Written by Paige DeLozier
2022 is coming to an end, and the team at TalkingPoints is thrilled to see so many new relationships formed and conversations happening between families and educators. We’re honored to help facilitate each and every conversation, along with the student success that stems from building such intentional engagement.
Here’s what we are most proud of this year:
New partnerships. New conversations. New impact.
More and more families and educators are using TalkingPoints to ensure strong teaching and learning and we’re proud to have continued and new partners, including Fairfax Public Schools (Virginia), Seattle Public Schools (Washington), and Cincinnati Public Schools (Ohio).
Impactful, actionable research
As a nonprofit committed to ensuring that schools embrace best practices to support student learning, we’ve invested in conducting and sharing actionable research:
- New causal research shows that TalkingPoints improves student outcomes: This study shows that using TalkingPoints leads to higher test scores, course proficiency improvements, and lower absenteeism rates in a large urban, diverse school district. These gains are even more pronounced for traditionally underserved students, including Black students, Latino students, students with disabilities, and English language learners.
- The study found statistically significant improvements on state standardized tests. Overall, students saw higher math test scores by 9 points, a gain that represents 7 months of additional learning for the average student. That’s why family engagement matters so much.
- Families and educators are saying what they want to know: Our research finds a gap between the information educators and families need from one another to build strong school-family connections — a critical finding since family engagement translates to better learning outcomes for students. Families want more academic progress and behavior updates from educators, while educators want more information on student social-emotional wellness and family circumstances from families. Let’s close this information mismatch to better support students!
More for our users: 145 languages and more access points
We added 20 new languages so even more families can more easily access their children’s educators. The new languages are:
- Bhojpuri, Dogri, Konkani, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), and Mizo — spoken in India
- Aymara, Guarani, and Quechua — spoken in South America
- Bambara, Ewe, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Oromo, Sepedi, Twi, and Tsonga — spoken in Africa
- Ilocano — spoken in the Pacific Islands
- Faroese — spoken in the Faroe Islands
We also expanded our platform so full learning and well-being teams can communicate directly with families (and vice versa!). Nurses, counselors, bus drivers, and other critical staff can connect directly with families through the TalkingPoints platform, increasing family engagement.
TalkingPoints’ TED talk: More than 1 million views!
When Heejae Lim, TalkingPoints’ CEO and Founder, walked onto the TED Talk stage to share her vision of how schools can better partner with families for student learning, we knew it was a moment to celebrate. But now more than 1 million people worldwide have viewed her five-minute talk. We couldn’t be more excited that the importance of school-to-family partnerships is taking center stage. “When teachers and families work together, everyone wins,” says Heejae in her talk.
Our funders and supporters
We are grateful for the many philanthropic partners who support our mission. This year, we were honored to receive major contributions from MacKenzie Scott, The Asian American Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, and more.
Want to learn more? Check out this Chicago Tribune op-ed on why investing in families that are linguistically isolated is so critical to school communities.
The team at TalkingPoints is looking forward to continuing this amazing momentum into 2023.
TalkingPoints is an education technology nonprofit that supports school districts in connecting families and teachers for the success and wellbeing of each and every student. TalkingPoints’ multilingual platform uses two-way translated communication and personalized content in more than 145 languages to facilitate meaningful family-school partnerships. Fueling this unique approach is a relentless focus on eliminating barriers to engaging families, including language, time, mindsets, and capacity. For additional information about TalkingPoints, please visit www.talkingpts.org.
