The Surprising Reason Kids Are Losing Their Creativity

[0:00]  one of the things that we talk a lot about is how important it is to keep creativity curiosity front and center in elementary school as children are learning to read and and write and and develop socially so um I think sadly your experience is is not unique and that's really sad to think about you know if we expect the Next Generation to be able to flourish and thrive in creating opportunities and Building Things to push our society forward if they don't have the foundation underneath them it seems like we're headed towards like a glass Cliff right Kelly welcome to the show I'm so

[0:48]  incredibly gracious that uh you're here today with me it's super cool to be able to talk to an amazing leader like you I'm happy to be here you know one of the things that we're going to be talking about today is not only your work as being the president CEO of collaborative classroom but I want to talk about some of the challenges that you're seeing out in the world of education and early childhood development you know I've had a lot of people on the podcast where we talk about why this work is so important and so before we kind of dive into that I want to know a little bit more about your origin story so let's talk about why this work is so important to you and kind of how we got to where we're at here today yeah so uh couple things about me I started as a second grade teacher up in Northern California in a very rural School uh up there but early early as when I was growing up my dad was a high school teacher so every

[1:36]  seventh period I walked for my elementary school and sat in his seventh period history class and got to kind of observe you know the the class with the high school kids and as a very young child few things I realized pretty quickly that uh were the sense of connection and relationship that kids had with each other and with my dad as the teacher uh in their school and that learning could be a lot of fun and but uh could also be really powerful for what's possible in the world when you kind of own the knowledge yourself it's interesting concept to me because I very transparently was not the best student right I never had somebody who inspired me to dive into the endless world that is knowledge but when I became an entrepreneur when I was 24 years old I started recognizing that there were so many secrets that were on the other side

[2:23]  of books in education and my only job was to continue to consume information to become the best version of myself and I wish I would have you know had an early experience in life that would have got me on that track a little earlier yeah no I think that happens a lot I mean even though my dad was a teacher I always say you know I'm the third smartest kid in my in my family um but I also think that allowed for a lot of creativity and thinking um as well and um you know for for me school was very social it was a big part of my social life and I was a big athlete in school uh as well but it did also take me a while to to realize how much I I loved learning let's talk a little bit about that competitiveness through being an athlete I'm a lifelong athlete as well I played baseball in college and I really started to decide that um when I got a little

[3:10]  bit older I was going through a big identity crisis if you will um where I had a a mentor of mine said Keenan you know for so long you've put so much time and effort into becoming a professional baseball player one day you're going to have to decide to go pro at something else and I started developing the skill set to be the best business person that I possibly could and that's how I translated that competitive nature of sports into the afterworld if you will of regular life how did you kind of use if you will your athletic experiences to kind of drive you into different areas yeah I love that um well I mean I think first and foremost I think being part of teams when we're growing up and you know when we're fortunate to have done that in college as well as the gift uh that keeps on giving so one of the things that I didn't have the opportunity to go

[3:57]  pro in basketball I kind of missed to that boat I love seeing where it is now um and truth be told now seeing all these women I would not be good enough uh but they're phenomenal I love it but I think one of the things you know I talk about this with a lot of my friends who also kind of grew up as athletes or were in the Performing Arts or had some way that they were really part of community and uh excelling in in in different things one of the things I think is so true that helps in my professional life and I would imagine with yours but that sense of teamwork for me is winning when we're functioning well as a team that feels like winning to me when I'm hearing about good things happening in schools and districts because our curriculum is helping teachers that's winning uh for for us so I think um I still have that competitive Spirit very much but it it's it's

[4:46]  definitely guided in a much different way now I want to talk a little bit about the work that you guys do um at collaborative classroom so what is the big challenge that we're kind of tackling in society today with the work that you guys do yeah so we very much work in the literacy and Social Development space so we have offerings that go from birth all the way up through fifth grade with some going up into 12th grade so uh the majority of our work is in elementary schools it's in literacy so as you know uh as a country we're not doing great in literacy uh we're also you know not doing great and children feeling a real sense of connectedness and connection in school as well so our work is really geared towards helping teachers um build very powerful readers writers and thinkers in their classroom and supporting them with their own

