Trends and events over the past few years have made it clear that timely school communications – teacher-to-students, teacher-to-parents, district-wide – are critical. Since 2011, Remind has worked toward meeting that need, and Quenton "Q" Cook, this mobile messaging platform's CEO, sits down with Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, to talk about all things SMS, the evolution of a technology, and the greater benefits of an efficient communication model within a school community.

Access this episode's Show Notes, including links to the audio, a summary, and helpful resources.

Elana:

Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni, and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week, I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing or content marketing, and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience.

Hello, everyone. I'm Elana Leoni, and welcome to this week's episode of All Things Marketing and Education. Today, I'm sitting down with Q. Cook, CEO at Remind. I recently got to know Q at an EdTech conference called ASUGSV just recently. It was in March and we were sitting by a fire in beautiful sunny San Diego. If you can imagine. And I sat down with someone who was the CEO of Remind, and I was just so pleasantly surprised how personable and how passionate he was. He talked about relationships so eloquently, and talked about how relationships in schools really affected him, and that stuck with me that conversation. And I thought he'd be a great guest for you all to get to know as well. Today, we'll be focusing on the power of creating meaningful relationships, and for you educators listening, we'll also talk a little bit more specifics and give you some tips and strategies, as well, as you navigate the school year.

Quenton:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor. This is my first time on a podcast, so hopefully I'll do well. But yeah, I mean, I think you nailed my background just right. You know, my background has definitely been in consumer software. I mean, I still feel like I'm learning about the EdTech space, even though I've been working here for seven years now. But I really made a very meaningful and purposeful shift into EdTech seven years ago. You know, I was looking at what I wanted to do next, and I was looking at how I could make a bigger impact, how I could really influence the lives of a lot of people in a positive way. And I come from a family of educators. My dad was a teacher, and my sister is a teacher. And I really have been blessed to have a lot of really meaningful teachers in my life. And so I was looking at education technology startups and trying to figure out which one really had a chance to impact a whole generation.

I think there's a lot of amazing startups out there. I think there's a lot of amazing work happening in education technology. But I found myself wary of any company that felt like it was trying to obviate away teachers, any company that said, "Oh, well, you just pop your kid in front of this program and they're going to like you." The personalized learning stuff is going to take over, and they're just going to have at it. I think there's a place for that. I think those can be really powerful and empowering for students, but just like you said, when I think about what made a real difference in my life, it was when a teacher challenged me, or when a teacher mentored me, or when a teacher opened my eyes up to a whole new area of interest. I mean, my entire career happened because I happened to just take a programming course on a whim, and this professor was amazing and really got me very excited about the possibilities of what we can create with software, and that's influenced my entire life.

So I think that if we can have more students and families having those tight relationships with their teachers, having the supportive moments, that's really what Remind is trying to do. And so when I founded Remind, it was really focused on building those relationships at a huge, huge scale that's never been done before. It just got me really, really excited. So that's why I joined Remind seven years ago and have been really blessed to be able to build and work with us for those past seven years.

Elana:

Awesome. That's really helpful. And I love to hear when leaders are also part of families that were educators, too, because it's kind of in your DNA, too, because you were raised that way. You have that utmost respect for educators and the profession. And I've talked to lots of leaders in EdTech, and they're kind of wayfinding to figure out how can they make the most impact using the skills that they have, right?

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

And it was about the time I seen a lot of people make that move and that shift, and it's cool to see how you started in product and got to really know probably the nooks and crannies of the product. And it's probably significantly changed since then even, but then how do I lead this ship? That's a bit daunting, but a cool role.

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

Do you want to just talk a little bit about your path inside Remind?

Quenton:

Yeah. I mean, to me, the heart of what we are trying to do is we're trying to build those relationships that support student success and facilitate teachers and educators that are trying to build those. And so, for a long time, for me, that meant what is the actual software we're building? What are the features we're building for educators? What are the ways that teachers' needs intersect with parent needs, intersect with student needs, intersect with admin needs? It's this complicated balance you're trying to foster, because if you build for just one user type, you're not going to get this natural explosion of engagement that we actually see and foster on Remind. And I think the challenge, though, even when I was just the product leader on Remind, was how do we take this really big, engaged user base – where we've got millions of teachers that sign up and start using the Remind chat product for free, they just start messaging their classroom –how do we make a sustainable generational business? Right?

