00:02.41

Eric Stano
My name is Eric Stano, and this is the Tech in EdTech podcast. I'd like to welcome our listeners for the conversation today. Today, we're going to be discussing how EdTech is increasingly called upon to serve not just general classroom needs, but also the unique challenges of neurodiverse students, something that I'm personally rather passionate about. Our guest, Diana Heldfond, who's the founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, brings out a real rare blend of personal experience with ADHD and dyslexia, plus business and neuroscience expertise at Parallel. Diana, welcome to the show.

00:41.17

Diana Heldfond

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:43.36

Eric Stano

Of course, before we start, why don't we begin with a little bit about you? Could you give us a snapshot of your journey in coming to build Parallel? How did your personal experience help shape your mission? Just tell us a little bit about your backstory.

01:00.71

Diana Heldfond

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's highly connected to how Parallel came to be. So I was born and raised in San Francisco in the Bay Area and was both lucky and unlucky enough to be diagnosed at about seven years old with both ADHD and dyslexia. So very lucky in all honesty. And that I really reaped the benefits of early detection and early intervention for those conditions. I was also very lucky in that I had access to some really, really great resources, some really great specialists who were ultimately able to work with me to help me, you know, to the best of my abilities, overcome those challenges. And those are certainly, yeah, areas that we'll talk more about, but they are certainly lifelong challenges, but you learn a lot of coping mechanisms, and there are some really wonderful professionals out there that can help tremendously, both, you know, children, adolescents, but also even adults who are navigating these challenges. So with that,  you know I know the problem that we're solving here at Parallel very well. I know it firsthand. I was one student living through a number of the services that we now deliver here through our platform.

02:11.29

Eric Stano

Right.

02:16.99

Diana Heldfond

And so it was a very full circle moment to be able to now get to spend, you know, every day focused on really increasing access and the quality of what special education support looks like and recognizing that there is a huge gap in school districts today and the level of care that can be delivered. You know, schools, I don't blame them. They have a lot on their plate. They're responsible for the well-being of yeah all students across the United States and to deliver super personalized precision in many cases, healthcare services, it's a really tall ask. And so I was really excited coming at this, frankly, not at all from clinical background or an education background, but rather from kind of again, just having lived my own first-hand experience paired with, you know, my background is much more on the kind of business finance side of things, spent years working on Wall Street prior to starting Parallel, was really excited to think about, you know, how we could partner with some of the greatest, you know, researchers out there in this space, paired with, you know, some really incredible engineers and folks on the technology side to really think about how technology could supercharge the delivery of this care.

And really, just like a super power, supercharge the providers that are ultimately responsible for supporting all of these kiddos. So it's been a really exciting journey and something, like I said, known pretty near and dear to my heart for quite some time now.

03:51.11

Eric Stano

Right, and actually, that's interesting. You know, yeah, having a challenge with which you grapple and something that you experience doesn't always equate to starting a business upto serve others who may have that a similar challenge. I'm curious as to what actually led you to stand up an entire and entire business that offered solutions in this space.

04:14.66

Diana Heldfond

Yeah. Well, you've got a point there. You know, I think the catalyst for me really was the start of the pandemic. You know, I started Parallel in September 2020.

04:26.75

Eric Stano

Interesting.

04:27.44

Diana Heldfond

So at that point, you know, was still pretty full-fledged, the middle of the pandemic. Students were not in school at that point. I was watching parents just struggling left, right, and center, and trying to get any resources for their kids.

04:42.92

Eric Stano

Sure.

04:46.41

Diana Heldfond

You know, Schools at the time were focused primarily on getting gen ed online. Nevertheless, you know, the special ed students were kind of falling to way side. And you just saw schools, frankly, getting into kind of more and more of a hole around, you know, compliance. And you saw parents getting extremely frustrated. And think just all these dynamics at play, paired with just the students who unfortunately have suffered so much. I mean, you think about this population of students who are already struggling with whether it's a learning difference, a developmental delay, a physical disability, a mental health condition, and then you have learning loss from COVID and the social and emotional challenges of, you know, not being able to see your peers for months at a time, you know, it was just, it really was the perfect storm.

