EdTech Startup Showcase

Classroom Mosaic
===

[00:00:00] You're listening to the EdTech Startup Showcase, an original series produced by the Bee Podcast Network. Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Scott Chudy, co host of the Fabulous Learning Nerds, and I'll be taking you through some amazing stories from the innovative emerging companies in ed tech.

In today's episode, we're gonna hear all about Classroom Mosaic. We're gonna find out how they got started, their vision for transforming teaching and learning, and the way they're currently supporting educators like yourself. My guest today is Ben Gufsison, co founder of Classroom Mosaic. Ben has been instrumental in developing a teacher observation platform for K 12 instructional leaders since February of 2011.

With a bachelor's degree in computer software engineering and business analytics from Auburn University, his entrepreneurial and technological expertise is well [00:01:00] recognized in the education and technology sector. Ben, welcome to the show!

Awesome. Thank you, Scott. I'm very excited

to be here.

We're really super excited to have you here and I am gleefully anticipating better understanding what Classroom Mosaic has to offer. It sounds incredibly,

Awesome. Do me a favor, I gave you kind of like this real baseline level of who you are and what you're all about. Can you provide our audience with a little bit more background on Ben, kind of where you got started and how you get to this amazing place with Classroom Mosaic?

Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in South Carolina. I would got formally educated at Auburn, uh, University. So, um, my dad gave me a really hard time about going to Alabama to get educated, but I absolutely adored my time at Auburn, um, and learned just an incredible amount. Not only academically, but then, you know, socially, the people there are just, a cut above everybody else and, thoroughly enjoyed my time there.

[00:02:00] And then spent a little bit of time in Dallas and moved back to South Carolina where I am today. And that's where Classroom Mosaic has grown. And so, our kind of M. O. is, uh, we, co founded this with a friend of mine in high school, his name is Tyler Smith, and, um, we were part of a STEM based program at our local, public high school, um, at Dutch Fork High, and, um, This was back in the day where the iPod Touches had just come out, and so the administrators that are building all got a set of iPod Touches, and they kind of got this edict from the district to say, try to automate and put as much stuff on it as possible, right?

Because that's right when technology was starting to come about. And so, as part of the STEM program, we were, taking a computer science research class, and we got asked to build an app to help give feedback to teachers. And That's where it all got started. So we built this app called Dutch Fork Observer and, our DF Observer and, we rolled it out and a couple of weeks later, another high school in our district said, Hey, that's really cool.

We'd love that. [00:03:00] And so instead of building a second app for them, uh, we decided to build a platform where as many schools or, uh, school districts that were interested in automating, you know, helping giving feedback to teachers, we decided to build Classroom Mosaic instead. And so we have this platform now where It's fully customizable, and I think that's one of the key differentiating factors with Classroom Mosaic is that we really want the observation process and the feedback that happens to be extremely organic and relevant to what goes on in your building, instead of, you know, coming with a certain rubric or a certain framework or a process process.

Now that you have to follow and make fit with what you're doing, we kind of take the opposite approach where it's very homegrown. We, we sit down with educators from all over and help them, uh, breathe life into the processes that they have instead of, you know, dictating basically what they need to do.

And so, um, a lot of people use our platform. I'll give you an example. in elementary school, they change kind of their goals every quarter. And so [00:04:00] at the beginning of the quarter, they're observing, giving feedback on something. And then, the first nine weeks, right? The first quarter, and then the second quarter that that's going to be something different.

And so our platform really helps make that happen. And, and people love it.

This is great. So I think feedback is, essential for growth. So I think the opportunity is there. how important is good feedback in K through 12?

That's a great question. It is, I guess, quintessential. I mean, there is, it is very, very important. And what we've seen in their research shows it as well, right? The instructional leadership, and this is kind of where we're leaning into as a company. How do we help give our leaders in the, in the building, in our schools, the best and the most effective tools to give helpful feedback and helpful coaching to teachers, so that they can, you know, grow.

themselves and ultimately have that impact in their relationship with the student. And there was a recent study that just came out that, that basically said a, a strong instructional leader can add up to three months of learning for each [00:05:00] student every single year. And that's at the principal level, right?