Because I tell a lot of people when they first join Remind, "If you want to make as much money as fast as possible in a startup, don't join an EdTech startup in general, you have to be here for the mission. You have to be here because you want to help educators build those relationships." But we have to sustain our business. And so, a challenge over the last five years has been how do we layer on services that parents and admins and the buyers in education really get significant value out of, so that we can build this business and make Remind last for the long term? So in many ways, I feel like every job I've done has just been trying to solve puzzles, trying to figure out how do you solve all these competing needs in a simple and elegant way. Sometimes that's been with code, sometimes that's been with features, and sometimes that's been with large teams. Right? And so that's just the next phase of what I've been doing as CEO, is really just trying to build out this platform in a way that keeps delivering more and more value for students.

You know, I think overall, the thing to know about Remind is communication always was looked at as just the beginning. I think a lot of people think about Remind and they think, "Oh, you're a messaging service. You're just a way for teachers to communicate with their classroom." And that's the heart of what we do, but the hope and the dream and the belief always has been we can take that engaged network of students, parents, teachers, and then start to distribute even richer and more impactful learning experiences. Because our belief is that if there's any student out there that's denied an experience that they would like – maybe tutoring, maybe an AP course, maybe some advanced office hours with their teacher because their school can't offer it in person – that's a failure, right? And so, if we can be there and partner with schools to offer richer learning experiences, that's our goal. And so, it's a really exciting challenge, it's hard to build. We're still a very small group of people. We have huge ambitions, and that's the path that we're on.

Elana:

Yeah, I remember when Remind first debuted, and y'all were on the scene when we didn't have a lot of smartphones, even in the beginning, right? So it was all about like SMS and making sure, and it still in some ways is, because you talk about equity and access, right? Reaching the parents and the students and the community and the admins where they are.

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

And when it's easiest to communicate with them. And I've always loved that. And it truly has revolutionized the way educators chat with everybody and students and whatnot. I can't imagine a day, can you, when you were in school where you could actually talk to your educator?

Quenton:

No.

Elana:

I didn't have anything. They literally pinned something to my clothes, because I'd always lose stuff.

Quenton:

Right. Yeah. You can't even trust the note home in the kids' backpack, right?

Elana:

Yeah. Yeah.

Quenton:

I mean, that access point, I think, is so key to what we do. And I really do believe that one of the reasons we have been successful and one of the reasons we're becoming the defaults for communication platform in schools is because we pay so much attention to making sure every person in the community can actually get and engage with the message. Everyone can actually build those relationships. And that is hard. It is significantly harder than just sending out an email or just putting a note in a kid's backpack, because there's all these barriers to communication: who has a smartphone and who doesn't? Even if you have a smartphone, maybe you don't have a data plan. Maybe you speak another language. Maybe it's really hard for you to get to parent-teacher conferences because you're working two jobs. There's all these barriers to those successful relationships forming. And, unfortunately, it's an immense amount of work for every bit of learning to conduct and every learning tool out there to build around those barriers. Right?

You know, if I'm building a curriculum software, I can't also worry about how to translate my notices to parents into every different language that parents speak. And I can't also worry about how to send Reminders over SMS. So Remind, hopefully, what we're trying to do is build this system where all of the content and assignments and notes to home that gets sent out there, we can take in from the teacher from the classroom and make sure it gets distributed and engaged and just a much, much higher rate. I mean, there are studies that say that less than 4% of parents log in regularly to their LMS, which is so sad. Because a lot of times, you put up the LMS and say, "Oh well, parents now get to know what's going on in their kids' studies and their school." And that's just not the case. You have to reach out to parents across all of these barriers, across all these divides, and reach them where they are.

I think another step that always really encourages me about Remind is when we roster inside a school and we sync with the school syst so that we can onboard and activate the entire community, we tend to have 20% additional contact points that don't even exist inside the syst, the school doesn't even have a record of them. And these may be the aunt that the student studies with after school before their parents get home from work, or maybe it's mom's new cell phone number, or maybe dad's work number that for whatever reason isn't in the school's system. So we tend to, again, just really focus on broadening reach to make sure every single person can access these important materials and relationship-building messages.

