to get the word out. We've got to get it out in the circles where folks are. I'm already imagining what would it look like to get this message out through our networks of district leaders who coordinate family and community engagement as well as state leaders who try to support those systems. But we have to help you. So thanks, you've given us a lot of good stuff here. Pleasure to meet you and I will be inviting you to do something. I'm Debra Leon who founded an incredible organization called Tools of the Mind. Hi, we have an early childhood and kindergarten program that teaches executive functions and uses play. So Kathy and I have talked a lot about this whole issue and what we're trying to do in Tools and is really kind of stretch the whole thing up and try to change the way reading is taught in schools because reading has very little language. If you remember your kindergarten classroom, everybody reads the same book and you all read aloud together and the teacher reads things and points at stuff. But really children don't have real rich, motivating background and so we've been trying to develop something that will actually let parents and teachers use the same reading strategies at home. But I do really think the problem is the language and the amount of language that children hear and what really worries me about kindergarten and elementary school is that parents feel less and less empowered to even talk to their children because they feel they don't know what the teacher knows and so we have to find ways maybe in building cross materials that go between home and school and have the same strategies that are prompted so the teacher uses the same strategies. We teach all of our reading collaboratively and it's amazing how teachers believe that children should read alone. When in reality children are much more motivated to try to decode if they read with someone else. So this whole idea of collaboration, even reading should be collaborative. We do that more in math, but in reading we don't. So I really feel that Kathy's idea of those six areas are really important to bring also to the upper grades and not to forget kindergarten is part of early childhood. Those poor kindergarten children. Rick Noriega from CEO of Avonce which is a remarkable family engagement and family support and parent support program that actually started in Texas but has led. Thank you Michael and he's very biased because he helped us in the early 1990s with the project and help scaling and wanna thank for all the work that's been put in here and all the heroes and sheroes that are out in the field changing people's lives each and every day and to Kathy I just wanna thank you personally. I mean you help bring crystallize and really help in a very concise way. Some concepts that I think that we have really implemented as an organization for many years about dealing with our core values and our philosophy of how we approach families and engagement caregivers really. You know that the parents of the caregivers the first teachers and the home given it's a safe environment is a place for learning. Our toy making we have been very very skeptical about going all the digital whiz and the new apps that are produced each and every day and getting out in front of that and have been very very hesitant in the field pushing back for fear of what does that mean about the social emotional development of the child and physical development as well if we're using now as a pacifier device versus what's important for real engagement so we are moving and doing some piloting but what's interesting in a lot of the communities that we serve is the study of families in the media project you're familiar. Given example in South Texas where we have first generation folks may have a particular device and they don't have they have cut off so they don't get the range oftentimes they don't get data. In addition if you go into Del Rio, Texas they have in Colonia they have dirt roads no electricity, no water. So the idea of internet and interconnectivity some of that Maslow stuff is still super important in some of the communities we serve but nonetheless I think that it's just super important. We stand ready to be a laboratory for new ideas and thinking there's so many folks in here that we partner with already campaign for grade level reading, Vroom and many many others in this room that we've worked with and so to the degree that we can still be that place for learning. For us what's challenging I think in folks in the field is the operationalizing of different concepts and new ideas and innovation. When you work in sustainability and looking out three years to five years how do you then as things keep moving and the field keep moving I think that's something we should collectively try to answer. Thank you. I want to invite Julie Holland from Mayor James's office in Kansas City. Hello. Oh yeah, hello so in Kansas City we've been testing I guess all the different types of ways we could engage families in early learning and so we're still I guess exploring it but I think Kathy's six principles has been gonna be a great way for us to really focus our conversation on what we want to invest in and what we want to disseminate more to families. So we have just started we just created an early learning hub as a way for us to bring our childcare providers and our parents and our parent educators together to provide a way to disseminate things like Vroom and our talk replay campaign and messaging but I certainly think this is a way if we when we add more technology or looking at other technologies I think that's I mean thank you so much for that that's just really helped me kind of focus our efforts but I do so I do have some great partners with me here from turn the page which is with our campaign for gray little greening they're the ones that launched the early learning hub and then also from Operation Breakthrough who's probably one of our premier early Head Start providers and they're doing that interesting thing with that a digi story where they're actually having people read and talk to kids at their school online and it's been a great success so again thanks so much it was really interesting. Thank you so much. I love the evocative language turn the page and breakthroughs so the connection between turning the page what I just do Mary Nash from the Jacksonville Children's Commission Council thanks for joining. I love that the screen goes black when it's my turn to get up here. I'm Mary Nash I'm from Jacksonville Florida and I also work for the city as part of the Jacksonville Children's Commission and really just here to talk a little bit about our system across our city. We're the largest not one of the largest cities land wise in the country and we have one of the largest school systems. So with that you can you can imagine the wide system of family engagement programs that we have in our community as well. One thing about these programs is that they really do span education and come and help and we're really working to meet families where they are. So what makes Jacksonville unique what makes us unique and my colleague from United Way that's here and I were talking that we both say this when we go all around the country is that we truly are a community of collaborators that work together to ensure that we're meeting the needs of the families and the kids and this is across funding sources. We have the school system at the table funders the city city funding early learning providers and we learn together we plan together we research together we fund together which is exciting but we now today with a lot of this are really thinking about how do we take it to that next level how do we come up with a community message to use the digital age with the families because I think that's where we are that's the next step that we need to take and one of the things that we were just talking about is okay this is great but how do we get to that parent like who's in McDonald's and on our phone how do we motivate that family to engage when she maybe is stressed and it's easier to look at her phone than to engage with her children so this is great we have a lot to go back and talk about and figure out how we can come up with that message as a community so thank you we're decided to be here. Yeah great and last up in this stretch is Amaya Garcia who's a senior researcher here at New America. So I have to say that every time I'm eating at a restaurant with my children I make sure not to pick out my phone because I always think about that study and I don't know who's watching me and who's judging my parenting somebody could be out there. So I work here at New America on the dual language learner national work group and so a lot of what I think about every day is how children are learning and developing a second language. So what you said about what Kathy said about that these strategies work for anyone bilingual multilingual really resonated with me because I think a lot about how we make those connections between the language that you hear at home and the language that you hear at school and anytime I'm in the district visiting I always one of the things I always look for in a classroom is how many opportunities are these students who are here to learn English getting to actually speak and engage with their classmates and engage with their teachers. And I think one of the most promising ways that we can do this is through something like dual language immersion which actually helps integrate a language that you speak at home with the language that you speak at school and it helps sort of elevate your language in a way that is not often done when you're classified as someone who's here to learn English. And so I think also a lot about the family engagement efforts that I've seen in some of the districts that we go to. So in David Douglas School District which is in Portland they have a really high percentage of language learners and what they've done there to actually promote language development is they give all kids in the district whether or not you're a language learner or not 30 minute block of English language development every day to really help them develop those oral language skills which they really need in order to become strong readers later on. And so I think a lot about also what happens in Harrisonburg, Virginia where they have homeschool liaisons whose whole role is to provide support to language minority families. They interpret, they translate, they give them orientations and they really make sure that they understand how the school systems here work. And so I think all of this together is just really exciting to think about in the context of what it means to learn two languages or even three or even four. Thank you. Okay. People left notes up here so I'm just gonna leave them here. So you all have met Shayna before and it's time to take a look inside your package and pull out this here little report which we're releasing today which Shayna is the lead and main author of and it's been sort of a deep dive into what's going on around the country and she wants to take you through this and then we're gonna get some really interesting reactions and perspectives from more leaders in the room. We decided to do this literally as a little bit of a movable feast because there's so much expertise, so much rich knowledge in the room that I hope you won't mind these sort of little interventions and pop-ups. There's a method to this madness that may become clear. Shayna, talk about integrating technology and early literacy, please. Hello again. Over the past year and a half, New America and the Joan Gaines CUNY Center at Sesame Workshop surveyed program leaders around the country who were using new tools to promote young children's early literacy and language skills. We created a map where we created a map where innovative programs that shows where innovative programs are located, how those programs are designed and what evidence of impact they were able to share. Now this is a snapshot of our map on New America's data visualization tool called ATLIS. To read more about each program, you can go to newamerica, I mean atlas.newamerica.org and click on the pin drops and that will lead you to a program's profile. So we have a total of 37 pin drops on our map representing the primary location of each program. The majority of programs focused on family engagement. 