ASU+GSV: Tiffany Green, CEO and Founder of Uprooted Academy

Tiffany Green is the founder of Uprooted Academy™, an Edtech platform designed to give students courage, confidence, and competitiveness in the college application process. Tiffany is a Black, first-generation Edtech founder merging mental health and college access. She is also an adjunct faculty of undergraduate and graduate psychology and serves as a licensed therapist and college counselor for the world’s only high school that travels the globe. Tiffany earned her graduate degree in counseling psychology from Howard University and became a licensed psychotherapist. 
 
 Focusing on her passion for understanding and helping alleviate educational anxiety for students, the college readiness program incorporates mental well-being and social-emotional learning while affirming identity and providing the "cheat code" hidden from low-income, first-generation applicants could be vital in minimizing the social capital, opportunity, and wealth gap.

Transcript

Alexander Sarlin: 0:05

Welcome to Ed Tech insiders where we speak with founders, operators, investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you like the podcast, please give us a rating and a review so others can find it more easily. Welcome to Ed Tech insiders where we speak with founders, operators, investors and thought leaders in the education technology industry, and report on cutting edge news in this fast evolving field from around the globe. From AI to xr to K 12 to l&d, you'll find everything you need here on edtech insiders. And if you like the podcast, please give us a rating and a review. So others can find it more easily. Here at ASU GSV. With Tiffany Green of Uprooted Academy. Welcome to the podcast.

Tiffany Green: 1:10

Thank you so much for having me excited to be here.

Alexander Sarlin: 1:13

So tell us about what upward Academy is and why you started it.

Tiffany Green: 1:16

Awesome. So former first generation college student or of low income, I'm a black woman, I grew up in the urban inner city area. And just remembering what it was like to navigate the college application process. And I think that just like lived in my head, but then became an educator. And my educator background is actually I'm a licensed trauma therapist, so worked in schools, and really started to recognize that in working in schools and helping students with their college application, it was part social capital, like they don't have the information that they need. But it was also that actually what our students were interfacing with the application, they were having a trauma response. So we do that even as adults, we see an application of something we want to apply to and what do we do, we fight it by not doing it. That's procrastination, right? We flight we run away, we're like, you know, I don't want to do it or we freeze, we feel like we can't remember who we are to feel like that we best fit this in our brain, our body. And our nervous system is programmed to autonomically do this. And so I realized that it's it is a social capital problem. But it's also a trauma problem. And so when students are alone, which happens a lot with first gen students, and they're overwhelmed, their body can only respond the way that is programmed. And so what would happen if we had a resource and a tool to intersect both the college application tips as social capital and mental health support to guide students through it. And so after over a decade of working in schools with students, it really during COVID, this happened, just recognizing the need to take things outside of the synchronous world and make it asynchronous. So our platform is you can imagine like a Netflix version of series that kids can use a Video Base helps to create that safety, that emotional safety. So beyond the Blog World, and then we have those mental health supports. And so really, we build this out this platform that really gives kids really what we call the cheat code of getting in. So the problem that we're hoping to solve outside of the mental health side of it is that we know that there's a difference between a low income kid and the support they have during this process. And high income kid, right high income kid has not only their community, but oftentimes money resources to hire additional support, upwards of like 30 $40,000. And if you think about a low income kid, their entire family's income is$15,000. So how do we combat that we combat that by democratizing the process by using tech.

Alexander Sarlin: 3:33

That's incredibly interesting. And the insight that it's not only the social capital, or the the knowledge base, but it's also actually an emotional response. I mean, I remember doing that when my college application, I put it off, I put it out, didn't want to write those essays. I had to have people chasing me down. And you know, it's true for everybody, but I'm sure it's extra true for a first generation college student, you don't have a aspirational role model, somebody who has been through it before. So how do you help people build this trauma response? I'm curious about what it actually feels like for students?

