7. Culturally Responsive Content for Equity and Engagement

GUEST: BEAU MCCOY, FOUNDER, SOLCADEMY. As COVID-19 exacerbates issues of equity and access in K12 education, how can teachers and schools respond? One approach is to find compelling virtual content that is relatable to students and motivates them to learn. Listen as Amy talks with ed-trepreneur Beau McCoy, founder of SOLcademy (SOL= Simple Online Learning). SOLcademy is an education technology platform that aims to ensure that no student gets left behind in the era of distance learning by helping to reduce teacher burnout, bridging the achievement gap, and supporting continuity of learning.

Transcript

Amy Baron

Today we are here with Beau McCoy and Beau is the CEO and founder of SOLcademy that's capital S O L cademy. The Sol stands for simple online learning. SOLCademy is an education technology company that is on a mission to make culturally responsive content more widely available. Beau is going to tell us all about culturally responsive content and SOLcademy. At this point I would like to welcome Beau. 

 Beau Mccoy
Hi Amy thank you so much. It's a pleasure to spend this time with you So glad to have. 

Amy Baron
Beau is an entrepreneur, an intrepreneur as we sometimes call entrepreneurs in the ed tech space. He led one of the biggest ed tech companies go guardian to a hundred million dollar acquisition. He has shifted his focus to Seoul. Cademy he's an education enthusiast who credits his success, at least in part to his fourth grade teacher, ms. Wills. Beau, why don't we start by just having you tell us about miss wills and the influence she had on you. 

Beau Mccoy 

Absolutely. I would love to. And thank you for that kind introduction. I was in fourth grade, I had just recently moved, out of New York city and into long Island. I didn't really know too many people and I was never that engaged in school. It just wasn't really my thing. I had this amazing teacher and she just had an, a great cultural connection with me. We like the same TV shows. We liked the same music and we could talk. About in living color, which was our favorite TV show back in 1990. It's funny that, you know, Damon Wayans. Did, or Jim Carrey did, it was just such great. It made me happy to go to school. She went out of her way to find things that were interesting to me. I liked baseball. She brought that into class and I didn't realize this, but she was really genius because she understood that if she could get me into a mood where I was receptive and I was happy, then I would be more likely to do good in school. She really took the time to personalize the approach and make it culturally responsive to me by finding the things that work for me as an individual, treating me as an individual and putting them into classroom. All of a sudden I turned into a really good student. I went on to be, have a pretty good career in K through 12, went to an Ivy league school and my life's gone really well and it wasn't until I reconnected with her a few months ago, after 30 years that I realized how much impact that one year had. 
 When I was nine years old on the entire rest of my life. I want that experience for every student and in today's world, today's interconnected world learners can go online and find whatever they want, but when it comes to their education, they have a lot less options. They're generally told what they have to do and how they're going to do it. When they're going to do it, but on social media, it's the exact opposite. They have complete control and it's a customized experience. And so that's our mission. That's why I started sole cademy was so that every student could have that personalized experience. That's culturally relevant to them with teachers and advisors and mentors who are invested in them, not just as a student, but as a human being and everything that makes them uniquely themselves. 

Amy Baron

That's great. You know, it really shows the importance. I mean, people always talk about the importance of a teacher and how much of a difference that one teacher can make in a student's lives. I think especially now with COVID the fact that we're remote, I, everything I read and hear is all about how teachers are just really trying so hard to make connections with their kids and understanding what's going on in that kid's life and knowing what their context is and what they're struggling with makes the teacher so much more able to be effective and to be able to, meet the kid where they're at. It sounds like that is the mission of sole cademy. You've mentioned this idea of culturally responsive teaching and learning. Can you explain to our listeners what that is exactly and why it's so important? 

Beau McCoy

Absolutely. We believe that everyone learns better when they're interested in what they're learning. If someone who is delivering the message is a great storyteller. You get captivated you're brought into whatever it is that they're talking about often. 

 Amy Baron
Sorry, I would add that. It's not just what you believe, but this is actually learning research. Learning theory says that if you have a personal connection or it's, the material is relevant to you in some way, you have a much greater likelihood of, absorbing the material. Sorry to interrupt, but 

 Beau Mccoy 

Oh, no problem. And, and it's true. It w the idea that I thought of implementing this was I was working with a bunch of schools in South Los Angeles. Think Inglewood, Compton, these Watts, these areas. I looked at the student population and I looked at the teacher population, and there were some differences there. It's not that you can't cross cultures, but someone told me, unless you've really lived something, you might not truly understand it well enough to relate it to somebody else. And teachers are amazing individuals. They all bring their unique experience to the classroom. And, culturally responsive means finding someone who speaks your language, who can have a similar background, enjoys the same things, the same way that ms. Wills and I had that cultural connection and it boosted my self-esteem in myself, belief in myself, motivation. That's why cultural responsive education is so important because it helps us students see, Hey, this person is me, and if they can be successful, I can be successful. 