[5:33]  professional development as they teach our our program so that's that's a that's where we spend all of our time is is how to make the the teachers experience much stronger when did you realize that this was a really big challenge that we were dealing with in the education system today and in society in general you know I think as soon as I got into teaching I knew it um I taught like I said in a in a school that you know we were we we were we were struggling with teaching our our children to read um and write and and be really powerful thinkers so very early on um almost 30 years ago now and I've been working on that ever since it's it's a really interesting priority in our previous conversation I mentioned a little bit about the uh interview that I did with the CEO of world reader right and we were talking about the Traditions the Curiosity and

[6:22]  the opportunities to inspire the young people in our communities through reading but it seems like this is a little bit more of a threat today especially in this digital consumption world that we live in is reading something that people are prioritizing and maybe why have we gotten so far away from that yeah I think that's a it's a really valid point I mean and I think it goes beyond just even being able to read but to think critically to you know to question things that people are reading or hearing is is going to become more important uh in the digital age that we get into um but you know just in the fundamentals of teaching kids how to read in elementary school um that's still a huge need and priority I mean the number of children who are not on grade level by the end of third grade is pretty overwhelming and all the research shows that if children are not on track

[7:10]  by the end of third grade some are even saying first um the the challenges that children eventual middle school students eventual high school students have is um is pretty overwhelming and it's something that we can do a lot about we know a lot about how to teach kids how to read I mean it erodes at your confidence though my personal story was in 1997 me and my family moved from Seattle Washington to a suburb outside of Detroit and the school that I went to was a small private Lutheran School 104 kids grades kindergarten through 12th grade now when I was going through first second third grade there I struggled with reading comprehension it was really tough for me but I didn't realize how far behind I was until I went to public school in fourth grade and I had a really tough time keeping up with all

[7:57]  the reading assignments everything else like that and it shaped my perspective of Education as something that I didn't enjoy because it was so challenging for me and it really kind of stunted my creativity my curiosity and learning things because I dreaded going to school every day because I didn't have the fundamentals underneath me yeah I you know I think that that sadly is common in a lot of places and I also you know one of the things that we talk a lot about is how important it is to keep creativity curiosity front and center in elementary schol schol as children are learning to read and and write and and develop socially so um I think sadly your experience is is not unique and that's really sad to think about you know if we expect the Next Generation to be able to flourish and thrive in

[8:44]  creating opportunities and Building Things to push our society forward if they don't have the foundation underneath them it seems like we're headed towards like a glass Cliff right where we're not going to see the changes that are necessary to push our society forward yeah I think that's true I also think folks are making a lot of strides I think that you know there's a lot of questioning about how we prepare teachers where how teachers come into the system how we support teachers once they're uh in schools and districts so I think there are a lot of uh States making efforts I think there's a lot of school districts making efforts um to try to change some of some of what has has happened for sure I want to know a little bit about your guys's model so when I think about your guys's model from the business perspective I think about it as like the Train the trainer model so you're going to equip the person who's in front of the people who they're impacting every single day with

[9:30]  the best tools and resources let's talk a little bit about what you guys have created yeah so uh you know just a real quick recap we started as a research Institution for the first 20 years and we really studied sense of connection connection sense of belonging with with with children and in the early 2000s our founder his name was Eric shaps and he said you know how do we marry this with literacy it's the biggest part of a child's day in elementary school and I really think the pathway here is marrying Social Development with literacy um development uh through the K5 years so that changed our whole organization so we went from doing a lot of just teacher training writing professional books to actually building that daily curriculum that teachers could use because one of the things we know is that if teachers just get

