ABCmouse's Head of Curriculum On the Role of Online Learning For Schools and Pods

Welcome to the Future of Education. I'm Michael Horne, excited to be joined today by Joel Kuperstein, the senior Vice president of Curriculum management at Age of Learning. And if Age of Learning doesn't mean anything to you, it's. They're the folks behind ABC Mouse in particular, which, Joel, you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's like the most downloaded set of apps for education for early learners up to. I think you go up to like age 8 or something like there, and then you have another set of apps for the next group that goes up to age 13. And I knew you all as sort of the guys that figured out how to break through what is a very crowded marketplace of educational apps and get a ton of downloads and a lot of usage. But I'm excited to talk to you, Joel, because what I've come to learn about Age of Learning is that you all put a ton of investment behind the instructional design being in accordance with the learning science, really making sure that there's academic gains for the individuals on your platform. So, first, welcome, and I'd love you to dive in first, for those that don't know, I gave my quick intro of Age of Learning. Just give folks a bit of an orientation of who you all are and what you do and who you serve.

Sure. Thanks, Michael. It's great to be here. Really excited to talk to you. Everything you said about Age of Learning and ABC Mouse is right. We serve kids in ABC Mouse, ages 2 to 8 and sometimes even younger than that. And we think really hard about how to manage engagement in the use case that we develop for knowing that kids have lots of choices. We want them to spend their time with us, and we want everything that they do to be purposeful and to be driven toward learning outcomes for them. So whether it's inside the metagame, part of the experience where they're exploring those parts of the. Of the product, or whether it's part of the more concentrated learning experiences, everything is purposeful, and that's really important to us. My team, for example, is composed entirely of educators. So we all come from the classroom. I come from the classroom. It's all I ever wanted to be when I was a kid, was an elementary school teacher. And it's great to be part of an organization that is as dedicated to doing that the right way as Age of Learning is.

It's awesome to hear. And frankly, that your title exists and that you all put so much into it is, I think, a pretty powerful testament. Talk to us first, before we get into the questions that I'm dying to talk to, you all started as really consumer app, I think, but you're actually in schools a lot now, working alongside teachers and helping them serve students. Just talk about the different use cases in which the range of products you all have get used.

Yeah, definitely. So ABC Mouse is primarily a consumer product where we do a subscription business with. With families and caregivers. We have always made it available for free to individual teachers to download and use. And it's really all about reach and access. You know, we want to make sure that as many kids as possible are able to use the. The content that we have inside ABC Mouse. And our commitment to teachers, educators, administrators, caregivers, parents, families is what drives us every single day. So that's a really important thing for us, and it will continue to be. That's always part of our mission. So. Yeah. So schools are a big part of what we do and making sure that we stay in touch with how things are changing. And we know that there's a lot of that going on right now.

Yeah. So let's get into the changing part of this because, you know, Covid ripped through society. A lot of schools are still virtual. I think over 80%, last I saw of students have at least all or some of their instruction. Now, virtually, there's been pods, there have been a variety of arrangements of what that virtual learning looks like. But as you step back from all of that, because that's sort of the choreography in some sense of learning. Right. But how you serve those individuals when they're learning online is really important. Can you sort of up level us a little bit and extract, like, what should we be looking for around good sound online learning experiences for these young learners who in many cases we're hearing from zoom and so forth, like they're struggling. Right. When that's the environment. So give us some. Give us some broad principles of how to think about how to serve these learners digitally.