Elana:

Quenton:

Yep. Yeah. I mean, you want to talk about best practices or things that we're seeing that become really effective in classrooms. You know, we generally try to really encourage all of the teachers that want to use Remind to start at the beginning of the year and don't wait till you need to communicate with a parent, but just start sharing what's going on in your classroom. Take pictures of what the students are doing. Send it out to the parents, have a little quick one-on-one interaction over messaging with every single parent at the start of the school year, introducing yourself, asking them about their student, what are their hopes and dreams for the year. Because if you start out that relationship from a foundation of trust, from a foundation of, "Hey, we're both here to support and care for your student," then when a challenging situation comes up, there's going to be that base layer of trust.

And you can approach the situation in a collaborative way. In a way it's like, "Hey, how do we solve this problem together rather than a combative way? Like, no, I don't trust you. I don't believe what you're saying about my student." Right? And that takes a lot of work. I mean, I'll say one of the good things about Remind is we've spent a lot of time thinking about how do we make it really easy for a teacher to build those positive relationships with all 30 to 60 parents in their classroom, and in as fast away as possible. Because no one says tha5 teachers have extra time in the day, right? And 30 to 60 phone calls takes a long time. And hopefully, building those relationships with Remind announcements and chat messages makes it just a little bit easier to start everyone off on the right foot.

Elana:

Yeah. Yeah. I am curious that you do get to see, I mean, you don't get to see all the specific things in terms of the messages and whatnot, but as of now I think it's 80% of U.S. schools use Remind. It's about 30 million active users and, like, 60% of U.S. teachers. Like, that's massive, that's a massive scale of people using a product to communicate. And I mean, this question is huge, but I'm just wondering how you've seen it evolve. The pandemic was its own anomaly and still is on communication. But do you want to just talk through how you've seen communication from your lens evolve, and then we can get to the pandemic, too, because that turned everything upside down.

Quenton:

So, it definitely has changed a lot since Remind started over ten years ago now. When we started, there was a lot of concern about having two-way online messaging with parents. Like, it was almost viewed as scary, or not safe or inappropriate. And so, in the early days, Remind was very restrictive. It was really just a way to send out announcements, a blast to the class, right? Which even back then, we always felt that's not really the way to build these full, supportive relationships. You need to be able to have a conversation back and forth, but it was the wedge that allowed a lot of folks to dip their toe in and start to feel safe with online communication.

But what has happened is the world and the expectations around it has changed, and now every parent almost expects the teacher to be able to message with them, right? It's weird and hard that they don't message with them off of their mobile devices, right? So, certainly comfort with two-way communication. The importance of that two-way communication has just increased dramatically over time. Other things we've seen is we have charted essentially the uptick of smartphone usage, right? And of data plans. Right? But I'll say that even now, where you've got – I forget what the set is. I think it's like 90% of EOS households have smartphones. We're not at that level of penetration on our app still. There's still a lot of people that have smartphones that prefer to communicate over SMS, maybe because they're very data conscious, maybe because they don't have access to reliable Wi-Fi at home.

And so SMS is still a really big unifier, and I think a really important thing that Remind has done is we've made SMS a pretty full-featured client end experience. So it's not just, "Oh, I can just get announcements from my teacher over SMS. I can have a full two-way back-and-forth conversation with translations if necessary between languages all over SMS." Really, no one else does this. It's pretty complicated to build and, frankly, expensive to support. But we think that the families that most need to engage are often the ones that have the least resources, and so we've got to do whatever we can to make it easy for them. So again, over time we've seen that two-way engagement just become more and more important.

And you mentioned COVID. It was actually really interesting, and I like to think that Remind in some small way helped play a lifeline to a lot of students who felt very, very isolated throughout COVID. It's part of what you get out of school is a social experience. You're building relationships, not just with your teachers, but with your peers, and normally if you chart Remind usage throughout the day, you can see a spike in the morning, and then a lull during the school day, because students are in class and in the physical school walls, and then a spike again after school. During COVID, it was just flat. It was just high the entire time. All day long, students were collaborating with each other, messaging their teacher, asking questions about the assignment. You know, we talk about Zoom fatigue. Like, you can't have a student on a Zoom call for eight hours straight. They need to have some time to not be recorded, but Remind hopefully tune s into that next layer down of communication that's a little less intense than a video call, but still really high throughput to build those relationships.

Elana:

Yeah. I listened to one of your heads of engineering. He was on a podcast, and he was talking about just his experience being at the helm during COVID and how it was just alarms going off, because the amount of usage that you were seeing were off the charts, and they were unpredictable. Sometimes they were late at night, and there was all these things, and in a tech business, it's all about capacity and servers and making sure that you keep the application up at 100%. And it was so fascinating just to see how communication was a lifeline, and you could see it with those spikes.