11 programs were school or center-based, five were public media partnerships, five focused on professional learning, and four had connections to a museum or a library. All programs offered English, 30 offered Spanish, and seven offered languages other than Spanish like Arabic or Mandarin. 60% of the programs served fewer than 1,000 children and there was almost an even mix of programs serving children from zero to eight years old. Most of the programs used mobile apps on phones or touchscreen tablets. Programs also used text messages, as we've already talked about some of these today, video conferencing that Kathy mentioned, websites and other tools such as a word pedometer. So we rated each program for their evidence of impact. Elisabeth McClure, a fellow at the Cooney Center, spearheaded our rating system. Strong programs had conducted a randomized controlled trial on the impact of their technological tool while developing programs were just in the beginning stages of evidence collection on the use of their tool with families and children. We found that one in three programs on the map were ranked as developing. This last slide is a map that we used in the paper to identify every program location around the country. So when you go on the atlas.newamerica.org on the website, those pin drops only represent the primary location and this map shows where all the programs are located. The programs in the green were rated emerging or developing and the programs in the purple were rated strong or promising. As you can see, we have many more programs in the beginning stages of their evaluation process. There's a lot more to dig in into this paper. We encourage you to go to the map, which I've said several times, so please go atlas.newamerica.org to review each program's profile. At the end of the report, we have also listed some implications for program design and policy considerations. In the panel later today, or coming up soon, and the breakout session tomorrow, we will be talking more about those policy implications. For now, I would like to take a moment to highlight some program design recommendations that came out of our analysis, which starts on page 15 of the report. Programs, so firstly, we said that programs should consider how to evaluate the impact of their work prior to implementation. Our second recommendation was for program evaluation. We said that program evaluation should spur continuous improvement and reflect family's input. Thirdly, programs should remember the science that shows human relationships as a more powerful ingredient than technology by itself. And for those of you who were at the BUILD conference, we heard this wonderful talk about how interactions, the interactions Kathy was talking about are really the active ingredient that drive forward language development and are the key component of family engagement. And finally, programs should, where possible, make their processes and outcomes open and available to others, building networks of professional learning. And for those of you who were at the campaign for grade level reading, texting, meeting this morning, we really are beginning to discuss how to create those professional learning networks. And we're hoping that this institute will foster that as well. So I'm happy to take questions during our breaks and during the reception. Now I'd like, just to keep the program going along, I'd like to call up some program leaders who are represented on the map. So the first person I'd like to call up is Anna Blagojevich from the Blueberry Harvest School. Anna was formerly with Mano and Mano which started a program on the map called Kamienza and Casa. Thank you guys so much for having me today. It's really an honor to be here and to be representing the families that I had the honor of working with for three years. From 2012 to 2015, I worked on code developing and implementing the program Kamienza and Casa. It starts at home. And in the program, I worked with families who are eligible for the main migrant education program in Maine. And the goal of the program was to provide parents with strategies and tools that they could use to help prepare their child for school and for life. The program served families both using an iPad loaded with very carefully curated apps and also traditional early learning activities. Incorporated home visiting. There were also group meetings at the school. We invited the kindergarten teacher to participate which was wonderful. Also we had group meetings and celebrations at the local library. So we really tried to partner with them as well. And we used different text messaging services and video modeling. We partnered with Reddy Rosie which was something that families really enjoyed. And thank you. Next up, we have Gina Maschiola who leads a program called Inquirer Within. And I'm gonna give Gina a little bit of time to get up here. But this is one of the programs on our map that has a library, there's a library setting and is really. So my name is Gina Maschiola. I actually work for WQED which is our local PBS station in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is a really awesome and unique place to work in education right now. So we have the remake learning network behind us which is really helping to push and move a lot of the things that are happening. That being said, I used to work for Head Start for 17 years. I was asked by WQED on a volunteer basis to look at PBS kids and a lot of the research and resources that they had and see how I could integrate those into my classroom and share those with colleagues. It took like 10 seconds for me to realize what that home to school connection could look like, using lots of those things and it helped to drive parents into my classroom immediately. It was amazing, the difference that we saw in our income numbers from that. So when I got to work at WQED full time and not just volunteer that I did for three years, I took that same concept because I was working specifically with literacy and went to libraries and said, hey, this worked in my classroom and I think it probably could work for you guys and we've got tons of content that you can use to help support programs that you're kind of already doing already and it will probably help to drive people in your doors. And so I had five librarians that were awesome and said, yes, we would love to try this and so they actually tried it for five years and their numbers were skyrocketing and they were creating their own curriculums. They were creating the Curious Club using Curious George stuff and Wild Crat Wednesdays using Wild Crat material and it was amazing what they were coming up with and I'm proud to say that in May, we had our first funded library launch and we now have 13, so it's picking up steam. So we're super excited about it and if anybody wants to know anything more about it, I'll be here till tomorrow and I'll be happy to share it so thanks. Next we have Sandra Gutierrez from Abriendo Portes. Thank you very much. At Abriendo Portes, we work very hard so that all mothers and fathers can be like mother three. We are very proud to be partners of Too Small to Fail and we use Vroom, parents love it. I'm really in awe of the potential that's in this room. You represent the best strategies that are currently available to support families and kids, yet I want us to go a little further and see what we can do to make tech an even stronger and an even better ally to contribute to closing the opportunity gap that is so critical to the future of our beloved country. I think it's important that we be very intentional about that. I'm really pleased that there's been discussion about dual language learners and one thing that I think needs to be said still, excuse me, is that being bilingual is a tremendous asset and we don't want to give that up. So speaking Spanish as an asset should be respected and honored, English needs to be learned. There's a lot of things we know about how to do that, do both of those things well and I hope that the oceans of vast potential that is here contribute to that area of work because there's very little done currently. Just two more things I want to say. In any line of work, you have to know the user, you have to know the user experience. This is true here too and there's just a great open door to co-create things with parents. There's no argument in the room that parents are powerful. They are prominent in their lives, the lives of their kids and they're in an unparalleled position to make a difference, have a huge impact. So we need to invest more in what they say, listen, listen to them as to what they need to be better consumers app and lab and a lot of things that we still don't know what is exactly sure but parents want to know more about how to use this. The other thing is that, yes, we've touched on the surface. We can go so much deeper as to how parents can support their kids to have an optimal development which is what we know they all want. The last thing I think is actually the most important and where there's very little work being done currently and that is in the area of advocacy. Parents need to know how to advocate for their kids. There's ESSA that gives us opportunities to advocate. You have to be ready to take them and we all know that even if you read, have nourishing meals and talk and do all that we're asking parents to do in certain communities the schools are struggling and you need to know your rights, you need to advocate. Lastly, I need to say one thing. Learning anything is the art of sharing, right? And I'm really honored to be here because the work of New America specifically Conor Williams and Amaya has really fueled the work of Abriendo Puertas and we share their work broadly with our network because it does value families, it does value folks that speak Spanish, values the immigrant experience so I wanna thank them especially for that. Please join me in thanking them. Okay, last thing, see I thought I was part of that two minute, whatever, rush up. So the last thing I wanna say is that there's a saying in Spanish, si no, el que al futuro, if you don't look forward, you stay behind, el que no ve a frente se queda atrás. We don't want that to happen to kids, it's happening and we have to be very intentional about the investments and the resources that are made so that this doesn't happen. Let's not keep going like we're doing it, let's be very thoughtful and intentional about that. So thank you and I'm honored to be in the wealth of all this intelligence and all the great work that you've done. Thank you. And finally, we'd like to welcome up Tiffany Graham with Parent Powered, which is an organization that has developed Ready for K. All right, thank you, Shayna. So excited to be here and really excited to share some information about Parent Powered and Ready for K. So the Ready for K approach was developed originally at Stanford by Parent Powered's co-founders, Ben York and Susanna Lowe. They conducted a randomized controlled trial on this program and what it is essentially is we text message parents three times a week with easy strategies for how to engage their kids and help prepare them for kindergarten and beyond. So simple things along the lines of while you're at the grocery store, find letters with your child, make it a game who can find the most. So there's a very structured approach that we take where we send a fact message, a tip message and a growth message. The trial showed that a few things actually. So it showed that parents that received these messages were more involved at home and in school, leading to two to three months of literacy gains in their children. So super positive results. Parent Powered was founded to basically expand upon this approach. So expanding on the fact tip growth model and also expanding our content offering. So in the past year, we texted about 35,000 families or Stanford did with the Ready for K program. Parent Powered is on track to text about 75,000 families this year and we're hoping to text even more. Very excited about the work that's going on, not just with Parent Powered and the research that our founders have done but all the work that's happening in the room. So I'm really excited to talk to everybody and learn from everyone. Okay, so whose head hurts? So many interesting things going on around the country and that was the idea behind the commitment to mapping and tracking a lot of these commitments but the other idea behind it was to really create a learning network so that as I said at the