How We Live Classkick’s Values: Dream
Values are real when they are lived. We’ve asked a group of Classkick team members to share their thoughts on the meanings and actions associated with Classkick’s company values: Focus on People, Work Toward Justice, Advocate for Learners, Stay Curious, and Dream.
We’re excited to have Natalie Bloom, Senior Partnerships Manager at Classkick, share her thoughts on Dream. Natalie leveraged her experience as a classroom teacher to join the world of edtech, introducing districts across the United States to the powerful connections teachers and students make with Classkick, dreaming daily about how to reach even more students.
This post is part 4 of a 5-post series on Classkick’s company values. To read more about Classkick’s values and how they came to be, click here.
What is Dream?
If you can think it, you can do it! Dream is the ability to recognize challenges and expand the realm of possibility by flexing problem-solving skills. The first step is to identify the issues at hand and analyze the causes. Once we’re able to generate a set of alternative interventions, we can evaluate the best solutions and implement a plan. The plan is where the real magic happens — we get to learn from our solutions and assess effectiveness to ensure success. When we set goals and vision toward success, we’re able to better ourselves personally and professionally. That’s how we strive for excellence.
What does it mean for Classkick?
At Classkick, we encourage dynamic and diverse thinking, which inspires us all to think differently. To dream at Classkick means to aspire for bigger things and to not limit ourselves. Dreaming is one of the most exciting components of working at Classkick because we all start each day with the fundamental understanding that we can and will do better. All we have to do is dream up the path forward.
As a core value, Dream roots us all in the vision and aspirations we have for Classkick. Classkick is comprised of dreamers who lean on each other, our users, and experts to educate us on what we don’t know. We do this to better understand the gaps and areas most needed for improvement.
How did we know this was important to us as a company?
We knew Dream was an important value to us as a company because we constantly innovate, iterate, and improve our product, systems, and interactions with one another. I think most people at Classkick are lifelong learners, constantly pushing ourselves to learn new skills. As a rapidly growing start-up, we have big goals that each employee is invested in. These goals make us better as a team, but more importantly, they make Classkick better for our users: teachers and students.
How does living this value make us better as professionals?
Living this value incites a way of thinking that grounds us in the basis for success. We push ourselves to be active problem-solvers and take note of what is going on around us. By focusing on the things we can change or improve, we can implement meaningful, scalable solutions rooted in our users’ needs.
How do our team members know we’re succeeding as a company in this value?
We know we’re succeeding in this value when we are able to name our users’ pain points and envision significant adjustments and purposeful changes to address them. Our Dream value shows up every day in our work, from brainstorming collaboratively across Slack channels to teacher feature calls where we hear directly from the classroom, as we see the vision for Classkick’s future.
What will we change since adding this value?
Fundamentally, nothing will change because we have always been a company full of makers and doers. Adding Dream to our core values has just given us a term to identify and celebrate one another’s ability to think outside the box. If it wasn’t for Andrew’s initial dream to build a tool to support collaborative learning, Classkick wouldn’t exist in the first place. Even though Dream is a newly recognized core value, Classkick is a company that has always valued thought diversity and encouraged creativity, collaboration, and communication.