Tiffany Green: 4:03

Yeah, that's a really good question. So first, we use something called polyvagal theory, which informs us to determine if things are safe. And if you think about safety, think about like Monopoly, like you pass go, you get to do the next thing, you get to go around again. And so in the beginning, we're thinking less about the content. Because the thing is, all of our students are smart, you're smart, when you put it off, I was smart when I froze and couldn't do it either. We just need the mental fortitude to recognize that we can actually move through this. And so like starting with mental fortitude, like even things like breathwork, mindfulness components, meditation, body movement, right, what we know about trauma informed resources, is that our brains don't really need new skills. What really needs to happen is our full brain or intellectual side of our brain needs to be what we call online. And when it's not online, we don't have access to all of our strengths. We don't have access to what we've already done. We don't have access to resources and be resourceful. And so what that does is it makes us Even less than power. So people feel powerless in this process, I don't think I can do it. And they have these psychologically inflexible thoughts. And so when a student comes into our app, they're able to navigate the content that they need. It's in bite size forms, right? So it's not overwhelming. And one of the things that we do anyone that comes into our app, they're not allowed to use acronyms, acronyms, sometimes they're the number one reasons why students will feel like I'm not qualified. Because when you use it, and someone just says it in a way that you feel like you're supposed to know, you're like, Well, maybe that's where I actually told you, we weren't good enough, right? That internal conversation. And so all of those things are embedded, including moments of pause. So we tell students to take breaks, we incorporate students to say, hey, let's move your body, let's have a like, let's start with a thought, a mindfulness guide. And so that's what it looks like, it's going to look so much better with our 2.0. And I'm excited to kind of tell you a little bit about it. And it's gonna incorporate AI. So

Alexander Sarlin: 5:55

you're anticipating where I'm going with this AI as the theme of the conference. But one more question. Before we get to AI, though, it's such an interesting idea. So you mentioned getting the intellectual part of the brain online. And I've heard the phrase like, like an amygdala hijack, or something like there's these ideas that when you have something really threatening, it feels threatening, you just can't even think straight to the emotions completely take over. And I love that example of an acronym. It could be just an offhand comment from a counselor or from somebody that actually just makes that emotional hijack. I think math teachers would probably recognize this in their kids as well, or, you know, other topics that cause anxiety. How, just for the listeners who recognize this as well, how could somebody start to think like this? A classroom environment? How do you build some of these things in and then we'll talk AI?

Tiffany Green: 6:42

Yeah, I think the first thing that's important is that we have to understand the brain, right? So a narrative is about to come online, right? So and the good thing is, you know, I used to be a professor undergrad and grad Psych. So like, breaking down these concepts are like things that bring me joy, because I like when people have understanding. So you're right, when there is something that our senses input that feels threatening our body, again, it's an autonomic system. So that means it's automatic, we cannot pull ourselves out of it. Even if we want it to it's it's structured, it's coded that way, right? We think about tickets coded that way. And so when that happens, a couple of things happen in our brain, our amygdala, which controls all of our emotions, starts to enlarge. So things feel much larger than they might be. But the other component that also happens is our hippocampus, a place where we learned shrink. So they remember hippocampus, because it's where we go to campus to learn. So that's where it is in our brain. And so that shrinks. So if our memory has shrunk, right, that means that we don't have access to all of our strengths, our skills, our perseverance, what we've done in the past, we actually can't even think about it. The other thing that's really interesting that happens when there's trauma, and remember, trauma is anything of shock, surprise or uncertainty. Now, that doesn't lead to what kids are dealing with, around the college application process. They see a sticker price shock, right, they realize a school only accept certain number of majors surprise, they're not sure if they're going to get in uncertainty, overwhelmed with all the requirements, another indicator of when our body goes into trauma. And the last one is when there's a flood of emotions that we don't know when it's going to go away fear that you put that recipe that cocktail together what happens is students autonomic system moves in from psychological safety, to psychological survival. When psychological survival happens, I already mentioned what happens to the amygdala, which heightens our emotions, but also shrinks our memory. The other thing that happens is all hands go on deck for our brain to go into fight flight freeze to survive. You notice what I did not say stays online, because in order to survive anything, we don't need intellect. So intellectual part of our brain turns off. So now when a teacher, when appear is using motivational tactics like you can do it, their intellectual side of their brain is off, their memory has shrunk. And so they actually you're saying it, but it's not registering all the things you're asking them to do whether a math class or whether this process they don't even remember. So really, when you ask them the next day in class, Hey, did you do this assignment? It's I don't remember you telling you they're actually not lying. Their brain cannot actually fathom that, because all parts of the intellectual part of our brain says, Hey, we don't need to think our way to survival, we need to move our way to survival. So we know that we need to move our way to survival. That means that the body is the key to unlock the place from scared or survival to safety. So what can you do in classrooms when you notice students doing this? There's a couple of things right, you can get them to move their body, right? You can also get them to use a technique that we teach advisors when we train them, called an eye gaze. So think about if I were to ask you, Who was your fourth grade teacher? Look at okay, I just want you to pause As you just moved your eyes, people don't know it right, I see it, you moved your eyes up, because our optical nerve connects to our memory. That means where we look impacts how we feel, and connects to who we are. So if I know that if you're stressed, and I'm looking at you as a student and I'm attune to you, and I'm paying attention, it's, it's a little bit easier when you're working one on one with a student. But even in a classroom, you can do it. Hey, y'all, let's just look over here. So even a teacher who understands this concept, notices a student is stuck because their eye gaze is zoned out there. What if they just move their body to the other side of the classroom, guess where that kid's eyes gonna go to the other side classroom, you can get them back online, even through little techniques like that. So we're not always aware of these things, right. And so what happens is students stay stuck. But we can get them unstuck in the same way they got stuck by getting their body to recognize that it's see. So there's all these different things that we can do that we can learn that we can implement and put in classrooms. And I'm not saying that I'm someone that was not in the classroom, I was in the cloud, I was in the weeds. But those you know, folks,

