Impact Growth Ideas for Children's Educators

Children's education community can sometimes feel siloed and disconnected: children, their educators and caregivers, education and child-development researchers, education policy makers, educational media creators, edtech entrepreneurs and other experts in children's education space need to exchange insights more often.

The challenge with idea-exchange

While conferences, meetups, academic publication exchanges, blogs etc. help in facilitating education experts' dialog across adjacent domains - one thing that's missing is FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE. We have early education researchers in academia who haven't directly worked with diverse children in classrooms, edtech entrepreneurs who superficially built businesses based on random statistics about supposed "gaps in research" and "what children need today", teachers who haven't had access to potentially helpful research findings hiding behind journal paywalls, self-proclaimed education futurists writing punchy posts and snazzy manifestos without any credentials or experience working with children.

How many times have we seen research, products, services, media etc. aimed at educating kids, and thought about remarking, "Excuse me, your lack of perspective is showing!"?

It can be frustrating when the person leading a children's learning experience has zero lived experience of working with children. It may look like designing a pointless toy, game, children's book, museum exhibit, STEM activity kit, business idea - or researching children's learning experiences by analyzing the "data" in a massive spreadsheet with analytical codes that make sense only on paper. A catchy framework and buzzwords terminology may yield more citations, but is it really making a point?

Just like having a degree in children's education/media/design doesn't automatically guarantee having enough experience and perspective - being a parent doesn't automatically make one a children's education expert, either. Because one's kid/s are not the representative samples of the populations they'd like to support.

It's important to truly understand children as a learner population through direct interactions, before jumping into design, research, and impact.

The Impact Spectrum & Personal Experiences

A potential solution to the silos? Break 'em! Move across the "impact spectrum" throughout your career in education to benefit from a FIRST HAND experience.

??Teach kids directly in classrooms, museums, makerspaces, and other formal and informal learning spaces

?? Research ideas that could help address the challenges in your immediate learning environment

?? Design solutions at a small scale and see what works and what doesn't

??Serve the larger education community through teaching, mentoring, volunteering, advising

?? Share ideas through social media, books, blogs, and any other platform of your choice (wherever your intended community is most active!)

??Invest in solutions to create a large-scale impact: it could mean literal investment in stock for the educational companies you believe in, volunteering for/donating to your favorite nonprofits, consulting with startups that you want to succeed, advising organizations that support the communities you care about or other ways of investing in large-scale impact in children's education.

Beyond Idealism

The practicality of our jobs could get in the way of creating this full-spectrum impact. K12 teacher burnout is real. Many teachers are burdened by overcrowded classrooms with insufficient resources, often buying school supplies with their own paycheck, dealing with behavioral issues or parental over-involvement/ignorance. Expecting underpaid and overworked teachers to provide service/social media musings/investments may sound ridiculous.

Similarly for career academics in education, the brutal tenure system could prevent them from "doing things that don't directly count towards tenure review". Gender bias in children's academic research is real too (As seen in 'The Professor is In' and 'Doctoral mom' groups on social media) . While several male academics can crunch out a high volume of podcasts, social media content, academic books and articles, and maintain Greek-god physiques - for female academics, creating a "work-life balance" can be a lot more challenging.

Having consulted with edtech entrepreneurs for 8 years, I've personally seen how well-meaning entrepreneurs often end up cutting corners on their vision for children's education because of value-misalignment with investors, redirections to meet grant guidelines and deadlines, recession, operating costs of the business, miscalculated product roadmaps, technical failures, and many other often unexpected issues.

With these real-life challenges, it could be unfair to expect the education community to walk around the spectrum trying to create idealistic impact.

Examples of Educators Who DO Travel Through the Impact Spectrum

Colleen Kelley, Ph.D. is a unicorn who has travelled the full impact spectrum. She's been a university professor, a K12 teacher, an Emmy award winning educational media creator, an industry chemist, an entrepreneur, mentor (and overall AMAZING human). She has done this impact spectrum travel over time in phases, and let her prior experiences inform the next. Having worked with children in the classroom as a science teacher she knew how to build a successful science education business. Having a PhD in her field and strong work experience made her an expert of the domain. The passion that comes from this lived experience shows in her media presence. I can't imagine someone without any classroom teaching experience or domain expertise to come up with the same business idea and execute it with confidence. You have to know your stuff, from a first-hand experience.

Dr. Dawn DiPeri is another such unicorn who has a strong Graphic Design background and solid understanding of children's education, has been both a college professor and a champion of children's education at UNICEF. She's authored a helpful book for applying design to learning, and has served the larger education community with public speaking, social media posts, podcasts, conferences, and other public events across the national and international learning communities. All while managing a lovely family and being wholeheartedly present to support others (like me) in the education community!

Danny Joe LaBrecque is the multi-talented former teacher and current social media celebrity impacting children's learning experiences positively at scale. If you've seen his amazing show 'Danny Joe's Treehouse' - you can tell that the heartwarming presentation and thoughtful content is coming from a 24 karat educator genuinely wanting to do some good for the children's education community (and not a performative "creator" mining for likes and shares)

Kavindya Thennakoon is another impact-spectrum-traveler running a fabulous children's education business informed by research, testing it out with children in formal and informal learning spaces: gracefully tying together her multi-expertise of learning design, research, entrepreneurship, activism, academic and industry experience.

Stephanie Bowles is also a budding researcher and talented entrepreneur managing technical, creative, and research aspects of her education business. Air Force Veteran, higer-ed and K12 educator, entrepreneur, researcher, overall badass genius. Talk about multi-hyphenate talent!

Personally, I feel lacking in large-scale impact. I've been a character designer in the children's gaming industry, education professor, children's makerspace educator, mentor in the children's educational media industry, consultant for edtech startups. Perhaps scaling-up my impact might look like pursuing large research labs, developing a globally impactful educational product or service, and answering more impactful questions through my research. Want to collaborate with me on this edu impact mission? Reach out!

Who might you add to this list?