It’s always productive to spend time reflecting on the work and the year behind you. Evaluating the good, the bad, the growth and setbacks provides an opportunity to reset and establish new goals and dreams for the year ahead.

2022 was quite a year. One that can be described as transitional, pivotal, critical, raw, terrifying, exhausting…and hard. But in spite of it all…it was a necessary hard. A hard year to get TEAMology to evolve the way it needed to for the children and child advocates we serve. The edtech startup world has never promised to be easy…and for me and TEAMology it never has been. But, it’s proving to be worth it because we are designing, building and developing something so very special, needed and important for the wellness of children today. 

TEAMology began as an education company offering a teacher platform to deliver our research-based curriculum, content, programming and training directly to educators. This work is important, but in my heart I knew we could do more to directly support children and their social, emotional and mental health. So, in 2018 the ideas sparked around a more direct approach to helping children.  We asked children questions related to how we could better support them and the answers were coming across loud and clear…they wanted to learn from, gain support from and talk with our TEAM characters directly. 

The story of TEAMology then took a sharp turn when the pandemic hit in 2020. The vision for providing direct-to-student support along with the increased post-pandemic accelerated the motivation to figure out how to create the groundbreaking technology we are now preparing to launch. 

So we listened. We connected with partners who had the knowledge to help us learn and understand more, like Penn State’s Nittany AI, Penn State’s Edna Pierce Prevention Research Center, Google and our current AI development partner, Custom House. Over the last several years we’ve designed, researched and developed a whole-systems product, aligned with the MTSS (multi-tiered systems of support) model. This is a holistic approach to supporting children’s wellness which focuses on:

• a brief “check in” at the start of their day
• a resilience screening that collects helpful and important information around home, school, family and self, which provides a strengths based report back to the school team and parents, to better inform how to meet individual student needs
• a direct and personalized coaching experience, offering direct support and tips in real time
• analytics that provide a way for organizations and child advocates to understand the data at micro and macro levels. 

It’s truly amazing. It’s been a year of focus, discipline, teamwork and dedication from my team and our partners to bring together years of a vision that will prove to be a critical part of the solution for how we can better support student social, emotional and mental health and well-being. As I reflect over the last year, it’s a tad emotional really. A year ago, I had no clue how we could possibly go from being a company transitioning from more of a content and curriculum delivery provider to a cutting edge, innovative AI edtech company. We were in need of the right people to support this dream. We were in need of funding to support this dream. We were in need of what felt like everything to support this dream! 

A year ago, I had some questions about how all of this would come together. But the doubts were put aside as we learned more and more about the real struggles children were having. It wasn’t a question of whether we could do this…it became a question of how fast can we build a quality, industry and child approved product and bring it to market in a time when the world needed it the most.

We have grown a dream team that includes leadership and employees of TEAMology, advisors, researchers, experts, partners and funders who all saw the potential and need for the work we were so passionate about. We’ve had opportunities to meet some of the most innovative education leaders from across the country and beyond that have validated the work we are so committed to bringing to children around the world. 

In the next couple weeks, TEAMology will be launching TEAMtalk by TEAMology, aimed to directly support students’ social, emotional and mental well-being for kids in grades K-8. We know, especially these days, it takes a TEAM to raise children. We look forward to the opportunity to become an extension and support the important work of your team.