Quenton:

Elana:

Yeah. Do you feel at this point now, I guess we're technically in an endemic, right?

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

Like, at what point do you see it normalizing to those cyclical changes in K-12? Or is it a little bit more of you see that pulse throughout still?

Quenton:

And the good news or a ray of light is, in theory, there's a lot of funding coming towards these schools. The different ESSER fundings over the CARES Act and the other COVID fundings has maybe seven X the normal Title One budget that most schools are going to receive over the next two years, which is really great. So hopefully, they can apply these resources where it will actually help students make up that unfinished learning. But again, it's not like administrators had a ton of time in normal situations. So, they almost have this decision fatigue. Like, "How do I put these funds to work? How do I run a school as it would normally, but also layer on additional services to help my students?" It's hard, and that's why you're seeing, I think, only 7% of that funding has actually been spent yet. And there's a time limit on it. It has to get spent in the next two years. So everyone's trying to figure it out, everyone's trying to figure out what programs to institute to really help their students.

Elana:

Yeah, and sometimes I feel like the broader the language, the more decision fatigue comes in, because it's kind of like, I graduated undergrad business and I'm like, "Well, the whole world's business, some of the Common Core standards can be broad enough that can apply to different ways to do them." Right?

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

So I see that people struggle with that. If, for those of you that are listening and are active listeners or want to listen to other episodes, we interviewed Rayna Glumac from RYE Consulting, and she went into to real intricate detail around ESSER funds, how to navigate all of the funding. And then if you were an EdTech pilot, how do you navigate pilots within all of that to make it successful? So check that out. We'll put it in the Show Notes.

So we talked a little bit about communication evolving, and it's super fascinating because I do feel that, regardless of where we're at now, there's now even more of the normalization of that communication. Like before the pandemic, sure, there was beginning to normalize, and now it's like, of course, we're all talking to each other. Of course, we have multiple ways to talk to each other. I love that you acknowledged that it's too much to ask of an educator, all the time with all the classes they have. So how do we simplify it? But then for you educators, too, I want you to think about how are you putting up boundaries for yourself? Because it's really important. I talked to one educator, one of our podcasts highlighted three educators that really just talked about the day in the life of an educator, and one person said to me, I think offline, that some of their apps where they're on call for parents and stuff, they actually don't put it on their phone at times, or they check it off because they need to have one moment where they don't feel like they're on call. So as an educator, I don't want you to listen to this episode and say, "Hey, we're advocating for you to go, always call, be on call because we know that this is a marathon and not a sprint." We want you to be there and fuel yourself first and foremost.

Quenton:

Yeah. I mean, to me, a lot of what we have done over the years that Remind has tried to build really for the teacher and understand that they are trying to orchestrate a lot of relationships that are really, really important, but we have to understand their needs. You know, I think there's a reason why educators don't use Slack or just regular text messages to communicate with everyone. You want to keep that divide, you want to keep some ability to manage and orchestrate your audience. And we hopefully have built tools to make it just a little easier and just a little simpler for you to manage your life. Things like office hours, make it so, "Hey, these are the hours when you can contact me. Any other time, messages are going to have to wait." Right? Things like our announcement feature, right? So you can send one message, it spurs conversations with every parent in the classroom all at one time, so you don't have to go repeat yourself 30 times. So hopefully, we make your life just a little bit easier because, again, yeah, there is this balance of you want to form these relationships, but your job is not to be on call 24/7 responsive at any time. It's unsustainable.

Elana:

Yeah. I was just reflecting as, like, this generation are used to having things on demand. But when we were in school, I had to physically wait to go to a room at a certain time and day to have office hours if they were even available, right? So it was a long lag time. And then in college, it actually got worse because I had to walk very far sometimes, and sometimes the educator wouldn't even be there. The professor wouldn't even be there.

Quenton:

Right.

Elana:

I think sometimes we take it for granted, that instantaneous. But what I also tell my social team, too, is that we also don't want to respond right away at times to almost instill a behavior of real time, too. So as an educator, think about how quickly you respond, what expectations do you want to set?

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

And Quenton, do you see that happening in the beginning of school, too, of like, when they introduce parents, are there expectations around communication?