 Beau Mccoy
There's so much value in importance in having an example of success. That's tangible, right? If someone, if they don't seem anything like you and they're successful, okay. If they're just like you they're from the same town there, they like the same food and they're successful. Now, all of a sudden it becomes something that's real. You've planted that seed of possibility in the child's mind. Or as one teacher said, you're giving them that moment of shine, right? They might not have someone who believes in them, but they can go online on Tik TOK and find something that they're really excited to do. Right. That's what we need to bring to the educational system. Just meeting the kid, like you said, meeting the students where they are with content that matches their personality, their tastes, their interests, their motivations, and gets them excited about learning. 

 Amy Baron
We know that's why the social media model is so effective because it's all based on these algorithms that pull up the content that they know that you're interested in and you're going to be interested in. 

  Beau Mccoy
Absolutely. Another thing that I learned was students nowadays have such a close relationship with the search engine. The first thing that they think of, no matter what happens in their life is to go on to social media and post about it, or to google and search about it. Basically the information that is contained by these search algorithms is much more detailed and accurate. What a student might know about themselves, or a parent or a teacher, or a friend or anyone else in their life, that data is out there. We need to be able to tap into that. Like you said, recommend things that the student will enjoy like, Oh, we noticed that you search for, the planet Pluto three years ago, here's a lesson about the planet. Pluto is this interesting to you? And maybe it is right. And we can Do that in the concept, in the framework of. 

 Amy Baron
Cool. That's a really good lead in to soul cademy and what Seoul Academy does, and your mission to make culturally responsive content available in order to minimize teacher burnout, to eliminate achievement gaps and to enable continuity of learning. Right? Those three things are really the foundation of your mission. Can you give us a little more context for that and tell us more about those three pillars? 

 Beau Mccoy
Absolutely. In speaking with parents, they're really concerned because everyone that I've spoken to has said that a teacher is no longer at the school where their student is going to school and teachers are being asked to do things that they weren't properly prepared for. They didn't go to school for that not trained for, and we're losing them fast. They're burned out, there's too much technology. It's too complicated and they need something that's really simple. That's the first pillar. Whenever we talk to teachers, they said, make it easy, please. We have so much going on. That's the S S S O L is simple online learning, make it as easy for us as possible. If you're a teacher and you have 150 students, like many high school teachers do, how do you build that personal connection without ever meeting the Cho the students? It's very difficult. What we do to make it easy is aggregate lots of variations on the same lesson so that you, as the teacher can point them to a wealth of resources, a library of content so that the student can learn what they need to learn in a way that's going to work for them, Because it's culturally responsive.

 Amy Baron
We want to just point out also that this is video content, right? We haven't talked about that. 

 Beau Mccoy
So, yeah. Yeah. So it's Asynchronous learning, which means you are the teacher. You S you assign what the students want to learn. They go to Seoul cademy to find the video lesson, and then they can watch it and be prepared for a discussion or an assessment, or what have you. We've, we'd have a mission of building a community of 1000 black, Brown and indigenous teachers to create lessons, to reach 1 million black Brown and indigenous students, because there's less than 7% of teachers are African-American in the United States despite making a 15% of the population. We believe that by aggregating this specifically from BiPAP teachers now, you're a teacher. You have access to this library of all different kinds of takes on the lessons that you're giving. The teachers can use this as a bank for ideas, for their own lessons, if they want, they can create their own and put them on the site to share, but basically create that personal cultural responsive for all of their students, 150, whether they built that personal Relationship with them or not.  

 Amy Baron
What about this idea of eliminating achievement gaps and enabling continuity of learning? 