And so, like said, I think watching all this from periphery at some point, you know, what seemed like kind of a interesting idea, And, you know, some of it also from my perspective was looking at, you know, some really incredible businesses that have been built in the education space and in the healthcare care space.

And like I said, the way that technology could be used to really, you know, kind of 10X the care that was being delivered, especially when you think about, I mean, so many cool digital health companies out there that are really tackling so many specialized conditions like this. It was super inspiring. So it was all kind of the perfect storm. And like I said, you know, a couple of months of watching the pandemic play out, I finally decided to dive in full time.

06:19.11

Eric Stano

Right, right. And I'm sure that there are innumerable businesses that, and actually probably innumerable podcasts around the businesses that began because the pandemic created that space for people to begin thinking about their next steps or the problems they wanted to solve. And I'm glad you jumped into it just to solve this one. You know, I think a lot about the learning loss that students experienced during the pandemic. And my own through line in my publishing and educational product development experience is really focused on trying to help those students who are on the bubble, whatever that means for it, you know, and for whatever reasons. So glad that you you jumped in to to create a solution for this population. Well, let's get into some of the specifics around the solutions that Parallel is supplying.

Now, I know that districts want to see when they're entertaining the idea of bringing in different interventions, different solutions, they want to see concrete evidence that science-based, quote-unquote, educational technology actually works. And your platform is set to draw on neuroscience research. Can you talk a little bit about how did scientific principles show up in the actual user experience for students?

07:39.68

Diana Heldfond

Yeah, absolutely. So just to maybe take a step back and guide us through how our platform works more specifically. So we actually will partner with public school districts across the country. We work in 26 different states right now. And we will ultimately kind of act as like an outsourced part of their special education departments. So typically schools will do their best to staff departments with all the various different specialists that students would need according to what's in their IEPs or their individual education plans.

What you can imagine, as I kind of alluded to earlier, is it's really hard when every single student's IEP has something completely different in it, right? To actually allocate resources is quite tough. And so a really interesting opportunity for you know us to be able to come in and really help think about how do we get the right specialists in front of the right students at the right time. And that's really what we deem kind of precision intervention here at Parallel. And so with that, you know the way that we've gone about this from more of a kind of content curriculum standpoint, we're really lucky in that we've partnered up with some of the top publishers of clinical test materials and then also curriculum companies on more of our ongoing service side. And I've ultimately integrated a lot of that into our platform. So instead of us actually developing curriculum in-house, we are typically partnering with those companies. And, you know, what's incredible is there's so much research around which interventions are the most effective for students. We are being able to contribute to that research because obviously, the students who are working with our platform we're collecting a lot of progress data. And we can talk a little bit about how we do that, and as we continue the conversation, but we're continually collecting information about how that student is progressing towards those individualized goals, right? And specifically also their objectives, which are kind of like self-goals. And so with that in mind, we are able to actually also feed back to the research community of which interventions are the most effective for certain students with certain cognitive profiles and certain demographics, and so forth. So it's been really exciting. Our clinical team is led by Dr. Jordan Wright, who is an incredible researcher based out of NYU. He leads their clinical psychology program there and he has done a lot of the forefront research around tele-assessment and validating um you know, the norms between in-person assessments and online assessments. And he's been doing that for decades now. And so it's been incredible to be able to partner with him. He spends a lot of his time really just looking at the curriculum that's available, the activities that's available, the research that's out there to really understand what is the best evidence-based solutions out there. And then we will start having conversations with those publishers to be able to actually use those as part of our platform. And as you can imagine, it's a really win-win for kind of everyone, right? We get to get the publishers directly into the school districts.

10:47.54

Eric Stano

Yeah. Yeah.

10:50.38

Diana Heldfond

The school districts get kind of guidance and like consulting almost on what is like the best evidence-based curriculum out there. And then on top of that,  we get to also help school districts, actually, sorry, kind of, kind of thought there, but the other part of that, that is also really helpful and beneficial is that we also then will work with the various specialists in our network and on our platform to help them actually learn how to use those tools most effectively and help consistently check that they're using those schools, those tools most effectively. So again, a real win-win for everyone.