And that is incredible. That's from a Wallace Foundation research study. And so you can't really overstate how important. The dynamic between a principal or an assistant principal or a coach in a building is with the, the teachers of the building or the educators of the building. And that's kind of where we live and where we play.

A lot of ed tech is directly towards students and we kind of take a look at it and said, Hey, we've, we've had a tremendous impact from. Many teachers throughout our journey, right? As I'm sure most people listening to this or even you, Scott, have, , you can think of those people and we kind of see education as it goes along.

You're never going to automate out that person, right? You're never going to automate out the, that educator, that mentor, that person guiding you along the process, and so we want to help develop tools to help support those people because I mean, and that's again kind of go back to the research.

That's what research says. The very best thing that a school can do is have highly effective students that are highly effective teachers in the [00:06:00] classroom with students. And the second best thing is to have a highly effective principle or a highly effective leader in the building. And so we're playing in that dynamic, and we want to help amplify what's going on.

Yeah, no, I think that's really important. Like coaching is just, it doesn't really matter in my humble opinion what field you're in. I just feel like it's such an important part for personal growth and development. And anytime I find Individuals that might, you know, be struggling from a leadership perspective or be struggling with what's going on.

Sometimes I have to really look and say, was it their fault? Because if they're, if they're not getting fed by somebody up above them, if they're not getting the feedback that they need to grow and learn and get better, then they're probably not right. They're probably not going to learn and grow and get any better.

really interesting. So I remember when I went to high school, I never. So, principal or assistant principal in the back room kind of observing or anything like that is, is that still prevalent? Or are we [00:07:00] seeing a shift or a trend upward around, hey, listen, personal growth development is important, therefore.

You know, at the principal level, so assistant principal level, like this is part of what you need to do. You need to be able to provide good feedback.

I think so. I think that is definitely the push from, a kind of an instructional leadership perspective where, just like what you're talking about, it used to be, Hey, the teacher goes in the classroom, they close the door, it's their own world, right? Nobody interacts with them. And it's very odd to have somebody come in.

And, in the literature says it. , the more often somebody can walk into the classroom and give feedback to teachers, the better it is for everybody involved. Teacher retention increases, the school culture completely changes now to where if, if you do it right and are having the appropriate conversations, and then giving the feedback and even sometimes the feedback can simply be just a simple question of, Hey, why did you do it this way than that way?

Or like, tell me what you were thinking about, right? It doesn't have to be, I, I know better than you. I think a lot of people get caught up on, at least from an administrative [00:08:00] perspective is, okay, I've never actually taught the subject before, what am I going to tell this teacher?

Right? And, the reflective, uh, part of the feedback, can be just as powerful as me coming in and saying, Hey, this is what you should do. And so I think there's, I think there's some change in what we mean by feedback. And I think there's also, some change in just kind of the expectation around, yeah, we, we actually do want people in our room and we, if, if it feels helpful, then teachers love it.

And, um, then honestly, that's one of the kind of what I feel like one of our crowning achievements as an observation platform. When you hear observation and you're a teacher and you go, absolutely not, right. We do not want you in our room. We do not want this because oftentimes it feels like a gotcha. It feels like, oh, I'm supposed to be doing this, I should have, you know, It comes across because it's, um, it's inconsistent and you don't know what to expect as part of the, that observation, uh, process.

And when you start to use Mosaic from an administrative perspective, we, uh, we really push kind of the consistency around getting into, uh, [00:09:00] classrooms. I think the research would tell you, it's like every other week you should be in somebody's classroom. And a lot of people freak because that sounds like a lot of time invested, right?

And it is. It is. But you don't necessarily have to be that person every single time. And so you have a, you have a team of observers. You have, uh, you know, maybe assistant principal, a coach, or even other teacher leaders that can be part of how do we see. All of our teachers, at least every other week and, begin to have the, those feedback and coaching conversations.

