Glean Education

In her 20 years as an educator and curriculum designer, Jessica Hamman has taught children and adults in both traditional and online classroom settings. In 2016, she founded Glean Education, a company that provides online training, coaching, and consulting to teachers, schools, districts, and state organizations to increase student literacy progress and academic equity. gleaneducation.com 

Students who do not learn to read are more likely to be incarcerated, unemployed, and live in poverty. Because of this, student literacy is a social justice issue. 

Much is known about supporting struggling learners and teaching students to learn to read, but teacher training and school systems consulting is not affordable or accessible. That means that school districts that are privileged to afford staff training can properly support their students, while high-need schools go without. 

Our online training and web-based consulting platform offers a low-cost, accessible, and equitable approach to supporting organizations with best-practices for literacy instruction, intervention school systems, and implementation consulting to ensure student progress.

We are solving the problem of ineffective literacy instruction, which has an impact on all learners. The scale of the problem is vast. The National Assessment on Educational Progress published in 2019 showed that every state in the US (except Mississippi) has declined in literacy proficiency. Nationally, students tested at only 32% proficient in literacy. That means that 68% of students are not proficient in the skills that will enable them to be successful, literate adults. 

Mississippi, on the other hand increased in student reading proficiency as a direct result of their commitment to professional development, coaching, and school systems change. In their cast, they had a 25 million dollar grant that allowed them to invest in their teachers and students, but many states are not as lucky.

We have created Glean Education to make that type of training, coaching, and progress accessible. Our online training and web-based coaching makes training low-cost and scalable enabling us to reach more educators and support more students. 

We train teachers with online training and support staff with job-embedded coaching. It is an immersive learning experience that brings teacher training into the 21st century. 

We are working directly with all educational stakeholders: administrators, school psychologists, teachers, paraprofessionals, and interventionists. We are continually piloting our programs to make sure they are being customized for our users. We know they are busy and that most educational organizations lack the funding they need to support their goals, but we also know that literacy instruction is a priority. We are supporting them by creating a vehicle for equitable, scalable, high-quality training and implementation coaching for their staff to support literacy progress in their students. 

We believe in educators. We know that when we raise their awareness of the science of reading acquisition, instruction, and intervention implementation, that they will be motivated to change their practice in ways that will drive student literacy progress. 

It may seem common talking about literacy. But our culture is so heavily dependent on the written word, that being a proficient reader and write is everything. We feel passionate that need to change this by supporting educators with a better understanding of the key instructional practices for effective literacy instruction so all students get a chance to learn to read.

My path started in childhood. I grew up in a family of internationally recognized educators: My mom was a professor of education and my father was a special education attorney who spent their life advocating for dyslexia awareness, effective literacy instruction, and practices for supporting struggling readers. My father created the definition for dyslexia that is in most state laws today.

When my own son started showing signs of dyslexia at 5, I thought the decades of advocacy work and research in the field would have made our path to support him easier, but I realized there was still a large knowledge gap among teachers. 

This launched me on a journey to figure out the barriers to teacher training on struggling readers and effective reading instruction. I took a job as a reading interventionist in the Northern California school district my son went to school in to learn more. I realized that although training is available in the US, it's not accessible to everyone in the nation. It's also expensive and time consuming.

As I saw it, in order to make an impact on this issue, In needed to create a solution that was scalable, high-quality, and accessible.

I'm passionate because this is personal. I'm a teacher and a mother. I know what it's like to sit in the classroom with an emerging reader and not have the tools I need to support them. I know what it's like to sit at the dining room table with my struggling reader and know that their teachers don't know how to support them. I'm also a teacher-trainer. I've seen the look on seasoned educators faces when they learn from our training why their previous approach didn't work and the excitement they feel when they learn there is another way to support their students.

I'm well positioned because of both my personal and professional background. Personally, I come from a long line of educational professionals who have dedicated their lives to dyslexia and literacy instruction awareness. This matters because it has given me a lifetime of access to the conversation and a growing awareness of the barriers that contribute to the problem. I also have connections to a network of internationally recognized experts in the field that have supported our creation of high-quality content.

Professionally, my career path has provided me with the perfect tools to lead this venture. I started my career as an Adult Literacy instructor where I saw first hand the repercussions of ineffective literacy instruction in childhood. Those adult student voices remain in my ear when I train teachers and remind them that their struggling learners will become struggling adults if they are not met with the proper path to instruction.

In addition, I've had a career in online instructional design for universities and for state departments of health and education. This taught me to build high-quality, engaging online experiences that effectively deliver content to our users. 

And because of my personal passion and vision as a parent of four (one who is a struggling reader), I'm committed to results. I'm committed to ensuring student effectiveness of our training and putting the necessary changes in place to make sure our solution works for our partners and the students they serve.  

Dealing with failure is an inevitable part of any entrepreneurial venture. We have setbacks all the time that we need to learn from. Pilots that don't turn into contracts, contract that don't renew, deals that don't get funded. I could look at these like failures, but I see them as opportunities. They are opportunities to improve, alter, and pivot to ensure a different path next time. 

One challenge that is more difficult to over come is dealing with the bias that comes my way from being a Woman Owned Business. Finding an office space, for example, has been extremely difficult. For six months, I looked for an office space in my area. Over that time, several offices came up for rent, were offered to me, and then given to men just before I signed the lease. This was a set back. It made it harder for me to do my training and design work and felt as if I were constantly being overlooked and not taken seriously because I'm a woman. This may be frustrating, but it also makes me want to fight harder and prove them wrong. So I just have to dust off the difficulties and try again.

One example of my leadership ability is highlighted by the recent Coronavirus closures. Many of our contracts have been put on hold as school staff and state organizations struggle with how to meet their new remote learning demands. We have quickly pivoted to offer pro-bono support to our clients to help them with the online learning shift and help guide them during this difficult and confusing time.

In addition, we've had to make hard decisions about staffing. We had very transparent discussions with staff to talk about what work looks like for our company for the next year and how we will support them and what will change.

We are a for-profit.

Our project is innovative because we are changing what teacher professional development looks like. Think of us as Coursera for teachers. 

We believe that creating wide-spread awareness about struggling readers and how students learn to read best will increase teacher understanding and lead to instructional change.

Our aim is to deliver trainings in the most accessible and scalable way possible. We've been working with states to disseminate our trainings for free to their state's educators. This summer, we aim to train the remaining 12,500 educators in Washington State. Through the pilot we hosted to kick off this training, 3,000 educators took our coursework. We had an 85% completion rate (MOOCs completion rates typically hover around 8%) and and 9/10 net promoter score from the end-of-course surveys, we already saw a reported shift in mindset and a deep interest in learning more.

I believe the solution to this problem of our country's challenge with literacy proficiency begins with building teacher awareness through online, high-quality, accessible training that changes their mindsets about classroom practice and then supports them with the implementation.

One major benefit to this type of training is that it is a great equalizer for communities that are more difficult to access training, like small, rural districts or large, urban ones. Our training is equitable because there are no geographic or economic barriers to access.

We are currently serving 5000 teachers with our training. 

Next year, our pending contracts with states have the potential for us to reach 75,000 - 100,000 teachers.

Because of our partnerships with state-level organizations (driven by laws passing in the US on training teachers on structured literacy instruction) our user growth has been exponential.  

In five years, we aim have 500,000 - 1,000,000 users.

Our goals are to create confident, knowledgeable educators who have all the instructional tools they need to support their students. The impact of that is hard to quantify. Some of the societal impacts are: lower special education costs for districts, more instructional flexibility that allows more students to be supported, higher graduation rates among students, lower cases of incarceration, more opportunities for students when they graduate because they are proficient in reading.

Our drop in the water has ripple effects that can be felt through all of society.