Alexander Sarlin: 11:08

that is so interesting, I think of like, you know, the fight, freeze flight, I think I got those right, fight, flight or freeze. And it's sort of you have to unfreeze them, right? If a kid freezes, you've got to move their eyes, move their body, thaw them out. That is incredible advice. I'm sure people are thinking very deeply, you know, these listeners about how do I put this into practice at my work? So let's talk AI. You mentioned 2.0 is going to incorporate AI? How's it gonna do it?

Tiffany Green: 11:32

Yes. So. So for me, let's just start with AI. Right? I am leaning into it. Right? I truly believe that AI is going to be a bridge builder for equity. And this is why many of us have had friends who said, I've applied to 1000 jobs, but I'm not getting a callback. And most people, especially if you know the world of jobs and interviews, you would say, Well, what are you putting on your resume, you have to put the right thing to get through the funnel. So AI is used to create into like, you know, streamline who they want to pick, same thing with universities, right, and all these other processes, right. So that's the open puzzle piece. And if we have the other side of the puzzle, to get it to match, it creates opportunity. Historically, if a person wanted to get through the funnel of the college admissions process, or the job application process, you had to hire someone who had the cheat code. Now AI brings that cheat code to us. So for me, I am excited for the students that I get to work with. And I'm excited. But I'm also I'm not excited, I'm not without wisdom, right, there's still an ethical way to use AI, that we can share with our students to do it, because you know what other people are doing it. And it's like, it's only when people have access to AI that now we get scared of it. But AI has been around, we have used AI in so many different ways. Like how do you think your phone knows what you think you're about to say? Right? It's not you, right? It's, we use it for grammerly. And we embrace that. But now we can use it to become more efficient. Right? When I think about the students that we primarily serve first gen low income students are doing 1001 things. And they don't always have digital capabilities to like, maximize Google to find all the things that they want. And then they have to still put them together. This is a one stop shop, hey, you know, they can put in, you know, AI platform, you know, based off of my GPA and LSAT, I want to go to school, and this particular region of the US what are some 20 schools that I can start looking at. So it streamlines that process is same thing, that if I if that kid had $20,000, they would hire a private counselor, and the counselor would do that. And the counselor, trust me is using AI. Right, so we cut out the middleman and we cut out the middle person and the middle woman and we say Hey, kids now have access to do it themselves. And money does not become a barrier. So what our platform is going to do, we're going to use AI to really help to generate responses to get kids grounded in this process. So right now, as kids are going through the process, if they're overwhelmed, they can indicate that and then they can be prompted to watch videos and those sorts of things. But now it's gonna be real time. So what are you feeling now and then we can actually use an AI kind of bot, to be able to talk to them and with them. Because one of the things of I think I mentioned polyvagal theory, which is the core of the work that I do on polyvagal theory says that in order to feel psychologically safe, or to get back to safety from survival, you got to be social, connected and engaged. So those three things are necessary and we can't have human capital do it because it's too expensive. But students still need to feel and move through survival to safety. We can use AI to do it. We can also use AI to look at their essay, make sure that they're on track even for things like building a list. Hey, I've already wrote out my activity list but it has to be in 160 characters. Listen, I am not the most sane person as you hear me chit chatting here today. I the same way I talk a lot, I write a lot. And so AI can be helpful. And it takes away the burden and the stress of something that's unnecessary that it doesn't show ability of a kid to put something in 160 characters, you're not measuring anything, you're not growing in anything, you're just making it easier for the reader. So let them get some support. So for me, I can't wait, we have some other things that are like in the pipeline, too, with AI, but we will 100% lean in, and we will teach our kids to use it ethically, because at the end of the day, to be very honest with you, like and even how, you know, Bill Gates mentioned yesterday, like wealthy kids are using it, wealthy folks are using it. And so we need to make sure that we're providing pathways for other folks to use it to.

