FAQ

Palo is a unique skill-building program for middle school students that goes beyond SEL. Our program features a 36-week long skill-building curriculum where students get to develop important life skills, executive functioning skills, study skills and social emotional skills through dynamic, engaging and bite-sized content. These skills empower students to navigate the challenges of middle school and succeed in school, college and beyond. Our curriculum is designed to follow a whole-child approach that goes beyond academic excellence and helps students spark a zest for life. 100% engagement in everything they do and exploring their full potential is what we strive for.

Research shows that students are lacking in critical life skills and social emotional skills. Though there’s nothing wrong with learning math, science, and reading— but often students fail to develop 21st century skills – such as the ability to get along well with others, understand other points of view, solve problems collaboratively, persist through challenges and stress, and have confidence in themselves– skills that are needed to thrive in an ever-changing world and the workforce of tomorrow. This is where skill-building becomes necessary. Enter Palo!

Our unique skill-building app curriculum is aimed toward whole-child excellence. With daily bite-sized content, we make skill-building fun and interesting. There is no boring, preachy content. Instead, students get to engage in dynamic, relatable content, animated videos, fun activities, challenges and daily skill-building exercises that set them up for success.

At Palo, we have categorized skill-building into 3 main pillars – Self management, Relationship skills and Learning strategies. These pillars form the foundation behind all the skills we teach students. Our ultimate goal is to help every middle school student gain complete mastery and competence over these skills which will help them thrive in school, personal life and their future!

The Palo curriculum is designed around 9 growth areas. These are 9 critical areas or skills in life that a student gains mastery over, over the course of his/her Palo skill-building journey. The growth Areas fall under our 3 main pillars (Self management, relationship skills, and learning strategies). The 9 growth areas are – The Mind, Emotion, Identity, Friendships, Learning, Responsibility, Impact, Communication, and Thoughts.

Palo’s skill-building journey focuses on building 3 different growth areas or skill sets in every student. All the skills we teach fall under these 3 main growth areas – Self management, Learning Strategies and Relationship Skills. The skills under each of these 3 growth areas include – organization, discipline, time management, critical thinking, problem solving, creative thinking, confidence, socio-emotional learning, communication, collaboration or teamwork, resilience, responsibility, emotional regulation, smart study skills, self-awareness and reflection.

Palo’s skill-building curriculum is based on ASCA standards and follows the CASEL framework. ASCA National Standards identify and prioritize the specific attitudes, knowledge, and skills that students should be able to demonstrate as a result of participating in counseling. The ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors are organized in 3 broad domains: academic, career, and social/emotional development. These domains promote mindsets and behaviors that enhance the learning process and create a culture of school, university and career readiness for all students. CASEL framework focuses on building 5 critical social-emotional learning skills in interrelated areas of competence such as: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

Everyday, students log in to the Palo website and engage in 5 minutes of bite-sized content, fun activities, challenges and more that Sparks them up!

A nudge influences a student’s decisions toward healthy development. We send daily nudges to students like a reminder to remind them of their plans or encouragement to boost their confidence or inquiry to ask them to reflect on different experiences. Think nudges as tips, tricks and tools you get from a trust partner to help you to make good decisions.

Yes, our wide skill-building curriculum covers SEL as a key part. But we are not just an SEL program. We foster a wide spectrum of skills in middle school students – that includes 21st century skills, life skills, study skills as well as social emotional skills. Our curriculum is aligned to CASEL’s Framework and 5 core competencies for an effective SEL program.

You’re in luck! Palo is free for up to 35 students. We also run seasonal promotions and may have discounted pricing available. Contact us here

Once the school purchases Palo’s skill-building program, an unlimited number of students can access and use Palo at any given time.

All our curriculum content for the Palo app is designed and developed by our in-house team of Curriculum Experts, led by Michael Cho and Lori Serratto. Find out more about them and their expertise.

Palo is inclusive of different student demographics and supports diversity. Our curriculum model and in-app content is designed to build and promote student equity, wherein we work directly with schools and students to build equity.

We provide 3 kinds of student insights and growth metadata: school or district climate, student engagement, student progress metrics. Alongside that, with the help of advanced technology, we use AI, NLP and sentiment analysis to collect student insights and track metrics.

To begin with, you can fill up the Contact Us form on our website to book a FREE Demo of the Palo app for your school/classroom/school district. Following which, someone from our team will get in touch with you to get your students started on this exciting 36-week long skill-building journey. Oh, and did we mention? Our team will handle the entire integration and schoolwide implementation of Palo, so no need to worry!

Presently, our SEL and skill-building curriculum is focused towards middle schoolers. But we are in talks to come up with specialized curricula for elementary and high schoolers in the near future. Stay tuned!

At Palo, we have put data security to be the paramount focus and ensure that the engineering and operational systems are designed with high security safeguards. Palo adopts end-to-end data security philosophy ensuring the data with 256 bit RSA encryption over SSL. Palo infrastructure is built on multi-tenancy architecture, ensuring the data access is restricted to its own organization (school, school district). Data storage is compartmentalized in cloud systems to ensure that the system follows the least access philosophy.