IN THE NEWS: SCE Chairman Susan Crown on Social Impact Investing

SCE Chairman Susan Crown spoke on a panel on Social Impact Investing for Chicago Ideas Week. Check out the Chicago Tribune feature on the event here.

SCE: Our Story, Model, Mission

Emotional intelligence has matured from a buzzword, or an exciting-yet-untried idea. Now there’s data to back it up. Daniel Goleman has been studying it since the 1990’s, and so have University of New Hampshire’s John Mayer and Yale’s Peter Salovey. As Goleman writes on his website: “Now the case can be made scientifically: helping children improve their self-awareness and confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in measurable academic achievement.”

Eleven years later, Goleman wrote “Social Intelligence,” distilling other powerful truths about how humans learn and interact. He wrote: “Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person.”

Yet how do we teach emotional and social intelligence, and non-cognitive smarts—the fundamental skills for life satisfaction and success? And further, how will the explosion of technology play a synergistic role in helping students access every chance to grow and prosper in a changing society?

These questions get to the very heart of the SCE story, what we’re all about, and what we aim to accomplish.

The story of SCE: Susan Crown came to the task of forming SCE after three decades as an executive and foundation CEO, with experience in social and commercial investing, and plenty of hands on work in urban education and global poverty. But she was eager for a better approach and in 2009 launched the Susan Crown Exchange. She persuaded some incredible talents to form a board and get rolling. Why start a new organization when so many nonprofits already exist?

The answer boils down to this: SCE seeks to take bigger risks on innovation in driving educational change. But it is not about creating brand new programs on a whim and hoping they work. This distinction gets to the heart of SCE’s revolutionary exchange model.

Our exchange model: In their groundbreaking book “Enlightened Leadership,” authors Ed Oakley and Doug Krug write, “People tend to resist changes thrust upon them, while they naturally support ideas and changes they help create.” Here’s another way of putting it: The best ideas in social learning are bubbling up already, healthy wellsprings of change and promise created by daring innovators. All they need is a chance to grow and flourish, given the right conditions.

With the exchange model, SCE recognizes this truth. Like detectives on the hunt for clues, we partner with and invest in practitioners doing exceptional work with youth. Working with “ideas and changes they helped create,” rather than believing we are smarter or imposing a strict agenda on them, we hope to offer support —both financial and strategic—to take their outstanding work to a new level. We call this our SEL Challenge (standing for Social and Emotional Learning).

We exist to connect talent and innovation with market forces to drive social change. But it’s not all as complex as you might think. Great ideas that drive social and emotional learning often begin as something simple.

Our mission: In studying this area, we’ve been humbled to learn a few things. One key statistic is that children spend almost 80% of their time outside the formal school environment. As a society we think of classrooms as the places where kids learn, and they do. But in looking at emotional intelligence and “non-cognitive” smarts, here’s the bottom line: Structured yet fun environments outside of school can have true, lasting impact.

That is, informal learning pathways—the kinds of programs that often exist in small pockets beyond the educational system, or school walls—help us to reimagine education as a broad and rich ecosystem for learning beyond academics.

Once we identify the best practices and evaluation methods of these organizations, we will then share these findings broadly through an SEL Field Guide. Think of it like this: In these programs, treasures exist for our children. Our agenda is to discover the programs, uncover their treasures, and then give other groups far and wide the roadmap to find them.

Is Social and Emotional Learning the whole of the SCE story and agenda? Far from it. Digital learning investments also make up a large part of what we’re about. Currently, the average American child spends about 7.5 hours per day consuming digital media. Yet many of the billions of kids’ hours spent with digital media (even inside school settings) provide little or no learning value.

We seek to influence the quality of the digital learning media tools that reach low-income youth. But there’s much work to do here. We need to increase the supply and quality of digital learning media. We need to stimulate demand for it. And we intend to help build the digital learning field—hitting all of these goals through our funding initiatives.

Is this an ambitious agenda overall? You bet. But SCE, based in Chicago, reflects the spirit of a great Chicagoan, architect Daniel Burnham: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

 

 

How Reading Literature Cultivates Empathy

Great read over on Edutopia about how literature helps us engage with compassion and care for others, and how the Common Core may have missed the mark on prioritizing the value of fiction in teaching empathy.

What are your thoughts?

Read the piece here: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/reading-literature-cultivates-empathy-in-students-elena-aguilar?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=blog-empathy-literature-elena-link

A note from SCE Chairman, Susan Crown

At SCE we are keenly interested in learning about learning.