Alexander Sarlin: 15:41

Wow, that's so interesting. And Bill Gates is so so interesting. Bill Gates, his point yesterday was so was about Khan Academy, and specifically how he originally thought that making access, you know, giving access to all this high quality content was just going to help bridge the equity gap. And instead, the only people who jumped into it with both feet were people like himself, people who are already really interested in math and science that already had the cultural capital. But there's a emotional part. There's a cultural capital part, there's a social capital part. I mean, I can imagine a world in which instead of a FAFSA instead of a common app, it's a chatbot. It just says, Hey, tell us about this, we'll put it in the right format. Who cares?

Unknown: 16:19

I mean, it that's how it should be, there's no these things are not, you know,

Alexander Sarlin: 16:24

in education, we don't mean to put up these walls, nobody wants to, but then we do because it makes things efficient, it drives people away the sticker price. So I thought was a great example to choose if your prices are so insane. We've talked about this on the podcast, but I could go on and on but

Tiffany Green: 16:41

the idea, intellect, right. So we believe that the harder that something is, that means that like it, that's the process that it has to take in order for someone to do it well. And so we think that if a kid really wants to go to college, that means that they have to fill out this really complicated financial aid form. And it's like, really, they didn't give you a measure of anything of their ability, all you did was become a gatekeeper for this work, right. And so we have to be very careful in education, this place, right? If you want to do something outside of education that's not rooted in development and thriving. I won't argue with you. But in education, sometimes we become our own gatekeepers. And like you said, I love this, like, create a chat bots, put the things in the chat bot can put everything into that financial aid form, and spit it out without burdening and traumatizing folks and creating a gatekeeping process. It's really unnecessary, but we've confused it. And it's just like Western intellectualization makes us feel like the harder that things are, the better we are as a people, but really is just complicated, unnecessary. And someone said yesterday, I was in a session of a panel that was talking about ethics and AI. And they said that, you know, oftentimes we think about, oh, do all the tasks, you don't want to do it and have ai do that. They'll do all the all the tasks that you even you want to do, because it can help make it efficient and better. And so I think we just have to understand how we can benefit from AI and lean into it. And the problem is, is exactly what you were just saying that Bill Gates mentioned is this, like, the folks who need it the most are going to be left behind because we're not leaning in. There's so many districts who already banned it. And it's just like, why not just teach people how to be ethical in it. It's a way there's a way

Alexander Sarlin: 18:32

for sure. Yeah. Ben Cornell, my co host on the weekend. edtech podcast specifically said that banning check. GPT is an equity problem. It's being banned in places where the schools are more authoritarian, where they're, you know, they're really looking to, you know, they don't trust their students enough. So giving them this incredibly powerful tool, they worry, it's gonna go the wrong way. And as a result, you're depriving students who need extra help in various ways who are traumatized from getting this really powerful tool that might pull them out of it. So I'm happy to hear you say that I think it's we're all on the hook right now to make sure we don't react in that way and start pulling these unbelievably powerful tools away from the people who need them.

