TeacherMIND

In Chile, the children and adolescent population present important challenges in the field of mental health (MH); a fifth of the population has had a psychiatric disorder throughout their lives (Vicente et al., 2016), and more than 70% of them have their onset before the age of 14 (Erskine et al., 2014). Chile implemented one of the strictest quarantine regulations in the world during the Covid pandemic exacerbating the MH crisis and severely affecting the development of socio-emotional well-being in students. According to the Education Quality Agency of Chile (2021), 70% of children and adolescents have difficulties expressing their emotions. Prolonged quarantines, family stress, uncertainty, lack of social interaction due to massive school closures, and the loss of loved ones have further highlighted the need for socio-emotional skills to cope with this crisis (Arias, Hincapié & Paredes, 2020).

Today, educational teams in Chile lack pedagogical tools to effectively manage socio-emotional challenges within the educational context (Jenning & Greenberg, 2009). Formal professional training for educators in socio-emotional learning is practically non-existent (Bassi, Busso, Urzua & Vargas, 2012; Palmer, Gardner, & Stough, 2003). In addition to the above, evidence has shown that personal well-being, as well as the development of socio-emotional skills in educational teams themselves, are fundamental elements for students' success, including their socio-emotional learning, better academic results, and positive school climate (Schonert-Reichl, 2017; Reyes, Brackett, Rivers, Elbertson, & Salovey, 2012). Currently, the mental health of teachers is of great concern; 87% of educators suffer from exhaustion or tension, 83% suffer from sleep disturbances, 72% have difficulty enjoying their daily activities, 67% feel decreased happiness, and 62% experience a lack of concentration (Choose Educar, 2020).

 In summary, the poor socio-emotional well-being of educational teams, the lack of training in mental health issues and socio-emotional skills, and the non-existence of pedagogical tools have become critical to face this mental health crisis in school communities. To address this issue, it is essential that teachers are emotionally stable, satisfied with their professional work, and can perform with less stress. If this is achieved, teachers will tend to have higher expectations of their students' learning capacity, influencing their self-esteem, self-regulation, and have a better ability for conflict management (Schonert-Reuchl et al., 2017). Furthermore, having specific knowledge, skills and tools will directly affect their students by enhancing their socio-emotional learning. Our project seeks to overcome these challenges by; strengthening the well-being of teachers, providing critical knowledge on socio-emotional learning, and concrete strategies for the classroom, thus improving the well-being of teachers and future generations of students.

"TeacherMIND" is a Mobile Application that supports the development of educational teams by providing socio-emotional skills and self-awareness in general, such as self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. In addition, it provides teaching tools for student development. The application has a friendly interface where teachers can work in three main components: 

1) Emotion in action: it allows educational teams in schools to develop socio-emotional skills playfully and interactively using professional real-life situations. Teachers are active participants in their training. 

2) Emotion toolkit:  videos of teaching tools to support their own and students' socio-emotional skills development. 

3) Emotion Notebook: It allows users to record their daily emotional mood with a section of results, progress, and personalized advice to acquire wellness. 

We provide plans according to each user's socioemotional needs, interests, and sociodemographic profile. This application will resolve an unmet need; Chile and many Latin American countries, don’t have platforms that help teachers learn socio-emotional skills, acquire teaching tools, and promote their well-being. This lack in the field ends up significantly impacting the teachers' mental health as well as their students as a direct consequence.

The target population of "TeacherMIND" is the educational teams of schools in Chile, focusing on vulnerable, rural, and intercultural communities. As evidenced in the literature, educational teams recognize the importance that educational establishments give higher priority to socio-emotional learning and not focus only on the academic field. In this sense, teachers declare that they are not trained in the subject and feel the need to have training in the socio-emotional field (Schonert-Reichl et al, 2017). In Chile, two of the five areas of teachers' training worst evaluated refer to the socio-emotional area (Gaete, Gómez, and Bascapé, 2016). Therefore, socioemotional training for educational teams is precarious and even absent in their career (Gaete and Ayala, 2015). Thus, creating an application that allows the development of these skills and provides teaching tools to incorporate them in the classroom is an attractive solution for this community. To the extent that educational teams receive socio-emotional training, they will be able to positively model socio-emotional learning in their students (ages 5-18).

Based on the complexity and challenges that good mental health for underserved students and their teachers present we have put together an interdisciplinary team that combines technical expertise, territorial representation, and the link with the public policy sector to address it.

 a)Technical expertise and territorial representativeness.

Our interdisciplinary team includes experts in education, medicine, psychology, laws,  public policy, communications, sociology, and engineers (an image with the management team and executive team is attached). This team has spent already more than a year studying and working with the educational communities we want to impact, understanding the problem, and designing a customized solution. Psychologists from the educational communities themselves are part of our team. Their involvement is critical since they have experienced first-hand this problem and understand best what the real challenges and needs of vulnerable school communities are, and have more realistic approaches for optimum well-being. This diversity, and having the participation of members of the schools themselves, have made it possible to understand the problem from the inside, and have helped us with accurate guidance, resulting in the design of a solution that is pertinent and useful for those affected.