And again, if, if you get to that level and, you're playing in that realm and it doesn't have to be that intense, right? We have some clients where it's like once a quarter, but we also have clients that is. every week we're going to see every teacher. And there's some people that even push it with the smaller schools that are like, I'm going to see every teacher every day.

And so there's kind of a continuum there. But, , with that, the conversations that you will have. And the language that you begin to develop with your teachers are so much more rich because you're actually seeing what is going on, right, you can, um, you know what [00:10:00] is happening in their, in their, classrooms and, and it's just, it's just very, very powerful.

Yeah. I had a mentor once tell me that like, feedback's a gift, right? So I wanna get the feedback, so I wanna grow, I wanna get better. And I think that you're right. Like the more we have these conversations, the less scary they become. Right. So it's like, Oh my gosh, there's Ben and he's in the back of the class watching me.

I must be in trouble. No, that's not it. Ben's in the back of the class. He's watching me today. Great. I'm going to get some feedback. He's going to see how good I am today. And, we're going to talk about things and we're all going to get better. think that's great. So help me out. I'm, um, I'm a principal, right?

And by the way, I'm just a quick question. Do you find that a lot of people in that particular position are coached and trained on how to give good feedback, or is that a big opportunity?

I think that is a big opportunity. It really comes down to. What's funny with the [00:11:00] feedback, right? It's their supervisor and the feedback that they've given them and the training that they've taken them through. So, and sometimes we do see more and more, I guess, principal. I want to call Principal Pipeline for a better reason that's sticking in my head, but the training programs that principals go through will have more focus on the feedback that they give to people.

Awesome. I've got Classroom Mosaic. Typically, how am I using it on an iPhone or a tablet or a laptop? How am I using it? Or does it matter?

another kind of differentiator for us. It really is truly any device. We have a website. It's mobile optimized, but we also have an Android app. We have a iPhone app or an iOS app as well. And so really any device that you have, you can go through and do observations. And, in, in our. Our users report something like, 13 to 15 minutes are saved for each observation.

And so now, you know, from a time savings perspective, oftentimes what that means is you get to do double the amount of observations, or you [00:12:00] can do the same amount in half the time. And, um, and so now that, that idea of getting into everybody's classroom every other week is, is easier when you have the right tooling.

Cool. Awesome. All right. So, Device Neutral. Perfect, that's awesome, you get the right answer, thanks a lot, that's great. So, how does Classroom Mosaic help me, both in my observations, but also in the scheduling of my observations, and then the feedback that I ultimately share with the people that I'm observing?

So at the beginning of the process, you would sit down and you would go through and decide what you're going to observe. So usually that's related around your strategic goals, or maybe that's something with the district. You know, the district is focused on something. Sometimes that's related to your teacher evaluation rubric.

Sometimes it's related to curriculum implementation. It really is kind of depending on what, what you're interested in giving feedback on. And you can have multiple forms on the, your account as well. So you could pick and choose based on that day, [00:13:00] depending on what you'd like to go back and give feedback on.

So you, you choose a form, right? You choose a teacher, walk into the classroom, and begin to capture evidence in Classroom Mosaic around what you're seeing. And there's a bunch of different ways that we can do that. There's over, I think it's over 20 different ways that we can, capture things, whether that be like counters or, timers or, photos, um, you know, obviously your comment boxes, your check boxes, select boxes, those kinds of things.

And you can script, there's, there's just a myriad of different ways to capture evidence. Okay. Thanks. And then you can take that evidence, and, uh, depending on how your observation process is set up, so that's, that's, kind of another key differentiating factor with Classroom Mosaic is not only, can you choose what you're observing, but you can also, build your own observation process, and so, uh, depending on what you're What it looks like for your building or, you know, your school district, you can go through and design it during this observation.

I wanted the feedback to be sent automatically to the teacher or during this observation, you know, I want to wait a certain amount of time, or, I'm only going to share this certain evidence with, with the [00:14:00] teacher and are or not. And so there's there's just a bunch of different ways that you can customize the overall process itself.