[10:16]  professional learning and have nothing to use every day it's not very sticky uh and also we can't expect teachers to be making every single lesson for every single day for every single subject that has coherence across the year coherence across a K5 um career you know of of a of a child so that's the work that we do so we really Provide support to the teachers who are you know really um serving their their children uh so we do it through curriculum and really powerful professional learning how do we get the curriculum adopted right in certain school districts you guys have a national footprint right so what were some of the early days of trying to say hey here's a standardized curriculum that we can kind of integrate into the curriculum that's being taught in the classroom did you guys run into early roadblocks with trying to get these

[11:02]  things adopted yeah you know we certainly did and it's and it's still roadblocks we have today one of the things that most people don't know uh almost every company selling curriculum in the education space is a for-profit company and at this point most are owned by private Equity mini or Venture backed we are one of the only nonprofits in this in this work so you can imagine you know we we are a little hindered by the amount of money we can invest at any given time um so we have a very strong ground game we have an excellent um group of Educators on the ground that bring our work to schools and districts we have a great uh set of professional developers uh and program developers we all come from education backgrounds uh so we're very unique in the space I'm really proud of the reach

[11:51]  that we have we support almost 200,000 teachers every day which is over three million students uh but it's very small in comparison to the student body that's out there um but I'm I'm pretty proud that as a nonprofit We can we can actually um support teachers in this way here's a little bit of an interesting question with so much Capital being infused to the Space by private Equity venture-backed organizations do you ever worry about the incentives that might be behind some of the things that they're pushing in the space I I I think it's a valid question um you know in in terms of you know what materials look like what you know what Market needs they're trying to meet um for us we stay rooted in a couple things what does the evidence say about literacy and let's stick to that what do we know about the

[12:40]  healthy development of children do we have a good understanding of Child Development and what do we know about what really supports teachers and so we kind of stay true to these these things um and that keeps us very rooted it keeps us very grounded and sometimes look we you know sometimes we don't grow in certain markets because of something a big publisher has done and we just have to be okay with that oh man that's got to be frustrating though you know with the impact that you guys are trying to accomplish here and the the clear evidence right that's in front of us that we need to do a better job it must be kind of frustrating to say you know some of these large Publishers have Texas as an example kind of locked down with all the information that they're putting out there and it doesn't leave room for improvement which can be kind of feel like golden handcuffs I guess yeah I I think it certainly can you know

[13:27]  districts do make their own local decisions and um you know States certainly sometimes provide guidance uh I always tell our team you know the way that we're going to continue to grow is help teachers get really good results with their kids and really support them and I do think it is a long game it's not a short game and we've made tons of progress in this you know over the years but we we certainly are the the little player in a very big sea I mean as the the leader right at the helm of this ship where you guys are driving this what what are some of the biggest challenges that you've kind of seen as president and CEO of the organization over the last couple years yeah I mean I think one of them is certainly um you know how fast we can develop some of our curriculum um and another one has been how much we can support the number of

[14:16]  teachers who are using our curriculum on a daily basis so as I said you know any given day maybe 200,000 teachers are using our curriculum we're never going to support 200,000 teachers with humans giving them professional development uh so we've made some pretty big investments in things like asynchronous coaching we just are getting ready to launch our first AI kind of um chat uh agent that is generative that has is built completely on our own knowledge base so you know for teachers getting into our work they can come and ask any question and we've answered these questions hundreds of thousands of times so we're trying to find ways to support teachers once they get our curriculum because even with a big publisher teachers are never going to to get enough support especially early on so um I'm really looking for other ways that

[15:03]  we can support folks and I I also think it'll be ways that other places won't invest right it's not a big money maker um but for us it doesn't need to be a money maker it's really about how do we best support the the teachers with our work I want to talk a little bit about this AI component because often when we think about education we think about healthare we think about different spaces they're often slow to move when it comes to Innovation right so why was this something that guys kind of identified as an augmentation to the support that you guys were being able to Leverage What was the strategy behind that yeah I'm so glad you asked because I I always tell people we are not a tech forward organization we don't have a bunch of apps for students we don't have a lot of you know kind of cute little things but you know the question I've always asked is how do we support all of these teachers so that they can be