outset, no less parallel play, no more orchestration, more coalition building, new mistakes, not old mistakes. So two things, one, does anybody have a further question about the map and where it's going or anything that's on it? And two, there's lots of really interesting perspectives in the room so if anyone has sort of a burning comment or wants to announce themselves as having something that's particularly interesting that everyone else should know about, this is our storming phase. So I know for example that my sister, Lori Levine, is doing some really interesting family engagement work that you might want to hear about. I know for example that PBS is doing some other sort of parent and so announce yourself, it's a time to announce yourself in terms of really interesting burning questions that are on your mind or things that you want the whole community to know about that are resources. Foundation allies, you're funding interesting stuff that may not be represented in the room, tell us about it. So we've got about 15 minutes, who wants to go first? Lori, wait, well hold on, this is live streaming so you have to wait for the microphone, sis. This is the first time that we've been at a professional conference together in like 12 years. Yeah, by 12 years. Welcome, Lori. So Michael and I have circled around each other in our careers for 30 or 40 years now, but every now and then we kind of all end up in the same room. So I'm sorry that Kathy left because actually we're doing some work with Kathy on the work that we do with children around child outcomes and I don't think she actually knows very much. Who do you work by the way? I'm not sure everyone knows. So I work at Asselera Learning. We run, we actually directly manage head start programs that serve around 5,000 children and then we have a technical assistance network where we provide support to around another 35,000 children in other programs through a variety of different models and we actually use our own programs as a laboratory for developing best practices and I oversee our family engagement work. And I think, hi Tony. I think that one of the things that I didn't necessarily hear yet today is how to build some of these onto the existing platforms and infrastructures of our national networks. And clearly I've been working in head start on and off now for many, many years and one of the powers of head start is that this is still a network. It is probably the original two generation model. Even though two gen is now very hot as a kind of new model but head start was the original two generation model. It's also serves a million kids and families still around the country. And so there's an incredible ability to leverage and so I think one of the things that we've been working on is, we've also been part of the Frontiers of Innovation Network at Harvard and actually I think one of the things that we're trying to do is how to actually use one of the main reasons that parents bring their children into a high quality early childhood program which is to really do a great job of supporting their children's development as the fundamental framework for beginning to model and coach around these high quality parent-child interactions. And so we've actually just created a family curriculum that is built around these types of high quality parent-child interactions. We've created a mantra called peer that stands for pause, engage, encourage, reflect and extend. Those of your educators might recognize some of those kinds of interactions as some of the things that Kathy just spoke about. And we're using that actually as a way to engage families so we're actually using the activities themselves as a way of engaging and modeling high quality parent-child interactions and getting parents involved in that. Thank you. I want to also, because both quasi, keep the microphone there for a second because I'm gonna ask Ms. Zimmerman, Elaine Zimmerman to say a few. So both quasi and I think Sandra really brought to our attention just thinking in some more nuanced, some new and different ways but also some asset-based ways of thinking about language and adult capabilities that exist already in the community. And Elaine's been working on this set of topics for quite some time. Elaine, what are you thinking about now? Just curious. At this very moment. Stand up. Hi, Elaine Zimmerman. We have just launched the National Parent Leadership Institute actually in partnership with the National League of Cities and Vroom and we're about to be in a partnership with the Children's Museums in the country. The idea and the core question is what will help parents who want to lead for their children and other children lead be the messengers? Because we can be the messengers in agencies and in government to a point but the truth is the social capital of parents are the really richest to Sandra's earlier point, the richest messengers. So what makes parent messaging and sustainable? How is that reach? What expands a parent social network rather than an agency's social network? How can parents become the messengers on this information? And what would it take to have that occur? And to your question, Michael, what parents have shared all over the country is they want to lead for themselves and for other children. They are not treated as assets or leaders by government or by many nonprofits. They are treated in a deficit framework. They are helped as if they are poor and fragile but even the most fragile when assisted with information many parents will then expand their own social network and be so much better at messaging and reaching the families that we never reach. So I'm thinking how do we turn this into a leadership strategy for parents as messengers? Great, wonderful. Thank you so much. My name is Nkechi Ezem from Grand Rapids, Michigan. And the first thing I wanted to talk about is I wanted to thank New America and Shayna for putting this together. What I love about page 15 and I haven't even read it that much, page 11, I'm sorry, is that for once we're beginning to pay attention to emerging and developing programs. For a long time, my background is in early childhood education and while I love the old program, the way we have been doing things, there has reason why all these new and emerging programs are creeping up because it's not reaching all our children and our family. And we need to start thinking about alternative way to reach families. We can just keep on talking about, we can get hold of them and all that. There are programs around the country that are doing exceptional work and I think that we need to, every now and then, like New America, I challenge you guys to go into the community and see what is creeping up. You're not gonna be a best practice if somebody's not paying attention to that. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, we have two exceptional program that is really generating a lot of data. One of them is called Baby Scholars and it's really reaching a lot of family but what I love about Baby Scholars and what we're proud of at that is that, it's also giving us a different tools of different way we can reach parents. We are creating a community that really values early childhood education and teaching parents to use ordinary moment, ordinary routine to talk about early childhood education. Another program that I'm so proud of is called Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative. So you could go to our website and check it out because I know I can talk about it. But thank you so much for paying attention to emerging and developing programs and I hope that this trend continues so that next time you do this mapping, there are so many other programs that need to be honored and that's how we're gonna make sure that we cover our community really with all this program and parents can choose the one that best meets their needs. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Keep it right there, Christina. Nyla, so Nyla's new to the family engagement field in a certain way. I mean, her model is actually deepening its family engagement work. Say a little bit about what you're up to. I'm Nyla from Jumpstart. And I wanna talk about the family engagement piece, but I actually wanna talk about workforce first because I've been thinking a lot in this conversation, sort of hearing what Kathy's talking about and the importance of working with existing practitioners but maybe even more importantly, the pipeline of teachers into the field and how we are training them particularly in this work around developing rich language, right? Cause we all sort of see what's happening in the classrooms and the opportunities for teachers to really dig deep with children to help them build meaning to create the kind of context that we've been talking about is really critically important. So I just hope we don't lose that in this conversation as we talk about family engagement but we're also thinking about everybody who cares for children because that's like, I think really our opportunity for the future. And we're doing more work on the workforce to really thinking about sort of our resources of, now we have 4,000 college students who are increasingly diverse, who are about 50% of them first generation college students themselves. So in terms of the future workforce and the kinds of people we want in the classrooms with our children, we at Jumpstart really see this as an opportunity for our growth moving forward. And then on the family engagement side, we have really been trying to capitalize on the opportunity of again these college students in the classroom really as liaisons with the family and building relationships with families. And we have been thinking about sort of a range of low tech to high tech touches or opportunities for engagement with families. We partnered with Tiffany and the parent powered to actually bring their program to Head Start families in the Bay Area. And then this next year, we're actually gonna use that platform to reach all of our 11,000 plus families around the country and try to hone the messaging to align with our curriculum, which incidentally is really connected with what Kathy was talking about. And we're deepening our own focus on oral language. And then just the last thing I'll say too, we had a year of just a lot of pilots around the country where we experimented with things in the sort of much more engaged area. We've been doing some work in subsidized housing and public housing around the country where we are doing sort of a real two-generation strategy working with parents and the Jumpstart model with the children at the same time. So we're really having an opportunity to go much deeper in our engagement with families. Yeah. Go ahead. Hi, everybody. My name is Maggie Stevens and I'm Director of Education for Mississippi Public Broadcasting. So I'm one of the local PBS stations represented here. But one of my challenging thoughts that I kind of bring to the conversation is I watched a video while Kathy was talking about interruptions. And then we all laughed around the room when the child started beating the baby on top of the head. It was a funny moment. But I think that when we deal with families in poverty, we kind of have this notion that parents are not concerned about their children and that we can kind of start pulling the finger. And I think we need to take their approach from a strength-based approach instead of a deficit. That you're bad if you interrupt at that moment compared to understanding that many times that families in poverty are led by single moms and they have busy lives. So when they worked eight hours and 10 hours, they may need to actually take that phone call or they may need to negotiate their lives around cooking dinner and just so many things. But I think this is where the technology comes into play where you can empower them to utilize those moments and say, well, how about you watch this video with your brother while mommy goes to make dinner and then I'll come back and we'll continue the conversation. But some kind of way we've got to turn that into a strength-based approach instead of just saying, you're bad because you have a busy life and we understand that as a single mom you really don't care about your children because you take advantage of the interruption and that's not true. So we're talking about family engagement. We have to understand where families are coming from and provide them with the opportunities of empowerment. Yeah, I'm