Tiffany Green: 19:13

We're in the weeds of one of the places that I was fortunate and really blessed to work at was think global School, which is this high school that travels the globe, it's based in project based learning, and our slogan, I keep saying, Our I know I don't work there anymore, but in my head, we're still family. But the slogan of thing global school is Don't teach me what to think Teach me how to think. And what we are caught up in classrooms right now is the what to think we're like at the low level of math, you know, I'm not Maslow's a Bloom's, right, we're at the low level of Bloom's, but if we could just get rid of like, okay, what is this information charge up? Anyone? Any AI model can tell you what the information is. Now you can move that information because it didn't it doesn't take a kid a whole day to find out. Now we go straight into like, why is it this way? How can we make it better? How can we We like you know, grapple with this content, but we love the busyness of it all, the busyness of filling out these forms the busyness of finding all the information. But we don't need to do that anymore. Right? How much better of a world would we be? If we could do it. And so that's part of what we do with uprooted Academy, we always say, hey, leave the information to us. So when you actually get those 38 minutes, the average amount of time a school counselor gets with their student over four years is 38 minutes. And so fine, we're going to take that because we can't change that. So let's maximize that 30 minutes, it doesn't make sense for your 38 minutes to repeat the same thing over and over to every single kid. And you're just at the what, now you get to take the information load off, that's where we come in, and you can do individualization. Now the conversations are elevated. So those 38 minutes feel like 70 minutes, because you're actually getting into what they actually need. But you waste your time getting into what to do instead of the how to do so that's taken from think global school, but like I ultimately really believe we're afraid that kids won't be able to critically think, by not chat GPT or AI. But really, they're not critically thinking by looking up content anyway. Right? The critical thinking comes at higher levels of Bloom's and we're just very, very, we like I said is synonymous with like busyness, and layers of gatekeeping make us feel like, oh, that's the road we want our kids to take. And it's like that's not it at all.

Alexander Sarlin: 21:23

38 minutes is a really scary stat. But it makes me think, you know, instead of the counselor saying, What's your GPA? Or how far away do you want to go for school are all these things that can be answered with a simple query by Google, but especially by chatty beauty, they could say, What do you want in life? Who do you want to study with? Who do you who what kind of place would inspire you to be your best self like, you know, you can elevate that conversation. And that's the conversations people should be having.

Tiffany Green: 21:49

Absolutely. asynchronous learning. We weren't we, you know, schools that moved to asynchronous learning during COVID, they thrived. The synchronous learning creative burnout for teachers, the students were not able to focus. That kid, whether they're learning the content at 10am, or learning it at 2pm, when they need it, it doesn't matter. But when they get in front of you, it needs to be meaningful. And so for us in our app, we were super excited. Our students spent 90 hours in our app over a year, yeah, 90 hours over a year in our app, that was a data I don't 90 minutes was like a no 90 hours. But the best stat for me, was the most popular hour was 11pm. So what does that tell us? It tells us that kids actually want to do this stuff. But they don't always have the mental fortitude capacity to do when we want them to, but they will find a way. But if you leave them with no solutions at 11pm, now they do nothing. And so we created a solution for them to use a call it like the Netflix of like the college application process, right? So they have the resources that they need. 11pm is the hour that they feel like that's the moment that they are most inspired to do it. And guess what I am sleeping, and every other educator is sleeping, but now they have autonomy. And kids, like teens, they need autonomy. And we can build that in by like you said, Hey, do this query send it to me. It takes you know, time, you know, time to read it. And now we could talk about that. elevate those conversations. Yeah.

Alexander Sarlin: 23:19

Last thought for me is that it could also bring in resources. So you know, in your example, before student says, I have this GPA of this LSAT, I want to go around this far give me 20 schools. It can also it can not only say here 20 schools, it could say here 20 schools, here's five YouTube videos about each school. Here's a video about a VA home a student who graduated that school saying why they loved it for each school. I mean, you could just overload not overload but load up the student with relevant, useful, accessible information that a guidance counselor couldn't couldn't give them anyway.