Yeah, for sure. I think back to March and April and how the entire educational system was blindsided by Covid. And as a former classroom teacher, you know, that's where my heart is. I can imagine, but not nearly as real as a lot of folks out there, how challenging that was. This may be a kind of a goofy analogy, but I thought, you know, if I gave somebody who'd never driven a car before a car and said, hey, go drive this, they'd bump into some stuff and they'd have a little trouble, and if they came back to me and then said. And I said to them, you know, four months later, we're going to do this again and you can practice all you want. Between now and then, they probably do a little bit better. And I think that's what we're seeing is that districts around the country are in better shape now. I think they have started to see the power of educational technology in ways that maybe they didn't before. And these are the things that I hope stick. You know, there are a couple of things that I'm excited to see as we get into whatever a post Covid world will look like retain. So, for example, I see families really appreciating what teachers do and how hard their work is and participating more. I think that's going to be a big lingering effect of this. And also I think they're going to recognize the power of ed tech as a vital tool for them. Not as some kind of distant supplement to what they're doing in person, but rather a really important tool to help them deliver, evaluate and respond to what they do with greater precision and personalization. In this industry and the industry I've worked in for a long time, we've been dedicated to helping teachers do that with every working moment we have. And I think people more and more are seeing what that can, what that can do. And it's an exciting time for us to have that coming to light.

So what are you actually seeing on the ground then? Because like you noted in the spring, I love that car analogy by the way. I'm going to probably steal it. But the, the. So. But you saw a lot of teachers sort of rush to zoom, to just deliver whole class learning over zoom now, or a lot of worksheets and non digital activities or not teaching at all in some cases. What are you seeing now? Are you seeing more intentional use of ed tech to deliver curriculum? Are you seeing asynchronous, like how has this changed specifically on the ground from your vantage point?

Yeah, I've been a little compulsive about gathering information about this stuff. Every time I talk to somebody somewhere, I always steer the conversation towards how's it going where you are, how are things working out for your classroom? And I hear all kinds of stories. It just runs the gamut from places that have really grooved in and have a nice routine, working with young kids, which can only imagine how challenging that is for them to folks that are really still figuring it out and struggling. But it all comes from a place where every teacher wants to serve the kids that are in their classroom. That's what they have always cared about. That's why they do what they do. And then it's a matter of comfort level. I think the teachers that have had the most success with it in the districts are the ones who have been able to map technology onto the existing paradigm. You know, when they think about the kinds of things that work for them in their classroom, they're looking for, you know, that comfort level to start with. You know, the first step into the pool has to be how can I continue the things that I do as a teacher that I'm successful with, using technology now and being remote and then trying to translate those into a digital medium. And of course, once you get good at that, you can start to see ways to expand that even further and to leverage the technology more. But I think it's completely reasonable for teachers to dip their toe in kind of slowly because comfort is the biggest thing, I think for everybody. You want to have some level of calm, the normalcy to these routines. You know, we all know that routines and structure so important for young kids. And you know, having these, giving teachers the opportunity to establish those is really important. And it's. It frankly has to start with them. You know, the most teachers are. The most successful teachers are the ones who you can see are feeling comfortable with what they're doing. I'm sorry, I can't hear you, Michael.

Sorry about that. Thank you for that. So take us through what you would say like an ideal setup would look like for a teacher to set up. What would that, you know, what would a school day look like for say a first grader or second grader in your mind? And what would be the split of different activities throughout that day?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think a lot of it has to go back to the instructional design principles that we know are effective for in person learning. Also, young kids need modalities changed regularly. They need them changed very, very frequently. So good teachers will move that around to let kids stand up and move around. They'll give them chances to interact with one another, which is unbelievably more challenging when you're doing this remote. So figuring out how to key into kids. Kids love it when they have an opportunity to help set the rules of engagement also and participate in the construction of their learning environment. So keeping that going, keeping the day brisk, you know, as opposed to having a five year old sit in front of a screen for multiple hours on end, making sure that things move pretty quickly from one activity to another. And obviously the family is so important in helping this because it's just essential for those things to go smoothly. We actually have just put out what we call my ABC Mouse classroom, which was an effort to kind of supplement and support all this. So inside ABC Mouse you can now go into this classroom experience that does a lot of the things that I was just talking about. It provides live action. Teachers talking about content across the curriculum, but within the context of a meaningful theme like responsibility or community or change. And then moving kids from activity to activity, giving them opportunities to participate actively and even offering stuff that they can do offline and in print so that you connect that learning to when they are away from the screen. So keeping, keeping it moving is really important and keeping kids engaged. And I also want to underscore this idea of engagement is so important to remember. It's not about something that's funny and it's about persistence and motivation and curiosity and getting kids really excited about what comes next. And the best teachers are the ones who can do that well and frankly the best educational technology, which is something we obviously think a lot about too.