[15:51]  successful and not get frustrated and and get that just in time support and be feel like they're surrounded by a team that that's supporting them so I had working with a gentleman his name is Fred Fishback he runs Javelin learning and he's worked in healthc care for the last 30 years in coaching training you know supporting uh pallative care physicians with really hard conversations of how do you coach around that so he's been a kind of a colleague mentor of mine for a long time helped with our asynchronous coaching and he just started to kind of show me a lot of things that were possible using um generative Ai and given that we had already spit spent four years answering live chat types of you know support we had this Bank of knowledge so we could tap into that and just build our own um

[16:39]  kind of tool just trained on our own content which I think is really important I mean it's incredibly important and one thing you probably don't know is like this is exactly kind of Where the Heart of my business lies as well we work in healthare human services to use things like conversational AI right that is trained on organization's data to be able to answer these type of questions because I think that if we can look at technology like this with a lens of curiosity right we can think about how these tools are not meant to replace but are meant to accelerate the support that we give to a disperse team Across the Nation and why shouldn't we use technology to be able to handle some of those FAQs those repetitive type of requests when our team can come over the top and really provide the value in those higher leverage tasks yeah I'm so with you I think you know um I I I been spending a

[17:29]  ton of time learning about it and what's possible and kind of talking with Fred like the power of domain specific information is never going to be as powerful as it is now uh I was just in an event with a kind of young entrepreneur and he's developed something for College counseling using AI uh and one of the things he shared with us is one of the colleges had to add 50 more counselors because actually students got more Curious and got more need needy around their college experience so whereas there was a fear of like we're all going to lose our jobs they hadn't end up having to hire 50 more people because it became uh so much more important to the students so this is an amazing conversation I was literally just talking with my team

[18:16]  we've been doing something very similar we created a solution for high school students one of my current my my personal experience in going to college was I wasn't the best student right so I had apprehension about going to my guidance counselor to ask questions about like how should I be kind of rounding out my application to be able to apply for school there was hesitancy that was in that so it stopped me from having those important conversations and then eventually I went over a cliff where I just wasn't prepared and I had to scramble to be able to get into school so I think about these pieces of Technology creating opportunities like you said for curiosity to eliminate barriers to ask questions which then will create more opportunities for people to come in and give guidance which is a really interesting time that we're kind of at in society where AI can play this role of I would say instigator in a good way to get people to think bigger um to put

[19:03]  people in the human seat which is so powerful that's so cool yeah no we're really excited about we're kind of we've been doing a ton of testing obviously uh and getting ready to release it this winter um to to our to our schools and districts and teachers and I I just think it's going to be a huge value add and I think it's a great use of the technology um and you know I I always lament to my my colleagues I am not a fan of going to a website and having a chat bot that's very like if then and preset three responses exactly you can click this this and this and it'll lead to the next thing and so having the power of using kind of you know generative AI that I can go back and forth I can ask for something shorter I can ask for something more specific I want a little bit more on this it's just it is I think it's going to be just a a really great tool for for our Educators

[19:51]  how do you get other people to buy into this Vision right because coming from the space like this often we're not the quickest to innovate we're often not going to take the risk right of saying we're going to develop our Solution that's trained on our information and data did you ever have any trouble getting people to kind of buy into this vision for what the future of integration of Technology was going to look like yeah I mean you know I I think we spent the last year showing people different things in my own organization uh a year ago no one really was talking about Ai and how we could support teachers with AI but we just kind of kept you know working with Fred and putting different things in front of our team to see what is possible and I think once people realize what's possible and then also once we started doing the testing and seeing what the accuracy rates were that gave us a lot of trust because the last thing we want to do is be giving out you know