Quenton:

Yeah. I think we try to build our classroom experience that the teacher manages in a way where they can decide how they want communication to flow. And so, a lot of what they're going to be doing, just like when you start a classroom for the first time with a new group of students, you're going to set norms and expectations for that classroom. How do we behave in here? How do we treat each other? How do we ask questions? What are the expectations for each other? You need to do the same thing in a digital space, right? When you message me, when can you expect a response? What are the kinds of things you'd ask me? About how much collaboration do you want to foster between people? There are some classrooms where the teacher really wants all the students talking to each other, talking about the coursework, thinking in groups, that discussing and debating with each other. And there are other classrooms where the teacher says, "No, I really mostly want you communicating with me, and that's it. And I'm not trying to foster as much discussion." There are classrooms where you want almost no two-way engagement, you really just want to send announcements. So all of those modalities are things that we offer. We do definitely encourage educators to just think about the digital space along with the actual classroom space when you're setting expectations for the year.

Elana:

Yeah. And sometimes when we think about communication, we think, especially in the world of texting and SMS, that it's very tactical. It's very transactional. It's like, "Hey, did you do your homework?" Or it's very assignment driven and whatnot, but that's not the case at all. I mean, do you want to talk a little bit about the different ways educators communicate beyond just like assignments and the expertise of what they teach?

Quenton:

Yeah. I mean, I think the most powerful thing is just sharing – one of the most powerful things is just sharing what's going on in the classroom with the parents at home. Bringing them into the learning process, because taking a picture and sending it to all the parents of the students working on something in the classroom, sharing a debate that you had that day about a particular topic, allows the parents then to continue that conversation and discussion when the students are at home, to reinforce that learning. So a lot of it is just looping in the parents. There's, of course, sending assignments and reminders about those assignments, again, not just for the student, but to loop in the parents. And then there's just both positive and negative feedback, right? "Hey, Sally did really great today, and you should be really proud of her for X, Y, and Z reason," or, "Hey, Billy, I really saw that you worked hard on this particular test, really great job for improvement." Just that acknowledgement, "Yeah, you're going to get your grade back," but having someone call out something that you did in a positive way is just so impactful. It builds that sense of belonging, it builds that sense of confidence, and maybe turns this into a lifelong passion for a student. So, I think that feedback, as well as assignments, as well as just sharing what's going on so the broader community can understand it, they're basically the three main areas that we see communication.

Elana:

Yeah. And it's interesting when we talked originally about how Remind has evolved, because where a lot of you EdTech listeners can relate is as you might have started out as a very transactional, almost like a commodity where it's a user utility, you do this function. Right? And you do this fairly well, but what I'm hearing you say, and what I've actually seen is that it's transformed the way that schools operate, but it's created an experience, it's created this meaningful relationship. And you were just talking about that and I was like, "Gosh, I would've loved that." And I couldn't imagine what type of learner I would've been if I had consistent positive feedback on the things that weren't necessarily a 100% valued in school.

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

There're different types of learners, right?

Quenton:

And there's people who want to receive feedback in different spaces. I mean, some people want to receive praise inside the classroom verbally. Some people prefer a quick note privately afterwards, right? So just again, trying to support those different use cases and different modalities is what we're trying to do. The other thing that I think that is really important to call out is that one of the things we absolutely see is that when an entire school uses Remind. So, most of the time Remind starts by just wondering teachers, they pick it up, they start using it, and they say, "OK, yeah, I'm going to use this for my classroom." And that's great, and we get a lot of usage, and you start to see those use cases that I was talking about, but when an entire school or an entire district even starts to use Remind, you just see really an explosion of use cases. You start to see that this is a tool that really every person in the district can use at different layers and with different frequencies.

We have this graphic we share sometimes for district leaders. It's almost like our nutritional pyramid, but at the base layer, it's like classroom comps. You want that daily, you want just constant back and forth about little things with your classroom teachers, just to keep track of what's going on and to reinforce those things. Then one layer up on the pyramid is school comps, "Hey what's going on?" There's a dance, or there's a fundraiser, or there's a community service event, or something like that, or it's enrollment day or school picture day, or here's grades, whatever. And those happen maybe weekly, maybe a quick check-in now and then from the principal. And then at the top of the pyramid are really important comps from the district, but they're less personal and they happen sort of infrequently, like, "Hey, here's important paperwork that you need to sign," or "Here's the state test scores that are coming out."

