Maria Barrera is the founder of
Clayful, a company on a mission to help address the mental health crisis. Through life chaging and life saving coaching, kids build the skills and resilience to tackle anything that comes their way.
Throughout her career in education, technology, and human resources, she has always been focused on solving big problems in complex systems. Now, she is tackling the biggest problem of all - the mental health crisis.
Maria’s dedication to helping others is rooted in her own experiences. She ran her first coaching session when she was just 15, and has always found joy in coaching others through everyday life stressors and challenges. Her passion for education led her to start a tutoring company while getting her engineering degrees at Stanford University, and to working with thousands of districts as a member of the founding team at Nearpod.
With Clayful, Maria is bringing together education, technology, and healthcare in a way that is helping kids improve their mental wellness, regardless of socio-economic status.
- Why do this through schools and not through parents?
- Life saving and life changing preventative coaching
- Therapy vs. coaching
- Always focused on moving the student forward.
- Don’t treat or diagnose mental health disorders.
- The Orange Years
- Helping kids build the skills, resilience, boundaries and strategies they need
- Rising suicide rates in 8 year olds
- helping kids get support early.
- Mental health for kids: working with families
- Mental health challenges were showing up in the classrooms in the form of attendance & behavior issues, teacher retention, poor performance and grades.
- Who do you work with and how do we fit in with your system?
- The biggest need is a kid coming in with an extreme thought and go through that mind work to change their perspectives.
- Needs to happen in the moment.
- Identify patterns and behaviors for kids and provide content for kids in their school specifically.
- Responsive to student needs.
- With the right tools, we can
- Anything else you want to share with our audience?
- clayful.co/resilientschools
We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL.
IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:
- Simplify and streamline technology
- Save teachers’ time
- Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
- Improve student performance on state assessments
🚀
Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.
Episode 17