[20:38]  misinformation bad information to teachers because of the job that they have of educating young children like we can't get things wrong um so I think it was a lot of bringing people Along by you know showing them things and and getting um I don't you know yes Buy in but also real legitimate examples um that they could that they could see and also realize like this isn't going to take people's jobs and what has happened in my organization is now other groups are starting to think wait a minute how could I be leveraging some of the aspects of AI in the work that I'm doing so my sales team my marketing team we're starting to look at our website like we have a flat website how do we get people to come there who are willingly coming that are curious about things and engage them a little bit more than than we currently are um and then I think

[21:25]  there's implications for development in other parts of our organizations what an amazing surprise this is so cool I'm so glad to hear that you know you're being so curious about these things cuz we don't have the ability to rest on our Laurels anymore right we have to be able to create multiplicative impact and support across our organizations at scale and I just don't see any type of solutions that are really going to be able to do this um at the same level now one thing I do want to talk about which is a unique interesting thing about your guys' model 250,000 teachers means that's a lot of people to engage with remotely right so how did we kind of start thinking about scalability like you said a little bit about asynchronous right you know the ability to engage with people how are you thinking about building the future of this remote organization which seems like there's a lot of complexities behind it yeah there are so right now we're about 130 full-time people and another 100

[22:13]  contractors um when I first came to the organization almost 18 years ago we were very much you know we had a home office and almost everyone worked out of that home office today we're completely spread out we have full-time people all over the country we have you know executive leadership all around the country so for us a few things um one we've made big investments in a group called The Management Center and we have a great um relationship with them and then a um a private consultant as well to really think about how we manage um really you know the whole organization but try to do it in a very inclusive sense of belonging kind of way so that's helped a lot we we started investing about six and a half years ago and I think that really helped as we went through the Pand mic and went completely remote and have stayed remote is having

[23:02]  that really strong management structure uh the other things we leverage a lot of Technology we leverage a lot of slack um and and so on I think they'll be a big um place for AI in in our organization um shortterm and long term as well um but we also we tend to attract Educators that want to work here Educators tend to always you know they want to work in places where they belong have a sense of connect connectedness want to be helping giving back um so I think we're pretty fortunate in that way in terms of the type of organization that that I'm fortunate enough to to run um but it's it's ongoing we try to find ways to get teams together uh we all got together last year but of course getting together of a year is quite expensive in a big organization so we can't do it as much

[23:49]  as we want but we try to take advantage of you know times that we're all going to be seeing each other in in different parts of the country uh doing the work I'm really interested I had a conversation with um a leader from an organization um in Wisconsin and she said that one of their core values that they changed once they went into this digital hybrid world was the little things they said we build culture on the little things the little interactions the ability to engage with each other lift each other up give kudos acknowledgement throughout the organization which is a really interesting thing about going from a place where you have an office where everybody shows up every single day we have those opportunities to engage and interact with each other to lift each other up have those one-off conversations but in this digital world it is quite isolating right so we have to do all of the little things to think

[24:36]  about how we can engage uplift and encourage each other even if it means just sending a you know a simple message or a thumbs up on a message like that has that been a little bit of a challenge for you as you kind of navigated this space yeah it's such a it's such a good point to to bring up um we we started using slack right when the kind of we all went remote which has been really helpful because you kind of can use some of the little emojis for a little bit of feedback we're actually just getting ready to bring Kudo uh Kudos into our organization we use something called culture amp and our HR Director uh or VP Maria Ross has been really instrumental and kind of pushing us into like let's get a little more formalized about this because to your point all these little things are really important because people are doing great amazing work every day and we want to find little ways to acknowledge it we I

[25:23]  I think it makes a big difference in how people feel about a place that they work and being recognized by their colleagues as well I have an interesting question about you know the journey in which you've come along so started off as a second grade teacher right now we're the president and CEO of an organization that reaching thousands hundreds of thousands literally people every single day which is amazing how has your development in leadership kind of been because being a second grade teacher often doesn't embed the skill set that we need to be able to encourage and cast a vision for people to believe in how's that yeah yeah so uh since I left being a second grade teacher I had a lot of experiences um uh I in my mid 20s I went to work for an organization based out of San Francisco that was doing a lot of professional learning uh around literacy and they had great leadership I'm still