But most people what they'll do is they'll go through do the observation and then once they submit that observation or finalize that observation that gets sent directly to the teacher. And so. , in the inbox for the teacher, they have the entire observation report, if you will, or the feedback from your administrator and oftentimes will encourage people to ask a reflection question.

So that's another best practice that we've seen is kind of at the end of the observation, ask a reflection question. And the way that our platform is set up is that the teacher can actually just respond to that email. So the email has all of the feedback. They don't have to log in to see it. They can read through the entire observation.

Reply in the email in, , that ultimately ends up in through, through some magic that ends up in classroom mosaic as a comment next to the observation itself. And so as an observer, you can read that comment, you can come back to the teacher, they're going to get an email notification. So from the teacher perspective, if you implement classroom mosaic.

There's nothing [00:15:00] that's really changed. What has, what has changed is that, kind of the, transparency has drastically increased because now I'm getting the immediate feedback, right? I know exactly what you saw in the classroom, the evidence that you captured, as well as the questions that you're asking.

And at some point later on that day, I can go, look through that and respond back to that. And then, From the administrative perspective, you're getting a much, much more streamlined process, from doing the observation, all of the dialogue is actually captured, you know, the coaching async dialogue is captured right next to the observation, and you can go review previous observations all in one spot to see, okay, um, , you know, how, how has this teacher changed or what are the different things that we're coaching this teacher on?

I, even today, I just had a principal say, that was one of the most powerful things in implementing Classroom Mosaic because before, sure, they would go in and do observations, but they didn't know if they were giving the same piece of feedback to the teacher for the past four years or not. And with Classroom Mosaic, you can actually go back and look and, and see.

And some of the reporting we also provide from a holistic level.

[00:16:00] I love the fact that you can put reflection in there. Cause I think that's where people really learn. You know, I can't remember who said it, but it was like, you know, you don't learn by doing you learn by thinking about what you did. Right. So, having that reflection, I think is really cool. You know, I'm a coaching junkie myself.

So the observation form, I can customize that, right. Or I can choose from different templates. I can customize that. Do you share that out with people before you go in so that there's some level of expectation of here's kind of what I'm looking for today?

Definitely that is a best practice that we recommend. So, you know, during a staff meeting, pull it up and show them, hey, this is what I see when I go through and do an observation. That's what I'm looking for. And that's also part of, from a leadership perspective, setting the goals for, you know, this quarter,

what are we focused on as a, learn your organization or as a staff. And that means there's a feedback loop that one of the key things here, right, with coaching is that they're in, um, and observing is that there's an actual feedback loop around, [00:17:00] hey, we said that we're trying to get to this place and that's only going to happen by us actively trying to move there.

And the observation process is one of those Key ways that you can continually push people in the correct direction, and oftentimes people want to go there, right? They, they want to hit the goal, but sometimes they need help knowing how.

Yeah, no, no, I totally get it. But I think key from an engagement perspective, if you want to listen to Gallup, they're going to tell us like, Hey, listen, I need to know what's expected of me. So I love the idea of, Hey, staff meeting today. We want to, this is our goal. Right? And then so, hey, no surprises. I'm going to come and observe it.

And these are the things that I'm going to be observing for. So think about that as we try to together earn our goal, right? And achieve those metrics or exceed those metrics. And then that whole process really becomes one of a continuous and never ending, improvement cycle but, Okay.

The idea of, hey, here are the expectations and this is the feedback that's going to follow is just really, really great.[00:18:00] how did you come up with the, uh, name Classroom Mosaic?

it stems out of this idea that every observation is a snapshot and when you put them all together. All of a sudden, you have a much better picture of your school and so it, it is a mosaic when you, you know, if you were to collect 100 observations, it would be a mosaic of your building, right? Or, or of the last, three weeks in your building and, um, and so that's kind of the second side or the second half, if you will, of Classroom Mosaic.

I, I kind of, I like to call it a one two punch. One is the actual observation process, right? It's very streamlined. it's very easy to do and it's very efficient and that makes it in part, much more effective because for you going through the process, it's very efficient. other side of this is, as a platform, we're collecting all of that data and we're aggregating it for you.

