Episode 271 Transcript

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 271

Jennifer Gonzalez, Host

GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 271 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’re taking a look at a tool that helps teachers solve some of their most challenging student problems. The tool is called Ellis.

GONZALEZ: Even the most well-prepared, experienced teacher can run into situations with students that leave them stumped. Students are coming to school with more needs than ever, and a lot of those needs aren’t strictly academic: anxiety, withdrawal, behavior issues, and learning differences that don’t always have quick or obvious solutions. These are problems that often send us to the internet in search of answers, but the nuances of each individual situation can make it hard to find exactly what we need. 

Ideally, we’d have a colleague with a lot of knowledge and experience who would listen carefully to our problem, ask us questions to make sure they understood it, and offer solutions. But even if we did, that person couldn’t be right by our side all the time to troubleshoot when we have follow-up questions.

Today we’re going to look at a new platform that is trying to fill that gap, to come as close as it can to being that trusted colleague who has deep knowledge about learning differences and student mental health and is ready at any time to help us figure out the best way to approach every individual situation.

That platform is called Ellis. Ellis is a free, chat-based tool created by the Children’s Health Council, and it’s designed to give educators practical guidance in those moments when something isn’t working and you’re not sure what to try next. The CHC team believes so strongly in Ellis’ potential to help teachers, they asked if I would do a whole episode on it, and they are sponsoring this episode. I almost never do these kinds of episodes, and I want you to know that even though it is sponsored, I only do these for products that I think are really unique and offer something valuable completely free to teachers. So this is definitely worth your time.

In the next 30 minutes, I’ll talk with Cindy Lopez, Director of Community Engagement at the CHC, all about how Ellis works. We talk about the technology behind the platform, what different use cases look like, and how Ellis addresses things like student privacy and mandatory reporting. Over on Cult of Pedagogy, I’ll also embed a video that shows you the tool in action. If you’d like to check out the platform while you listen, head over to askellis.org and take a look. In the meantime, here’s my conversation with Cindy Lopez from the Children’s Health Council. 

GONZALEZ: Hey Cindy, welcome to the podcast.

LOPEZ: Hi, Jenn. It’s great to be here. I’m excited about this conversation and being able to share it with your listeners.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, I am too. So we’re going to be talking all about Ellis today. So let’s just start by letting people know who you are. Tell us a little bit about your role at the Children’s Health Council and just a little bit about your background as an educator, how that got you where you are.

LOPEZ: Yeah. So I’ve been in education a long time, almost 40 years — administrator, teacher, public schools, independent schools. I actually started at Children’s Health Council. You’ll hear me call Children’s Health Council CHC. So I actually started at CHC about 16 years ago, and I was hired to start Sand Hill School at CHC, which is a school for kids with language-based learning differences. So my background is steeped in education, and I am now in this role—transitioned to this role—which is community engagement.

And so our work in community engagement really includes making the expertise of CHC more accessible to our community. As part of that, we work with schools, and our expertise is—we have two schools, as I mentioned, Sand Hill School and another one, Esther B. Clark School. We have all of our clinical services—psychology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, behavior specialists, all those kinds of folks. So we’re really working to bring our expertise to the community and make it more accessible. As we do that, we work a lot with schools and develop partnerships with schools. We provide support when they need it, especially if it’s a complicated student scenario or student case, or we’ll go in and provide some parent education or professional learning for teachers. It’s usually around learning differences and mental health, because that’s kind of our sweet spot at CHC—the intersection of learning differences and mental health.

GONZALEZ: Okay, got it. We are here to talk about a platform created by the CHC called Ellis. This is what you all came to me with—you really want teachers to know more about it. So we decided to devote a whole episode to that, and you all are sponsoring the episode. So we’re really just going to talk about this platform. Tell me, in sort of an elevator speech, what exactly is it? And then we’ll drill down into the more specifics of it later. What does it do?

LOPEZ: Yeah, so it’s free. That’s important to know. And we, as we all know, have been in the midst of this mental health crisis with our kids. Teachers are on the front lines of that. They kind of face an uphill battle to meet those needs of their students, and most schools are really not able to cope with the immensity of the need that they’re seeing. And teachers feel that. So that’s why we created Ellis, in response to what we are hearing from educators in our school partnership work. Educators are feeling overwhelmed and underprepared for what they’re seeing in their students—things like panic attacks in the classroom, school refusal and avoidance, depression, withdrawal. 

So Ellis was designed to meet that need. It’s a chat-based resource designed to support the expertise of educators as they respond to the learning, behavioral, and emotional challenges of their students. So when real situations come up during the school day, educators can type what they’re seeing into Ellis and get guidance and actionable strategies. It really helps teachers respond with greater clarity and confidence and meet the diverse needs of their students.