[26:11]  really close with folks from there uh today so very early on in my career I got some really great training I also continued to go to school so I finished my Master's in administration I got my Doctorate in Education leadership um and really you know and kept working in uh non nonprofit organizations but nonprofit organizations that generated Revenue that didn't just live on Foundation dollars so I I was very fortunate both with the schooling that I had and kind of the Cadre I was part of in my doctoral program like we're all really close we're all a lot of us are running big organizations right now but we we had some great um support and work in there and then I've been really blessed with a lot of great mentors so from my kind of first role out of teaching all the way to the other three organ organizations I worked in at

[27:00]  really strong people that kind of you know supported me and also uh taught me things um that that I didn't yet know so and I tell people all the time that are in education like there's a lot of work in education happening that if you continue to build your your skill set and your uh relationships with people that there's a lot of opportunities to do really really good work here here's a question for you nonprofit CEO burnout is a huge problem right and one of the things that I've been able to kind of tap into through my intuition having so many of these conversations is often we have a really tough time staying grounded in how long this mission is going to take to accomplish right when we get our goals right they're a good Finish Line a check mark or a destination but when we get

[27:47]  them wrong they're a horizon we take one step towards them and moves one step further away how have you stayed grounded in what you guys have accomplished and made sure that those goals didn't turn into those Horizons that are always just out of r out of grasp yeah I'm so glad you asked about this Ken because my organization's been around for almost 45 years and I think 25 years ago people in the organization could have never imagined that we're impacting almost three and a half million kids every day right and for me I'm like we're still only impacting three and a half million kids so we still have so much work to do um but I think a couple things in terms of kind of managing for the present and managing kind of for the future one is we have a really strong board I tell everyone I have the best board in America like I'll go toe-to-toe with anybody who wants to

[28:34]  who wants to bring it to the table about um the folks that they have but and this board not only are they just strong in their own kind of knowledge some of them are really strong Business Leaders uh subject matter experts researchers they've also known the organization for a long time and they have grown with the organization as well so things that we were talking about 10 15 years ago are very different than what we're talking about now however the heart of what we care about kind of deep Social Development connectedness deep literacy is the same how we do it is going to shift over time so I'm in current conversations right now like how do we build the organization for 2035 because it's going to be very different than what we built for 2015 so I think having the people around you that can be in these conversations that

[29:21]  can help um you know both guide give input is really important for a nonprofit leader um and so that's that's something that's that's real here is really strong board great executive team really strong staff that can look at the now but also think about the future let's let's talk about that Vision that you're casting for the future because we have a lot of leaders here right who have been incredibly seasoned but we also have a lot of young leaders who listen to the show as well so when it comes to Casting a vision right for 2035 like we're talking about 10 years 11 years down the road how what kind of things are you prioritizing what kind of things are you betting on yeah um I am I betting completely on teacher success what can we do to be making sure that whatever we create teachers are really successful with because they're the ones teaching their kids so if we can equip

[30:09]  them with really powerful curriculum strong professional learning that makes their jobs a lot easier in the work they're trying to do um with their kids that's what we're going to do um how we do that you know we we've only ever you know in the beginning we only had print curriculum for a long time we only had professional books now we have a lot of this AI technology to support uh the the teachers so I think constantly looking at what's going to be supporting the teachers we're going to have a lot of teachers leaving the profession I think in the next few years through retirements we're going to get a lot of new teachers so what are they going to need um to be successful um but that's kind of what really we really look at is what can we do to really equip those teachers yeah I think about that next generation of teachers who are coming into this space on the podcast I had an amazing guy um on here his name is Frederick Martin and he's from a a