We're giving you this picture of what is your building look like and we're giving you the tools to be able to say, okay, I want to take a [00:19:00] look at, , you know, like last week's observation data. And so when you mentioned that continuous improvement cycle, yeah, there's, there are. There are many buildings that use Mosaic now to every week they go back and look, okay, what, what did we see in our classrooms last week?

What does that mean that we need to change as a, as an administrator team, supporting our teachers, right? Or let's go back and take a look at the last quarter. Let's use that information to inform the PD that we're going to use, that we're going to do this coming quarter, because we're seeing areas for improvement in second grade and we're seeing really strengths in fourth grade.

So maybe we should pair those two teams up and have a specific conversation about this indicator that we're looking at. There's just a myriad of. of ways that you can use this information if you have access to it. And so that's the second thing that we do as a platform is that we aggregate it all together.

We make it really easy for you to understand. And you don't have to dig through a bunch of spreadsheets. You don't have to go through and create all the graphs and reports and all this stuff. We're going to do that for you. And so from a leadership perspective, that gives you just a completely new picture [00:20:00] into the.

Instruction that is going on in the professional practice that is going on in your building and that is real time. I think, I think that's one of the, one of the interesting things that I always find about this or, or when I think about this is that the student test scores are a, what's called lagging indicator.

Right? It is. It's the outcome. It's been done. It's in, you know, it's a, it is in the sand. You can't, you can't go back and change that. But the instructional practice is actually the leading indicator into the student outcomes. And so if you spend your time. Perfecting and coaching right in developing the instructional practices going on your in your building, then the student test scores and the student achievement are going to also move because you're actually moving the leading indicator instead of waiting for the lagging indicator to come out and go, Oh, we should have done something different.

So there's some interesting things that we're taking a look at from a platform perspective, like in the future, how can we help marry those two things where.[00:21:00] You get this full picture of, the professional practice that is going on right now, as well as how might that impact and how can we relate that to the previous information that we know from a student data perspective, because I think that's kind of the holy grail, right, is, is knowing, it's kind of predicting the future for this individual student or for this class or for this building, where are they going to end up and what are the things that we need to do today to move them to the place that we want to be.

And that's what we help Do and provide from a, just an observation from a platform perspective is around that instructional practice and, and yeah, and again, we've just seen where if the building cultures shifts to talking about professional practice, then everybody kind of wins.

Yeah, no, I think it's great. And that's what good coaches do regardless, right? So your best coaches aren't looking up at the scorecard, or at the scoreboard, excuse me, right? To get all these people on the field, they're making plays, right? So what are they doing? How are they getting better? And the other thing that I would say in my journey in, in education last couple years, like they put me in charge of data and data is just [00:22:00] such a great thing because it's real, right?

So we can all learn from that. Like again, feedback's a gift, good data is a gift. So good, bad, or indifferent. This is not what I expected from a data perspective. Fantastic, I can fix that, right? And now I know what I can fix versus I don't know how to fix this, right?

So that I have no clue. , so, you know, if you don't have a data story, I mean, it sounds like Classroom Mosaic is going to help you get one.

It's going to help you be better and get you the results that you really want. And you're absolutely 100 percent correct. Like the, the results. are a product of all the culture and all the activities and everything that we build as leaders within that building to get to that place. And so focusing in there will, you'll get there, right?

So I think that's cool. You know, help me understand where you're at on your journey today as far as Classroom Mosaic is concerned. Like, you know, how many schools are you in?[00:23:00] You know, how did you get there and where are you going?

Most of our schools have come to us through word of mouth. And that's another thing that we, we particularly enjoy is that the, the people that use us actually share it with their friends, you know, and it is one of those things where we had, we had a administrator come to us after talking to one of their teacher friends.

And that was just, again, one of those things where, you We, we'd love to hear that because if teachers are talking about it in a positive way, that means that it is, it is working the way that we want it to work. Right. But we're in roughly, say, 700, 600, 700 schools right now. Mostly in the US, we have schools kind of across, spread out throughout the world.

