We Not Me: TJ Hoffman (Sibme)
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Dr. Nikki Harding: Hello friends and welcome to another episode of the We Not Me Inclusion in Action Podcast. I'm really excited today to welcome TJ Hoffman to the podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Sibme,, which is the AI platform that we utilize at the Inclusive Leadership Lab. And I am very excited to have TJ here because.
I [00:01:00] really wanna pick his brain and share the origin story behind Sibme So, TJ, could you take a minute and introduce yourself?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, sure. Hi everybody. I'm TJ Hoffman and I'm very excited to talk with you guys today. Long history in education. I worked for years here in Houston, Texas, working both as a teacher, a campus leader. And then did a whole bunch of things at the district level in in Houston, ISD. I've been very interested in the intersection between technology and instruction for quite some time.
And yeah, as Nikki said, Sibme was born out of a handful of classrooms with a bunch of us in the Houston area who about. A dozen years ago saw the opportunity for teachers to learn in an entirely different way, a way that was less prescriptive, less about, you know, the old sit and get PD sessions and that sort of stuff.
And much more about reflecting on what's really going on in our classrooms. And so we. We started as a video [00:02:00] platform and since then we've sort of expanded to be a full suite of platforms and services that are empowering educators to drive their own professional learning. And we are we're thrilled to be doing that work and and, and exploring how AI can even unfold, fold into that work as well.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Yeah. So when I first discovered Sibme, I was scouring. The internet, I was in a position where I was actually a supervisor of some staff members and I was tasked with also being their mentor. And it was, it was not working out well because that dynamic does not work. But we were in that position because we were so short staffed. And I kept thinking there has to be a better way. There has got to be a better way because we have to support these teachers. It, it wasn't looking like they were gonna stay. And they had great talent and we needed to figure out a way for them to stay. And so that's one of the reasons that I started my business is how can we find this middle ground where administrators are not put in a [00:03:00] position that they have to also be mentors just because we're so short staffed that, that, that's what we have to do in order to provide that required support. and so I found Sibme and I thought this is a great way for me to build capacity and provide that support. But I'm curious for you what was that, what was that piece that, that you thought I need this, this is, this is the turning point for me that I need an additional tool in Houston in your position?
I.
TJ Hoffman: I mean, so I, it was a similar situation where I, you know, I was coaching 40 teachers, a big six a high school in Texas. I was still on a campus at the time, and I. You know, so some of it was capacity. It was just, I, I can't be in these classrooms enough to really get a clear picture of what's going on.
But also a lot of it was just my own acknowledgement that I didn't know. Everything. Right. And so I was working with, you know, my background, I was a choir teacher, right? So [00:04:00] like I didn't know what I was coaching, hosted teachers and English teachers and math teachers and all these sorts of things. And so I was like, well, I don't have the credibility to really come into your classroom and say, I know how to teach your class just as well as you do.
And so I was looking for ways to make it possible For, the best example I have is, you know, our, our nursing teachers on our campus. I wanted them to see outstanding nursing instruction. I was working with new teachers. And so there was no easy way for us to, you know, get subs and do all that sort of work so that they could drive up the road, you know, to the next high school and see that teacher teach.
So I was like, well, what if they could just. Watch them remotely. At the time, you know, that was a pretty challenging technical thing. But, but I think that, you know, it was really more born out of our belief that teachers learn best when they learn from one another. A mentor's job is to kind of act like a traffic cop, protecting the teacher from the.
Stuff [00:05:00] they don't need. And then sort of guiding them towards the things that they do need, but really helping them build their own ability to sort of navigate the system themselves. And and so that was really the, the thing. And so yeah, it was this kind of dual mandate of of the. Resource constraints of not having enough support for teachers on a campus.
And then also the, the practicality of just knowing that I wasn't gonna be able to know everything that a school needed. And so I needed to figure out a way to sort of crowdsource the expertise of all the people in our district. But the last part of it really for me was. The reality of walking in, watching a teacher teach and you know, taking a bunch of notes and then sitting down with that teacher afterwards and describing their class to them, and then having them go, well, that's, that's not what was going on in the classroom.
Right. And what I quickly realized, [00:06:00] especially with new teachers, is they're so caught up in just the particularities of. What's the next thing I have to say? What's the next activity I need to get ready? You know, they're just sort of trying to remember the next thing that they need to do. They have very little awareness of what's going on in their classroom.