But what happens when you've got all the communication happening in one layer is they can support and reinforce each other, and you find even more use cases. "Oh, well, maybe the updates about the bus route should go out over Remind." And "Oh, we've had to shut down one of the schools because the pipe bursts, and we can communicate with the parents about that over Remind." And so you just get this really vibrant ecosystem where parents know that the most up-to-date information and students know that the most up-to-date information is going to come to them over Remind. And it just snowballs and becomes like a digital school square, basically.

Elana:

Yeah. I was going to ask you about the admin use case, because in a way you don't want to pepper communication that's overwhelming.

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

But there are really important uses for admin to use school comps. And, in particular, things around safety come up, too. And I know that there are urgent messaging features in Remind, but do you have any use cases of how it's helped with school safety? It's just unfortunately something that we all have to think about, and it breaks my heart to think that we have to be constantly aware and – educators, I mean – even now, the ripple effects. The educator who wrote this heartbreaking poem I read today. And it was just about something small happens that's a noise, and everyone just blocks doors and freaks out, and it's in their right to do so now, but I'm curious on how technology potentially can help. And I see you uniquely positioned there, too.

Quenton:

I mean, a lot of schools have emergency alert software. I think that it tends to be insufficient in a couple of ways that hopefully Remind can help with, with our urgent messaging features, our emergency alert features. One is, Remind really is a mobile-first service, right? Even for an administrator. Yeah, we have, of course, a web interface, and you can log in on the web and on your computer, and get analytics or set up your roster, and advance things like that. But a lot of times, the principal's out roaming the halls, talking to teachers, talking to students, and if an emergency happens, the last thing they need to do is run back to their office to send out an emergency message. So being able to reach your entire school community, including your parents from your pocket, being able to target that maybe you only need to talk to a particular building full of parents, right? Or particular buses full of parents, being able to target that message, personalize it, send it out with the appropriate level of urgency all from your pocket, is actually really, really important and provides a much more close sense of emergency befitting to the situation.

The other thing that I think is really, really important is a lot of the old emergency alert services out there are really about one-way communication. And, in some sense, that makes sense because you actually can't have a principal or a district leader communicating with a hundred or hundreds or thousands of parents at once, right? But what happens when you send out an emergency message and say, "Hey, we've got to shut down school, you need to come pick up your kids." Well, immediately the school phone banks are busy. You can't get through, parents can't reach them. And parents have important questions. "I'm at work, I can't pick them up." Or "How do I get there?" Or "Is my kid safe?" Or "What do I do?" Right? And so it actually comes back to that triangle I was talking about, our nutrition triangle of communication. What you really want to happen is you want important mass comps to go out from the district leader or the school leader, but then coordination and one-on-one collaboration to happen with the teacher, often the homeroom teacher, right?

An example I have is five years back now or something, LA Unified had a bomb scare, and they had to shut down the entire district. And they shut it down like 8:00 in the morning, and they canceled school. And so kids were already on their way to school. They were already walking to the bus stop. Parents were already going to work. They sent out these mass comps texts from their old provider, and parents were in a panic. They didn't know what to do. They were like, "I thought my kids were already at school. I'm already at work." But the parents who collaborate on Remind with their teacher, we heard just so many stories of teachers saying, "Well, hey, I'll go pick up your kid, and I'll wait with them at the Dairy Queen until you can come get them, or I'll hang out with them at the bus stop or help them walk home, or whatever." And really, kids take real human intervention like that, and you can't just scale it to thousands of people. You need these teachers who can care for a small number of students at once in these emergency situations. And so, hopefully that whole process becomes easier on Remind when everyone's really used to communicating in one platform.

Elana:

Yeah. And I'm just reflecting a little bit on this conversation. It's giving me goose bumps, because it's horrific that we have to deal with school safety all of the time, and seconds count. When I think about seconds counting, I think about how we can enable technology to help us, and what your point was of one-way versus two-way. It's about getting the initial message out, but sometimes that initial message is wrong, and you need people on the ground that can say, "Here you go." And I mean, I always think, "What if, what should have?" And I started going on the should path when I hear these stories, but gosh, what if they did have somebody who immediately said, "No, the shooter's over here. No." There were so many conflicting reports. So I mean, I don't want it to be, something that's a popular feature for y'all, but I do want everyone to feel safe.

Quenton:

Yeah. Yeah. And again, I really think that it has to be collaboration up and down that stack. It can't just be a district leader problem. And it can't just be a school classroom problem. It's about the whole community.