I think that's just kind of the beauty and the power of the internet. And we. What's really interesting is that we deal with, like a, uh, individual, really small charter school with a few hundred students. We also have, clients with a hundred schools, you know, and they're one of the largest school districts in the, , [00:24:00] in the U.

S. And then we also have clients like College Board, where they're going in and they're doing, professional development and training, and they're capturing a bunch of observation data and giving feedback based on that. But they're not necessarily, like Just they don't have their own schools, right?

They're, they're going in and do coaching themselves. So schools is kind of a rough metric around, how we track. Who we serve, but there, there's a bunch of different types of clients that we serve. And, and that's, again, one of the beauties of our platform is because it's so customizable, um, we can help support so many different people and, and we grow with them.

So like our very first client is still our client and it's been 13 years and, you know, their observation process has changed. Their forms have changed. The people have changed, like all this stuff has changed. And what's been, what's one of the things that have been consistent is that we've been able to And, um, and we have a number of clients like that.

Once, once you've landed with us. You're gonna stick with us because we can grow with you and, and a lot of other times where, you know, in, in the observation world, you kind of have three different categories. You've got like the video [00:25:00] observation, which is, usually pretty costly and time intensive, um, just because of all of the equipment and all that goes on.

There is, there is something to be said about watching yourself in video. That is a very, very powerful reflective practice to do. But that's not really us. The, The second group would be kind of your Marzano or your Danielsons of the world, where they come in with a rubric or a framework and say, here's the language.

Here's what you get to observe. Here's the reports that you're going to get. And, um, and you can't really change much. And then we're kind of the, the antithesis to that, where you can go through and set it up however you want, you can observe however you want, and you can change it tomorrow if you'd like, and we're going to help you make that happen.

And so that's a lot of people, what ends up happening is that they'll, they'll maybe adopt one of the other two. For a certain period of time, but then it's not flexible enough to actually grow with them. And so, so that's kind of where we see ourselves in the overarching observation world right now.

But we're really leaning into this idea of, instructional leadership and that, [00:26:00] and again, the power of an effective leader and effective leadership team in a building or at a school district where, the school leaders can actually look into what's going on in an individual building and give feedback to those leaders there in, that is again, another continuous improvement process that's coaching the coaches themselves, which is again, very powerful.

So we're pushing in that direction and, Thinking of it, one of our, one of our clients, uh, just the other day kind of put this in my head where they're taking a look at it almost like an MTSS, idea where most informal observations or walkthroughs are, done, that email gets sent to the teacher, there's some async coaching that goes on, and that's kind of your tier one.

Your tier two would be going through doing maybe a longer informal observation And noticing something and coming back to do some face to face coaching with that individual teacher. And then Tier 3 would be coaching cycles where we're going to sit down. Okay, we've identified this area that we need to work on, and we're going to have a very intentional week after week observation.

and coaching cycle that we go through with this person and kind [00:27:00] of structuring it that way, where, they're really engaging and personalizing the feedback that they're giving to their teachers to what they need. And so from a platform, we're, we're kind of moving in that direction as well. We're stepping into things like, walks or instructional rounds, team observations, and, there's just kind of a whole different, a whole other world around, how to capture observation data.

And, so you, the idea behind a learning walk would be something like a screener if you want to put it that back into the MTSS terminology where you can go through and do a diagnostic test, if you will, with a bunch of people. In a building, or sometimes people will flip flop learning walks and instructional rounds, so depending on where you are in the country, that I might have just defined it differently than what is happening on the ground for you, but, that, and also teacher evaluation, so we have, a whole, uh, system and process to help guide people going through the evaluation process to where, just like informals, if it's more consistent and it's more transparent and it's easier to do, it's actually going to be much more effective.

That's where you can actually have the conversations and focus on growth [00:28:00] instead of, focus on growth and focus on, the development of the teacher instead of focusing on just the end result of I got to check this box to get to the valuation done and nobody liked that. So yeah,

I am sure that in your journey that there might have been a time or maybe two where things kind of didn't go the way you thought they might be going. So help us understand, like, what have you learned? What are some things that you've learned in this process?