11:29.79

Eric Stano

Yeah, and what is what I appreciate about what you said is that it sounds like you're not only drawing on the available research, and have somebody who has been doing this for many years really cultivating and curating what research Parallel fuels and uses in its own interventions. But then there's a recursive process in place where you're returning the results really back to the community. So you're helping to build on the available research and allowing folks to, you know, again, stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, and really just bit add to that research base that you're actually drawing on. And if I got any of that wrong, please, please correct me. But it sounds like you're both pulling from it and feeding it.

12:12.88

Diana Heldfond

No, that's exactly what we're doing here. And, you know, it's also great for our district partners because we're able to give them really valuable information about how their students are progressing with our services, working with various different specialists really helps them as well as they think about managing their own SPED departments and what resources are being allocated to which students and so forth. So, we are hyper-focused internally. We want to take a lot of that burden of clinical management off of the school districts that we work with, but very validating the work that we're doing is shown in the outcomes data itself.

12:51.28

Eric Stano

Right. Well, actually, keeping with that theme, you know, I know from my own experience that school boards, when they're again, they're entertaining partnerships or help or interventions or products, they often will ask,  you know, show me the numbers. That's actually not an ask. It's more of a request. How do you at Parallel measure whether the solution is genuinely improving outcomes for students with ADHD or dyslexia, what have you, beyond just anecdotal feedback?

13:20.71

Diana Heldfond

Yeah. So what's very nice about the way that IEP goals are typically written is that they're very qualitative. So if you think about a unique student who's receiving speech and language therapy services to overcome, you know, an articulation challenge, the goal might be 80% of the time that student is able to pronounce that letter without a lisp, right? Just to give a sense kind of the types of goals we're talking about, right?

13:49.79

Diana Heldfond

So the way that the platform is built out is to actually guide providers throughout each session to be able to collect information around how that student is progressing towards that goal. And some students will have multiple goals to work through. But it allows us to basically track students' progress session by session. And keep in mind, many SPED students receiving services multiple times a week, if not every day.

14:16.28

Diana Heldfond

And so with that in mind, we're able to look at their progress over long periods of time, it's not necessarily that if you just look at time to complete an IEP goal, it doesn't tell you enough about that student's real progress because as you can imagine, going back to this idea that everything is so individualized in the special ed, you know one IEP goal is not equivalent to the next IEP goal for the next student over. And so it's hard to just look at, like, you know, we as a district are doing a really good job closing IEP goals. Well, how aggressive were you in setting those IEP goals? And is that the right goal for the right student and so forth? So what we've been really focused on is how do you look at progress over the period of time to say that every student is starting at a baseline and should be improving upon that baseline. I'm proud to say essentially every single student working with Parallel is improving from that baseline with the end goal of course of us being able to say, as we are able to standardize more and more truly what those goals and objectives are, that students are able to truly make progress faster using Parallel and working with Parallel specialists because of that curriculum, because of that tooling, and as well as like the guidance that we are also providing from a clinical perspective, right? Because Jordan ultimately has a full set of clinical managers who are working directly with these providers and specialists on our platform to make sure that they really are making progress with students, right? So it also feeds into kind of more of a management tool as well.

15:50.88

Eric Stano

Right, right. And that's very persuasive to be able to lay claim to, positively impacting every student who is using the platform. So that's an amazing accomplishment just in and of itself. Let's shift gears slightly to something that informs just about every edtech conversation, if not virtually every conversation that people are having these days, and that's around AI. And AI is often touted, you know, as a game changer, which you know I believe it is. But many school leaders and teachers remain unsure of how it can help underserved or neurodiverse student populations. What specific problems in education do you see AI solving today as opposed to just theoretical future promises that it holds?

16:42.06

Diana Heldfond

Oh my gosh. 

16:43.80

Eric Stano

A big question, yeah.

16:50.52

Diana Heldfond

Um, big community question, I had a feeling AI was going to be the where we went with this.

