Life Skills GO Case Study - Tyson Destefano

The team from Life Skills Group were fortunate enough to speak with Tyson Destefano, who is the Assistant Principal at Concord Public School. We talked about the school's trial of Life Skills GO and how it has already started making a difference to student wellbeing and helping staff with their workloads.

Tyson first found out about Life Skills GO through his wife, who is also a teacher at Westmead Public School. They had already implemented the program and shared with Tyson how it was helping them better understand and support their students.

Tyson thought it could be a great tool for his school as well. He went to his executive team to ask to start the free trial of Life Skills GO in his class to gain hands-on experience with the platform and gather real data. With that, Tyson was able to demonstrate the true value of GO to his Executive team, which made the conversation about bringing on GO much easier.

After the trial, Tyson found that the program had a lot of benefits for their students. As Tyson said, "Every single kid has been accounted for and has a voice. GO is powerful in the sense that we have so many time constraints and it’s a program that does it all for us."

One of the things that impressed Tyson was the data he could get from the program. For example, he could see that peak readiness to learn was on Wednesdays, which helped him organize his schedule and run PDHPE lessons on Mondays instead and move subjects such as mathematics to Wednesdays when students were more ready to learn.

The program also helped Tyson support students who might be struggling with their language skills. One ESL student was reporting anxiety every day, but the program helped open up discussions and develop an emotion language. As a result they were able to see the student move out of that anxious state and into readiness to learn.

Another time, Tyson had a parent meeting about a student who they felt was having issues in class, coming home upset, and not wanting to go to school. Tyson was able to check the contextual data that accompanies each check-in, where a student can choose the origin of their emotion selected, and found that the student was having issues with their sleep and coming to school tired and upset. He had a conversation with the parents and showed them the data, which helped them make changes to support their child at home. Tyson says, “If the child is telling someone is some way, like the check-in, the parents understand that it's not just the school. It builds the relationship between the school and the community. It might also help open that dialogue between that student and their families."

“Some students come to school and never say anything. Through the GO check-ins those students were able to open up and share how they felt. They might not have had the skills or confidence to speak up. It's their door in to have a voice. Now they can have discussions and sharing how they feel has become the norm.”

When Tyson presented the program to the executive team, he anticipated objections around it taking more time. But he was able to show that it just becomes a part of roll call and that it is student-lead. The real-time data also meant that teachers could quickly gauge the state of their students and act accordingly to work more preventatively.

The program also complimented what they were already doing as part of their PLB to track students' progress and could take the data to the PBL team. In Tyson's words, "It saves taking raw data and turning it into graphs for our wellbeing reporting and external validation as they are already provided on the dashboard.'

Tyson summarises that Life Skills GO is:

• Not too time consuming.
• Easy to understand.
• Simple to set up and run, especially with the Sentral integration.

Tyson believes that the program benefits every student in the school and is easy to set up and run with the Sentral integration. As he said, "It's student lead and we didn't have anything like this in our school."

Tyson has already booked a first PL and through this and his work directly with his teachers, plans to have 60-70% of the staff adopting the platform over the following weeks.

Overall, Tyson and the school are very happy with their adoption of Life Skills GO and the benefits it has brought to their students.

Key points:

Life Skills GO gave every student a voice and opened up discussions that helped them overcome their challenges. Even the quietest students found a way to express themselves and be heard.

Life Skills GO data showed there were improvements to students' overall well-being and helped organize schedules around the patterns that presented through the dashboards of when the class was most ready to learn.

Life Skills GO helped identify issues and address them promptly, leading to powerful results for our students and their families.

Life Skills GO is a program that benefits every student in the school, providing valuable data and insights to support their growth and development.

Using Life Skills GO was not an additional workload on teachers and the benefits were evident very early into the trial.