so glad that you said that. So part of that is how we actually set cultural norms and what's permissible and what's not. I mean, we're at a moment where almost anything goes in the public discourse and I think there needs to be some progressive antidotes to that that are really positive family support, supportive statements about what it means to raise a family today. I wanted to call on Patty for a minute because Too Small to Fail is doing some really interesting cultural norming and sort of let's get messages out into the order supply kind of approach and maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. Thanks so much. Can you guys hear me? For the last couple of years, Kara and I and the Too Small to Fail team have been working actually with TV writers and producers to actually incorporate messaging about early brain and language development into the content of prime time television shows. Our thinking is that similar to what's been done with public health issues, if you think about drunk driving or wearing seat belts, it's shifted cultural norms on how we think about those activities. So we thought why not early brain and language development? Why not ask TV writers and producers to be part of the solution? And so we started this about two and a half years ago. We did a convening in Hollywood for about 200 TV writers and producers and we had a call to action which was twofold. One, can you talk about the issue of early brain and language development and the power of talking, reading and singing? And two, can you model the kind of behaviors we wanna see parents and caregivers engage in? So when you have a baby on the show and so the baby being a prop, actually show someone actually actively engaging with that child. So we've had nine television shows so far integrate content. Some you would expect like maybe parenthood. Some you might not expect like Orange is the New Black, Law and Order, Special Victims Unit. And what I will say about these shows is they are very creative, like the way they come up, but they're able to do it. But it's actually been really effective and a kid showed Doc McStuffins, did a whole 15 minute segment on this. So it's been really fun. And I think now we're actually trying to figure out how to actually evaluate this work. We have, as we did this work too, we also realized that daytime television was really important and so days of our lives is the next show that's up and that'll be this fall. So we're really trying to think about talk shows, game shows, soap operas. And then at the end of March we were thrilled to partner with the Basil's Family Foundation in zero to three and save the children to do part two of our Hollywood convening to really get the message out that early childhood is not just about the issue we're working on, but there is a lot of work that needs to get done to get the public and parents and caregivers to understand how important those first five years are. So we did part two of the convening and we're getting some really good traction of more TV writers and producers who kind of want to jump into the mix and think about how they can be part of this effort to get good messages out to parents and caregivers. So we're excited about the work and we'll keep you posted as it develops. That's great. Thanks. Everybody here working on these issues with policymakers, we're about to transition into an exciting discussion about the opportunities with every child succeeds act. Besides the folks who are on the panel, who's beginning to like, who's engaging policymakers to talk about these issues? Lane. So Lane used to run the Connecticut Commission for on children. So the state of Connecticut is taking the question on how is technology affecting children's learning? And they took it on absolutely clean saying we need to learn everything. And so the education committee, both parties and the executive branch are all engaged in this question. And we've been working with Roberta. She came and worked with hundreds and there's a continuation of it. And it's actually being led interestingly by Republican leadership. Fascinating. Interesting. My name is Ralph Grafana. Hey, Ralph. Thanks for coming. I'm just shifted gears. I was with the Department of Education in Maryland. There's an assistant state superintendent and worked on issues. And now I'm with the council of chief state school officers and assuming the portfolio for early childhood education. So one comment I would like to make is that some of the information in the learning community that you're setting up is going to be very helpful in our discourse with the chiefs. I think on ESSA there is a technology component that goes through all titles, but particular title one. When I think about the title one programs and what is still called parent involvement, we can switch over to family engagement and then have those kinds of strategies that you have laid out today as part of resources that are available to our title one coordinators out there in local school districts. So that can be extended to those families that are part and parcel of our early childhood programs and elementary schools. Perfect. Rick, and then we're going to transition. And Jason, Jason, if there's anything you want to say about the policy work that Joyce is doing. Okay. And this is through title one and what some perceive to be family engagement or parental engagement is to bring in a guest speaker and have box lunches twice a year. And there's no kind of meaningful outcome based or some kind of criteria of what that means. And I think that's real important as well. Great. I see a quick little plug. So in Shane's paper, there's a whole page how ESSA could enable innovation in family engagement which talks about that title one piece, what the law says, but to your point, Rick, what, how to really activate it so that it's meaningful and not just checking the box. Yeah. So that's a great conversation, a great segue. I will just say this. What's going on on the map and just in general in terms of the many community initiatives that are making a big difference around the verge of making a big difference is a lot of small scale with some medium scale and large scale initiatives mixed in. And I've said this once before on this stage, I'll say it again. We've got a lot of rose gardens and not much amber waves of grain. And what I think we need to do is to really think about the real challenge that we had early on from several of our speakers about the notion of scale. And I haven't given up on policy. My own training is in public policy and it feels like things are locked and broken but never fear we will break through these difficult times at some point soon, I hope. We have a great policy panel coming up that's going to be led by Delia Pompa, who I would like to take a moment to introduce because she's worth introducing. Delia actually fairly recently moved to the Migration Policy Institute. They're graciously a co-convener of this here institute. Delia, for those of you who don't know, was for many years a senior vice president at La Raza where she oversaw not only education but all of the sort of health and social issues and is one of the nation's leading experts on second language learning. She previously directed what was known as Obemla at the time and is a long-term friend and colleague of mine. She's prepared with a little bit of collegial support, a really interesting panel and she's gonna come up here and invite her co-panelists and we're gonna get into the policy issues. Thank you very much. Okay, I know my introduction would have been a good one because the last four speakers took my points, which is great. This panel is on the Every Student Succeeds Act and I was really excited to be able to talk about this today because when I hear research and I hear these great programs, my mind goes to, it's okay, how do we do this in more places? How do more people find out about this? And I do have a lot of hope in policy. I do think the strides we've made in early childhood education, the strides we've made in serving kids who start with less and need more have been because of policy. So we have a new law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, for those of you who aren't in K-12 education, I think you're gonna be excited to know that there are many places within the law that now address early childhood education. So we're gonna talk about that. It is a way to begin to take things to scale. We're not there yet, but I do think there are many, many, many hooks in the law that we can play on and count on. My fellow panelists are going to have some great takes on how we do that and also some takes on what the challenges are ahead of me. So let me introduce them first, right next to me, is Melissa Dallin, who is from the Center on Enhancing Early Learning Outcomes, and from EDC, there's a great publication. She is that that I hope she's gonna talk about. Next to her is Raina Hernandez from the Illinois State Board of Education, someone who's worked in the field a long time and understands big systems and how to move states. And next to her is Danielle Ewan, Ewan, excuse me, from Ed Council, who has some very specific ideas about how we should get things done in moving through big systems. So you're gonna hear about, you can't believe she has big specific ideas, huh? If you know her, you know she does. So as I said earlier, I didn't have the opportunity to talk about what I was thinking about as a partner earlier today, and I just wanna take a few minutes to talk about that. I look at the Every Student Succeeds Act, and as I said, I have a lot of hope and policy. And I see four strands in the Every Student Succeeds Act that are very, very important to us in this room. Throughout Every Student Succeeds Act, you're going to see early childhood education mentioned. There are hooks everywhere in the Every Student Succeeds Act in a K-12 essentially bill that focus on early childhood education. Throughout the bill, you're also going to see an infusion of parent and engagement opportunities. And I think having been around a long time in a different way than just checking the box and saying, okay, you have to invite parents to the meeting or have a parent's night, really some opportunities for deeper family engagement. Throughout, someone mentioned earlier, there are technology provisions through all parts of the law that we can hang our hat on. And finally, for me and the work I do at the Migration Policy Institute, looking at how we integrate newcomers into our society and we do it through the school, is throughout the act this time, there are mentions of young dual language learners, kids who are just beginning to learn English. And they are throughout the bill and in very important ways. So what I see before us and what I'm thinking about these days is how do you create a system out of all those points? And that's what our panel is going to talk about. So they have graciously agreed to give us their thoughts off the top of their head to begin with and then we're gonna go to some questions. So let's start with you, Melissa. Hi everyone, I'm Melissa with CELO and I'm really excited to be here today. It's my birthday and I get to spend it talking about my favorite subject. So I'm just gonna give you a little background on me to help you understand where I'm coming from. So at CELO, we work with state education agencies and I've worked with a number of states on family engagement and systems thinking and mostly around pre-K. And then I also work at a shelter for families experiencing homelessness in DC on infant toddler we do play times and so I work with parents a lot there so that's also informed my thinking in a lot of this. And so when I looked at ESSA, I was really happy to see that it extended parent to be parent and family members and the language that's in there is a lot that's very inclusive. And so that to me is a really positive thing and there's a lot of explicit ways that family engagement is mentioned. So in the Title I requirements, the report cards having parental involvement in the design and also the family friendly language, parent involvement in the state and local education plans. There's also other areas where I see a lot of potential. Professional development comes to mind in Title II. There's mention of the transition from pre-K to K and to me that's an obvious bit with family engagement and there's a lot to think about the world technology can play in