Tiffany Green: 23:51

No, they don't have the time. They don't even have the I mean, we don't know everything on the internet. You know how much time I would spend googling stuff with a kid and my office. And I'm just like, This feels so wasteful, right? And so we really want to increase. The reason why educators get in this space is to make individual impact. It's done on a collective scale. But really, we want to feel meaningful. And the reason why people don't feel meaningful because we become robotic, we have to just say what we're supposed to say we're saying the same thing over and over. And it's not inspiring. But when a kid gets to tell you why they want to do something, or why they want to go to that place or what they found from that chat GBT YouTube video that they found that becomes the moment where the conversation is just ignited and we want to live and we want to bring one of our solutions in the pain point is like, you know, counselors come in it. It was really good reasons but then they're burnt out. You're not burned out because you don't have the skill you're burned out because you're doing like the same thing without an easier process. Right and so, AI will we do with upgraded Academy we try to create that process at It's easier to elevate that to really decrease that burnout of a, you know, the counselors, but also to give them the resources of being trauma informed, because we believe that's really the vehicle. Because really the role that we play is we get to create new neural networks. So when a student, the first time they look at an application, for the most part is going to be their college one, if we can have a strong neural network that their body is calm and neutral, and they have a really good psychologically flexible thought that says, I can handle this moment, when they look at an application to study abroad, or for an internship or for a job, guess what's registered in their coding, I can do it. When we don't meet those kids. And they become anxious, what happens is their body codes that anxiety is needed to do things that are difficult. And so that's why and that's not always guaranteed. So if a kid has like, high heart rate tends their tummies hurting all the time when they're applying to college, and then they get in, and there's joy, attach their body codes that to say, oh, in order for us to get something, we have to rev ourselves up. So in the future, their body revs up, but now depending on how much they're dealing with, like if they're dealing with COVID, it's too much they're overwhelmed, the system shuts down, maybe they keep going, but that keeping going is still at harmful to the body, which is why we have so many physical illnesses in our society, right. But what we are really using is we're using the college application, you know, platform in this time in their life, to create new neural networks, because we want strong, resilient, mentally, fortitude, strength, students, right. And adults because we're struggling as adults. And is because we struggled as kids, and if we understand neural networks that neural networks was created. And so it's far better to prepare than to repair. Right? And so yeah,

Alexander Sarlin: 26:41

wonderful. It's so interesting. Friend, Steven Syverud is one of the smartest people I know in education always says that. Really, the big difference between different types of students is how well they're taught to apply for things. He's like, that's really what it is, people get really good at applying. And then they get into the college and they get into the grad school and they get the jobs. And it's it's all just about being good at application, it doesn't really have to do with much else. And I think feel so relevant here.

Tiffany Green: 27:05

It doesn't. That's what we say we say, Listen, it's not the brightest kids that get into these top institutions, the ones who know how to navigate the application. It's a social capital cheat code, right? Like, and if you don't have it, you are like, out of luck. And what we say when we're talking to folks is when I listen, these students low income version, folks of color. It's not that they're not working hard. They're working wrong. And they're spending double the amount of time with these other students because no one is guiding them. And so we want to be there at Northstar, right, we provide the fire behind the school counselor, so their job is more meaningful. And we don't ever believe tech AI replaces humans, it becomes a compliment. And it allows us to do things really, really well. And so, yeah, I mean, just imagine, like, think about even being here today, right? You didn't need to share all this stuff. It's like, okay, this is the podcast, I can listen to it, or I can understand what it is. And then I can come and be ready imagining how to share and debrief me for every single person you can stack right, you couldn't do what you wanted to do. Or you could but it will feel tiring. Right. And so yeah, I love that they said that because it's true. It's like applications are the gatekeeper for everything in life

Alexander Sarlin: 28:13

completely. I wish we could keep talking about this, but we have to close it up. Tiffany green uprooted Academy. I can't wait to see what you're doing next with version 2.0. And I hope that everybody listening to this pod feels as inspired as I do right now. Thank you so much for being thank you

Tiffany Green: 28:29

so much for having me.

Alexander Sarlin: 28:31

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