Our new SEL initiative is an effort to better understand the non-cognitive skills—grit, resilience, and agency- that fortify and sustain us through challenges, and keep us on course to reach our goals.

We are very pleased (and surprised) by the level of interest in this program.  Over 200 potential partners joined our conference call outlining the effort to prospective partners, and over 4,000 have visited our Challenge Grant website.  We take this as a strong indication that that many are as intrigued by this topic as we are.

Thank you for the time you are investing in this undertaking. We hope we have useful insights and protocols to share one year from now. Thanks, too, for your work equipping the rising generation with the skills and tools needed to thrive in the 21st century.

-Susan Crown

NOW ACCEPTING LETTERS OF INQUIRY

In December, SCE unveiled our most recent initiative, the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge. Your responses have been enormously positive and we are happy to be among such dynamic doers and thinkers in the nebulous– yet fast-ascending– space that is Social and Emotional Learning. We look forward to reading your Letters of Inquiry (which we will be accepting through January 24th @ 5PM CT)!

In the meantime, please save the date for the Question and Answer Conference Call on Friday, January 10, 2014 at 1:00pm CT [Dial-in Number: 1-712-432-3022; Conference Code: 707402]. Please submit your questions beforehand tochallenge@scefdn.org. If you are unable to call in, don’t worry. We will be posting all of the questions and answers here: http://scechallenge.org/sel-questions/

Thanks for reading and we look forward to hearing from you.

Announcing the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge

SCE is inviting letters of inquiry for the Social and Emotional Learning Challenge! Do you know of any high impact organizations working with teens outside school hours? We want to connect with them. Learn about the initiative at the link below. We will be accepting LOIs January 6th-24th, 2014.

Social and Emotional Learning: Elevating “EQ”

At SCE, we are investing considerable time growing our Social and Emotional Learning Program (SEL), a portfolio of initiatives aimed at shaping ecosystems that broaden and enrich opportunities for learning beyond academics and outside school walls. The SEL Program emphasizes emotional intelligence (EQ) and “non-cognitive” smarts as key drivers of life success that help us navigate relationships, conflict and stress.

Through both SEL and Digital Learning investments, SCE aims to influence the way markets function across fields and sectors to build out an infrastructure for anytime, anywhere 21st century learning.  Read on to find out more about where we started, what we’re learning, and how we’ve chosen to move  forward.

Our exploration into social and emotional learning began with an inquiry: why do some young people achieve success despite adversity? Are there pivotal moments or transformational experiences that shift young people’s trajectories toward success or failure? We wanted to discover what inputs along the pipeline propel vulnerable youth onto positive life paths, so we started investigating and asking a lot of questions.

We engaged experts and practitioners in virtually every related field: researchers in various sectors of psychology, developmental science and applied youth development; policy leaders at institutions such as the American Institutes for Research and the National Research Council; and experts at advocacy organizations like the Forum for Youth Investment and the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). We read dozens of books, articles, white papers and reports on topics ranging from neuroscience and early childhood literacy, to personality theory and economics.

Along the way, we discovered that the phenomenon we were interested in could not be distilled into a single experience, but was the result of a complex and nonlinear process of growth and positive adjustment throughout life, called thriving, and that it takes a network of supports and opportunities to help youth foster the skills they need to get there. Social and emotional skills, particularly empathy, resilience, grit, self-regulation, and agency—sometimes considered outcomes— were the very “inputs” for life success that our exploration set out to uncover.

We define social and emotional learning as the process through which people learn fundamental skills to recognize and manage their emotions and social relationships. Our SEL Program leverages the unique ability of informal learning pathways to structure experiences for teens in creative ways that encourage them to connect to positive futures.

SCE will soon be launching the first SEL Program initiative to partner with and invest in practitioners who are doing exceptional work with youth. Watch this space for up-to-date information about a forthcoming request for proposals.

SCE Digital Learning Challenge: Partner Update

Last year, SCE launched a challenge initiative to identify and partner with organizations working to increase access to the most engaging, educationally effective digital learning media, particularly for underserved populations.

We were thrilled by the response we received and were able to learn about many high-impact organizations working to increase access to quality digital learning tools. We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY’s PowerMyLearning and Ednovo’s Gooru demonstrated the greatest potential to increase the supply of high-quality digital learning media, and foster greater use of these products in environments that maximize learning.

We recently checked in with Pram from Ednovo and Elisabeth from CFY to share an update on their progress, thoughts on how the digital learning field is changing and ideas about how we can continue to develop an ecosystem that supports the development and distribution of high-quality digital learning tools.

