Classroom pilots are starting 😅
Documenting state before the rubber hits the road
In this update:
Wanderly school pilots are starting! 2 schools, 4 grades, 11 classrooms
Stuffies and web portals for delivery
Try it yourself 😀
I’ve been so heads-down this summer building that I haven’t had a chance to update y’all after my last newsletter calling for help to get Wanderly into 5 schools. I asked for 5 schools because I was really counting classrooms, estimating 1–2 per school for a goal of about 10. I ended up with 11, across just 2 schools that were eager to sign up more classrooms than expected.
Today, I start my first training for Wanderly for Schools, and I wanted to write a snapshot of how things are going while everything is still fresh and before I forget how excited and nervous I am at this exact moment.
My pitch to schools was simple: a low-prep, interactive social-emotional lesson that fits into the storytime slot teachers already have, once a week. Then parents can repeat the same story with their children at home, reinforcing the lesson and giving them insight into their child’s social-emotional development.
I had already hosted a successful social-emotional learning (SEL) workshop at my daughter’s elementary school, and the staff was receptive to trying Wanderly in the classroom. In April, I brought on Alia Dolan — a licensed social worker with a decade of SEL curriculum experience — as my curriculum consultant. She was already a well-respected member of that same school community, and before I ever pitched the principal, she emailed the early-elementary staff endorsing the program. Much to my delight, the principal and I agreed to pilot Wanderly in all 6 of the K-2 classrooms, repeating the 1st grade curriculum in 2nd grade since we didn’t have to worry about kids experiencing the same curriculum twice.
The second school came from an introduction by a close friend and high school teacher. She emailed 25 TK-3 teachers in her school district. 7 wrote back. 5 committed! 2 Kindergarten classrooms, 2 1st grade classrooms, and a 3rd grade classroom. One of the Kindergarten classrooms is also a Spanish-English classroom.
By the time all these classrooms committed in mid-June, I was already starting to reach my budget and getting a little nervous. As part of the pilot, I commissioned stuffies for each classroom of the 2 of the 6 main characters for my Rubberdale universe1. I ordered 10 before the summer started, given the lead time, accepting the fact that I had probably over-ordered and I would give extras to kids in my life. Thankfully, my 3rd grade teacher was willing to teach without stuffies, and I ordered extra for my kids to arrive in early September.
Once I felt like I had enough classrooms committed, it was time to get to work on the curriculum. Working with Alia, I drafted a rough scope and sequence, and then started drafting specific story lessons. Alia’s a licensed social worker who has been supporting children in school settings for 20+ years, so she knows the issues kids and teachers deal with and hundreds of scenarios and scripts that work well for kids at each grade: How to make new friends, how to transition between activities, how to share, how to deal with someone taking your spot in line. And it’s all the micro lessons in between: How do I know when to involve an adult, how do I deal with seeing my best friend playing with someone else, and how do I self-manage when things get tricky?
I’ve now drafted most of the stories for the first 2 months’ worth of Wanderly curriculum, and it’s been eye-opening, even as a mom of an 8- and 4-year-old and having immersed myself in social-emotional learning for the last year. I have a new appreciation for all the challenges kids deal with in early elementary, and how little I knew about supporting my kids through these moments as a parent, in a way that still puts them in the driver’s seat. I hope Wanderly helps bridge this gap for all future families.
In addition to the curriculum, I had to invest in delivery to teachers and parents; i.e., I built a teacher portal and parent portal.
The goal for the portals was to make it one click for a teacher or parent to open the weekly story with the right configurations. I also wanted to provide optional context, so curious parents or teachers with more time could dig deeper. I wanted it to be dead easy for a teacher to send home a note to families every week to encourage the school-to-home bridge. And I decided to build it on the web because I wouldn’t know what was most important until the school year started, and I wanted to iterate quickly and cheaply.
I finished building it last week, including a flow for parents to opt in for a free access code. I’m thinking of these portals as a starting point: I know I’ll need to make many changes based on feedback from real users.
School starts next week for both schools, so training starts this week. Mostly it’ll be answering questions, but getting real teacher feedback and building relationships are my top priorities. And I needed to have enough figured out so I could actually answer questions with confidence. In the coming weeks, I’ll also be figuring out how to best collect feedback and quantify impact from teacher and parent surveys. I’m anticipating that teachers will start the Wanderly curriculum the week of August 24, as I’ve heard the first few weeks are mostly about introductions and routines, so that buys me a couple more weeks to improve.
The initial responses have been encouraging, and that’s my anchor right now: teachers see the need and want to give Wanderly a shot! I feel like the stories I’ve built with Alia and Hilary address real social-emotional skills, and I think Wanderly delivers that content in a fun way. The stuffies are cute! But… this is the first time Wanderly will be used in a classroom context. Will the teachers like it? Will it be as low-prep as I hope? Will parents actually use Wanderly more if it’s teacher-endorsed? And finally: is the quality of the stories good enough to achieve social-emotional outcomes? I believe yes; otherwise I wouldn’t be here, but I am very nervous about lining up on the starting line, ready to take that big first step into schools.
Wish me luck! And if you have a Kindergarten through 3rd grader, or know someone who has a kid starting these grades, and you want to give them a little extra support as the school year starts, sign up here for a personalized plan that covers friendship skills, new routines, confidence, and managing big feelings.
Gah! I keep meaning to write up a post about worldbuilding with Wanderly. Coming soon, I swear!