And I mean, I, I, I think practically, you know, when I think back on my own time in the classroom, I'd like to pretend like that's a problem that only new teachers have. But I, I probably had that problem also as I, you know, even 10 years into teaching, I was still kind of, you go in and out of those moments.
And so we have these blind spots, right? And so if I could expose those blind spots to people so that they could see themselves teach, it made the conversations a lot more fruitful because we didn't spend half of our time negotiating about what I saw versus what they thought was going on. We were able to sort of look at it together and have that conversation investigating a mutual understanding of what went on in the classroom.
Dr. Nikki Harding: One of the things that really stood out to [00:07:00] me when I was looking at the platform itself was how, intentional you have been about designing the platform so that it is supportive and not evaluative. There's no gotcha element at all to the platform. And I know like sometimes teachers might feel a little bit nervous about the video piece, even though evidence shows us that that is how powerful that is. But anyway, I just really appreciate all of the, all of the work that you put into, making sure that that is supportive and not a gotcha. but I wanna talk about the AI piece. I think that's really important because there's a lot of different types of ai and sometimes when I say that we are working with ai, people get really nervous.
So can you in a simple way talk about what the AI is that Sibme uses?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, and I think, you know, I, I recognize that AI is the most [00:08:00] recent technology that's sort of made its way into the world. But I think we've always had a little bit of, a hesitation in education to implement new technologies in our work. We wanna make sure that it's not gonna do more harm than good.
We wanna make sure that it's not going to make make our already hard jobs harder, right? And those sorts of things. I don't really buy this general. A feeling in that, that you sort of read about it in the news, that like people are worried that AI is gonna replace them. I think by now all of us have had enough experience with AI to know that it can't replace.
People yet. And, and so, you know, there's just no, no possibility there. So, so I actually think that the terminology shouldn't be artificial intelligence. Ai, I, if I could go back and, you know, if somebody would listen to me, but I'm not Sam Altman, so nobody's gonna listen to me, but if somebody would listen to me, I would say we should call it [00:09:00] ia.
What it really is, is an intelligence accelerator and what it's doing. Within the con, at least in the context of Sibme, is it's providing an opportunity for you to move your way up sort of the bloom's ladder more quickly, right? So if you think about just the data collection of observation, right?
When I walk into a classroom, there's a lot of data I have to capture. I need to write down what's going on in the classroom. And you look around at the room, I need to be able to see what the kids are saying, what the teacher are saying, all that sort of stuff. In our context, what our AI is doing is it's making it easier to sort of just roll all that information up and get some, output that, that's able to point out some trends in what's going on.
I mean, I use this, not, I'm not a teacher anymore, right? But I use this all the time. I use chat, pt, I use all kinds of different tools simply because the quantity of intelligence that's out there is so great [00:10:00] that it would take me forever. To go through all of it and use it in a meaningful way. And so then I'm limited to what's just sort of freely available in my mind.
Well, I, I don't want that. I wanna know what I don't know. And and that's where I think artificial intelligence could be helpful. You know? So like, I'm, I'm still a little, honestly, like as somebody who runs an AI company, I'm still a little, i, I, I'm not a, I'm not fully on board with the idea that like, AI can do teaching.
Ai, we have all used AI for 25 years, right? I mean, like, we use Google, we use, we, we use GPS, we use Netflix to tell us what TV show to watch next, right? Like, that's all ai It's, it's just content recommendation. This is a different way of interacting with it, but, but I'm, I'm not entirely ready to say, you know, a a, you know, I can sit a kid in front of a chatbot and it's gonna be able to then just teach that kid whole hog by [00:11:00] itself.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Mm-hmm.
TJ Hoffman: ready to say that. I mean, the internet has more access to information than I do. It's not all good, but but it has more access to information as long as I'm still willing to use my critical thinking skills, my ability to sort of. Make decisions about the information that I'm provided with and saying, eh, if that's junk, that's good, that's valuable.
At least I'm getting a greater volume of access to information than I would've been able to get before.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Kind of how I've been describing this instructional coaching model is as a hybrid model. And I say that the AI tool is, is just a tool to start feedback something to look at, just to provide some beginning parts for reflection. It's, it's not something that you would say, you know, this is definitely something that I need to do. It's something to consider when you are looking at planning future lessons or something to consider when you are. Reflecting on your [00:12:00] practice and it sounds like we're definitely on the same page as that. So for somebody who's never seen the platform before, and for somebody who's completely unfamiliar with what the copilot can do, what, you give an example of some insights that the system detects that like a human coach might miss?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah. So I mean, and, and I mean a human coach, I don't think there's anything that the, that RAI can do that a human coach couldn't do. But again, we can just do it a lot more fast. We can do it a lot more accurately. And so, like for example, I, I remember when I was still coaching, I would spend and I.