GONZALEZ: Okay. So what we’re going to be doing in a little while is sort of looking at some sample scenarios where a teacher has a need and then have you explain to me how Ellis meets it. But I want to talk about the chat aspect of it and the AI aspect of it, because it is powered by AI. I think particularly now, when people hear AI, their minds go in all different directions and they think they know what it is, but AI use has become more and more sort of like refined and niche. What you all are using is a model called retrieval-augmented generation, which is not what people think of when they hear, “I’m just going to ask ChatGPT.” So tell me a little bit about why your use of AI makes it more reliable than what people would think of.

LOPEZ: Yeah. As you noted, AI feels a little bit like the Wild West out there. It’s everywhere—from homework tools to social media algorithms. It feels like it’s taking over. So it’s important to know that the results you get from an AI system are reliable and trustworthy. And Ellis is trustworthy because of how we built it. You mentioned the RAG, or the retrieval-augmented generation. All that means is that we’ve created a knowledge base that’s built on our own content and content from trusted partners in the learning and mental health fields. So Ellis uses AI to surface guidance from that curated knowledge base instead of scraping the entire internet. So when you get results from Ellis, you know that it’s reliable, it’s trustworthy, and it’s evidence-aligned. And our partners include organizations that lots of your listeners probably know—CAST, CASEL, Understood, NCLD, Digital Promise, The Reading League. So the results are not only trustworthy because of the content we’ve created, they’re also meaningful, actionable, valuable.

GONZALEZ: I’m thinking of it as like a closed system, basically. It contains a lot of curated resource. And so the AI is searching through all of that stuff and not just randomly going out to the internet.

LOPEZ: Yeah. And I think it’s important to say that a lot of people are concerned about AI. We have to build our own reasoning and thinking and ways of reflecting and evaluating the AI that we’re using and the system that it’s in. Lots of us go to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others, and it’s just important to be able to look at that and say, “Is this reasonable? Is this accurate?” With Ellis, you don’t have to do that. You can step back and not use your time trying to figure that out, but for teachers who don’t have a lot of time.

GONZALEZ: Okay, so now let’s dig into how Ellis operates. I’d love for you to walk me through a couple of scenarios of teachers who are having a problem, what Ellis would do for them so teachers can get a really good idea of how this would work for them.

LOPEZ: Yeah. Ellis is in beta right now, but we have lots of educators using it, and they’re finding it’s a valuable resource—especially as they think about how to reach specific students and the diverse needs that they encounter. Having been a teacher myself, I know how it feels to do your best to show up every day for your students, you know inevitably you’re going to encounter challenges that can derail your day, your student’s day. So we created Ellis for those kinds of moments. So a couple of ways that I’ve heard from our educators who are using Ellis—for example, a middle school learning specialist. And when I talk about Ellis in terms of educators, any role in a school can access Ellis, use Ellis, and find it valuable, whether you’re a classroom teacher, a school counselor, a learning specialist, a behavior specialist, an administrator.

So in this case, a middle school learning specialist was managing a large caseload, which they often do, needed a way to work through challenging student situations and support teachers. So Ellis helped her gather strategies, check her thinking, and approach conversations with a little bit more clarity. She works with teachers to address academic and behavioral challenges across their classrooms. So she began using Ellis when she needed additional input on more complex cases, the tools, the strategies that she used and were her go to’s were not working. So she needed something more.

So for a student with ADHD who is consistently behind, Ellis helped her think through assignments, how they could be broken down more clearly, and really laid it all out for her. So she could copy anything in Ellis, and she could copy and send it to the student’s teacher. And the teacher was grateful to have that support and some actionable strategies. So it was a way for this learning specialist to kind of amplify her own expertise and use her time well, use the teacher’s time well, and bring strategies that were meaningful. 

GONZALEZ: So before we move to the next example, so that we can help people picture this, what is actually happening in the interface? Am I just typing a question into a search bar? Like, what does the experience look like?

LOPEZ: Yeah, good question. So Ellis is chat-based. So you set up an account, tell us a little bit about yourself—again, all free—and then you’re free to use Ellis. You describe a scenario with a student. It’s a dialogue box, basically. You just start typing. 

GONZALEZ: Right. Sort of like if you’re like on a website and there’s a little bot that comes up in the corner, that kind of a chat back and forth.

LOPEZ: Yes. Yeah. You just kind of chat.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And you just use conversational language to explain what’s happening.

LOPEZ: Yes. And we do ask some questions, like, tell us about the strengths of the student, and tell us about how you would characterize the dynamic, the teacher-student dynamic. Those are a couple of things that we really want to bring to the forefront as teachers are trying to respond to those diverse needs of their students. Often that strengths piece kind of gets lost in the frustration of trying to meet the challenge of the moment. And so we try to build those things in as well. 