A few moments with Prasad Ram (aka Pram), Founder, CEO and Chairman of Gooru

Tell us a bit about Gooru.

Gooru was founded in 2011 as a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a mission to honor the human right to education by developing innovative technology to positively impact learning. Gooru accomplishes this by delivering the best resources on the Web to teachers and students through a free search engine for learning. With over 10 million online resources and 1 million questions, Gooru makes it easy to discover topic relevant and standards-aligned K-12 content to address specific students’ needs. Teachers share lessons and homework with students through Gooru collections, playlists of videos, digital textbooks, games, and quiz questions they can customize for their class. View this video to see how Gooru works.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is Gooru impacting the digital learning space?

We all know that teachers are strapped for time. As the amount of information and access to technology increases, teachers and students are now challenged with filtering through the noise. Gooru saves teachers time by giving them personalized access to the best materials on the web, the ability to organize and remix content into playlists and share with students in class or as homework. Like familiar sites you use to find movies or shop online, Gooru learns users’ preferences and unique needs through their effort and performance on the site. Gooru can suggest to teachers the exact set of learning resources that meet individual student needs, giving them a scalable solution to differentiate the materials they share with their students.

What impact does Gooru have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

Gooru brings the vast content of the Web to teachers and students in a way that immediately addresses their specific needs and learning styles. Students use Gooru for independent learning or when directed by their teachers during class or through homework assignments. Diana Herrington, a veteran and honored Mathematics teacher based in Clovis, CA, used Gooru to help her students learn more efficiently, and to be able to evaluate whether material is beneficial for their learning process. Using this teaching method, Diana’s participating students saw their unit test scores increase 10-15 percentage points above those who didn’t. Diana says, “my students learned that Gooru gave them an alternative for engagement in the curriculum.”

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

It is clear that personalized learning at scale through digital learning environments has the greatest potential to produce positive learning outcomes. As personalization technology is used to extend the benefits of the Web and technology for learning we are seeing innovative approaches in traditional and non-traditional learning environments propel forward with strong momentum. This can be seen by the growing number of students who are enabled to take ownership of their education with custom learning pathways based on their interests. There is compelling research showing that students who are empowered to use resources that they learn best from and at a pace that they are most comfortable with, approach learning with greater motivation.

We are also excited to see more and more classrooms coming online with smart phones, tablets and laptops. It will take some time to have all classrooms in America technology ready, though one can feel that the digital classroom with all its great benefits for learning is within reach.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

Teachers and students have a large number of tools and learning resources accessible to them today. These independent tools and content have been supported by funders and investors over the past decade. Teachers and students are however demanding integrated solutions — not point products. They want capabilities such as search, social, wiki, analytics, personalization and assessments to work as a tight knit solution. For education to succeed in this new technology-centric era, it requires a vibrant ecosystem of funders and companies working together to foster open systems. Funders can help by requiring their grantees to develop open solutions and content and avoid duplicative efforts by leveraging open solutions. The greatest source of friction to a world of open education is the absence of platforms that every edtech company can build upon. Similar to the iOS and Android mobile platforms, or enterprise platforms such as SAP and Oracle, education needs a platform that the world can rally around.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

We envision a world where every student will have access to the highest quality of education and personalized learning is becoming widely accepted as the way forward to achieve this.  While technology is viewed as the catalyst for this shift in approach, it is clear teachers will continue to play a crucial role in facilitating an environment of autonomous and pervasive learning for students. This means a future education paradigm that extends beyond the four walls of a classroom and a learning path that is mapped based on a student’s interests and optimal pace administered by teachers through technology.

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A few moments with Elisabeth Stock, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CFY 

Tell us a bit about PowerMyLearning.

PowerMyLearning.org is a destination for thousands of the best free online learning activities from across the web. Developed for K-12 children, and their parents and teachers, it offers an engaging way for kids to learn while having fun. PowerMyLearning makes it simple to find and use carefully curated games, videos, and simulations that have been tagged by subject, grade, individual Common Core Standard, and more.

The platform also includes powerful tools, like our Playlist feature, which lets teachers sequence activities (like songs on iTunes) and assign them so each child gets material that’s right for them. Kids can then access these Playlists anywhere, providing them with a fun educational resource to propel achievement.

The next generation PowerMyLearning will be launching in September and will include lots of great enhancements. Later this fall, the learning experience will become even more engaging, social, and personal for kids as we integrate gamification features funded by SCE.