 Beau Mccoy
Right? So McKinsey, the consulting company, they estimated that $700 billion has been lost from the United States economy since 2009, because of the income and racial achievement gaps that exist in the educational system. We don't think that's acceptable anymore. We need to eliminate those gaps. The way to do it is to meet these students where they are with this culturally responsive content, vice presidential candidate. Kamala Harris has recently posted that if, an African-American student has a teacher, but an African-American teacher by the time they're in second grade, they're 17% more likely to go to college. I believe if they have to, they're 33% more likely to go to college. It goes back to what we say about visualizing success and self-motivation, and believing in yourself. If you see someone who's from a similar background, who's achieving success then becomes more of a realistic thing for you. That's what we're trying to accomplish to have someone who looks, sounds, acts similar background to every student inside the United States, because you're a teacher and you have 150 students, they all have their own background. Let's find a teacher who they respond to for whatever reason. They like the way that they communicate. And there's something there for them. 

 Amy Baron
Super, super important. So, so you're talking about, how SOLcademy can help teachers, right? Because it makes their lives easier because they're able to find content that they know is going to resonate with their students. That's key to connecting with them and getting them engaged. Right. So, can you tell us more about how soul cademy helps teachers and what it, what are some of the functionalities you have? 

 Beau Mccoy
Yeah. The most important thing that teachers have pulled is number one is that it's easy. The number two thing is they need to see what students are doing. We have the zoom fatigue going on all across the world, where people are showing up and just turning off the camera, who knows what's going on, because we're just kind of burned out from doing this and what Sol Academy provides teachers. That's so valuable, it's an easy way to monitor student behavior and activity. You can put a lesson out and see which of your students actually watched it. How long did they watch? How many times did they watch it? Did they repeat certain points, right? This, the kind of useful information so that, as a teacher, how to support that student, and you have an idea of what they learned and what they might need to learn. So that's the most important thing. 

 Beau Mccoy
The other thing is we're creating this community. A lot of teachers feel like they're on an Island, they're doing things all by themselves. They have to come up with a lot of the content on their own, but there's a teacher in every school, in every district, across the United States, who's going through that same journey. Why don't we have a site that unifies them? They're not starting from scratch every single time. They could look and get inspiration and ideas for lessons for, 80% of the stuff. They only have to do 20% on their own and save them a lot of time and frustration and away from that burnout point, which is really what we're trying, 

 Amy Baron
Sounds like such a fantastic tool. I know you've come in contact with a bunch of really talented educators out there, Bo and I would love it if you could give us an example of one student journey. So, you've got a student that you really want to reach, you're teaching X subject, whatever it is. As the teacher, you can now connect them with this really talented teacher giving a really engaging lesson. Like, is there one case study you can kind of walk us through so we can just get a real sense of what's going on in the platform? Yeah, absolutely. 

 Beau Mccoy
I can think of, a specific ninth grader who is an intelligent person, but kind of quiet and not the most popular student in school. It all comes down to her confidence and her belief in herself, she kind of goes along and she does okay in school, but she never really finds that one thing. She's in a class, let's say it's a chemistry class. She goes onto a site like silk Academy and her teacher, maybe she doesn't have the most clear accent. She doesn't really pick up on a lot in class, but she picks up on the basics. She goes onto soul Academy and she sees someone who's funny, who's dynamic who speaks the way she does, who makes the cultural references that she gets, she's doing the same dances on Tik TOK as she is. All of a sudden that light goes on and it's, I believe in myself, Oh, I can learn this chemistry. 

 Beau Mccoy
She turns in the assignment, she's got everything right then on the assessment, she's getting a hundred percent. What happened that something out there happened? No, all that happened was she started to believe in herself. She had that spark, the joy, the love of learning, the intrinsic motivation that she needs to achieve. And that's really the thing. Unfortunately, when a lot of students, they just, they never had that moment of shine. They don't have a teacher who tells them that they can believe in themselves. The way that ms. Wills like really inspired me to believe in myself and in today's world, on social media, they're finding that right? That's why so many young people nowadays, they just want to be stars on social media because that's where they can get their shine and they can feel good about themselves. That's the journey that we want to bring. 

 Beau Mccoy
Right now our T our focus is on grade seven through 10, because were told by teachers, that's the time when they're going to decide what's going to happen in their academic journey, right? That's like the chance where that way. We're going to go for those seventh to 10th graders right now, and give them that spark and get them to believe in themselves. It's amazing. As soon as you believe in yourself, then all of a sudden, all these things become easier. That was my journey in fourth grade, right. I didn't really believe in myself as a student then ms. Wills helped me find that self belief, and now it's changed my whole life. That's what I want and for everyone, 

 Amy Baron
So great. So great. I love this mission and I love this product, and I really wish you the best of luck with it. Happy that you could join us today. Beau McCoy, everyone's SOLAcademy. Take a look. Thank you. 

 Beau Mccoy
Thank you, Amy. It's been a pleasure.