Yeah, it's interesting hearing you say that just because to riff off of it for a moment. I think it's a lot of times people just say like, well, we'll get them excited by a topic that they're already excited by or just engagement for its own sake almost. And then forgetting the connection to the learning, learning objective that is so critical. And I think people often forget that kids interests are still unformed in many cases because they haven't been exposed. But the advantage of that is that it's actually if you ask an interesting question or put forth an interesting scenario or an interesting problem or an interesting scene that is connected to the learning, you can get their interest pretty quickly if you're intentional about it. Is that something you all take advantage of? How do you think about that tension of driving with interest, driving engagement, but still accomplishing learning objectives?

Something we have to our advantage in the work that we do is the fact that young kids love to learn. And if you can make something compelling, if you can make it relevant and you can connect with them and you said it, great, they're going to be excited about it. I remember as a classroom teacher, a lot of the most successful lessons I had were ones where I was really selling. I was really excited about the topic and doing everything I could to get the kids excited about the topic. And if you're skillful at that, whether it's as a teacher delivering instruction or as a designer of digital Curriculum, you can get kids excited about just about anything. And it's the beauty of young kids that joy for learning is a treasure and it's what makes us excited about the work that we do. And it's a great thing for teachers to tap into. That's the best thing to me about this business is working for people who love learning as much as young kids do.

That's awesome. And so just to go then deeper into some of what we have seen and haven't seen, I think one of my big frustrations with a lot of the districts and teachers that have put forth things that I would say are less than inspiring, where they've sort of said, okay well we're going to do classroom on zoom now is exactly what you said earlier, that there's not that variety of modalities, it's not changing frequency and it's also frankly not relying on like some really cool, not just what you guys do, but a lot of cool educational technology that is really good at moving learning outcomes and using it intentionally in slots. So, you know, you now are going to go learn double digit addition. Here's a great edtech product that can introduce the concept, give you a bunch of practice and so forth. And then we're going to come back together as a small group or in one on one with the teacher or peer to peer learning to break it down further, do some learning. Then maybe we come back as a whole group to create that social emotional bond and so forth. I. Are you. I guess first you should say, do you agree with that vision? But second, are you seeing more of that this year where teachers are starting? And it's not just on teachers, frankly, it's on the schools to be able to help them orchestrate that. Are you seeing more of that?

Well, I think it's relatively slow, but not surprisingly slow. You know, it's such a drastic transition. When you think about the physical classroom, what you were describing in an app world, teachers have done in the physical world forever and ever and ever where they know the things they want to use to teach a particular topic. And like a great chef, they have their mise en place set up and they move around and grab things and their moves are almost balletic the way they can set up their lesson and, and they know what it's going to look like for every learning objective and the great ones know how to modify it based on what kids are getting and what they're not getting and how to attend to specific needs of kids. But they're grooved into some of these things that they trust. We would love to be that one stop shop for, for teachers at lots of levels. And we do have fantastic content for all of those, for all the subject areas. And we want to be, when they are using technology to do some of those things where they go, you know, we want to be there. Sort of goofy as it sounds, digital mise en place for how they set up their classroom with all the great resources that we have.

As someone whose wife is in the food industry, I rather like that analogy as well. But I'm curious because it's actually, I think you helped explain maybe what I've seen as paradoxical, which is that digital learning has been growing in schools for the last decade. Plus, by my estimate, you know, before this hit, at least 15 million kids were experiencing blended learning for part of their school day in school. Right. Doing some digital materials, having some control over the path and pace of that learning based on their individual needs. We then have this happen and we sort of fall back to what feels more traditional in some sense in the standard deliver or not deliver at all in some districts. It sounds like. Actually what I think you just helped explain is. Yeah, because teachers lack that familiarity and sense of moves because they're now in a foreign environment, on top of which you're having to build the parent muscle to help them engage, to be part of it in a way where parents are sort of co educators now in a way that's not been true in the past. Am I reading that right? Where else would you amplify that?