that. There's also the literacy education for all results in the nation grants that are in there as well and I think, Daniel, you're gonna talk about this in more detail. So that's there but then I also have my concerns. I've heard this a few times about checklist items and it's spread throughout there and my concern is it won't be taken as an opportunity to be strategic. So when you have the families there, you have the parents there getting their input and getting their opinions and having them also shape the agenda. I'm concerned that that won't happen and I've heard from several people, teachers I know and other people were at their school, family engagement, something that someone else mentioned this. Oh, we have to do this, it's a compliance thing and it's not that out and it's not tied to anything. So in the brief you mentioned, I talk about this that we often want to go into the strategies first and into the action part but we need to step back and also think about what are we trying to do? Is it family engagement for family engagement's sake or are we gonna really look at this strategically? And one of the recommendations I make is looking at frameworks. So what is guiding this? What outcomes do you want? What are your guiding principles for this? And then what's great is it can be customizable to community or a school but still touching on the points that we wanna touch with and I think especially around engaging families as partners. I don't think the system strategic look is gonna happen organically. I think it's on us to make that happen and make that a conversation piece and push that. And I also think someone else mentioned this about parent leadership and family leadership. Not just communicating what this is but also giving families tools they can really fully participate and feel confident because that's another thing I see as families may wanna be part of the conversation but they may not feel confident. We use a lot of acronyms and terms in education that they're not always familiar with. So I think reaching out to them and getting them prepared to be participants in this. Thank you, Reina. What are your big ideas as you came onto this panel? Sure. Well, I think, I'm gonna go very broad instead of deep because I think there are just so many potential opportunities. But for starters, I really wanted, we talked about intersections and I wanted to make sure that one of the things we had talked about initially in the planning for this event the concern around developmentally appropriate practice as technology intersects with early childhood. And so that was one of the tensions and one of the concerns. And so in all of this we're thinking about how can technology enhance good early childhood practice? Then we add this layer of families and we go, well, this has a lot to do with relationships, with connections. So how do we layer technology in a way that does not replace relationships but enhances them, creates opportunities, creates connection, right? Because we know technology can create connection, but we also know that it can be very hard to have a meal across the table from someone who's in their device, right? So, and then we add this layer of like ELs, for example. And that for me, that's the intersection because I oversee early childhood, family and community engagement and ELL. And so this is my favorite space. And one of my concerns is always are we providing equitable opportunity as we bring technology into the space? I've had colleagues who have suggested, oh, we don't have language access for these kids, so can we just have technology do it? And are you replacing what would be an interactive learning space and learning opportunity with something that is not, that is the kind of technology that we just saw the keynote speaker talk about as being the wrong kind of technology, the kind that doesn't deliver the same kinds of outcomes. So, you know, technology has opportunities, but it's not there to replace what already exists. So within all of those things, the actually the Illinois framework was mentioned in the brief, and so take a look at that. But our framework does a number of things. So it focuses on the dual, we think about, right now the work we're doing in Illinois, it's the dual capacity, similar to the way the federal framework talked about dual capacity. How do we raise the capacity of systems to engage families and how do we engage, how do we build the capacity of families to do a number of things? So we've laid out principles. If you do it this way, things will work well. We've laid out a framework for how you integrate family engagement into every major component of education. It's not just a separate box curriculum instruction and families somewhere off in the space. Families are part of curriculum, part of instruction, part of planning, part of professional development systems, part of leadership, right? So if they're not already part of your system that way, how do you make those connections? On the family capacity side, we're really focusing on three core areas. How do we build family capacity to engage as partners with the educational system? That's one type of relationship. How do we engage parents and build their capacity to support child development? And that's a different kind of engagement. It's a different hat. And a lot of what we heard today is technology that would help with that type of meaningful interaction and that sort of thing. And our third is how do we build parent capacity around self-sufficiency and around their own, the assets and resources that we know if mom and dad are not working, if there isn't housing access, food access in the home, that will impact the child, right? If mom doesn't have the rich language environment and we can build up some of those supports, will that create more resource? So in doing all of that, I think, we think about the state system and state levers for how we can impact change across all of those areas. And particularly with ESSA, I think there are a lot of opportunities. So I think about how we set standards through our work as in an SEA, there are five major areas that we engage in that are major levers for change. The first is around how we engage in administration of programs. So we set standards, we review grants, we really create expectations, making sure that these expectations are embedded within all of that. We have accountability systems monitoring. So moving away from the checklist approach, okay, how many parents showed up at how many events, right, do you have the sign-in sheets and really look for the kind of meaningful engagement where families engaged in leadership opportunities? Maybe we can do some conversations with parents that were involved. One of our levers for change is our support and technical assistance. So as we create professional development for the field, as we create parent capacity-building strategies, is this a major priority, is this a major threat? Are we building teacher capacity to be able to engage in the technology and engage with families? Because that's not necessarily something they were prepared for. Our intervention strategies, right now with ESSA, we have these different comprehensive services and targeted services. Those targeted services are really getting at subgroups, which are a major equity vehicle, but are those types of services looking at these types of issues? Because what we find right now is a lot of times that continuous improvement intervention is like a coach that comes in and does everything and you have these overwhelming plans and so really bringing focus to I think a lot of that. And our fourth major lever is intervention. So when do we step in and provide supports and how do we do that to the field in a way that's meaningful and that really can tackle some of these issues? So in Illinois right now, we're seeing the ESSA plan. What we're trying to do is fit it into a landscape that's already looking at a state accountability system that includes accountability for program quality. In early childhood, we have our quality rating system that includes family engagement, major component of quality. It includes a linguistic and cultural competency, major component of quality. But we're also trying to write a K to 12 system that's looking at quality as being inclusive of environments. What does the climate look like within a school? And family engagement is a huge component of climate. So we're seeing that as an opportunity to build things like climate and family engagement into an accountability system that lays out both either you miss the mark and we're going to provide support that includes family engagement or you didn't because you already had that area that was very robust. We're also engaging in a lot of work that cuts across different agencies to try to bring comprehensive services to children and families by taking a two-generational approach, working with the Department of Human Services, the Department of Child and Family Services and other entities. And right now what we're trying to figure out is how do we create a strategy, and this is where I see the huge technological opportunity, a strategy where we're trying to reach kids and families where they are instead of trying to bring them into our slots. Because I think we've been focusing a lot on bringing children to where we are and then we say the hardest to reach aren't showing up at our door. We're saying, well, every single child in Illinois is somewhere today, right now. So how do we go there and support that? And because that's a lot of more kids than we're currently serving, we're looking for scalable solutions, but that continue to bring best practice and interaction and everything that we know is good. So that's what we're really looking for. The big idea of challenges, opportunities, family literacy, technology, how do you pull this together? Inform it. So I think you're gonna hear some echoes. We didn't plan any of this, so it's really great. They're gonna hear a lot of the same words and some of the same approaches. I would start with a really big picture approach to the law, let me backtrack by saying it is called the Every Student Succeeds Act. Some people call it ESSA, some people call it ESSA. Some people call it the new education law. I just refer to the law. You all know what I'm talking about when I say that. So one of the core components of the new law is about equity. It's about making sure that children who have great needs get what they need to be successful in school, in college, and their careers moving forward. I would argue, given what we've just heard from the keynote speaker and what we all know, that helping children build their language and literacy skills is a core component of an equity agenda. And so what we've been talking about in CCSSO and others have talked about is encouraging states not to start with the language and the law, but actually to start by setting their vision for equity in the state. And so for us, as early childhood advocates, as advocates for underserved populations, as advocates for children who are trying to do better and their families, we need to go to state agencies and say, what is your vision to help children gain the language and literacy skills they need from birth to be successful? And how can we leverage what's actually in the law that I'm gonna talk about in a second to achieve those goals? So Melissa talked about have your vision and then come to your strategies, which I think is a great way to talk about it. So that's the vision, equity, language, literacy as part of equity. The strategy is early childhood. The strategy is family engagement and how technology can support some of those things. So when you're thinking about early childhood, it's really important to remember that while this is a K-12 law, early childhood is indeed woven through the law. And I would say it's not just pre-K or preschool, it's actually a birth through law. Many folks don't know that Title I has always been allowed to be used for children from birth through the age of school entry. And it has been allowed to be used not just for direct services, but for comprehensive supports for children and their families, for two generational approaches, for home visiting, for developmental screenings for children to target interventions to children that need it. And all of that continues to be true within the current law and its current iteration. However, what we have in the current law are four ways