Unbelievable amount of time calculating things like ratios of teacher talk to student talk. Where were kids raising their hands in the classroom? What kinds of questions are being asked in the classroom? Where do I see evidence of Danielson or some other framework in a, a lesson? I was just capturing that data, which then consumed all of the time that I could have been spending.
Making deeper [00:13:00] decisions about it. So our AI makes it really, really easy for you to upload any kind of artifact, whether that's a lesson recording, whether it's audio or video of a lesson student work, the lesson plan, any of that sort of stuff. And then being able to sort of collate that based on all those kind of more quantitative data points that you might be looking for.
Where do I see evidence of misconceptions in my student work? Upload all of it. Here's the what, here's what their, here's what the learning objective was. Oh, I see. On, you know, pages two, three, and seven. This is sort of a trend in what's going on in the, in the misconception. Where do I see that? The teachers are sort of in the course of the lesson cycle, getting off track from where they should be and they're losing time in the lesson.
Those kinds of more quantitative things. It can then give you some suggestions of what you might do about it. I think at that point, that's really where the human coach becomes so much more valuable because you are gonna be able to customize it to [00:14:00] what's really going on in the classroom.
Dr. Nikki Harding: So another issue that I know school districts are
When adopting AI policies and practices is really looking at equity and bias. What safeguards have you built into your to make sure that feedback is fair across the different content areas, grade levels, and culturally diverse classrooms?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, so it, it's a good question and it's a complex answer that I'll try to distill down to something a little bit. More less boring, I guess I'll put it that way. But you know, I mean, a lot of the problems with bias and AI are because the. Algorithms that the AI is trained on can just sort of run wild on the data that they have access to.
And so if the underlying training data is biased, then the output can be biased. So we've worked really hard to do two things about that. First, we've limited the access to do just auto training. So one of the things that we don't do [00:15:00] that other larger AI platforms do is just tell our ai, Hey, just keep, keep getting better all the time or keep changing your analysis all the time.
Use unfettered access to all the data that our users are providing access to. We don't do any of that. So we created the guardrails to begin with in saying like. Don't train on data so that you're not, then the AI isn't then becoming more and more biased as it did. You know, kind of the famous example around this is early on Twitter had a, a, a, an AI bot.
This was five or six years ago. And, and it. It let it go wild. Twitter released the, the product, I don't even remember what it was called. And I mean, we, we all know what Twitter is like. Right? And within, within five minutes it was saying all this racist stuff and all these sorts of things. Well, it was because it was pulling all the tweets that had ever been written, written and trying to reproduce them.
We're not pulling all the things that have ever gone into Sibme [00:16:00] where there may be human bias. We can't control for human bias. Right. But there may be human bias that then would. Affect the output from the robot, but then the other part is. The human guardrails that we put in. So we've done this already multiple times with gender, with race, with all kinds of information to crosscheck.
So Sibme also has a virtual coaching service where we have coaches who are experienced educators who've worked all over the world, where we're having them make analyses of the same video that the AI is is making analyses of and comparing those two things so we can then. Retract it, make some changes and put it back out there so that it's more accurate.
And we're always making those revisions over time with that constant view of making sure that we're providing sort of equitable analysis of what's going on in the classroom.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Yeah, I know that. Is very complex, so thank you for explaining that. Okay, so really big to schools [00:17:00] is privacy and compliance. That's particularly in special education. So can you explain a little bit about the safeguards that you have in place for schools with with privacy laws?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, so I mean, this is our bread and butter, right? I mean, long before Sibme was an AI company, we were the first scary platform in education, which was video, right? I mean 10 years ago teachers were very nervous about the concept of a video of their classroom being on the internet period. And and so we've been.
We've been very serious about privacy from the get go. We've been very serious about security from the get go because we wanted to protect a teacher's trust in knowing that when they uploaded something from their lesson that it was only gonna be available to the people that they wanted to have access to it.
And so it's all teacher driven. The Sibme platform is all teacher driven. And it's really [00:18:00] based on the teacher's willingness to open up their classroom to other people, providing data to other people. We set up all these different structures within our platform where we sort of start with the most private space, which is a private workspace where a teacher can put things in their workspace, or any user who puts their things in their workspace is private to them.
