Carly Shuler: Looking Back on 15 Years of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center

Carly Shuler authored several reports, including D is for Digital, Pockets of Potential, and  Learning: Is there an app for that? during her time with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center from 2007-2012.

 

The Cooney Center didn’t just play a role in shaping my career—the term isn’t strong enough. The Cooney Center incubated my career. My company. The 50 people who work for Hoot, the 900 teachers in our teacher network, and the thousands of kids we work with. Our impact all comes back to the early days at The Cooney Center.

As the inaugural Cooney Center fellow, I played a small role on an incredible team that found that in the right set of circumstances, kids could make meaningful reading gains remotely over a live video call.

That simple research finding became what is now Hoot Reading. Hoot has delivered over 150,000 evidence-based, 1:1 reading lessons. This translates to over 2,000 days of 1:1 literacy instruction! This is just the tip of the iceberg for one of the most rapidly growing ed-tech startups … and there is no question in my mind that none of this would exist without the Cooney Center.  

While the Cooney Center incubated my career, it undoubtedly played a role in shaping me as a person.

The experience of getting to dress up as Elmo (fun fact – I am the perfect height for an Elmo walk-around) for a magazine photoshoot with Gary Knell taught me that we can do serious work without taking ourselves too seriously.

The wisdom of Michael Levine taught me the importance of not just doing good work – but disseminating that work and making sure that it has a broader impact on the field.

The opportunity to watch Joan Ganz Cooney ask frequent and often seemingly simple questions in board meetings taught me to be brave in asking questions, and that you are never the only person in the room who doesn’t understand something – even when it can often feel that way. 

This year marks 15 years since the founding of the Cooney Center. It also marks 15 years since my mom passed away. I can’t help but smile thinking of when I would call her from work and “Sesame Street” would pop up on the caller ID, she would always answer “Is this Big Bird?” The leadership and support of Michael and also my colleagues – Ann, Dixie, Catherine, Lili, and Lewis – during a difficult time taught me that the people who work for us and with us are humans first, and that is a lesson I will never forget. 

 

 

Carly Shuler is an ed-tech leader leveraging the power of technology to change children’s lives through literacy. As co-founder and CEO of Hoot Reading, the leader in online literacy tutoring, Carly partners with school districts across North America to provide 1:1, evidence-based reading instruction for thousands of students. She has been working at the intersection of children’s technology, education, and media for almost two decades. She holds a Master’s degree in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studied how media and technology can be used to educate children effectively. She has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Sesame Workshop, Spin Master Toys, and UNESCO. Carly spent over five years at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, where she researched and authored a number of reports focused on the power of digital media and mobile devices to help children learn. Carly speaks worldwide on the topics of early literacy and children’s learning through technology.