What challenges or gaps are you trying to address and how is PowerMyLearning impacting the digital learning space?

PowerMyLearning addresses a major challenge in the digital learning space – the dizzying array of learning content available on the web that makes it hard to know what’s trusted, what’s high-quality, and what’s age-appropriate. PowerMyLearning addresses this challenge by making it easy to find and use the most engaging and effective activities available. PowerMyLearning can be used to help children learn, by enabling them to catch up if they’re falling behind, encouraging them to push ahead if they’re not challenged enough, or just empowering them to pursue a topic of interest. A team of professional educators has already vetted the content found on PowerMyLearning so kids and their families and teachers know it’s trusted.  This team has also tagged the content by subject, grade, Common Core Standard, and more, so kids and their families and teachers can easily find and use what they need.

What impact does PowerMyLearning have on how and what children are learning and how are you measuring that impact?

PowerMyLearning helps children learn and empowers them to take charge of their learning. By making available thousands of activities, PowerMyLearning enables kids to enrich their education through exploration, sparking new interests in the process. It also offers pathways for self-remediation. Kids learn in different ways and PowerMyLearning provides them the diversity to learn in a way that works for them. Kids quickly become cognizant of their academic strengths and weaknesses and know how to help themselves advance their learning.

To measure impact, we look at academic gains at partner schools using PowerMyLearning. A New York Times article highlighted the results at one school where the use of PowerMyLearning resulted in real gains, especially for the most struggling students. Kids who had previously withdrawn from studies were suddenly re-energized by the range of fun and engaging educational activities they could access and explore on their own. We also look at time on assigned versus unassigned activities. Data shows kids spend approximately half their time on PowerMyLearning using teacher-assigned activities and half exploring activities that they have found on their own.

In your opinion, what is the most exciting thing happening right now in digital learning?

The most exciting thing happening in digital learning is the explosion of content children can now access online to meet their specific learning needs. Kids can use this content to get immediate feedback on how well they understand what they are learning and to get to know themselves better as learners. They can also use this content to explore and enrich their learning. One factor that is making this happen is the transformation taking place in the K-12 education marketplace. Basically, the marketplace is undergoing the same transformation that the music industry has already experienced – evolving from offering content in large chunks (such as a comprehensive software product or “music album”) to offering content in small granular and modular chunks (such as a short learning activity or a “song”). The benefit of this shift is that small pieces of content from different publishers can be mixed and matched and mashed up with teacher self-generated content to create the best possible learning experience for each student. We see the PowerMyLearning platform as an integral part of this transformation to granular, modular content.

How can funders, investors, educators and consumers help to develop the innovation ecosystem needed to support the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools? What barriers or gaps do you see in the field?

To encourage the creation of high-quality, scalable digital learning tools, we need to change the current ecosystem. Right now, small developers have no easy distribution mechanism for getting their products into the market and instead must sell their products via relationships in a fragmented marketplace. One way funders and investors could change this ecosystem it to help platforms like PowerMyLearning remove these barriers so we can have a more vibrant marketplace where small developers can thrive.

How do you see digital learning transforming education over the next decade?

Over the next decade, we see digital learning transforming education by enabling teachers to fully personalize the learning experience for their students and also enabling kids to drive their own learning at their own pace. We believe that it’s essential to propel both a personalized instruction cycle and a student-driven learning cycle in an integrated manner. If we can do this, we can improve academic achievement nationwide and better prepare kids for college.

SCE’s Digital Learning Challenge: What Happened, What We Learned

The Challenge didn’t start with a Challenge. It began with a question: Why isn’t the best stuff getting to the most kids? And by “stuff,” we meant “digital learning media.”

During late 2011 and early 2012, our staff and board talked through this problem with our partners and advisors. At one point, it was “building the School in the Cloud.” At another, it was “creating the systems integrator for digital learning.” We thought someone should build The Platform for digital learning, but we knew it wouldn’t be us. As with everything SCE does, we were looking for a high-leverage way to address a multibillion-dollar problem.

We settled on an idea, inspired by our board member Paul Jansen, an expert on prizes and innovation. Why not just put up a vision of what we think should exist, and let the experts in the field tell us how they’d build it? That became the Digital Learning Challenge.

The Knight Foundation and Gates Foundation are two of many organizations using similar methods, with great success. There would be two key differences from what we’d seen before:

1. We were more specific about the world we wanted to create
2. We were more focused on system-level change than the success of individual projects.