No one else can see it in the platform. It's it's password protected and encrypted. And then we create shared spaces in our platform where. There's no there's no hiding. It's fully transparent as to who has access to that. So if I set, set up a shared space with you, Nikki, inside of our Sibme platform, but then but then the superintendent of our school district is the person who owns our platform.
She can't see what we're doing inside of that shared space until we invite her in. And that's that's the other part of it. So I can own the, I mean, I, I, I have access to all of Sibme, right? But if I log in to somebody else's Sibme platform, unless they've, I can pull a link from a [00:19:00] video and click on it and all that sort of stuff, unless they've actually shared that with me, I can't see it.
So that same principle that's so important around those old. Worries around video and that sort of stuff is, is what guides our access to our ai. So I already talked about how we don't train on any data that's put into our platform without express permission from the specific user who shared it with us.
We never just automatically train on that data. And also we're very serious about with, with our ai, making sure that while we may still be storing that data, like, you know, I upload the video, I get the report, or I get the, the co-pilot's output. We store it on an entirely separate server from where our AI lives.
So it's kind of like opening up the garage door, letting the AI look at what's going on, and then we shut it and we say, you gotta delete everything that's in there. So we keep all that kind of segmented apart from one another to make it much more secure over time.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Interesting. [00:20:00] Okay. For an EdTech company, you guys have been around for a really long time. I know that you have a lot of data to support all the work that you're doing, and I want to give you an opportunity to brag about the work that you're doing. I have bragged about you a lot, but I want this to come from you.
So can you talk a little bit about the teacher retention rates? Some of the goals that teachers have made and been able to accomplish themselves, talk about some of the things that have been accomplished as a result of using this platform. I, I really want you to just brag for a little bit.
TJ Hoffman: Okay, well, it's, I'm awful at it, so that's gonna be hard for me. But I'm very good at looking at all the ways I can improve. But but yeah, I mean, like one of my proudest moments actually was as a person who. In quite a while working in public ed trying to deal with a serious problem with teacher turnover in a major urban school district where we had constant replacement of, of teachers, and we were constantly losing teachers, and it was a big problem.
It cost [00:21:00] us a lot of money. It hurt kids because they had three teachers in a year. All those sorts of things. Teacher turnover is really, really important to me. What we know from the research, you can go from TNTP all the way to university research. What we know is when teachers feel successful and supported, they stay.
Those are the factors that contribute to a teacher wanting to stay in the classroom. And one of my proudest moments working with Sibme was when we had a new teacher at one of the schools that we support, who at the end of the year told her principal. I was gonna quit in December until I saw myself teach in September and at the end of the semester, and I saw how much better I was.
And, and you know that, that, that feeling of we're so hard on teachers in this country. We're constantly talking about all the ways in which teachers are failing. And you know, this is probably why I'm bad at bragging, right? 'cause I was built in that culture. Teachers do amazing things, right? And if they could just see their [00:22:00] success, then they'll stay.
And the data supports my claim, right? So we have schools where they've reduced teacher turnover by upwards of 90%, 93%. Where where schools that are, are sort of engaging in this continuous process of self-reflection, continuous improvement, and celebrating success that they just do not lose. Their teachers year over year.
The teachers that are engaged in that process, they're hesitant to begin with, but then they just stay because they feel successful. And the student performance gains are the same. I mean, we see kind of time and time again, double digit gains, 15%, 20% gains year over year in literacy rates, in math numeracy rates, and all kinds of ways where students are doing so much better because they're being .
Being taught by a teacher who's serious about their own self-improvement.
Dr. Nikki Harding: I think another study that I read on your website, excuse me, losing my voice. Just a second. So another study on your [00:23:00] website I read there was significant improvements in classroom management. Was it over 60%
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, so we had a 60% reduction. Yeah. We've had schools where they've had massive reductions, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60% in, in behavioral referrals and and in suspensions and expulsions. Because the teachers are. Are just more aware of what's going on in their classroom and able to manage it better.
Yeah.
Dr. Nikki Harding: That's, that's huge. I'm actually presenting at a national conference in November on the dangers of suspensions and expulsions. Did you know across the country students lose 11 million days due to suspensions and expulsions?
TJ Hoffman: I didn't know that number, but I'm not surprised. You know, I've been in schools where that's a huge, a huge problem and I've been, I've been the person who gets sent the kid, right? And and then has a conversation with them and is a aware of the, the dynamics, the human dynamics between a teacher [00:24:00] and a student that lead to those expulsions.
And oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes it's a preventable solution. If both, again, if both people can be on the same page with what's going on in the classroom. I mean, we've actually had situations where a a, a kid will sit down and watch themselves in a class and go, oh. Yeah, now I get it. Okay. I'm gonna, and you know, I mean those are the places where at that very specific level where you're really being able to get to the crux of that teachable moment, that, that opportunity to say, here's what you could be doing differently to maximize the student's instruction, whether it's classroom management, instructional strategies, whatever that happens to be.
Dr. Nikki Harding: I love it. Okay. Technical question. That I get asked a lot. Teachers are busy people. They live bell to bell. You know, I remember when I was in the classroom, you know, I, there were days I, I didn't have time to [00:25:00] eat lunch and didn't have time to go to the bathroom between classes. So realistically, how long does it take to upload a video, get feedback,
so what does that process look like for a teacher who is participating in this?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, so Sibme's a fully integrated web and mobile application, so you can use any device to capture the audio recording or the video recording of what's going on in the lesson. And we've done a lot of work technically to make it. Possible to make it access accessible to the AI to another person as quickly as possible.
When you record a video using your phone on the Sibme Mobile app, we're uploading that recording as you're recording it. And so it usually takes a matter of seconds for that to be accessible in our platform. Processed the longest. Point is actually the transcription. That's the thing that takes the longest because we're detecting the language.
Sibme's fluent in 144 different languages. And so we have to first detect the language, transcribe the, the video. But then once I've done that, it's just a couple [00:26:00] minutes before they're able to then interact with it. So from, from soup to nuts, the whole process can take. If it's a short video, it can take a matter of minutes.
If it's a longer video, like if you're blocked schedule and you're recording, you know, a couple hours of lesson at a time, which by the way, I would never recommend that you do not from a technical standpoint, but more from just the practical standpoint of like two hours of video is a lot of stuff to, there's a lot that can happens in two hours of a lesson.
, But you could do it and and it would take maybe 20 minutes for the whole process to be done.
Dr. Nikki Harding: That's pretty quick. Okay. So if you're a district and you are looking at adopting Sibme as a tool to provide on the job support what advice would you provide a district from things that you've learned? And also what have you learned from mistakes in the past?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah, so I think that , the biggest mistake with most professional learning, to be honest with you, not just with the concept of, of using Sibme, but the biggest mistake that [00:27:00] schools and districts make is they, I. Are data driven, but the data that they're using to drive the kinds of professional learning that they need is not nuanced enough.
And so my first advice is know what you want. Oftentimes we have school leaders who will say, well, I just want teachers to reflect. That's a pretty broad, I mean, you could look at Pete Hall and Alyssa Sall have done. Tons of research on cultures of of reflection. And you know, I mean, just asking teachers to reflect is an insufficient directive, right?
You need to give some context to reflection. And so a lot of the work that we do when we start working with a school or with a district is we say, okay, what are the specific student outcomes that you wanna change? What are the teacher behaviors that you wanna change for the student outcomes? And then how are the systems set up?
Are you doing PLCs? Are you, do you have instructional coaches? Are you bringing in our coaches? And then what's the job to be done by those people? So that's kind of the first thing is that people [00:28:00] kind of broadly define, well, I need to implement HQIMs. Okay. Well. Implement how with whom, you know, like, do that thinking ahead of time.
It makes such a big difference. But then the other thing, you know, to, to quote someone smarter than me you know, like I always, you, I think the best advice with any sort of new initiative in schools is go slow to go fast, right? So don't do a whole bunch of stuff all at once. Going slow can look a lot of different ways depending on the culture.
So it could be, well we're gonna start with a handful of teachers. We're gonna start with a grade level, we're gonna start with a department, but it could also be around the expectations. The with Sibme specifically, the biggest mistake that people make as I mentioned just a moment ago, is they record way too long of videos.
And you know, like the biggest mistake I made, the very first time I did Sibme me, I had 40 teachers at my school. I said, Hey, everybody. By Thursday, I want you to record your lesson and I want you to share it with me. And [00:29:00] by Monday I'm gonna have watched all those lessons and give you feedback on all those lessons.
Well, on Thursday at 3:00 PM I had 40 hours of video to watch by Monday because they all recorded all of their Class, right? And like I said, a lot happens in a class. Really what we're trying to do is we're trying, it's like ESPN, right? Like we're trying to get down to that one little thing, that one little move that somebody could have done a little bit differently so that they can try that differently tomorrow.