There's two things. One. The idea that if we built a very user friendly, very effective platform, that people would know about it overnight. So that's kind of from a company perspective. That's just not, it's not true. You, you have to build, right? You have to build, not only have a great product, but you also have to have great distribution and to be able to tell people about it.

And so.

If you build it, they will come. Only works in a Kevin Costner movie, right?

Yeah, not true. Not true at all. And in our heart of hearts, we're builders, right? We, that is what we do is we sit [00:29:00] down with educators. We listen to what they're trying to do. And then we, we make that dream a reality. And again, that's why people stick with us is that we, make things that most educators and don't think are possible.

We make them possible. And, and that's what we honestly love to do that. That is what gets us out of, Out of the bed every morning and especially because it's in education, right? There's not really any other realm where sure you could like maybe make more money on wall street You could you could spend this time trying to perfect something else But we want to help educators because what we want And we ultimately want every kid to have a world class education.

We got offered we We had an incredible education. We graduated high school with a business, right? And we were able to build this platform because of the things that we learned in high school and because of the people that we were around in high school. And, we want that for everybody. It may not be a business for them, right?

It may not be that exact same thing, but we want a world class education for them. And what that means is world class educators and [00:30:00] world class leaders. in their buildings. And so we have this love of, beautiful products in efficient systems and all of these, engineering things. And even if that is true, and even if we did build those things, which we feel like we have, it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody in the world all of a sudden all knows about it.

And that's one of the reasons we're doing this podcast, right, is to begin to talk about what we're doing, with some of these educators that we've, been in partnership with for almost 15 years, and bring that to the world and invite other people to be part of that journey as well.

What motivates you? When you think about Classroom Mosaic, you think about where you're going. What's it, what's it all for?

It is about that that kid, or all of the students going through, school now, then even, even my kids, right. I want them to have access to a great education. And again, what that means is, ultimately, that means, world class educators and world class leaders in their buildings, and doing it every day.

And so [00:31:00] we've We feel the way we kind of fit into that equation is helping build the systems and the platforms that they're using, throughout the day to, sharpen themselves and grow and, and that's kind of where, where we see, see ourselves fitting into that equation, but it is ultimately because of all of those students that are walking in to those buildings on a daily basis and the educators that are walking in right alongside them.

And so we, we want to, We want to help make their life just a little bit easier and we also want them to feel that, excitement of growth, right? And that, that, that hunger for continuing to hone their craft and to teach that, lesson a little bit better next time, or to ask that question a little bit differently next time, you know, all of those little nuanced things.

That are happening, you know, as we speak right now, we want to be a part of that and to help encourage that because that, from a grand perspective, there, there isn't much more important. Than that.

Ben Gufsison. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Could you do me a [00:32:00] favor? Could you let our audience know how they could connect with you?

Absolutely. It's the, it's really simple. It's classroom mosaic.com. You can find a bunch of information there. You can find, tutorials and, demos there. You can sign up for a trial account. We have a a 45 day free trial, so get your feet wet. We have a form library as well. So if you're not exactly sure what you want to observe, there are hundreds and hundreds of observation forms from educators that have gone before you.

And, um, you can be part of that conversation there. That's, that's one of the things that we want to build as a community of educators focused on improving their coaching and improving what they're observing. And so, our very first step is to publish all the forms, but we're eventually going to make that into a community where we can have a conversation about what we're observing and giving feedback on some.

That is the Classroom Mosaic. That's the place to go to classroommosaic. com. Yep.

Again, the product's Classroom Mosaic, building phenomenal leaders. That will create future leaders and so much for spending time with

us

Scott.

you bet [00:33:00] hey folks could you do me a favor could you hit that like button hit that subscribe button and share this episode with your friends and colleagues to learn more about this series and our other amazing content be sure to follow the be podcast network on twitter linkedin or subscribe to our email list at be podcast dot network thanks for listening and we'll see you on our next amazing episode.