Elana:

Agreed. Yeah. Well, we talked a lot about communication, and we went through one of the most challenging times in K-12 education. And you were at the helm of one of the fastest growing EdTech companies, too. Given your unique vantage point of what communication is and how it evolves, I'm just curious on if y'all have talked about what is communication looking like in the next five or ten years? I mean, we've got Zuck out here talking about the Meta in Star Trek, we always have the holograms popping.

Quenton:

I tend to be a little more tempered, I think. I think it's great if we can offer really interesting VR metaverse experiences inside schools, but I think it is, again, that we just think the access question is so important. And we really believe that if you choose a communication pathway that lets even 1% of your families fall behind, you're doing them a disservice. And so, we're going to continue focusing on ways that we can bring access to more and more people.

And one of the areas that we're investing in a lot right now is actually accessibility. You know, SMS actually is pretty accessible. The phone makers have done a good job making sure that their SMS capabilities are accessible to people who have hearing or vision difficulties, but we want to make sure that all of our services are apps and our websites are even more accessible. And that's something we're definitely putting a lot of energy into. But I think a lot of what we think about when you think about the future of communication is who else needs to be in this community that we're building? And how can we enable the school to extend their resources even further? Because right now, actually, I think the big change that we're seeing, and I think it's driven by COVID or accelerated by COVID, but I don't think it's going to end just because we're past COVID (not that we are) is schools are starting to really think about how really high-dosage tutoring needs to be a part of their offering to help students who are falling behind.

Schools really talk about multi-tiered systems of support, right? They talk about, "OK, well, everyone's in the class," and then students are struggling to get this extra support. And then students are struggling even more to get this extra support, and to us, the pinnacle of that is high-dosage tutoring. It can be expensive, it's one-on-one or small-group consistent tutoring rate, but it is over and over again, research driven, proven to be the most effective way to actually accelerate and change learning outcomes.

Elana:

Yeah. One of the trends we saw at the pandemic was the evolution of the term "learning pods" and all of the other things around that, but it just frustrated me, because I saw inequities and the gap grow bigger and bigger, because the people that had the funds to do so got their children high-quality learning pods and tutors and things like that. And so many kids were left behind with that. So I love that it's any offering is being offered on the district level, and access is really important there because a lot of the B2Cs that target the parents, they have to make money that way, but it is fueling a lot of haves and have-nots with education.

Quenton:

100%. Yeah. I mean, to us, the students who most need tutoring, who most need help getting up to speed are going to be the ones that are often the most unengaged and often maybe have the fewest resources. So the onus can't be on parents. The onus has to be on the district to identify these students, support them getting the help that they need, and we have to have the political will and the budget, and we're starting to see that, to support these students in doing that. It can't just be, "Oh, well, some students fall behind and that's OK." I think that's just no longer acceptable.

And the great thing is when you see a school roll out a tutoring program, when they identify the students who need it, when they facilitate time for them to meet with that tutor a study period where they're on a computer interacting with a tutor, it really is transformative. And you see students that were failing get five out of fives on AP exams. We have tons of examples of that. And I really think that the school buyer is definitely the right buyer to help push forward this equity issue in schools.

Elana:

Yeah. And I think this entire conversation, as we talked about in the beginning, is all bubbling into meaningful relationships. And sometimes I need to redefine things like tutoring and communication, because we tend to think it very transactional. Like, you got this problem, let's get you here, but you can't get people to really, truly succeed if they don't feel like they're being cared for, and there's not a relationship there. And I see if there's more touch points within the ecosystem of a student learning, one educator's not going to be that meaningful impact for every single student in their classroom. It's just not physically possible. Even if you're the best teacher. So if a tutor can also provide that or be that one that cares and believes for them, I think that's powerful.

Quenton:

Yeah. And we're just hardwired evolutionarily to respond emotionally to other people, and if you've got that one-on-one connection, and we tell our tutors, spend the first five minutes, the first ten minutes of every session, just talking to them, just saying, "How's your life? What did you do last week? Anything interesting going on?" Building that connection, because that connection is going to motivate them through productive, challenging moments, right? For those moments where they're not sure they don't know, they think this is hard, they think this is stupid, but they're going to want to do it because you're there rooting for them, caring for them. You know, they know that you're on their team. And yeah, I think almost every definition you read of high-dosage talks about consistent tutoring in small groups. But to us, when we read that, that means relationships, that means building that supportive relationship.