So what you should be doing is recording less, but record the right. Thing. So start again with what am I trying to change in the classroom? What's the best evidence to capture the implementation of that? And then only capture that. So that's another way to go slow to go fast, is to just record short, small snippets of what's going on in the class so that you can really hone in on that.
But, and then I'll stop after this. The hard part about that is the technical part, right? If that. Important thing is halfway through my class, what am I gonna do? I'm [00:30:00] gonna stop teaching and go pull my phone out and start recording and all that sort of stuff. This is where our AI can be really, really groundbreaking because I can record the whole lesson and then I can say to s, Hey, find the clip that's connected to.
Differentiating instruction in this lesson, and it's gonna pull that moment out and find those teachable moments without me having to manually look for them so that we can get to that 30 second clip that we can use in our coaching conversation and that we can use in our PLC. That will really make a big difference in changing behavior in that classroom.
Dr. Nikki Harding: Yeah, that's that's great advice. I love the shorter and I think that all of our listeners will like that too. 'Cause that's simple is better.
TJ Hoffman: Yeah.
Dr. Nikki Harding: So what this is, this is my last question here. What do you think your districts that you've worked with over the years would say has been their biggest ROI from implementing the use of Sibme in their schools?
TJ Hoffman: So, I mean, [00:31:00] I think, you know, I often wonder how people measure a return on investment, right? I think really when you think about the fact that you can spend between nine and $21,000 to replace a teacher, if you're able to reduce teacher turnover by 90%, you're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by not having to constantly replace.
Those people not have to constantly invest in onboarding their replacement, onboarding their replacement, onboarding their replacement every year. So that, you know, sort of financial ROI is really, really valuable. I think. When I was working in Houston, I would spend 50% of my week in a car driving from campus to campus.
So that's another way in which you can save a ton of money because you're not having to physically spend time not in classrooms. You can be in classrooms a lot more frequently and then through that, be more effective in sort of the work that you're doing, whether [00:32:00] you're a coach or an administrator.
Whether you're teachers who now aren't having to get subs to watch another teacher teach to do lesson study or whatever that happens to be. So that's another big return. But ultimately, I think that the return is the community. I think that schools are really lonely places for the people who work in them, that what we do typically.
In schools, as we say, here are the keys to your classroom. We'll see you in May and oh, by the way, we're gonna have a PLC meeting on Wednesday at two o'clock. You're gonna be exhausted. You're not gonna be engaged. Oh, we may have a faculty meeting once a month or something like that, but there's very little opportunity for teachers to.
Work together. And if we can create structures, and I think Sibme is a really powerful tool for doing that, then what you do is you create this more collective approach to teaching on a campus. And to me, that's the return. The return isn't, there's not a financial, you know, sort of [00:33:00] measurement for that, but it, it is my philosophical belief that if teachers could just be more connected to one another, schools would be completely different places.
Dr. Nikki Harding: So that was, that's amazing. So I saw the platform and immediately loved the platform, but then when I talked to you I knew that our values aligned. That right there is in perfect alignment with the values of my company because what I really wanted to do was give teachers a feeling of belonging in schools. I think it's so important that everybody feels like, school is a place where I belong. And I think part of that is recognizing that everyone's professional learning is important. You know, we expect teachers to personalize learning for every student in their classroom, and then often we provide professional development that is once and done and one size fits all for teachers and for administrators.
And I don't think that's fair. You know, I was a special [00:34:00] education teacher and I, I don't know how many PD D days I sat through that. I was like, I don't, I don't know that this pertains to me or any of my kids. But personalizing learning for everybody creates that feeling of belonging and that that my learning, my professional learning goals that matters to somebody. It matters that I grow and that I learn, and that. Is passed on to my students. And I think that you're right. How does that, how is that ROI measured? Other than those teachers stay?
TJ Hoffman: Yeah.
Dr. Nikki Harding: . Well, thank you TJ. I really appreciate you taking the time to to be on the podcast and really excited to see this partnership grow and blossom.
I think that we're going to do amazing things together. To learn more about this partnership, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. Or go to the website. And really look forward to talking more about it as we, as [00:35:00] we move forward, we will be working closely with Sibme and there's a lot more to come, so thank you.
TJ Hoffman: Thank you, Nikki. It's been great chatting with you today and, and yes, I couldn't agree more that it's, it's a wonderful partnership. We're really excited to continue to find new ways to make schools more inclusive, places.