Look, I mean, this is just maybe a high-level way to answer this question because there's so much tactically, it's hard to even say, like, what's the most exciting use of it. But I think when you just think about what AI allows us all to do now in our day-to-day life, and how it’s really changed the way that we all do work, right? When you think about a student with a neurodiverse condition and specifically how they're operating within schools, not to beat it a horse, but this idea of students in special ed working towards very personalized goals, AI allows you as a specialist to manage these caseloads of, first off, so many students, right? Like, as we all know, see articles all over, you can see the teacher burnout. You can see the SPED numbers, particular, of so much turnover of these providers because ultimately they're managing crazy high caseloads of students, right? And each of those students has such specific needs. You as a provider can be so empowered, right, by the way that these tools operate to be able to deliver that highly personalized care to students and to be able to also really summarize where did you leave off with this student, right? And what is really making progress for the student? Even just, I mean, just going back to the last point that we were making around the progress data, right? Like the way that can interpret that data using AI is completely different. We would have had to have a team worth of researchers to try to draw any kind of conclusion around the progress being made. And now using AI, there's so many ways to be able to actually now start to think about truly that precision care layer. And so I think it's just, it's a really exciting opportunity. I think this is like across healthcare spectrum, so exciting, but also those same kind of tools, learning, so forth can be applied also to the education realm.

18:49.56

Eric Stano

Right.

18:50.43

Diana Heldfond

And also, I'll just say to like augment it to a way that a student actually wants to learn, right? Because at the end of the day, we ingest information in different ways. We memorize information in different ways and enjoy information in different ways. Right. And so being able to make information flexible in the mediums in which it's delivered is really exciting. Like I, a lot of the time I see these work tools and I'm like, God, if only I were a student in school today, life would be so easy. And there are obviously challenges around AI and so forth that we can get into. particularly in schools. But I think there is a lot of excitement in, you know, just being able to deliver that kind of 10x care that I go back to as like one of the core visions I had for Parallel upon starting

19:38.10

Eric Stano

Right, no, and we can dedicate an entire other podcast to my churlishness over not having AI tools available to me and the various aids that are available to students today. I just had to brute force it, but that makes me sound like a baby boomer when I talk like that, so we'll skip that for now. I want to actually come up with the AI topic in a slightly different way, and I wonder what your reaction to this will be. You know, Districts often miss learning differences until the later grades, it makes that you know harder to address. You've already talked about how you know your challenges were identified pretty early on, and you were you were grateful for that. Do you have any reflections on whether AI can assist in spotting some of those early signs of things like ADHD or dyslexia? Are there any are there there's signals signals or data points that, based on what you know of AI and its capabilities to date, you think could pick up, you know, some of these signs that a classroom teacher might otherwise miss?

20:42.99

Diana Heldfond

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the biggest challenges that we see in school districts historically is just that there's not enough actual professional development and knowledge across all folks that work in the schools around what does ADHD look like and dyslexia and all of these various different conditions, right? That it's really hard for actually, as you put it, right, like a typical classroom teacher is managing dozens of students, right? It's really hard to pick up on the unique needs of one individual dual student. And so I certainly think, you know, there's some really exciting technology going into, for example, so screeners for dyslexia, as well as actually ADHD. These are two areas that are certainly being innovated around quite a bit. And I certainly see AI playing a role in being able to help us get to some more kind of consequential conclusions around the data itself. I'm not sure that it's there yet with any specific screener where you can confidently say, I mean, the whole point of a screener is said it's early detection. It is not a diagnosis. I do not think we're at the place where a computer could diagnose a student better than a psychologist with a degree can. And I don't think we'll be at that place maybe ever because there's so many nuances to what a professional who has dedicated their career is able to see and experience in a student, especially because each student with you know any any of these host of different conditions we've talked about is going to look very different in the way that they you know struggle with those conditions and so forth. And so I think it's a really exciting tool. And like I said, a really exciting to be able to parse through so much data. It makes me want, as a company, certainly to collect more data because then we can start to make some real conclusions about, you know, to your point, right? Like, what does early signs of ADHD look like in dyslexia? And just research that much further. And so I think the opportunity is, is certainly immense. I'm very pro like AI integration into all of this. But I think it's really important to keep in mind. It's a balance, right? Like I can see it being such a helpful, like a really advanced screener, is such a helpful tool and then helping guide, that classroom teacher on how to support that individual student and helps them speed up also such a crazy, like discovery process of how to make real gains with a student who might be struggling when again, they do have dozens of other students.

23:21.02

Eric Stano

Right, right.

23:22.30

Diana Heldfond

So I think it's, you know, it's an exciting time that we're in.