Elana:

Yes. Well, Q, thank you so much for your time. One question we ask all of our guests, and I think it's always going to be timely, this question, because of the challenges we face with the pandemic and life, but it's all about trying to rejuvenate yourself and trying to keep inspired. You obviously are the head of a very mission-driven organization, but are there things that you do on your hard days, some things that you do, physical exercise, you read, you watch, you have things in your life that just keep you going? When you feel really down, you're like, "This will help me get through, well, things." Can you let our audience know?

Quenton:

Some of my favorite things are hearing from our teachers and our educators. Hearing the little stories of what they were able to do. Even just looking for mentions of Remind on Twitter, you just see great use cases of what teachers are doing. Things that we never even imagined. New ways to communicate, new ways to engage their classroom that are enabled by Remind. Those are always inspiring to me. So we love hearing from our educators, absolutely. And then to unwind or to center myself, the other thing I do is, I think in another life, I would like to be a chef. So I also cook a lot. So I think anyone who's had a stressful day just take some time to cup some vegetables and cook them up, and it'll make you feel better.

Elana:

Yeah. It's kind of meditative, right? You're like, "God, it just is taking so long," but that's the whole purpose, right? That's to do small tasks. I used to work in the food industry, and I would always love folding up the napkins and doing the roll-ups, because it was a mindless task that I could just get very good at.

Quenton:

And it's accomplishable.

Elana:

Yeah.

Quenton:

I can do this, and it will be complete when I am done. Not all of life is like that.

Elana:

So with cooking, there's that art, there's that sometimes it always doesn't come out the same way. There're things in there that you're like, "Yes, I'm learning." I don't know. I find it inspiring as well.

Quenton:

Yeah.

Elana:

Well, Q, how can people get in touch with you or your team if they're inspired?

Quenton:

Yeah. I mean, you should reach out to us on Twitter. I think it's RemindHQ on Twitter. Everyone's able to email me at any time, I'm quenton@remind101.com. And leave us a message, we'd love to hear from you. We'd love to hear from teachers. We'd love to hear from other people in the EdTech community. If you've got an EdTech service out there and you think there'd be an interesting way that we could collaborate, we're always trying to, again, connect all of the content and services out there to the parents and students who needed to see it. So, hopefully, we can help everyone in the industry get their stuff engaged with.

Elana:

Awesome. Well, thank you everybody for joining us today. I truly hope that you walked away with a new appreciation for how communication has evolved throughout K-12 education. And if you're an educator, too, I would love you to think about how you communicate with your own students. What are the barriers? What are the expectations? All the ins and outs. And now think about it as it relates to back-to-school in the upcoming school year as well. And I challenge you to come up with something that is thoughtful, that meets the needs of your class and your parents, but also yourself, too. So again, really guard your own self-care throughout the year, and messages can fuel you from students. But we know that being an educator is sometimes one of the most thankless professions out there, and it can be also draining. So there's my little standing on my soapbox for you educators out there.

You all can access this episode's Show Notes at leoniconsultinggroup.com/23. So that's 23. We put everything that we talked about with Q, we'll also put some resources for Remind too. There's a couple of guides I think might be helpful for communication, too. And they can be used regardless of what product you use, too. I really want to make sure that, regardless of any kind of EdTech product you use, is that you're thinking about communication critically and proactively: "How do I want communication to occur in my classroom?" So, thank you all. We will see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.

Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you liked what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can visit leoniconsultinggroup.com/podcast for all Show Notes, links, and freebies mentioned in each episode. And we always love friends, so please connect with us on Twitter at Leoni Group. If you enjoyed today's show, go ahead and click the subscribe button to be the first one notified when our next episode is released. We'll see you next week on All Things Marketing and Education.

Elana Leoni, Host

Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding LCG, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.

Quenton Cook, Guest

About All Things Marketing and Education

What if marketing was judged solely by the level of value it brings to its audience? Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education, a podcast that lives at the intersection of marketing and, you guessed it, education. Each week, Elana Leoni, CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, highlights innovative social media marketing, community-building, and content marketing strategies that can significantly increase brand awareness, engagement, and revenue.

Rate, Like, and Subscribe

Let us know what you thought about this episode by rating and reviewing our podcast. Click here, scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select “Write a Review.” Then be sure to let us know what you loved most about the episode! Also, if you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the podcast to be notified when we have more content to share with you.