YouSaid · the spoken record

Jessie Woolley-Wilson

lines on the record: 21
first: 2020-08-08
most recent: 2020-08-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Importantly, accelerate the impact that we can have to make sure that every child is successful in learning math on Dream Box.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So benevolent friction is trying to capture the importance of courageous conversations. We want to be hard on ideas, but soft on people. We believe our work is so important to democratize learning opportunity that we want to try to leave our ego aside and be willing to subject what we think is the best idea, our best innovation, to the scrutiny of our peers who share our mission and share our values about unlocking learning potential. And so in order for you to do that with confidence, you have to be willing to subject yourself to the scrutiny of your peers and to hear that there are ways to make something good better. We're in pursuit of greatness for all kids. So benevolent friction is really a signal that says, I'm going to have a hard conversation with you, but it's not really about you. It's about the idea. And it's about the idea that we think will help accelerate our growth so we can serve more kids.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To bridge the gap between talent and opportunity. We believe all kids are mathematicians. We believe all kids have a spark and we need to make sure that their learning environment is structured in a way and is designed in a way that we can show that not only to everybody else, but more importantly to that child. We want that child to know that they can do anything that they want to do.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would say that you're justified to be concerned. But I would also encourage you to be very hopeful about what might happen. We were at a precipice now. And so we can reduce the waste. We can reduce the frustration of children who are bored to tears because they've already mastered a concept and they're ready to move forward, but the teacher isn't aware of that. And we can move to a model where the teacher can use the data from a system like Dreambox to organize her class and do rotations so that kids who are advanced can be in one group or kids who were struggling can be in a different group. And she can modify her live instruction to make sure she delivers exactly what that smaller group needs when they need it. I fundamentally believe that talent abounds and talent lives everywhere. It's that opportunity doesn't.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Information that changes and adapts to what a child needs moment to moment. And it's that modality that will help kids with special needs as well as quote the gifted and talented. I think all kids are talented. But for kids who need acceleration and are ready for more advanced work, the system can help alert the teacher that when the child is ready and what specifically that child is ready to do. That's very difficult for even the best teacher in the best resource school to be able to personalize learning instantaneously for 30 kids at once. But the nimble personalized learning technologies can do that very effectively at scale. And so the trick is to connect what the technology can do with the in-person learning experience to bring it to a new level. That's the trick.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of research that shows that the most important variable for student success is their teacher. I don't think that's going to change in the long term. I think there are things that humans will do and continue to do that technology will not be able to do. I fundamentally believe that technology should be used to support human beings, humanity, versus the other way around. That being said, I think that we will not return to how things were before COVID. I think we're all moving and marching toward a new normal. And that new normal is going to have blended learning as a permanent feature of the best learning because technologies can understand what is happening in a very nuanced way. And technologies can help personalize learning and give learning guardians actionable insights. What should I do to support Sally's growth in this moment? Dynamic.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I feel right now we're in a pause and I feel like the next window is really after January to see how we get through the fall and the winter. And once there's a vaccine in place and once there are effective treatments in place, I will have a different answer for you. But in this moment, I am not aware of any, many districts that are confident that they can send their kids back to school full time now.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this is such a hard question. I think that in the absence of a national strategy that will optimize frequent testing and tracing, it's very, very difficult to anticipate when a school will be safe. That's the first thing. The second thing is there are conditions and requirements for the learning environment, just like the home environment or the office environment that you would need to have in place. So do you have sanitizers? Do you have enough masks? How do you mitigate the risk with distance requirements? So all of those things need planning and I think the support of a national strategy in order for parents, for teachers to feel safe going in there, for parents to feel safe sending their child there. And I don't think that many districts feel that level of confidence.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I absolutely did. One of the things that we did several months ago was we studied the marketplace and we studied industries that had V-shaped recoveries that were anticipated, U-shaped recoveries, and L-shaped recoveries. So maybe a cruise line is not going to come back. It's L-shaped. Maybe an airline is a U-shape. But we really feel like education technology is a V-shape. And we're seeing that now. We've had explosive growth in users, as I mentioned. And we expect that that is going to continue for the future because we feel like people who were trying out learning technologies as a nice to have complement now have been forced with distance learning to see it as a must have. And so if they have good experiences and they see that it complements what they want to do in the classroom and at home, we don't see any end in the growth opportunities for proven effective, engaging, and reliable learning.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Access are targeted to the least well served communities. And what I'm encouraged by is that the CARES Act and a lot of what districts are using with federal funds is to address device and broadband access. Now the good news is that almost 90% of kids have access to broadband and devices, but that doesn't help the 10% that doesn't. So we need to work with libraries and we need to work with foundations and we need to work with private-public partnerships while we develop policies and funding mechanisms to close those remaining gaps. The last 10% is going to be the hardest, but we can never let up on that.