that early childhood can build that equity agenda because it's woven throughout the law. And I would argue that a focus on Title I actually really limits what we can do for children and families in all of the buckets that we're talking about today, language, literacy, serving underserved populations, how to use technology, how to build family engagement. So I encourage you in everything I say to think about all the titles, all 1,000 pages, and you don't have to read them because we all have. But all 1,000 pages have something about early childhood, something about the populations we're talking about. And so I think of it in four ways. First is allowable uses of funds. So as I said, Title I, Direct Services, we've heard a lot about preparing teachers. Title II is very open. In fact, we have revolutionary language in Title II that addresses this issue. It says, let's think about how we can develop strategies to help principals and other school leaders understand child development for children through age eight. I about fell out of my chair when I saw that we'd gone that in there. Let me iterate that. Help principals and other school leaders think about child development for children through age eight. In other words, ESSA makes it the responsibility, potentially, of state leaders and school leaders to think about how to build language and literacy skills in a developmentally appropriate way for children from birth through. So when we're thinking about how to advocate with state agencies, that's a big thing to think about. What's the professional development? There are a number of titles that reference how early childhood can be used to build services for children from language minority communities, for American Indian families, for Alaska Native children, and from where I sit, most importantly, for children who are facing homelessness. In fact, the law actually changes McKinney-Vento and now requires that state and local agencies focus on preschool children and ensure that they have access to a school of origin. We can talk about what that means, but really making sure that underserved children have access to where they can get the best supports where we can then put resources in to build their language and literacy is really important. I know I'm at about three and a half minutes on my four, so I'm gonna start talking incredibly quickly and you all have to keep up. If it means you have to stand up and run, please feel free. So that was allowable use of funds and support for targeted populations. The third thing is direct investment. There actually are a number of places in the law where we can support children and families. We have preschool development grants, which we can talk about. The Learn Act that Melissa talked about, I wanna highlight that the Learn Act is very specific on supporting professional development and successful strategies, including technology to support literacy development in children from birth through 12th grade. So again, we see that system building approach throughout the law of thinking about children at their earliest possible stage and creating systems through our schools to get where we want them to be. And promised neighborhoods. Please don't forget to think about promised neighborhoods as we're advocating for use in the law. Promise Neighborhood Language actually talks about high quality early childhood as a pipeline service. In other words, if you were going to create a promised neighborhood that serves children and families in the best possible way, if you don't have high quality early childhood services, which for me is too generational, build language and literacy, et cetera. If you don't have those services, you're not actually doing what the law requires. So it's critically important to think about that. And finally, this is about system change. I saved the biggest for last, so I would get an extra minute. Tricky that way. ESSA is about creating new systems. What you heard from Illinois is exactly what we want folks to be doing. It talks about building accountability systems, assessment systems, systems of continuous improvement, teacher effectiveness and evaluation systems, how to identify schools in need of improvement, how to build ongoing stakeholder engagement. In none of those sections, will you see, and this is about young kids, people, but I'm going to say to you now, all of those things are about young children. Accountability is about saying that what you measure is what counts. So we need to help state and local agencies create accountability systems that measure things for children as young as possible. That doesn't mean I am advocating for putting children in desks that one year old, putting a pencil in their hand and saying, tell us what you can count to. But if we can start measuring things like chronic absenteeism for our youngest kids, evaluating whether kids have developmental screenings and what that means for interventions as early as possible, tracking suspension and expulsions of our young black children as early as possible, those are accountability systems that will build equity and also make sure our children get access to the high quality programs that are building language and literacy that we need. That's just one example. The last thing I will say, I mentioned stakeholder engagement as one piece of the system. Stakeholder engagement, if done right, is one of the places where we can truly build family engagement, where we can truly attach families to schools as early as possible. And if your state has launched their ESSA plan process and families are not involved and early childhood people are not involved, I want you all to write angry letters and march on your state capitol and tell them that our people have something to say at the beginning of the process about what a high quality state plan should look like that is inclusive of young children's needs to be successful, to build their language and literacy skills and to be part of a birth through 12th grade system. It's been said about this law that the old adage, watch what you wish for is what happened to states because now states have to implement their plan without a lot of direction from the federal government. So states have to have a plan in place by March. They have to integrate all these things. They have to have stakeholder engagement. And so my question to you, Melissa, is how do they do all this? Where do they get the models? I thought you asked me that. And you touched on this too. So in the brief I discussed, you can go to silo.org and find it. I bring up another models for family engagement frameworks and one of the main ones is the Head Start parent family and community engagement frameworks. That's one a lot of states are drawn on to inform their work. That's something that can be used in districts or in programs or at the state level. There's also the dual capacity framework from the US Department of Education you mentioned. If you're looking for a state one, Maryland has an amazing framework, Illinois has an amazing framework too. So those are some places to start. Raina, you gave some great examples of how Illinois is trying to coordinate family engagement and early learning and your policies across entities. Those are great examples of how you can do it. What are some of the challenges you've run into though? Well, right now we're trying to, just at the very highest levels, coordinate around outcomes. And even there we begin with, I think some struggles around what the outcomes look like at different parts of the continuum for a health agency, a welfare agency, an education agency in a way that is less focused on our sector and more focused on what we do for kids and families. So I think a lot of states have been trying to shift to thinking about impact and not just service delivery as we think about our own agency accountability. So I think that as we're making that shift, then we can better line things up but it's just been a huge challenge. And then from there really trying to take a step back from the ownership of our strategy, our program, and really trying to figure out when are we duplicating, where can we complement each other. So, Danielle, your focus on the big ideas was really, I think gave us a lot of hope in this room that bureaucrats will also think about big ideas. One of the things bureaucrats are trying to think about these days is technology, because they know it's a thing. How do you ensure that technology really is responsive to families and to early learning and gets everything done and isn't just a thing but it's a tool? That's a great question. So I think one of the ways you do that is by constantly asking yourself those questions, right? Why are we doing this? Who's using it? Is it being used the way we imagine and how are we using what's coming out of it? And so a great example is we like to buy iPads for teachers, right? I did it when I was in the DC government to do gold with kids. That's a great thing if it gets used. But if you then go into classrooms and you find that those iPads are sitting on a shelf or those iPads are being used for kids who are the problem, then those iPads are not doing what they should be doing and we should take them out, right? And so one of the things that we have to build into this process is the continuous improvement, the constant evaluation of the strategies we put in place. And the law encourages slash requires states and indeed local agencies to be engaging in that process. The other thing I would say is that I think a lot of the time technology is our first answer and I really would challenge us to think of it often as the last answer. Not that I think technology is a bad thing or as I like to joke with my husband that I'm a Luddite, although I am, I'm always the late adopter. But I think that sometimes we bypass relationship building, communication, small group instruction, basic pedagogy and go right to a technological answer whereas technology should support those things, not replace it. And I think that's one of the questions we have to ask is whether and how technology is building those core pieces. You know something else, lots of people referred to but we haven't talked about it in depth and that's workforce development. Who's gonna do all this? We have some great ideas, Kathy's work, it's just stunning and what its promise is. But yes, you can, I'm throwing this out to the universe, I'd like to hear from each of you about how we're going to deal with workforce development especially in a country that's changing where the demography is changing and not only among the kids but among the workforce. So I think one of the things that we have to think about in the ESSA frame is that ESSA requires consultation and coordination with other programs. So in the early childhood world that means the childcare and development block grant, that means Head Start which themselves have workforce development requirements and resources built into the law. And so the core tenet of early childhood right is that we're entrepreneurial and we steal everybody else's money because we don't have enough. This is a place where we can bring the systems together and really think about how to leverage some opportunities to build the workforce. But that's not gonna be enough without investment and partnerships with institutions of higher education, particularly at the community college level where we can serve providers who come from language minority backgrounds who come from non-traditional learning backgrounds where we can work with state licensure and certification agencies to really think about what's appropriate for an early childhood system of licensure. So it's gonna take building a lot of partnerships, some of which are required in the law, some of which are required in other places and some of which are just gonna require people to be entrepreneurial. But we've seen it work in places like New Jersey when they passed the universal pre-K law and they tripled the number of bachelor's degree candidates they had when they created partnerships between all the different pieces. So I don't think it's easy but I think it's possible. All right, so you brought up that iPad example and I've heard, I've seen it both ways where I've seen iPads come in and this gets to a leadership, administration leadership. Well, okay, here's the iPads, go use them by and you see them sitting there and I think when I've seen it work, it's when the administrators say okay, I know like at one