In addition, to keep representativeness and objectiveness in our team, we also conducted a study in 12 vulnerable schools in different districts of Chile, in urban and rural contexts, to better understand the target population. In this study, we raised the voice of students and educational teams regarding poor mental health and well-being conditions. For this, we performed interviews with directors, those in charge of school coexistence, and educational teams. We also developed many focus groups for students and used the "comprehensive diagnosis of learning" (an instrument that measures the well-being and socio-emotional skills of students in Chile during the pandemic period) which gave us a complete perspective of the problem. Overall, these evaluations have allowed us to understand the communities' needs, interests, ideas, and agendas, and importantly to identify specific leaderships. 

Finally, we have developed a breakout session with the leaders of the communities to co-create our pilot project (a list with members of the intersectoral table is attached). 

b)Link with public policy:

In parallel to working on the ground, we have established alliances with the Chilean Congress, committing a group of parliamentarians from different political sectors to the cause and its solution. In addition, we have added and advocated the presidents of the top-ranked universities in Chile to TeacherMIND. This strategy has allowed decision-makers to be involved with the problem and become aware of this technological solution, ensuring our project growth throughout Chile and benefiting thousands of educational communities that do not have the tools to face a transversal and systemic problem (a list with members of the policy makers is attached).

One of our most important challenges is ensuring a satisfactory user experience so that teachers constantly use the platform. The user expectations have climbed higher with technology improvements. They require ease of use, speedier loading time, the ability to complete a specific task within a reduced number of actions. The development of an application with these characteristics requires the effort of a team with vast experience and technical knowledge like the MIT solve community. Since it is not only about making available to the community all the necessary material to contribute to socio-emotional development, it must also be attractive and friendly.

 We admire MIT's culture of innovation and believe that the MIT Solve community's technological support and professional guidance will be a tremendous contribution to our team. Being part of this community will help us establish alliances and generate new ideas for our platform. For example, we would like to learn or collaborate with projects from MIT  that are relevant in the area,  like the ELIZA computer program, a pioneering tool to work empathy. 

 At the same time, MIT solve can support us with our growth projections. This community provides a robust network that can help us scale "TeacherMINDS" to other countries affected by the same mental health crisis.

 In summary, we are applying to MIT because, in addition to financial support, it will allow us to be part of an innovation community, establish international collaboration networks, and have first-rate technological support.

In Chile, the government demands schools to teach their students socio-emotional skills, but these are competencies that teachers did not learn when they studied their careers. If they want to learn these skills, they have to spend lots of time in after-work studies in specialized centers, spending lots of money. 

 So what we offer is definitely something new, that has never been seen before by teachers. It’s an innovative way for educational teams to learn about socio-emotional skills, in an interactive, entertaining and personalized way, giving them real and practical teaching tools to be able to help students with their socioemotional development. 

 It’s the only platform that is focused especially on educators, not only giving them tools for their classroom, as we just mentioned, but also helping them improve their own mental health. This is an area that post-graduate studies don’t focus on. They only teach the theoretical matters of socioemotional skills but don’t realize that the educators need to be in good mental health themselves, to be able to teach it to others. 

 TeacherMIND takes this matter into its hands and includes it in its content.

TeacherMIND seeks to impact 15 schools by 2023. We expect to have fast growth and reach 60 (2024), 170 (2025), 700 (2026), and finally, 1,300 schools (2027), which represents 7% of the schools in Chile. This number allow us to impact more than 300 teachers and indirectly 12,000 students in the first year and 26.000 teachers and 1.000.000 students at the end of the fifth year.

We have formed a solid network with the Chilean Congress and many City Councils to achieve our impact objectives, facilitating access and sales to the schools. Complementary to this, we have developed a marketing strategy that will enable the promotion and adherence of our application.

In addition to the above, TeacherMIND will constantly ensure a playful, attractive, and straightforward user experience focused mainly on users' goals and interest. In this sense, we will continuously monitor the user's fidelity, experience, usability, and attraction.

 It has been demonstrated that supporting teachers' socioemotional learning can directly impact the well-being of their students. Also, students' socioemotional skills can improve their mental health, happiness, academic performance, and future employment rates.   Therefore, TeacherMIND might impact the development of socio-emotional skills and well-being of teachers and improve their students' academic results,  university admission rate,  employment index for the future, and;  school dropouts (Durlak, 2014).

"TeacherMIND" aims to solve one of Chile's most important educational gap: the low development of socio-emotional skills and mental health problems within the school community. To do this, "TeacherMIND" provides a series of tools to create awareness and knowledge about this topic. Despite the relevance of socio-emotional learning, it is not part of the learning curriculum during teachers' careers. "TeacherMIND" brings understanding to educational teams in a friendly and engaging way. This application will allow teachers to incorporate socio-emotional learning in the classroom, promoting and developing their students' well-being and mental health. 