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's two things I would like to say here. It's really important that one thing that keeps me up at night when I think about online learning is that it might widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And we all as a society have to be very intentional about making sure that we don't lose sight of that and that we work very hard to make sure that every child, regardless of their zip code, frankly, has access to great learning experiences. So one of the reasons we moved from the consumer approach to the institutional approach is to bring DreamBox to every child. We brought Dreambox to where all kids were in schools, not just to the parents who happened to know about it, but to institutions and communities where parents might not be aware of it. So that's one thing. But we need to make sure that some structural impediments like broadband access and”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our former educators. We don't think that technology should replace the learning guardian. We think technology should do what technology does best, which is to help understand the thinking process of children and to give them actionable insights so that they can modify their instructional strategy and personalize it to be more high impact for every child.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's such a great question, guys, because a lot of people don't realize you're right in 2010. We started to move toward the B2B model, but I didn't shut down the parent channel, the consumer channel. We knew that there were teachers there and administrators there. In the parent channel, and we thought that if we could win their confidence, it would help the institutional side of the business. So the other thing that we did is that we opened up Dreambox through the end of August now for parents. They could get a free trial so that parents who were working from home and being overwhelmed while they were at home would know that they could find a solution that was proven to be effective, that was engaging for their kids, for mathematics with Dreambox for no cost. We offered that trial for parents. And I don't think we're ever going to move away from parents. We think parents are the X factor. And we think technology should never be designed to replace teachers. 40% of the employees at Dreambox.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we put a hold on hiring for that survive phase and now we everybody's back to work. We came back earlier than expected in early July. We came back 100%. And so now we are starting the recruiting process again. So, I will tell you guys though we expected that all the schools were going to open up at least partially and maybe have, you know.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a lot of people said, you can't lead like that. You can't tell people what you don't know. But people already know what we don't know. They need to know that you're going to be, you know, authentic about that, and they appreciated that, even though I didn't have a lot of answers for them.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so at the time that we move them to a four day work, we expecting very low volumes, expecting no sales, expecting nobody to use the system. We had an explosion of new customers, an explosion of kids on the system. And I just told the team, you know, there's a lot that we don't know. I'm going to tell you what I know and I'm going to tell you what I don't know. We're going to meet every month instead of every quarter. And I hope that with every successive month, what I know is going to start to creep up and be more than what I don't know.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I love that question because when I say that, most people say, Oh, that's so great. You know, you had exponential growth. And what I say in response to that is when you grow really fast, you get stretch marks. And we got stretch marks. So our stretch marks were our support system was overwhelmed. And this was at a time when they were usually, it was a low period typically. So gearing up for the fall, busy back to school season. And so we looked at our team and we said, you're going to have to sprint now. And it was very, very difficult because it meant that we had to stretch ourselves. And the one thing I didn't mention earlier is part of our cost reduction. We moved everybody to a four-day work week.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have many, many things to worry about, they won't have to worry about math instruction. That will be one thing they won't have to worry about. So I went to my board. I said the thing that we should do is to open up the platform so that if a district had 50 schools on Dreambox, they could put the remaining 47 on for free through the end of June, just so that they could keep their kids learning at home. And we figured the best thing to do was to go to our existing customers because they were already trained. They had people in the district who could be resources to parents and to children. And we didn't know if we were going to be able to train them. So we did that. And within six weeks, we nearly doubled the number of students and districts were really desperate. So fifth in five weeks. So that was over 2 million students that were added.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the beginning, we didn't know what was going to happen, so we decided to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. And so we cut back on all of our expenses dramatically. We moved everybody to work from home. That meant we weren't spending as much money on travel. We didn't go to any conferences. There was a lot of education conferences where we meet principals and district administrators. We cut out all of those. And we really cut out everything that we have relied on for the past 10 years to cultivate customers. And we didn't know what was going to happen. Then I got together with my team and I said, what do we do to help teachers through this? We have to figure out a way to demonstrate our partnership. And they said, what we should do is open up the platform for free throughout the whole school year.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a lot of change for us. So there were two phases of this evolution post-COVID. First phase was to survive. And the second phase was to thrive. And in the survive phase, we were guided by our company values and by three principles, really. The first is, what do we do to take care of our employees? We want them to be safe and secure. And we close the office early, early March before many other people do. And then the second was, what do we do to take care of our school customers, our kids and our teachers and school administrators? And we figured if we took care of our staff, then we could take care of our customers. And then the third piece was if we take care of our customers, then we will take care of our company. So the default was not what do we do to take care of revenue. The default was what do we do to take care of our talent so that we can take care of our customers? If we do that, we will do everything we can to protect revenue in the company.”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dreambox is K through eight math program that delivers personalized learning for every child on it. So it's engaging. Kids think they're doing games, but they're actually doing very serious math learning”
2020-08-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · How I Built Resilience: Jessie Woolley-Wilson of DreamBox · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT