EdTech Startup Robin Pioneers Human-Centric Solutions To Mental Health

By: Christos Makridis

Amid surging mental health challenges among children following COVID-19 and school closures, Robin, an NYC-based educational technology startup, recently launched and has begun pioneering a novel, human-centric approach to improve mental wellness outcomes in both children and school support staff, ranging from teachers to bus drivers. Focused on creating human connectedness among student communities, Robin’s programs proactively counter the loneliness epidemic head-on, while promoting life-critical skills such as resilience, forgiveness and self affirmation for students across age, gender, and racial brackets.

A holistic approach to mental health

Traditional approaches to improving student mental health are often ineffective because they are either too short-lived, lack the consistency necessary to be effective, or put too much emphasis on technology itself instead of people. Students often turn to school counselors for the lion’s share of support, which is unsustainable and infeasible given that students outnumber counselors on a 424:1 ratio at the average school. “The counselor-to-student ratio is ridiculous at most schools,” said John Avritt, a Robin coach and Army Resilience Trainer at the R2 Performance Center at Fort Hood, Texas. “The counselors are task-saturated and overwhelmed. It’s difficult to stay up to date with what’s going on with all of their students,” he continued.

Other approaches that have sought to scale without a dependency on school counselors have also encountered challenges. In cases where cleverly designed apps aim to provide useful knowledge and resources, they can create other undesirable issues. Flashy tech-heavy interfaces on applications can actually increase addiction to smartphones and be distracting in the end- or fail for lack of engagement, according to researchers Jerica Koh, Germaine Tng, and Andree Hartanto published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine.

Robin’s curriculum is anchored in a recognition that humans, especially children, need connection to live healthy lives. “Human connection is at the core of everything we do at Robin,” said Sonny Thadani, co-founder and CEO of Robin. “Common childhood life events, such as a divorce, failure and rejection, can have mounting lifelong effects if left unaddressed without community support,” Thadani continued. After consulting with hundreds of teachers, school staff, and parents, Thadani learned that any solution would require several features.

• In order to have a sustainable impact on students, we have to include the adults in their lives (parents, teachers and school staff)
• Proactively tackling mental health requires consistency; positive mental wellbeing habits are built over time and require continuous reinforcement
• Students are drawn to authenticity and vulnerability from coaches who have faced similar challenges
• Technology extends accessibility and reinforces the message, rather than replacing the role of human instruction

The decline in social capital – referring to trust, community, and norms – and rise of social media, has put an increasingly growing burden on teachers to wear multiple hats, functioning as not only educators, but also guardians and counselors. But the challenge is that habits related to perseverance and resilience are often overlooked, while goals such as Math and English test scores are prioritized. Building resilience, however, requires intentionality: each student and teacher must choose to prioritize cultivating it each day.

“Most people don’t know this, but social isolation is as dangerous a risk factor for early death as cigarette smoking. You don’t see it… but it’s absolutely there,” said Ned Hallowell, Robin Coach and advisor. However, promoting social connectivity – referred to as the “connection prescription” by researchers Jessica Martino, Jennifer Pegg, and Elizabeth Pegg Frates – can counteract the effects of social isolation on mental and physical health.

Robin has built a curriculum that combines hybrid in-real-life coaching and online learning. Coaching is generally done in small 15-18 person groups that meet 1-2x per month with session topics that span building healthy relationships, self affirmation, growth mindset, social media and perception, believing in yourself, resiliency skills, forgiveness as strength, and countering thought traps, among others. Then, students watch 60-150 second videos on the online learning platform to reinforce the concepts that they learn about in-person.

“We were very fortunate this year to have Robin partner with us. Through our partnership, our students were able to participate in two Mental Health Challenges and we had four coaches present to our student body on much needed topics such as the effects of social media, body image acceptance, and negative thought patterns. These invaluable sessions provided not only our students, but also our staff with powerful coping tools that we can put to practice in our daily lives.” – Bronx New York Assistant Principal

These lessons are also reinforced through competitions that gamify the learning experience. For example, in Robin’s Healthy Habits 30-day challenge, participants invest 3-4 minutes each day reflecting on what actions they take to become resilient. At the end, a resiliency champion is awarded with a gift card to Starbucks and lunch with the principal of their school. Every step of the program is designed to improve connectedness across each layer of the school ecosystem.

“Robin works with our school to address our specific social-emotional learning needs and provides the best and most personable programs that really benefit our community,” said Michael Parent, Ed.D, Principal, Glen Rock Middle and High School in Glen Rock, New Jersey.

To measure the efficacy of its approach, Robin designed a measure of connectedness based on the response of respondents to 20 questions that each are rated on a Likert scale. The summer pilot program in a NYC high school saw a 25% increase in their connectedness score, compared with the substantial decline in mental health, on average, throughout schools in the U.S. and abroad. In the 2022/23 school year, Robin has partnered with over 30 schools, signing 10 in December alone.

The student feedback is also resounding. One Florida-based 8th grade student said, “I like the interactive session and how you could relate to the coach’s experiences. It made you feel like you weren’t alone in your struggles.”

Democratizing effects

Although students are in need of additional mental health resources and training, so are the teachers, staff, and even school bus drivers that support them. Teachers are more than three times as likely to report depression-like symptoms, relative to other adults, according to a RAND survey from 2021.

That has had reverberations on their quality of teaching, as well as retention: 55% of teachers report that they are more likely to leave or retire early because of conditions that intensified during the pandemic, according to the National Education Association. “Nurturing the mental health and well-being of teachers is core to our proposition …if they’re not supported they can’t be effective,” said Thadani.

As part of its holistic strategy, Robin has also been serving the school staff such as bus drivers after the increased on the job stress encountered during the pandemic. Robin Coach John Avritt met with the Bus Transportation Team Director in Gananda, New York for a one-on-one coaching session focused on leadership and team management. After the sessions concluded, 88% of the transportation team members rated the training as “very good” to “excellent” and 63% said the coaching will make their jobs easier.

An additional benefit of including school staff in the training is that these workers get to build new habits. Recent research has found that intellectual tenacity – habits relating to persistence, initiative, and achievement – matter at least as much in the labor market as cognitive and technical skills. In this sense, the training allows school staff to build general human capital that is portable from one job to another and prepares them for a potentially new career. It is not lost on Robin that these support staff – many of whom are diverse and/or fall into lower income brackets – would be much less able to access a similar toolkit in the absence of its programs.