Branching Minds 2023 Roadmap

Author: Emily-Rose Barry, VP of Product at Branching Minds

Nerd Alert: I’m busting out the vision board. 🤓

The beginning of the year is an important time in product planning for Branching Minds. Even as we support practitioners in finishing out the current school year, clarifying what we want to achieve together for the next one starts today. If you’re curious about what we see on the horizon and what you can expect from product announcements over the coming twelve months, you’re in the right place! I’m excited to share our vision.

Delivering On Our Core Value Proposition

There will always be drive and opportunity in product development to innovate and create brand-new functionality, but we can’t forget our commitment to delivering on our core promise. We are keenly aware that the Branching Minds platform has become an indispensable tool for our partner districts, and it’s used to carry out essential work by thousands of teachers every day. What a privilege this is! But with this privilege comes responsibility. Especially in the early part of the year, our development team is focused on all the little things we can do to iteratively strengthen system reliability and performance.

Expediting data ingestion for customers is also a focus because we know that your ability to leverage data to monitor the health of your MTSS and understand student needs is only as good as the data that’s available to you. Over the coming months, we will work to decrease the time it takes for you to see new data in the platform and increase the quality of the feedback we are able to provide on the files we receive.

Moving the Needle on the Metrics Important for MTSS

Aligning what learning science would espouse as best practice with healthy indicators of platform adoption and the impact we want to see on student outcomes is our home base. We are combining the forces of our Customer Success, Learning Science, Professional Learning, and Product teams to identify the actions we want to see our platform drive in order to have the most meaningful impact on the health of our partners’ MTSS. With this insight, we will be prioritizing features that advance:

• The use of universal screener assessment data to systematically identify student need
• The successful implementation of a multi-level prevention system across all schools and grade levels
• The use of valid and reliable progress monitoring data to monitor the success of intervention plans
• The application of evidence-based interventions to support student skill development
• The collaborative facilitation of data-based decision-making in problem-solving meetings
• The establishment of the systems and infrastructure needed to sustainably support students

Focus on Student Wellness

At Branching Minds, we believe that Student Wellness…

• Is intentionally created within consistent, proactive support frameworks
• Helps systems understand and meet the urgent needs of individual students
• Connects schools, families, and communities with common goals for student wellbeing
• Supports student learning and positive academic outcomes
• Guides learners to successfully collaborate and problem-solve in partnership with others

Meeting the academic needs of each student starts with acknowledging that those needs are multifaceted and interconnected. Advancing student wellness, then, is a matter of mission fulfillment for Branching Minds. We know it is a priority for our partners to surface and support the urgent needs of students around not only academic skill development but also school climate and culture, SEL competencies, behavior, and attendance. Supporting academic outcomes holistically is a matter of equity, and so we are galvanized in 2023 to implement a product roadmap that helps our partners:

• Create a supportive, healthy climate for learning where all students feel like they belong
• Build and reinforce positive behavior and attendance systems 
• Help students better understand themselves, connect with others, collaborate, problem solve, and support their communities

The Branching Minds Web Platform Enables Educators and Administrators To:   🌟 Identify students in need of learning support in your school or district   🌟 Collaborate on surveys to determine the root of each student’s challenges   🌟 Find the best evidence-based interventions for each learner   🌟 Streamline documentation and quickly understand student progress