We were thrilled to receive nearly 100 letters of inquiry in response to our Request for LOIs. Our first-round screening process focused on five core criteria (rating each on a 1-to-10 scale):

• Vision: Does this project offer a compelling vision for changing the field?
• Strategy: Does the LOI describe a realistic plan for achieving its goals?
• Organization: Is this organization capable of executing successfully on this strategy?
• Alignment: Is this project aligned with SCE’s Challenge focus?
• Accountability: Will we be able to measure the project’s success?

About a dozen rose to the surface for our review team. After discussions with our board, we solicited detailed proposals from five organizations that seemed most aligned with SCE’s goals and our capacity to be strong partners. From that group, we worked with our advisors to select CFY and Ednovo as our two key partners (see earlier announcement).

Here are 5 things we learned about our field during the process:

1. The field is smarter than we are. That there is wisdom in crowds—and in unexpected places—is no secret. But after nearly three years of deep exploration in the education technology sector, we were still surprised to surface dozens of great ideas and great projects we had never heard of.
2. SCE is a little different. We thought our goals and our process were ambitious, but straightforward. Yet throughout the process, we heard feedback that we were doing something unlike our grantmaker peers. The downside was that we received some blank stares (or their digital equivalent) when we described the Challenge externally. The upside is that many of the field’s most forward-thinking leaders really got what we were doing, and became passionate about spreading the word.
3. Everyone thinks they’re the platform. We know that there won’t be one platform for accessing digital learning product, but we do expect major consolidation around how children (and the schools, programs, and people that serve them) access digital learning media. It seems there are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who disagree with us. We’d love to be proven wrong.
4. People still love school. Edtech boosters seem to fit into two categories. Those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Hey, let’s bring videogames into school, and make education more like a videogame.” And then those who see kids playing videogames all the time, and say, “Wow, that’s a lot of kid time. Maybe we should get them to play different games, or better harvest the learning that’s happening in the games that exist.” From the looks of what we saw during the Challenge process, most people are still stuck in the former category, and (more disappointing, at least to us) trying to slot technology into traditional school paradigms instead of rethinking new models of blended learning.
5. Content has a long way to go. We read a lot of strong proposals from content developers. But most of them focused on the basics (reading, writing, arithmetic), not on more complex Deeper Learning skills or social-emotional skills. And the products themselves weren’t pushing the boundaries of technology: we saw zero alternate reality games, only a few virtual worlds, and a surprisingly small number of tablet apps. One of our next big post-Challenge initiatives is aimed at helping developers and entrepreneurs create path-breaking learning products. Stay tuned.

Thanks for reading. We’re so glad the selection process went as well as it did, and we welcome feedback as we look to try it again.

Announcing the 2013 Digital Learning Challenge partners

We are excited to announce this year’s Digital Learning Challenge partners: CFY and Ednovo!

CFY will use the SCE Challenge grant to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, its platform that aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible and usable. Ednovo will create Gooru: BLEND, which builds from Gooru’s existing education search engine to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience.

We saw some incredible proposals, but CFY and Ednovo clearly rose to the top. Here’s a little more information on who they are and what they’re working on with our support:

• CFY has more than a decade of experience delivering educational tools and technology to underserved learners natiowide. Its PowerMyLearning project aggregates the most effective digital learning activities available on the web and makes them easily accessible, usable, and free. The Challenge project will allow CFY to enhance the user experience of PowerMyLearning, including introducing new viral marketing and engagement features and improving the platform’s look and feel. We expect this catalytic work will create a virtuous cycle of greater demand, which drives new development of digital education content and in turn more demand for PowerMyLearning.  The ultimate objective is to enable children to make greater and more effective use of high-quality digital learning activities.
• Ednovo has built Gooru, an innovative search engine for learning. The Challenge project will allow the organization to create Gooru: BLEND, which will build from Gooru’s existing platform to provide students with a cohesive, personalized digital learning experience. The project’s primary improvements will be building the infrastructure for “Collections 2.0”—curated, guided collections of digital learning resources, with quizzes that provide learning feedback in real time. In the long term, Gooru: BLEND will become a blended learning suite that is engaging, affordable (free except for the cost of the device), and relevant for students across all subjects. This project also provides funding to design and create a prototype for collections in the high-need subject area of middle-school math.

Our team had a great time reading about so many high-impact, under-the-radar organizations, and becoming acquainted with the finalists. It gave us great faith in the education sector as a whole, and in digital learning entrepreneurs in particular.

Look for another post in the coming weeks about the Challenge process and what we learned. And yes, we expect to run another Challenge in the near future.