Yeah, I'd say that think about the paradigm shift for classroom teachers. I mean, you're ingrained in the way you move around your classroom and the way you think about delivering instruction, practice and assessment to your kids. And all of a sudden that is shifted 100% in a different direction and that that paradigm is now totally different for you. You find you react, people are going to react in different ways and with different levels of readiness. So that I think that's what we're seeing. You're seeing districts behave differently at an administrator level. You're seeing teachers at the classroom level behave differently. And I think all of that we have to receive with empathy and some patience. And I know as a parent, I'm constantly reinforcing to my own kids. You know, hang in there. This is tough. Think about it from the teacher's point of view. I'm really impressed and grateful for the resilience that so many teachers have shown. So that paradigm shift has been mammoth for teachers and for the entire education community. And it's something that we should just always keep in mind. But that's one of the reasons I'm hopeful that being forced into that way of thinking a little bit will help teachers realize, wow, look at all this stuff can do. You talked about blended learning, for example, and I think blended learning has been largely nominal, you know, for a lot of classrooms. There's technology that sits in the back of the classroom and almost tech for tech sake, and it isn't really plugged in. You know, blended learning to me means connection. It means that all of the parts of your day, all of the parts of your instruction and curriculum are, are stitched together really, really fluidly. And now because of the shift, because of the move to remote, we've sort of forced the hand a little bit on that. And I'm excited about the junctions that teachers are going to find as they employ technology newly, differently, and probably more.

Yeah, that's a very encouraging and helpful also perspective for me to hear, because I've been frustrated, I think, in certain ways. So I appreciate on that note as well, shifting gears a little bit as you speak to teachers, particularly, what would you tell them as they're starting to build and look for technology. Right. To help them accomplish certain objectives. You already said, you know, step one is perhaps mapping it onto your existing paradigm, your existing curricular goals, your existing routines. As you think about what that looks in the digital world, as you're specifically, as a teacher, specifically evaluating technology products, what are the three or four things that they ought to be looking for? Asking the vendor that comes before them.

Yeah, so educational rigor is key from a curriculum standpoint, from the learning objectives we're accountable for and interested in. How does this content address those? Does it do them well? Does it avoid misconceptions? Does it teach conceptual understanding? Or does it just kind of gloss over the top of things? This is something that my team and I talk about every single day and, you know, really, really building that into the type of experience we're trying to design. We talk about North Stars a lot. What are we trying to do? And then designing back from those. So I think teachers need to think the same way. What's their North Star? What are they trying to do? And finding technology that does that. I think they really need to think about comfort. You know, what's going to make sense then? Not necessarily what makes their job easy, but what makes them do what they know they need to do better. What's going to facilitate their excellence? What's going to Empower them to do what they want to do with their kids. And that's also something we've been thinking a lot, a lot, a lot about lately. You know, how do we design our experiences for teachers so that they have access to the information that's going to help them manage the blending of the art and the science of teaching? You know, in a classroom, in a given moment, there's a ton of art at play, just kind of figuring it out, knowing it from your gut. But there's a lot of science that we can bring to bear, and we strive to help with that, to take some of the guesswork out of knowing what is really going to help kids at the right time.

Okay, so let's shift then to the parents now. Because as I mean, the way we originally got connected was looking at all the pods popping up around the country, and regardless of whether parents have pulled their kids out of the system as I have, and my kids are getting an outdoor education with three other families, families that we're putting together, or it's supplemental to what the district or your school is providing, parents are engaged in a way that they haven't been before. In many cases, that means pulling for ed tech products. They're probably not thinking at the level of educational rigor or learning objectives or things like that. What's a tip or two, you'd say for parents as you're pulling off that educational app or that product? What should they be looking at?