Then you submit all that, and it takes as long as you want it to take, depending on how many details you want to include, but it could take just a couple of minutes. Then you hit submit, and Ellis comes back with strategies and tools that you can use. And so in Ellis, the results you’ll see usually come back with three strategies that are described in a couple of sentences, but you can ask for more strategies. You can find out more about a specific strategy that it has come back with. You can create an action plan from a strategy. So you can see, like, how could I do this in the next six weeks or something like that. And those scenarios you create around students are saved, so you can come back to them at any time and continue working through a situation, because we know a situation with a student is dynamic. It changes constantly.

GONZALEZ: So are we giving our students sort of pseudonyms in there so that they can reference, like, oh, this was when you were talking to Patrick or whatever?

LOPEZ: Yeah. So we don’t collect any personally identifiable information about students. So the user, the educator who’s describing the situation, is giving a nickname of sorts to a student. And Ellis is built—we’ve trained Ellis so that if a user accidentally puts a student name in there, Ellis recognizes that and comes back and says, I’ve noticed a student name here, and I’m replacing that with “the student.”

GONZALEZ: Also, it sounds like when it gives you replies to your queries, is it pretty much just advice, or are they actually providing you with downloadable resources or links to things? Like, how does that look?

LOPEZ: So it is strategies and tools, and each of those strategies is cited. So I mentioned that we have a lot of content of our own and from partners. So you’ll see this strategy came from an Understood article or a CAST article or CASEL or something like that. And you can click out right into that article and read more. You can see any of the downloadables that might be associated with it. Right now, we don’t have specific downloadables in Ellis, and that’s one of the things that we are looking at and working on. As I said, it’s in beta version, so we’re continuing to iterate and design. The more feedback we get, the better it gets.

GONZALEZ: Yes, of course. Well, and I got curious at one point, because you were talking about Ellis breaking down an assignment and that she could copy and send that. That was what I pictured, did she paste the assignment into Ellis? 

LOPEZ: Right. So what I was referencing is Ellis comes back with these strategies. You could copy and paste those and share them with your student success team or your MTSS team or you just want to save it and, you know, keep it on your own computer.

GONZALEZ: Got it. What does the action plan look like?

LOPEZ: Yeah, the action plan. So the results from your scenario come back, and they’re on half of the screen. If you select “action plan,” it pops up on the other half of the screen. So the scenario always stays there, or the results from your scenario always stay there, and the action plans too. And the action plans say, here’s week one. So if you’re trying to create, there’s a student who needs, perhaps one of the strategies is create visual references for the student to keep him on track, right? So then in week one, it’s going to say, create visual references. Also, it will cite any sources that that comes from. And it will give you ideas about how to create those visual resources. So specifically, like put a note on the desk with a checklist that includes these things. So it’s very specific and action-oriented.

GONZALEZ: Okay, so we already talked now about this teacher who is working with the student with ADHD. Let’s hear a different example.

LOPEZ: Yeah. So a second-year high school teacher, so newer to teaching, struggling to support a high-need student, found that some greater clarity and momentum using Ellis. And she talks about how it transformed how she shows up now for every learner, not just that one, but for every learner. So one of her students, on an IEP, struggled with reading and writing, disengaged quickly. She tried everything, but nothing was really moving the needle forward. So she turned to Ellis and found practical, actionable strategies, confirming that she was on the right path. So she saw perhaps some things there that maybe she had tried, but also showed her things she hadn’t tried, so what she could try next. And so she implemented some strategies, and after implementing those strategies, describing her experience with Ellis, she felt more confident in her decision making and more calm, more calm even during challenging situations, because it’s like, okay, I responded to this previously, I could do it again. And I think that was—it just—that confidence, like I’m more sure that I’m actually doing the things that are going to move the needle. 

GONZALEZ: Yeah, absolutely. Because most of these things are not overnight kinds of fixes. So they require some persistence and patience, and if you get affirmation from a trusted resource that you’re on the right track, then you can keep pushing through. And I guess from what you said earlier, it sounds like you can come back and say, all right, I tried this, it didn’t seem to work. And it’s going to prompt you to delve into what happened.

LOPEZ: Yes, yes. So that’s a good point. Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, you can come back and say, you know what, I tried that strategy, didn’t really work. Ellis will probably come back and ask some specific questions, like what was the context, where was the student, what were you doing, what worked, what didn’t work. And then Ellis can come back and suggest more, refining that strategy or trying to do something, making the approach a little bit different. And you can also create an action plan again from what you learned that day from Ellis. So it changes. Ellis can adapt as the situation with the student changes, which, as we know, it does all the time.

GONZALEZ: It does. Yes.

LOPEZ: So what we really want for educators—and we’ve built kind of a theory of change around this and Ellis—but what we really want for educators is that they get the support they want and need in a timely manner. Because what we’ve heard from them is, “I don’t have time. Please don’t give me another resource or whatever that I’m going to have to learn how to use.” 