23:26.54

Eric Stano

And no, and I tend to agree with you. You know I do talk about AI a great deal in my daily life. And one of the assertions I find myself constantly making is that it brings a lot of competencies and capabilities to the table. But one of the things that it lacks is judgment. And I think that what you were saying about somebody who spent their career, their lives researching this understanding, this meeting, meeting the students or the people who have these challenges, I think there's there's likely no replacement for that. Certainly not in any time in the near future. So I appreciate your perspective on that.

24:03.26

Diana Heldfond

Nudging professionals to have just a greater arsenal or a greater toolbox of, you know, interventions that could work for that student. But I think the clinical judgment at the end of the day is really important.

24:20.22

Eric Stano

Right, right. It's a tool, but it needs a human to actually utilize it. All right, well, I'm going to stop making you serve as an apologist or a representative of AI. We're going to turn to your real field of interest here and and talking about the neurodiverse. You know, School districts and edtech companies alike are beginning to see the value of having neurodiverse voices at the decision-making table. How does focusing on neurodiversity to your mind push design thinking even further, potentially benefiting all learners? You provide a platform. How do you think thinking about the neurodiverse is going to to you know, impact design thinking?

25:06.28

Diana Heldfond

Oh my gosh. This brings me back to when I spent a summer are in college working at the Stanford D School. So every time I hear the word design thinking, I get very excited. Look, I think at the end of the day, you know, it's interesting when you build a company that's all around neurodiversity, you get quite a few neurodiverse people who are certainly very committed to the cause around the table. And that's one of, you know, very important hiring traits here at Parallel is you know, what is your connection to the mission at the end of the day. And people come at that all sorts of different ways.

But I think, you know, look, being able to build for so many different use cases is only possible by having a lot of different voices around the table. And when you think about our business, it's fairly complex. We are selling to school districts and building, building for school districts, but we're also building for students, and we are building for school psychologists and speech therapists and special ed teachers, and parents. And, you know, the list goes on and on. And so being able to ultimately have this kind of breadth of folks around the table who can bring different perspectives. I think we end up with a much more value-added product at the end of the day. And also at the core of it, right? Like it's a bunch of adults around a table building a product for school-aged kids. You know, we can do at least is try to put ourselves in their shoes. It does help when we have, you know, vastly different memories of what school was like ourselves, right? Because the reality is like common classroom is not built for one specific, or sorry, it is. All right, let me start that over. The reality is, is that you know, the common classroom is built for one specific type of learner who learns and thinks in very kind of general ways. But reality is, forget, you know, all of the formal diagnoses and so forth. Like there's auditory learners and there's visual learners and so on. Right. And so just being able to build with that flexibility in mind. I think it's really nice to be able to be around a leadership table and have such open conversations about how people learn and think. And I think it translates directly into the product that's being built.

27:33.66

Eric Stano

Yeah, and also as I was preparing for this conversation and thinking about you know product design and design thinking and keeping the neurodiverse population in mind, it brought to mind a not to use your company name, but it brought to mind a parallel for me and my own publishing experience. There have been, you know, titles and portfolios and products that I have published over the years that were meant to aid ESL students, so students for whom English was a second language, and those very interventions were that I was applying to those textbooks, those products, we found actually aided students for whom English was their first language.  Those additional interventions, those it's additional supports just ended up serving not just the population that we were targeting, but really all students. Do you find something similar unfolding when you think about neurodiverse students and their needs, and do you see it potentially helping other students who may not necessarily require the interventions to be performing as we hope they can be?

28:45.91

Diana Heldfond

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I go back to, first off, all of this is a spectrum, right? I also go back to, you know, there's auditory learners, there are visual learners, right? Everyone thinks in processes in different ways. And so having the flexibility and even the comment I made earlier about, you know, the various different AI tools for work. One of the things that I love so much is like there are so many tools out there for all different mediums of ways that I can get work done, or I can get information, or I can record information, and so forth, right? And to be able to be a student with those types of tools at your disposal, it starts to make learning a lot less scary and a lot less of a focus on how do you learn, how do you study for this test, so on, really start to focus on the material itself. And I think that's a big win, right, for this generation of learners. So I certainly think, you know, beyond the students who are formally getting special education resources, even just having districts talking about these, these, having these conversations more broadly is, is a big one. And I will note also goes without saying, but we all know that the earlier you intervene with students, you can really set them up on a different course to success.

And so, like early intervention tools, screeners, of the stuff that we've talked about here today, like, it's really important and it can really change the overall dynamics of a school district. Right. And like you see of really incredible district leaders who are starting to put a lot of resources into, you know, tier two intervention and really trying to just change, change the reality for these students. So it's really, again, I'd say an exciting time.

30:32.12

Eric Stano

Yeah, and I'd like to actually, you know, a as we're as we're talking, it occurs to me that our audience of listeners is, you know, it's a broad array of people who tune into to these episodes. And a lot of them are educators. a lot of them are in the school districts that we're talking about. But a lot of them are also, like you,  business leaders, right? And I'd be curious as to whether there are, you know, somebody who has neurodiverse traits, whether there's any lessons you've learned about channeling those differences i'm into an innovative leadership style or decision making. Are there ways that you harness that as a leader in the business community? 

31:21.74

Diana Heldfond

Oh my gosh. I think about this all of the time.

31:27.75

Eric Stano

Sorry, sorry if it sounds like I'm reading your diary. Apologies.

31:30.95

Diana Heldfond

No, no, I'm just like, I always am like, what are the key takeaways, right? I think one thing that I do with all new employees is I hand them basically a document about me, and it has details about how I like to receive information and how I manage my life, right?

31:46.51

Eric Stano

Interesting.

31:49.67

Diana Heldfond

As somebody with ADHD and dyslexia, like you sent me a long Slack message, that's not going to get read. Yeah, you do. Huddle me on Slack, you will get my attention. That Slack message, or sorry, if that meeting ends up being more than, you know, 15 minutes, you might lose me again. But a three-and-a-half-hour meeting yesterday, and by the end, I was like, I can't even be in the room anymore. It's really a waste of my of everyone's time, frankly. I think one of the takeaways that I have actually found, like I have found the team to be very responsive to that, to the openness around how I operate. And it is such a breath of fresh air to be in a world in which, you know, I can openly come to the table and say,  you know, this is how I learn and I think and process information and so forth. I similarly have started to do that with everyone and ask them to do the same exercise as well. And even for folks who do not self-identify in any way as having any specific neurodiverse condition, right? But really starting to think about just how do you process information so that we can work as effectively as possible together and have that be an open communication channel has been really effective in my working relationships with folks on the team. Beyond that, I think also just being very okay with the things you need to do to get work done, right? In my case with ADHD, there are times where I have so much motivation to do work and more often than not, I have no motivation to get certain things done, right?

33:33.74

Eric Stano

Right, right, right, of course.

33:33.92

Diana Heldfond

And when I am able to tap on really great team members across the board to say, I really need your help getting X, Y, and Z done, right? Especially, and this sounds  I recognize it's quite the luxury of being in the CEO seat. And so this is where I say, I think about this all the time. What does this look like for somebody who's, you know, in a manager seat, but they're ultimately reporting upwards or an individual contributor on the team? And how do you give people the same kind of levels of flexibility to get work done? But I do think it all starts with communication at the end of the day. Like, I will commit to getting what I promise will get done. And I think because I'm very communicative with folks, there is a willingness to also, you know, kind of meet me halfway. So I hope my team would agree with all of this.

34:23.38

Eric Stano

Well, you know, I'll certainly,  I can't speak for your team, but I can speak for me. And I do find it resonant, much like i was saying with, you know, sort of platform capabilities or educational resources that,  you know, are are targeted towards neurodiverse students and the likelihood that they would help other students who who have different challenges the absence of some of those challenges it's likely to help all boats rise as you're talking about your your leadership it's it's resonating in that you're talking about you know proactive transparency as to this is how I operate which i think perhaps a lot of leaders don't necessarily do people just sort of find their ways of working by, by trial and error, but how much more effective could we all be if we understood how to communicate effectively with our bosses or our colleagues? So I think right there you've tapped into a lesson you've learned in a practice that you engage in that is, is pretty universal from what I hear, I can hear. So, so thank you for that. I actually have a tip that I'm taking away myself.

35:34.73

Diana Heldfond

I'm happy to hear that. I have a very practical version of this or a very literal example, which is, 

35:40.36

Eric Stano

Please.

35:54.28

Diana Heldfond

You know, in school growing up, I would always get feedback on like almost every single project or test that I was on, my attention to detail was horrible, which might be the dyslexia. And maybe a little bit ADHD, cause I didn't want to go back and reread my answers before I submitted anything. But all that aside, you know, now in the seat that I sit, you know, we have an incredible CFO on the team. I am so transparent with him of like, do not trust a number that I put in front of you. You need to check this. And that level of transparency means that the work product that we do collectively is incredible. But we would not get there if we did not have that level of communication. We would actually probably run into some very big business problems if we didn't have that level of communication.

36:28.76

Eric Stano

Right.

36:30.58

Diana Heldfond

So it's just, it's really interesting to see, you know, also again, go back to like, it's a luxury of being in the seat that I'm in, but I do think, you know, across all spectrums of the business world, there are ways that you can really kind of hack your work life to make it more accommodating to how you process things.

36:47.46

Eric Stano

Yeah, and and one of the things that I'm taking away, and and please correct me if I'm misreading it, but i'm sort of purloining this from even the tone in which you characterized that, and perhaps this is something that would be helpful if there are any people with you know neurodiversity with which they they grapple. You sound... unapologetic. You're just, as you're talking to your colleagues and what have you, it sounds like you approach it that, you know, this is just the way that this is. If we want to get things done,  let's just understand the rules of the road, and here's how things will get done because things are simply as they are. And I think that to me that I appreciated hearing that because I could see somebody in another setting perhaps having a more apologetic posture to that kind of conversation. Am I, am I hearing that right? Or do you want to correct anything that I've said?

37:47.60

Diana Heldfond

No, I think that's like a, it's an incredibly good way of putting it. I will note, you know, for my own career, there have been scenarios. For example, I worked on Wall Street with dyslexia. My whole job was numbers. And in that case, it's not as obvious what the workaround is, right? I found a ton of different ways to cope in that scenario. I certainly was not disclosing to anyone. So would never try to work for a product that I was so dyslexic, but, you know, I would copy and paste every single number.

38:13.07

Eric Stano

Right. Right.

38:19.34

Diana Heldfond

Right. So it's, it's not impossible, but I think that is actually one of the greatest traits of, you know, when you grow up with a learning and thinking difference, regardless of, frankly, whether you're diagnosed with it or not, you end up learning how to cope. And I hear people all the time who would tell me the most incredible stories of, you know, they didn't get diagnosed until they were 50 plus years old, but they learned all these incredible coping mechanisms to make, you know, school less painful, essentially. And then once they got into the real world, it could really focus on what they, you know, excited them and and things changed a little bit. But  I just, I think the takeaway is very, yeah, very on point, if you will.

39:03.70

Eric Stano

Oh, well, that's great.  I'm glad I heard you. You're right.  Well, now I'm going to shift gears again to what my team here perhaps odiously titles the lightning round of our conversation, which is really kind of just a grab bag of questions that are related to what we've been talking about from a few different angles. So I'm just going to fire a few questions off. And if you give me a you know an answer off the top of your head. I think that'll move us through. So thanks for your patience in advance here. So let's let's get let's get started. On to the questions. If you could snap your fingers and invent an edtech feature or tool for neurodiverse students, what would it be? Again, a finger snap, and there it would be. What tool would you create for a neurodiverse student?

40:12.88

Diana Heldfond

My gosh, it depends on what type of neurodiverse student. But I think one thing I've been thinking lot about is

40:17.17

Eric Stano

Pick one.

40:19.14

Diana Heldfond

How the technology is evolving around, like ASMR technology and and students being able, especially students with, you know, a speech challenge, articulation, communication challenge, being able to actually talk into a virtual tutor to be able to test the work that they've been doing with their speech therapist in school. Speech therapy is one of the most prevalent service lines of ours; it's a very, very big part of most special ed teams. So, something that we are thinking a lot about internally here at Parallel, but something that is cool where technology is going.

40:58.08

Eric Stano

Nice, and again, a grab bag of questions here. Okay, what's one piece of advice you'd give a neurodiverse educator or an edtech leader who's just starting out?

42:31.72

Diana Heldfond

My gosh. Well, in the vein of everything we've just talked about, I think being very transparent about whatever your condition or challenge is, I think it is very well received by your teams. I think you will gain a lot of goodwill with your team, regardless if they change the way they're working with you because of it or not. Just to be able to be that personal goes a really long way.