To measure the application's progress, we will evaluate: the number of users monthly, active users  (daily and monthly active), retention, lifetime value, and app rating. Additionally,  we will track indicators related to wellness and socioemotional learning of users,  performing an evaluation test initially and finally. This test provides a diagnosis of the awareness of the relevance o socioemotional learning,  the level of development of socio-emotional skills, personal well-being, and teaching tools. Based on the results of this instrument, "TeacherMIND" delivers personalized plans and then follows the progress of each of the areas mentioned above, controlling the individual performance of the user. 

After the third year, we will also applicate a pre and post-test in some representative schools. These tests will allow us to determine the impact on long-term variables such as mental health and socio-emotional well-being of teachers and students at a community level.

Our core technology is an Application. We chose this technology because every teacher has a cellphone and they use it daily. This enables our solution to be at hand reach everybody that wants to use it. It is a practical way to be in every teacher's pocket, at their service, whenever they need it. 

We previously studied our users, and they reported that an application was the platform through which access to knowledge was more accessible and attractive. In this study, also relevant conclusions were exposed, which are crucial elements to reach the platform effectiveness, for instance:

a) the relevance of personalized objectives and work plans according to the level of each user. 

b) users want to be aware of their progress and visualized it 

c) users want to learn through games

c) the importance of practical teaching tools. 

We incorporated all of those critical points in the design of our Application in order to have an appropriate technological solution.

Our leadership team comprises a multidisciplinary group of people from different regions of Chile with diverse cultural and social backgrounds. We have experts from education, medicine, psychology, laws, public policy, communications, sociology, and engineers who have spent more than a year studying and working with the educational communities. Our team is led mainly by women (more than 60%) and professionals who have experienced this problem first-hand. We also have incorporated minority groups who have enriched the team with different perspectives and visions. 

We hold a serious commitment to inclusion, so we ensure that each of the members of our organization can enjoy and thrive in the workspace, showing their greatest potential and fulfillment. If we are fighting for an inclusive world, the first thing is to ensure that our human group values diversity and eliminates any arbitrary discrimination.

We know that always more opinions and views can enhance our solutions; therefore, we performed several focus groups where we guaranteed the inclusion of the opinions of students of different ages and teachers with different social and cultural profiles. The entire process of evaluation and testing of users was designed so that anyone could improve their mental health, regardless of social and cultural background.

To address the principles of equity and inclusion, although the entire community of teachers can use the application, we focus on those who need it most (underserved communities). For this reason, the diagnostic instruments, although they will be available for the general population, will be tested first in vulnerable and multicultural people.

Finally, we are also concerned about being very careful with the use of language and avoiding bias. For this reason, all sources of information, examples, advice, and recommendations have been made based on focus groups and interviews. We have collected the concerns, interests, and needs of both students and teachers from various regions of Chile and sociocultural contexts.

Chile allocates more than 1.5 billion USD per year to school innovation through "Suvención Escolar Preferencial" (preferential school subsidies). The money is given directly to schools based on the number of students and vulnerability indexes.

 Each institution can freely choose how to use these funds, as long as they comply with the educational innovation guidelines of the central government. However, the supply of educational services is relatively scarce, so these funds are often poorly spent.

 We will offer this product to public schools and help them solve their problems. We also aim to provide the product for private schools as they have the same need to train their teacher in socioemotional skills, and they will be willing to pay for this product.

 The App will be offered as a complete service to schools, with the possibility that all their teachers can use the platform. There will be a basic version (US$600 annual) that will have a limited amount of material and basics. The premium version (US$1250 annual) will have much more material and be categorized in an organized way.

 In the first years, we will offer the App through direct sales to educational establishments in strategic municipalities with which we already have alliances. From the third year, we will start a strong advertising campaign through social networks and mass media to increase awareness and accelerate the growth process. The experience of the first users will be the basis of our massive sale and disclosure process.

In the first year (2023), we will have 15 schools using our prototype with the basic features. We expect to attract 50 new schools and our old schools to start using the premium app for the second year. By our 3rd year, we expect to attract 1% of schools' market as new customers with the basic app. By this year (3rd), we are covering all our costs and starting to have a positive net income. In the fourth year, we will attract 4% of the market as new customers, and in the fifth year, we will be with 7% of the market. We will assume a churn of 10% from year two onwards, and in year five ahead, the churn will rise to 2%.

According to our fieldwork, the need for this app is very high, as we already have 15 schools that bought the pedagogical material without having the app ready to use. These schools are sure buyers of the app when we advance from the prototype version to the definitive one. We have tested the market with these schools, and we believe that there will be much more interested in buying the app.

We have already raised more than 150,000 USD for the design and prototyping stage. The effort aimed to understand the problem and work collaboratively with the communities to obtain a useful, adaptable, and easy-to-use product.