school they said we're gonna weave this in, we're gonna train you, you can play with it a bit and this isn't replacing your instruction but take time to think about how this complements how it can be a tool and when it's useful and when it's not and I think that time and encouraging teachers to think about how they're going to use it instead of telling them how to is really important so I think principals and school leaders play a big role in that. When I think about how we address the workforce issue, you know, as a state administrator I think both pre-service and in-service and so when we think about the pre-service challenge and anything that comes that's new there's also a faculty capacity building. When in 2009 we had some policy shifts for really being able to provide robust bilingual education services including native language instruction which matters to English learners in the preschool setting and that was a major shift for higher ed because higher ed didn't have that capacity at the time and we're a state that has had native language instruction since the 70s and so other states are in a different position so we began with faculty institutes bringing together early childhood faculty and ELL faculty and we were introducing folks from the same institution at times and they started to build on technology platforms for sharing coursework, for sharing syllabi and things like that so I think there's a piece around supporting a faculty to be able to prepare teachers in service or pre-service. I think within programs there are a couple of leverage points so one, we're thinking about our state and our professional development systems so right now we've been coordinating between the childcare, PD system, the Head Star PD system, the preschool PD system and we're trying to bring priorities. One of our priorities is community systems development for example, being able to engage with partners. Bringing these types of things like use of technology and as a priority is really key and I think one other is program standards and how we provide support. The preschool development grants had a major component around instructional leadership and so I know in our state we've actually funded instructional leadership positions and have provided training for those instructional leaders within pre-K programs. Well how do we build the capacity of that instructional leader to provide the support to teachers and then to families and others around technology and literacy? And I would be probably strung up if I didn't also mention that we must think about how to improve compensation for the workforce, particularly the early childhood workforce. Thank you. We have far too many very high quality providers in early childhood who have to move to the more formal K-12 system for salaries and benefits in order to support their families and if we're going to keep those high quality folks in early childhood programs we have to completely reform how we compensate them. And just worth saying there's a huge equity issue as we think about compensation and when we think about working with diverse families, I can tell you that I come from a state where the workforce diversity is very stratified based on the program and the quality component and so quality is constantly in tension with diversity and we've been trying to move away from that but the higher the credentials required the less diverse the workforce becomes. In a couple of minutes I'm going to give you the opportunity to ask these panelists some questions so be thinking about what you want to ask and I'd like to ask you all. I won't ask Jaina because I know what she's going to say because she's talked about the good model that Illinois is but Melissa and Danielle could you talk about some beacons of hope out there? Anybody implementing some of these ideas that you have and doing a good job of it? Sure. I think there's lots of beacons of hope because if I didn't think that I couldn't go to work every day. So obviously Illinois has led the way for lots of folks. Tennessee has done some tremendous work in building quality across various providers. Colorado is doing some wonderful work particularly in Denver in building a birth to third grade system and thinking about what the core components for children and families are when you build that system and then matching them to an improved quality rating system across the state and getting increased access for children in high quality programs. Georgia has spent quite a bit of time not just building their universal pre-K program but now using an early learning challenge grant creating what they call E3 zones that are early childhood zones that are focused on high quality access for the whole community and really building again thinking about from an equity lens how you get more children who are at risk into environments where we can build their language and literacy where we can build family engagement and those kind of things and build better connections to schools. The Atlanta Public Schools as well are thinking about how to be part of a birth to third grade system. Surprisingly I think Alabama has done a tremendous amount of work both in building high quality systems that are linked at least pre-K into kindergarten and then because the woman who runs the department for children is actually now running the process to create their ESSA plan. They have a very young child approach to how they're building the ESSA plan. So who's there a couple? Like with Georgia in terms of communicating with families if you look at right from the start go to their website they have done a phenomenal job with really communicating what developmentally appropriate practices to providers and to parents and family members. I'd also say Maryland I've talked to Maryland a lot and with their framework they're looking across all early learning settings so it's not just one program it's across all of them and touched almost the other ones I was thinking. Well and just to have them make sure that folks know in the room their family engagement has become a lot more robust. Early childhood we know has had a lot of support and CELO and other entities but it's great that Quacy's here because we've had we just had our third annual family engagement conference with the new NAFSCI National Association of School Family Community Engagement Partnerships. We actually have a state administrators group that meets on a monthly basis and we meet once a year and these are state administrators Maryland and Tennessee and Texas and we're at the table and we're really thinking about things like ESSA and how we make that real and so there are folks within the state and if you don't know who they are find them because they're huge partners as we're rewriting education right now. I like that rewriting education right now so what questions do you have in the audience and I would remind you if you haven't spoken if you're just speaking second time tell us who you are and where you're from. Still Quacy. So Reyna I'm curious after all these years a couple of years ago it seemed that there was an effort by your colleges and universities to address the new certification requirement for principals that I think Illinois may have been the first state to require a P-12 certification for principals and so that led to some new things can you tell us a little bit more about that and I wonder if anybody else knows if any other states have moved in that direction. So the LINC initiative really brought together so it added a lot of very robust requirements around principals, three well in particular making sure that principals had both content but also practicum experience around early childhood around ELLs around working with students with disabilities and trying to make those opportunities really reflect I think the kind of demographic shifts that we're talking about but it was a huge redesign and so there was a lot of bringing together some of our partners like Illinois State University were bringing together the prep programs again higher ed faculty what we found is anytime we make a major shift like this we have to bring higher ed on board and really help them make that bridge. What we've heard more recently I think is some you know it's been a huge challenge regionally to find the practicum experiences that really do provide those robust opportunities early childhood isn't universal the ELL population is kind of concentrated in different places but it's been the kind of learning curve that I think will give us that kind of instructional leadership we've been trying to kind of mirror it with some in-service projects so the ELLs of Prevention Fund has been working on a Lead Learn Excel project under our Early Learning Challenge Grant that's really working with particularly principal leaders and trying to help them become instructional and administrative leaders within early childhood programs knowing in a lot of places their purview is much bigger and they don't always focus on that area. So a couple of things to note the National Association for elementary school principals is engaged in a process to create a curriculum for principals around early childhood K-123 to build child development knowledge based on some work that's been done in New Jersey and in Minnesota and I'm sure you know about that so that's some important work. North Carolina has a birth to five certification as well as a pre-K to fifth I believe certification. One challenge when those exist is remembering that a lot of hiring decisions are made at the local school level and that a certification that goes across various grade levels may not be equally balanced in the background information that teachers bring and so somebody who's a very good third grade teacher who has a pre-K to fifth certification may be an awful pre-K teacher but his or her certification says it's okay for a principal to move them around which affects the quality of instruction for our young children. So it's not just about building those certification and licensure systems it's about, as we've heard, making sure that higher education builds appropriate child development knowledge and how to teach pedagogy of young children into those certification and licensure programs. Thank you. I've got questions from the audience. Hi, I'm Claudia Haynes from the Homer Public Library and I guess I'm wondering how you see libraries and other community institutions and organizations fitting in to the future under ESSA. I would just say on our end there are a couple of really interesting things. So we have our second largest school district in the state began a partnership between the local hospital, the local library, the school district where at the hospital parents were given orientation packets to the school district and they would get a school district onesie if they went to the library to pick up a library card for the baby. And so just right there they were starting to set the and it was a class of 20, whatever, right? And so they were starting to just create connections, small things, right? But that partnership came with other components. You're never too young to have a library card. You're never too young to begin to take your infant and be in those spaces. I think right now for us we're seeing a huge opportunity around the building parent capacities component looking for all the different partners because I think libraries have been trying to find where they fit in this digital future and is it about books? Is it about being a community space? Is it about courses and classes? That sort of thing, adult education? So I think in all of that wherever a library is we're trying to figure out can we create a bit of a community schools type hub where we can start to prepackage some partnership opportunities for school districts that they can then kind of know what could a role for libraries be as we try to build parent capacity around these. And can I just add that the idea that Raina talked about, I can see it right now being funded of at least five different programs within ESSA, the Title I, the community schools piece, through the early literacy piece. I'm trying to think there are about three others I can think of, but there are lots of hooks in there. So in a way it's sort of figuring out where you wanna go and then figuring out how you get it done through the law. The other thing to add is I think libraries are particularly important in supporting out of school time and summer learning and making sure that