So one is, Ellis is easy. You don’t need any kind of training to use it. You just start. And that they can make a difference. As you noted, it takes time. It’s not going to create change overnight, but you’re going to get some step-by-step support from Ellis that will show you how to implement it as you work through the challenges with the student. It increases agency and confidence in teachers.

GONZALEZ: Yeah, it sounds like it. I’m thinking about my own use of Claude and ChatGPT, and I know that both of them offer the ability for me to upload items into my conversation. Is that something Ellis is capable of yet?

LOPEZ: Yeah, no, not currently. And that’s something we’ve also heard from our users, is, I’d love to be able to take—I’d love to be able to create something kind of in a community space on Ellis where I could share with other teachers and my colleagues who are also working with the student. We know as we work through some of the things like student success teams and MTSS teams and all of that, that there are these levels of interventions for students. So Ellis can help at almost every level of intervention.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. And the reason I was asking, too, was just in terms of, if I go in and say I have this student who is struggling on this assignment, if I could just say, here’s the Google Doc, maybe you can tell me what the problem is. But it sounds like not yet. But I can go to it for academic stuff, but also mental health issues. If I’ve got a student who is struggling with anxiety, or if I’m a little bit worried that maybe there’s a situation where I might have to report something, is that something I could check in with Ellis about?

LOPEZ: Yeah, so that’s a good question, too. So yes, mental health issues. If a student is struggling with anxiety, or you’re seeing things that you don’t know are really mental health-related, but you think might be pointing to it, Ellis can help in that situation. If an educator comes across a situation where they’re seeing self-harm with students or suicidal ideation, Ellis will respond and basically kind of stop the conversation. And say, follow the protocol that your district has set up. And we will also give some crisis intervention resources, like hotlines and things like that. But basically the conversation stops. We don’t want to train teachers in how to respond to that, and they’re not. So that’s why they need to call in the professionals who can.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. So how long has the beta version been out?

LOPEZ: Yeah, so we started—it’s been about nine months, almost a year.

GONZALEZ: Okay. And right now, the conversation we’re having is at the end of March of 2026, because people listen to this episode for a couple of years. So right now it is less than a year old. You have—anybody can go in and use it, and it’s free for individual teachers?

LOPEZ: Yes, it’s free for anyone who’s using it right now. As we consider the sustainability, we’ll figure—we have to figure all those kinds of things out.

GONZALEZ: Yes. Yes. I’ve seen how that works. Is it—does a person have to actually go in and register and prove—I know there’s certain education-based apps where you have to have a school email address in order to get in.

LOPEZ: You don’t. So you can, but—

GONZALEZ: So I could go in and play around with it and see how it works?

LOPEZ: Yes. Yeah. You can go in and play around with it. And when you do, there are choices—like when you check off, you either say you’re an educator or you’re not. And then the registration is a little bit different, just because we don’t ask as many questions for non-educators. We want to know more school information from educators.

GONZALEZ: Okay. Okay. I got it. Like your context. And it sounds like you all are very much open to receiving lots of feedback from people.

LOPEZ: Yes. We’d love to hear how people are using it, what kinds of things would make it better. And we are in the process of just measuring outcomes, like I talked about, and our theory of change, and how we really want teachers to feel greater confidence and agency, because we think that makes their jobs more enjoyable and fulfilling. And so we are just kind of starting that process, and we’ll be able to show outcomes too in the next year or so. So the more people that use it and give us feedback, the better it will be.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay. I almost think that the AI itself will get better trained too, just if it offers ideas and teachers come back and say that didn’t work, it might process that and say, okay, good to know.

LOPEZ: Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah.

GONZALEZ: Yeah. Okay.

LOPEZ: So we’d love for everyone listening to try out Ellis. It’s, as we noted several times, it’s free, it’s easy.

GONZALEZ: And so to find it, we’re going to put links in the show notes and over on the blog post on Cult of Pedagogy that it’s going to actually have a code in it so we can sort of follow how many people came from this interview. But if people are just listening and they want to go and take a look right now, where would they go?

LOPEZ: You can go to askellis.org.

GONZALEZ: Okay. I think it’s really, it’s very cool what you, what people can do when they have a set of things to help people and then they can sort of harness a little bit of technology. And so whoever thought this up and is trying this out, just kudos to them. And I hope it continues to grow.

LOPEZ: Yes, thank you.

GONZALEZ: Thanks for coming on.

LOPEZ: Yeah. Thanks so much, Jenn. It’s been great talking with you. Great to meet you and hope that your listeners have perhaps learned a little bit something and try out Ellis.

To watch a video of Ellis in action or read a full transcript of this conversation, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 271. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.