Project TEAM wants to know: “Are you in the house?” Entrepreneur Linsey Covert’s graduate-project-turned-business-idea is carrying out social and academic change in school communities across Pennsylvania through her company, TEAMology LLC.
Project TEAM helps teachers foster leadership, positivity and teamwork among students, while students learn to work together toward common goals for their schools. Those goals include acceptance, belonging, and community. In other words, getting everyone in “the house.”
Covert’s Project TEAM is more than a business idea… it’s a movement designed to promote meaningful interpersonal relationships among peers in a school setting.
Importantly, what students learn extends beyond their high school experience. “All of this is really promoting social and emotional learning, which is important in order to prepare students to be career-ready,” Covert says.
Covert believes that successful team building and the ability to collaborate with peers are critical to career success.
“Students are coming out of high school and college not really ready for the work force,” she says. “They are lacking problem-solving skills and collaboration skills.”
Project TEAM is built on a foundation of six pillars:
- Helping Others
- Positive Change
- Anti-Bullying
- Problem Solving
- Resiliency
- Leadership
“We connect all of these together through the program with the goal of reducing bullying and providing the necessary skills sets for students to develop appropriate relationships and feel more connected to each other,” Covert said.
According to the TEAMology website, after Project TEAM was implemented, schools report positive outcomes, such as stronger teacher-student-staff relationships, decreases in student aggression and increases in academic performance.
Teachers report feeling more involved with their students and optimistic about future success in the classroom.
Outcomes around anti-bullying motivate Covert to continue to promote the program to more and more school communities.
“We know that over three million students report being bullied every year and in my research, we narrowed that to be directly related to students lacking positive peer relationships in school,” she said. Most schools are not providing the social and emotional learning needed to address this challenge.
Thanks to early support from the Ben Franklin TechCelerator and Invent Penn State, Covert’s Project TEAM now boasts 1,200 teachers on its platform, impacting 14,000+ students.
“We hope to continue to make improvements and talk to our customer base to make sure that we are doing what we need to do to keep our technology moving forward,” she said.
Covert shared that her focus is to implement and perfect Project TEAM’s model across Pennsylvania before moving into other states that would benefit from the program.