[30:58]  healthcare institution University of Kentucky Health and he said you know one of the things that we have to do in preparing our students for the future is align what our businesses look like from a resources perspective you're going to have a whole generation of people who are coming out who are used to engaging with iPads generative AI chat GPT are going to be a part of their everyday life and so if our organizations are not ready to say here are the resources that can help you do your job effectively we understand what your needs and wants and expectations are it's going to be difficult to meet that next generation right with the tools that they need to be successful and have the impact that they Envision yeah no I I think you're I think you're totally right and uh I think you know back to the earlier part of our conversation I think curiosity and creativity are going to be key I really do I think you know really not not having a growth mindset or not being

[31:49]  open to new ways to do things is going to be the downfall of a lot of organizations and so that's something I'm trying to instill in our own organization of you know the the what we're doing I think is going to stay the same we're focused on literacy want to help with you know healthy development of children how we do those things it's probably G to look pretty different in 2035 if we could go back in time to a younger version of Kelly when she was just getting started in this organization right and she's going to be navigating the future what piece of advice would you give to her as she kind of goes on the next 5 10 years of her career yeah um I mean I think a big one is you know find some people who can really support you um and I don't mean support you of go along with everything that that you say but really support you of also people who can give you really

[32:36]  critical feedback um and also find some of your first followers when I first got into more leadership positions and in the organization I am now I was pretty young in the organization um I wasn't the you know the on the on the old Side by any means um but one of my first followers followers was key it was someone who had a lot of kind of social capital in the organization um and really you know said I'm going to do everything I can to support you to you know to be successful and I'm also going to let you know when I think things aren't going right um so I think having some of those friends is really important the other thing I think is really important for young leaders is have a broad Network I tell everyone in my organization all the time you should have a lot of friends that are in the same industry that don't work here even though they might be competitors if

[33:24]  we're all on the same side of the fence of like we're all trying to help kids bu build really strong reading literate lives because that literacy is uh Freedom um then have some friends like I'm I'm friends with almost every CEO in our space and we share pretty openly about things that we're doing um because I want the whole I want the whole sector to get better so I think that that's a really key thing too I think sometimes especially young leaders can feel a little scarcity mindset of like oo I don't think I should be talking to them and giving that information away and I'm the opposite it's like abundance the more abundant we are I think more things will come back to you such a tough thing to lean into though right we're taught through so many of the systems that we been reinforced with that there's only a certain amount to go around for everybody but when you can lean in to

[34:11]  that abundance mindset more opportunity comes because I mean if we think about the impact that we're trying to create here right this is not for one organization to gobble up a Lion Share we're talking about impacting the Next Generation and I believe that we are stronger together in business so if we can share best practices and we can all be impactful the impact that we're going to have on society as a whole is so much greater I feel the same way and I think especially for folks who are working in our space around literacy and what happens when kids don't get a lot a strong literacy background of all of you know uh what their future lives look like I don't know how we can't all be working together to try to make the whole sector better what else is on the front of your mind Kelly what else should we be talking about here yeah I mean I think a lot uh around Early Childhood needs to

[34:58]  get talked about a lot more we just brought in a really wonderful nonprofit into ours last year um uh uh called seeds and I think we need to be giving more attention to Early Learning we have you know obviously we still have a lot of work to do with you know children who were young in the pandemic and how they're doing uh in school but attending to you know really really young children and supporting families and Educators in those spaces I I think needs to get lot more uh a lot more air time why do you say that uh well think about what happens when when children are birthed to 5 years old all the development that happens all of the language all the social interactions it is it is the setup for everything in life and so I think if we can uh be looking at kind of