as the state is writing their state plan that you're at that table in the stakeholder engagement process to help push those ideas, programs and hooks. And in a lot of low income communities, libraries have been digital hubs for families, especially families that don't have access. And so I think libraries might be one of our better partners to really be able to bridge digital and families together. We have time for one more question from the audience. Very much, this has been very promising. What's in the law about working with low performing schools? What if anything is in there? So there is a lot, there's a whole long many page section on schools in need of improvement and how states identify them, which is based on some of the accountability factors, which will be set by the state. What needs to happen once a school is identified, including a needs assessment, which in sort of opinion, should include access to high quality, early childhood programming in the community, especially for underserved populations. Schools in need of improvement have to come up with a plan, there have to be research-based interventions, there are a number of years, there's lots in there about it, yes. Can I just add that, two things, one is that the law says the lowest 5% has to be served, then it also says schools where one of the subgroups is consistently underperforming, they have to be served, especially. The piece I would add is each state is going to determine consistently underperforming, each state is going to determine what the lowest 5% is. That's why it's so important for you all, if you have an idea of how you want those schools and those kids serve, you need to go and talk to your SEA, your state education agency, and testify at these hearings. It is really important that your voice be heard and how these ideas are shaped, because they're going to be shaped in maybe 50 different ways, depending on the state. And then when schools are actually identified in need of improvement and the district chooses the interventions, early childhood could be one of the interventions that's chosen, either reaching out to the community to build transitions and improve quality or actually doing direct service. Again, the local district will be writing those plans after the state plans are written, and so there'll be another opportunity to have your voice heard in terms of what we can contribute to building high quality systems for kids. I think that's a really important shift, and it's a leverage point for folks in the room. Early childhood is traditionally either not been really thought of as part of the federal elementary and secondary education framework, or it's a program, and I think right now there's this phenomenal opportunity. Under the last round of the big school improvement grant, early childhood was seen as a model for improvement. So you go, if your third graders aren't reading at grade level, maybe you need to start sooner and make sure they have access. And so that's one major shift in thinking this is an improvement strategy. And the second really important piece, as Elia mentioned, is the targeted component. There's a huge opportunity for equity here, but states may not have a lot of experience in building robust systems to address inequity. We tend to focus on low performance. Well, what does that look like when it's about a particular context that certain kids are facing? And that's, I think, one of our biggest challenges right now. You all came here as experts. You were invited as experts, but I wonder if you were coming here, you were thinking about what you wanted to learn from these folks over the next couple of days today and tomorrow. What was that? So I think the intersection of early literacy, technology, family engagement is fraught for many people. We talked about what can technology bring to the table. And so I think I was, I'm very interested in hearing those models that work particularly in low income communities for language minority families, for families that are disengaged for various reasons and how we can really bring services to them rather than requiring them to act with us. For me, I think the digital piece definitely is the kind of, was the biggest question mark because, again, that developmentally appropriate piece has always been a concern. And so I've been trying to listen for what is something that we're excited about as an early childhood space, as a family engagement space, knowing family engagement number one tenant for us is relationship and trust. And so I just don't want the digital piece to get in the way of that. And we're particularly thinking about what about families that we may not be touching in other ways deeply. Is there, are there strategies that may work if we have, you know, we may not have that family actually participating on a daily basis with us. Well, I've been slowly reading through the Institute of Medicine report, Parenting Matters. If you haven't read it, start reading it, it's fantastic. But one of the things they bring up is the role of technology and communication and how we're using technology. And also these gaps we have in research about what works for who. Because it's not a one-size-fits-all type thing. It's gonna look different with different subgroups. So I'm interested in hearing what's working and different populations. I hope we've proven that policy can be kind of exciting and help me thank our panelists. They were really good. Wasn't that great? And great moderation by Dr. Delia Pampa. Thank you. Close this out and talk a little bit about what we will expect, what we hope will happen tomorrow. And we wanted to just make sure we kind of start to wrap some of these pieces together and connect the dots for you a little bit. But then we'll also, we're not gonna take too long because we know we've been in this room for a while and we're excited about the reception to follow. But we front-loaded a lot of information here, right? We've been really trying to give you a sense of, first, that there are, and the partners that you're seeing that are part of this institute with us, that there are a lot of very exciting networks that are being built already that are now starting to even speak to each other and across. We're also seeing that, and we're hoping that you're seeing, that there's some real value in mapping and tracking. That it wasn't until we started putting all of this on that map that came out of this idea from CGI two years ago and from Shayna's, and Shayna did the work on analyzing this, but she also was one of the tech whizzes behind this. So we had a data-vis developer, but we also had Shayna working on the coding. Without that, we wouldn't have seen what we have, so I think that we need to kind of put that on the table. And then this really rich discussion about how to leverage some opportunities for scale-up if there's that. So we're working across those today to kind of put that into the air. And now, tomorrow, we want to set up some opportunities for some real conversation and some work, you know, help us. We are at the point now where we feel like there is a moment to make something bigger out of this, to drive towards those questions that Danielle and Rayna and Melissa just asked at the end here. How do we do this well? How do we make sure that this is not about some sort of strange add-on that actually doesn't get to the equity issues we so badly want to address? That is, in fact, not appropriate for children and families. So we are excited about the conversation tomorrow. I was going to start the poll everywhere, please, Michael, but I want to see what you might want to add. I mean, find your network, find your ally. This is really about an act of human discovery and human relationship building. There's lots of knowledge in the room, and we're trying to distill it and offer some of it in bite-sized pieces through conversations, through great action guides. You'll get into some of this tomorrow in terms of some new frameworks that we're providing to you. But it really is intended for the beginning of a conversation but expanding the conversation into an action framework. So here's a poll. OK, so what we wanted to do for the end here to really kind of take the temperature of the room a little bit and to set up tomorrow so that it's most useful? Oh, yeah, the temperature's been all over the place. It's sort of like where the field is, up and down and over. Yes, sorry about that. On behalf of New America, I will say we haven't quite figured. We moved in here eight months ago. We haven't quite figured out our air conditioning system yet. We've got 160 degrees outside. That might have something to do with it. But on another kind of taking the climate temperature of the room note, we wanted to use some new technology to get a sense of where we still might sense that the biggest challenge is lies so that we can make sure we're tackling those issues head-on tomorrow when we have our first breakout session. And this is also because about 60 of you responded to the survey that we gave earlier. And now we want to get everybody in the room into the next. That's right. So you, in front of you, at every table, there is a guide to how to do this. It says poll everyone. Everybody has a table number. And on that table number, there is a poll everywhere line. And sorry, and Deborah's got a question. That's why I was just about to show. So on every table, there's a card. Your table card. Thank you. Thank you, Deborah. So on that, you'll see the Wi-Fi code if you'd like to get in. You could also do this just using your regular cell phone plan. You don't have to be on Wi-Fi to do this. And if you're just using your cell phone, and if you will first do this text to get started, this really won't take long, I promise. Just text. Most of you, it won't take long. Go in as if you're going to text your friend, your husband, whoever. But open a new message and text to 22333. And put the subject, I mean, the words that you're texting will be New America. All one word. Just string it together. And I have a question from Michael. OK. Thank you. Choose C. OK. Sorry, I didn't see this. So some people are already doing this. This is so exciting. So everyone see this. So once you've gotten in, then you'll be able to answer this question. And I'm going to read this out. And I'm also going to show you the one little problem that Michael just forgot I found just found for us, which is great. So what you do is put down what the biggest challenge or barrier you face in using a tech tool. Is it limited funding? And if it's limited funding, pick A. If it's lack of internet access, put C. And don't worry about B, because we doubled that by accident. If it's your inability to serve families in their home languages, you can choose D. If it's concerns about using technology with families, with young children, et cetera, et cetera, does everyone see it here? And definitely raise your hand if you're having any trouble. Yes, yes. Oh my goodness, is the poll full? The poll might be full. I think that we may have had a limit as to about 70 people or something to do the poll. So as everyone's starting to get the full message, we may have reached the limit on our subscription. I'm sorry. We expected 70 people here originally. And 115 signed up. I think we'll just let this finally run out here. And I'll just read a little bit. We're going to capture this. In fact, maybe we should take a screenshot. Read it. OK, I'm going to read it out for you. Thank you. So I'm just going to, if you guys can hear me, I'm going to read this now. A is limited. I know, but people can't see it in the back. They want me to read it to them. A is limited funding. B is or C, if you don't have reliable internet access, that that's a big barrier. D is inability to serve families in their home languages. E is concerns about using technology with families with young children. E, sorry. F, can you guys hear me OK? Yeah, F is limited motivation from stakeholders to change ways of doing things. G is high turnover of program staff. H, for lack of interest or support or lack of interest or involvement from families. I, concerns over scalability. And put down J, if your barrier is program evaluation or a lack of evaluation of your tech tools impact. So we have lots of options up there for you. So I hope I'm sorry for those who got a full message. And maybe we'll try to fix that before tomorrow. We're going to use this at the end of the day tomorrow as well.