42:57.92

Magic EdTech

Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. It's one of the key takeaways that I'm going to hold with me as I leave this conversation. If you had to pick one emerging technology that you think will radically change how we support neurodiverse learners in the next five years, what would that be?

43:19.53

Diana Heldfond

My gosh. mean, we've talked about a lot of it here today.

43:22.50

Eric Stano

Yeah, yeah.

43:22.53

Diana Heldfond

I think there's a lot of supplemental support that you can give to students. I don't think, you know, the way that schools operate and also just generally within the field that we operate, as we talked about, I don't think the actual specialists are going away, but things like a speech coach, for example, or so on, Like there's so many opportunities to really personalize the way that we are helping kids overcome these challenges and provide a lot of supplemental resources so that they're not regressing from session to session. So I think that's an area that I'm super excited about, how we can really change the support system as a whole.

44:04.21

Eric Stano

Right, and staying with technology and dragging you back to AI for just one final moment. is there Is there one assumption about AI in the context of special education that you'd like to set straight? You made some comments earlier that I think are evocative of probably what I think your opinions here are going to be or your thinking here is going to be. But Anything that you'd like to set straight relative to AI and its application in a special education setting?

44:35.74

Diana Heldfond

No, I mean, I think at the end of the day, as we all know, whether it's special ed or gen ed, AI is going to really change the way that we have to both teach students and the way that they're going to also ingest and gain information. Right. So  I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily, but I certainly see it as, you know, it will take effort and it will take time to get that right. I would say, and specifically in the realm of special ed, I go back to kind of where I where I've been going with this conversation, which is that I don't see AI like replacing the specialists that exist in the school system. I just see AI as a tool to make them more efficient, more effective in delivering care. And that's been really kind of our underlying thesis here.

45:23.48

Eric Stano

Yeah, yeah. And I agree. And ah and again, one of my my additional takeaways here is that, you know, anything that we have been talking about relative to serving neurodiverse student population, to being a neurodiverse leader,  is that a lot of the the lessons, a lot of the strategies, a lot of the interventions are really are universal and can can help all students, can help all leaders. So a lot of the things that you're thinking about at Parallel and a lot of things you're doing at Parallel really have an impact and application in many respects outside of the context of just the neurodiverse community. So I appreciate the universality of this conversation and I hope I'm getting that right. Again, if I've misstated anything or mischaracterized anything, please feel free to correct me.

46:20.41

Diana Heldfond

Absolutely, agree with it all.

46:22.97

Eric Stano

Great. Well, listen, we will conclude on one thing, and I won't make it overly engineered here or highly specific, but really, if there is one thing, again, we have school administrators, edtech entrepreneurs, teachers, business leaders who listen to this podcast. If there's just one thing that you want them to take away or think about differently after listening to our conversation today, what would that be?

46:54.49

Diana Heldfond

I think based on where we're at from a technology perspective, there's so much changing so quickly that I guess my takeaway would be, you know, as I think about those different profiles of listeners, I almost want it to be as simple as, you know, work together. I think for companies to build technology that is truly valuable, they need to have district partners and administrators who are helping them really get to the core of the issue. And on the flip side, there are some really talented, talented professionals out there, and some really amazing things, as we've talked about over the last 45 minutes, the technology side that is evolving. And, you know, I am very excited to see what solutions come out of, you know, the next couple of years of really great edtech companies. But I don't think you can build the perfect product without really having someone on the school side help you lead the way. So I guess that's my key takeaway.

48:01.77

Eric Stano

100% agree. Well, listen, Diana Heldfond, founder and CEO of Parallel Learning, thank you so much for the conversation and for really getting into the meat of the issues here. And again, I think a lot of what we've talked about, while specific to your company and the community that you're serving, I think are really, as I've been saying, a very universal. So I appreciate that a great deal and appreciate your time in joining us. So thank you very much for today.

48:34.26

Diana Heldfond

Of course. Thank you for having me.

48:36.60

Magic EdTech

And thank you to all of our listeners. Again, my name is Eric Stano, and this has been the Tech in EdTech podcast. Thanks for listening.