So, first of all, I'll say this is one of the things I love about this time, is that parents are paying attention and they're thinking harder about it and they're understanding what's happening. The distance between parents and schooling is shrinking, and I think that's great. You know, in this field, we've talked about this for decades, getting parents involved is really important. So a lot of the tenets are the same. You know, I think parents understanding that that notion of engagement that we talked about before is even going to be a little bit harder to get their heads around than teachers. When, as a parent, you think about what's engaging for your kid, you think about the thing that's funny or you think about the thing that is fun, but you forget about how engaging learning can be. That museum feeling, the excitement of seeing a kid's eyes light up. At the zoo, for example, we've actually tried to build that same kind of thing into ABC Mouse and a lot of the products that we do so that you have the same light bulb moments, you have the same eyes Lighting up there. And I think that's what, what parents need to look for. They need to look for purpose. You know, the screen time kids are spending should be purposeful. And parents have every right to know exactly what the intent of the software is. You know, what are they trying to do and what is that purpose. And we try to be really transparent about that because you know, we're really proud of it and we think it's, you know, it's important, it's the most important thing that we deliver. So parents should be attending to purpose I guess is how it's on that. Sum that up.

Yeah, no, that's terrific. One more question that I have is what should teachers and parents alike what would make you run from an EdTech product? I'm not asking you to throw one of your competitors under the bus here, but you know, I suspect I can say it right. I see a lot of stuff out there in the market. I see a lot of stuff where a very well intentioned teacher creates a company out of their one experience and then ignores a whole bunch of principles of science of learning or instructional design online or so forth. I mean MOOCs, for example, in the higher ed space were created out of a passive lecture mentality that makes no sense for learning. And so unsurprisingly I think has had the outcomes that they have. What's that thing for that early childhood that where you look at an edtech product and you're like, if you're a teacher or parent and you see X or Y, like is there something like that that to you warning bells go off?

Well, certainly what I'm looking for and what we think about is how to drive towards durable and meaningful outcomes. Making sure that what kids learn is important and will stay with them and transfer from what they did on screen to what they do out in the world. And edtech products that don't do that are not terribly helpful. Edtech products that sort of put a band aid on top of learning objectives and you know, inspire speed over understanding are not necessarily all that valuable. You know, the thing I love about being part of age of learning is that we do an amazing job of balancing what on screen is compelling to kids and engaging to kids with the, the rigor of the academic design, of the curriculum design. These things are not mutually exclusive and we're pretty uncompromising about the two. And that's, that's such an important thing for parents to look for is, you know, find ed tech resources that you can tell care as much about about the Content as they do about the present, about the presentation of the content. Because that's where durability comes in. You know, you got to get the kids there, you got to make it meaningful for them. And if you can do that, then that learning is going to stay with them. And there's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't do that as well. Certainly not as well as we do.

I think that's awesome. Well, durability over speed. I like that mantra as well. As we sort of wrap up this conversation, any other thoughts that you would have for folks navigating the current moment? I mean, you get to see a lot of parents, a lot of schools through your app, working through this. You know, final parting thought as we.

Wrap up through all of this, I think there are opportunities to take some really great things away from this. And I implore everybody to be thinking about the social, emotional well being of the kids and the families that are going through this together. You know, we're all talking a lot about learning loss and we're all talking a lot about curriculum and learning objectives and that sort of thing. That's great. It's really important. I don't mean to say otherwise, but the holistic well being of our families, the way we take care of one another and the way we use education to support that is going to be critical for getting through this. Kids are really resilient when it comes to learning and I'm confident that great teachers and a great education system can help us make up for some of this lost time. We have to make sure that through it all we're taking care of one another because the other side of that is a little bit more frightening to me. Social, emotional, whole child be thinking about those kinds of things. Everybody's got to lean in to use what's now a cliche and have the patience to do that. But I think we can.

It's a great way to sum up the moment and what we're all working through. Really appreciate you coming on and joining me for the conversation. I've enjoyed, as I said, learning a lot more about the set of things that age of learning does and the care that you all put into it. So deeply appreciate it and keep up the good work and helping teachers and parents make that next step of what is a transformation. Thanks so much.

My pleasure. It's great to talk to you and I appreciate the opportunity a lot.

Sounds good. And we'll keep the conversation going.

Fantastic. Take care, Michael.

Thank you.