[35:46]  the the workforce there supporting them supporting families uh in that way then these children by the time they get to to kindergarten will be in much better place and I think this is a multi-front attack right this can't be just the responsibility of the education system but there also has to be a little bit of accountability that comes into the the family right into the home as well because it does take a village to raise a child and I think that we do need to have more of these conversations because it's not just a one person responsibility very transparently one of the biggest aha moments I had during the pandemic was when I heard so many parents being upset about how difficult it was to teach entertain and keep their children attentive towards the things that were during the daytime when they weren't in school and naturally like a little alarm bell went off of my head to think about

[36:33]  do we not now realize how incremental our teachers are in influencing and building and molding the next generation of great minds I feel like we need to give these individuals so much more credit for the incredible role that they play in society I mean I couldn't agree more I have a lot of friends that are that are uh teachers uh yeah it's a it's a huge job um and I think anything that can do both with pay support um you know everything class size uh we we definitely need to be talking about a lot more I mean especially if we think about I was listening to a podcast the other day where an ex-executive from Facebook was talking about the impact of artificial intelligence in the world right and he's painted a big picture for the future he said imagine very similar right to when we were younger we always

[37:21]  used to be told you need to learn how to balance a checkbook right and then all of a sudden online banking apps became something that was real we know no longer write checks but we have a phone that instantly instantaneously tells us what our balance in our checking account is right think about the same thing in the future of artificial intelligence when we have children who are coming up that have ontap tools like generative Ai and conversational tools that they can get resources and answers from the teachers in our society are going to be one of the highest ranking influencers that we see because they're going to be teaching our children how to think about problems and that is a huge thing that we have to recognize that's just around the corner yeah no I think you're totally right I I think uh that I think the the Curiosity building I think the creativeness that's going to have to

[38:08]  happen the the really critical thinking the questioning of things uh is going to be become bigger because knowledge is going to be you know it's going to be easier to access that you know in terms of what's the answer to something but being able to discern is going to be more important than ever absolutely absolutely well you know one of the Traditions that we have here on the podcast Kelly as we kind of put the landing gear down is our guest before wanted to ask you a blind question I love it this is a really interesting one what was the best lesson you learned from the worst leader you had ooh you know I have to say um I haven't had a lot of bad leaders so I I I don't have I don't actually have a good answer for this because I I

[38:56]  never I haven't I haven't experienced a really horrible leader in let's put a little bit of context around this thing so part of what the conversation was about from our previous guest was you know sometimes we learn by seeing what other people do that we do not want to repeat have you ever had an example of somebody doing something that showed you oh now I know how to not handle that situation and that was imprinted on you to how you kind of handled that situation in the future yeah I mean I certainly you know well I've had some really strong leaders I've certainly had some that are you know a little more abrasive than I would go ever go about doing things so uh it's not in my nature it wouldn't be my thing but seeing how others respond to that kind of uh way uh certainly was you know imprinted on me

[39:43]  pretty young but um like I said it's just it wouldn't it wouldn't have been in my nature but it's something of you know it doesn't bode well for for for teamwork and trust and relationship well Kelly let's talk a little bit about let's use the last couple minutes here to give give you the opportunity to take the floor and you know do a micro commercial for a collaborative classroom talk about where we can find more information about the mission the impact everything that you guys are doing where can we find you if we want to follow along with your personal story what's going on sure yeah so uh you can find us at collaborative classroom.org uh you can of course find me on on LinkedIn pretty easily I think most importantly though if you have listeners that are really interested we work in every single state and so we're working in schools and districts in every state so if anyone is curious and uh wants to talk to folks in their their own Community I can I can certainly uh matchmake in that way as well I think

[40:32]  it's really important for you know anybody listening to this podcast to really inquire about how are my kids being taught to read what is what is the you know kind of the sense of connection feel like for my kids in these schools how do I know it um so you know I'm always a fan of asking some good questions well Kelly you are definitely the definition of heart and hustle it's been an amazing time having you on the show and thank you for blessing us with your with your presence here it's been absolutely amazing this has been wonderful thank you so much and thank you for all the work you're doing I loved hearing about your story as well I appreciate it guys we'll catch you in the next one that's a wrap