Educational Market and Policy Barriers: Education budgets are tight, so selling into state departments of education (which has the highest option for scalability and free teacher access) is difficult. For example, our training was declined in the legislature, but approved internally for a portion of the initial proposal. However, with the onset of Coronavirus, all education spending was transferred to health spending.

Technological and Cultural Barriers: Teachers are not always comfortable with technology, so an online learning solution has posed barriers to training.

Although budgets are tight, the law is on our side and is propelling our work forward. Many states are passing policy to train their staff and state-level organizations are looking for affordable solutions to take the pressure off of their school districts. They are finding us.

In the past, technology and teacher comfort with online learning was a barrier, but increasingly this barrier is being removed. Especially now after Coronavirus closures, teachers are more familiar than ever with the way in which content can be communicated online. They are likely more comfortable than ever with online learning, which we will use to our advantage!

We partner with state departments of education like California, Maine, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington State (and others) to offer training to their staff in different ways. Some are just free opportunities for training for their state's staff, others we work with them to tailor our content so our training is more tailored to their state laws, and thus more likely to be chosen as a training by their district. 

We partner with the National Association for School Psychologists to offer credit hours to their membership and create training based on their members needs.

We partner with Dominican University of California so our users can receive graduate units for our training from an accredited university, giving them more incentive to take our training for credit.

To view the Social Business Model Canvas Image from Glean please follow this link: https://drive.google.com/file/...

We provide customizable, high-quality online training to schools, districts, and state departments of education focusing on building teacher knowledge of literacy instruction best-practices and supporting struggling learners. We also provide organizations with options for job-embedded web-based coaching. 

We host our training on a user-friendly LMS that allows for self-guided, on-demand, and cohort-based, train-the-trainer professional development. We provide materials teachers need to execute lessons and resources to support deeper learning. 

Our business model is based on selling our training to both large organizations (like state departments of education or urban districts). We believe working with large org maximize outreach. We are able to train a great many people through the large organizations without cost to the teachers themselves. 

As of May 1, 2020, our revenue streams breakdown as follows:

• A La Carte Sales from Website: 5%
• State-Level Sales: 11%
• District-Level Sales: 84%

We are an embedded social enterprise, where the social program and the business enterprise are one. We are an entrepreneur support business model offering consulting, training, and customized instructional design services.

At the start of our venture in 2016, we received a $10,000 grant and coaching fellowship through 4.0 Schools Tiny Fellowship. This helped us get launched and set us on a path for success. Since then, we quickly started generating revenue through district sales (Plumas Unified School District, Palo Alto School District, Chicago Public Schools, Mariposa School District, and others). In addition, we've begun generating revenue from our state-level partnerships like we have with Washington State, Oregon, and others. 

We do not seek to raise funds. We rely on state, district, and school training sales to run our company.

We are lucky to have very low overhead. This can change depending on the organizations we are working with and the demands of those contracts. We are happy to furnish more specific financial information privately and upon request. 

We are applying for this prize for a few reasons. As a bootstrap operation, we have been learning on the fly, but also often in a vacuum. I believe would be healthier in our growth if we are guided by mentors who are experts in the field.

We would use the funding capital to invest in content areas that we have not yet had the capital to explore like Literacy Instruction for Homeless and Foster Youth and a training program to specifically designed for Teaching and Supporting Incarcerated Youth.

The media and marketing campaign embedded in the Elevate Prize would help forward our mission of building awareness of training, the need for it, and the positive effects of it. 

Solve.MIT.Edu is a powerful engine for good. We would be honored to be a part of the outstanding work you are doing and believe that by being in your company, we would be able to fully actualize the mission and vision we have for our company.

I'd like to partner with organizations that need our support, like state level organizations looking for high-quality content to support their school districts and hardworking teaching staff. 

There are other organizations working hard to make a difference in the field of online learning and teacher quality that interest us as well: Quality Matters, NCTQ, and the NCII. Partnering with such organizations would help us make our content more valuable to the organizations we serve and would enable us to support them with our content which their members are looking for.