Branching Minds Empowers All Educators To Effectively, Efficiently And Equitably Support The Holistic Needs Of Their Students

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Below is our recent interview with Abigail Woodworth, VP of Communications at Branching Minds:

Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?

A: Branching Minds is a system-level K-12 education company that brings together innovative, easy-to-use technology with the latest insights from the learning sciences to help teachers support positive outcomes for all students. Our mission is to empower all educators to effectively, efficiently and equitably support the holistic needs of their students; and to create a path to academic and personal success for every learner; and our vision is to help all K12 schools achieve a high-fidelity Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) so they can strengthen educators’ professional satisfaction and efficacy in improving student academic outcomes and wellness, and close equity gaps.

The platform is currently being used across 33 states in the US to support over 1.5 million students and more than 260,000 educators.

Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?

• A: Branching Minds’ overall impact score of 130 is the highest across all B Corporations (B Corps) within the educational support industry, globally.
• Branching Minds has been certified as a B Corporation since 2015, indicating that we meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.
• We had high scores across all 4 assessed domains (Governance, Environment, Customers and Workers), but our scores for positive impact on customers and workers were exceptionally high.
• As stated by David Magier, Co-Founder and COO of Branching MInds,“We are particularly proud that our score in the customer domain increased by 102% since our last recertification, reflecting our excellent stewardship of customers, the quality of our products and services, and the strength of our data and privacy practices”.

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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?

A: As a company, we understand how hard it is for teachers to have all of the insight and guidance they require to understand each student’s needs, and support the whole learner. We also know how challenging and time-consuming it is for school systems to coordinate all the components of effectively identifying students who need support, making sure they actually get that support, and verifying that the support is actually helping. It requires data sharing, communication, and collaboration across stakeholders, access to evidence-based interventions, and, most importantly, visibility. Branching Minds brings all these components together in an easy-to-use platform that streamlines the work of MTSS, improves student outcomes, and reduces administrative burden for educators by enabling them to:

• Identify students and their needed support levels, and gain insights into their strengths and challenges across academic, cognitive, behavioral and SEL skills
• Curate learning support plans from our robust library of evidence-based intervention programs and supports matched to students’ needs
• Scaffold collaborative intervention plans guided by best practices for both individuals and groups of students
• Provide a daily and weekly summary of tasks for teachers to provide support for students
• Plan and document student support meetings
• Monitor students’ progress and responses to interventions
• Generate reports and letters to communicate student needs with families and other stakeholders
• Achieve compliance with state mandates and federal regulations

Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?

A: Over the next six months, Branching Minds will be expanding and deepening our student wellness offering to more comprehensively support students’ behavioral, social-emotional and mental health needs which in turn impact their academic outcomes.

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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?

A: Branching Minds was founded in 2013 by Maya Gat, a then fourth grade classroom teacher who wanted to find a better way to identify and address the learning needs of all her students. Our mission centers educators’ needs and input at every stage of our development process, and in fact, approximately ¾ of our staff are former educators because they believe it is the optimal way for them to have the biggest impact on improving outcomes for students!