Transcript

Lori Boll

00:00

Hello, listeners. Today’s guest is Dr. Clay Cook, who is the Chief Development Officer at Character Strong. And we’ll be diving into implementation science, what it is, why promising initiatives sometimes fail, and what it takes to help adults adopt and sustain effective practices so students experience the intended benefits.

We’ll also discuss the roles of leadership and adult behavior change, implementation in diverse international school communities, and what Clay has planned for our upcoming conference in Jakarta. So Clay Cook, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Clay Cook

00:43

Well, thank you, Laurie. It’s really a privilege to be able to spend some time on the podcast and just been a fan of the work that you and Cinny have been doing on behalf of inclusive practices, turning people into champions for all kids.

Lori Boll

00:56

Thanks. Well, you’ve worked as a paraprofessional, middle school math teacher, school psychologist, researcher, and now chief development officer at Character Strong. How have those different experiences shaped the way you approach school improvement?

Dr. Clay Cook

01:17

Yeah, I think the combination of those experiences. When I was a paraeducator, the first tree the training I got was a person who told me to write my behavior on the inside of my hand. And I thought it was the dumbest training ever. And then I was working in a self contained classroom for kids with really intense social emotional and behavioral needs, and I r realized how profound it was. It everything boiled down to my behavior.

Whether I was proactive,

whether I taught things, whether I responded when the kids dysregulated, did I co-regulate, or did I add kind of gasoline to the fire? So that shaped my early experiences, like how powerful our behavior is as the adults and as a middle school math teacher. I became interested in more of the whole child. I realized kids had other things going on besides interest in math that get built curiosity, became a

School psychologists, school psychologists, we understand data, evidence-based practices, systems change. All that is really mounted to this kind of core belief. It’s all about us to get to the outcomes for students. And it’s the adult work. We got to get the S piece right as the adults to get to the the student outcome piece right. And w that that kind of framing and how I see the world. I haven’t been able to shake it. So those kind of experiences has all led to this like

interest and really thinking about adults. How do we get support the adults to get to outcomes for students and that’s closely tied to the topic of implementation science.

Lori Boll

02:50

Hmm,

that’s so interesting. Yeah, I think back to my experiences teaching. And anytime I had a bad day with my students, it all was based on me. It you know, it was like I was tired that day, or I had something happening in my personal life that was frustrating me. And then the kids would frustrate me, but it wasn’t really them, it was me.

So

Dr. Clay Cook

03:21

So true. At the end of the

day, we can’t make a kid do anything. All we can do is control

Lori Boll

03:26

No.

Dr. Clay Cook

03:26

our own choices and actions. That’s all we have control over. So it’s kind of a futile fight to like try to make kids be a certain way. What we need to remind ourselves is how we regulate ourselves, how we show up, how we respond, what we do to get more proactive and preventative, what we’re doing to teach and model, all those things can will to

really potent and powerful influence on our young people. And I came to the same realization. I it’s all

Lori Boll

03:55

Yeah.

Dr. Clay Cook

03:55

what I’m bringing to the situation that’s gonna ultimately determine whether I’m gonna be a part of achieving outcomes for kids or not.

Lori Boll

04:04

Thanks for that. So, implementation, from what I understand, is a multidisciplinary field focused on facilitating the adoption and high fidelity use of evidence-based practices. And you’ve said that evidence-based practices require evidence-based implementation. So tell us more about that. What is what is that? What is implementation? And

Dr. Clay Cook

04:33

Yeah, it turns out lots of disciplines like medicine, public health, education, child welfare. We have these evidence-based things. And I call them things. Things are like practices, supports, interventions. And hopefully they’re evidence based because we have some evidence that they work. When someone receives it, it’s going to help them prove an outcome. You know, the recipients of everything we do are young people.

And our families, but there’s evidence-based things, practices, but those evidence-based practices aren’t going to implement themselves. Implementation is not the thing, it’s the process we wrap around the thing. And

Lori Boll

05:16

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

05:17

it’s called train and hope. We train people to do it and we hope that that thing’s going to get implemented really, really well.

Students are going to receive it. They’re accessing higher quality supports, experiences, and supports going to translate into outcomes. And we know that’s a flawed approach. Implementation’s a process. It’s actually a behavior change process because there are implementers. Those implementers are the people who interface with students and they’re going to have to adopt the thing. And when we adopt things, it doesn’t mean we’re always good at it. Then we need to be supported to continuously improve doing the thing.

In a way that it’s likely to be effective. That’s the code for that is fidelity. And then we got to keep a good thing going. That means we got to sustain good things. And once we start implementing a thing, we have to support it forever. I like to say it’s kind of like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Once we go through the Golden Gate Bridge, once we get to the end, we got to go back to the beginning and continue to paint it. If you have an effective thing, a practice that

We know kids need from us daily and consistently, then we have to support the adults forever. And you’re gonna get new people

Lori Boll

06:32

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

06:33

into your system. We’re gonna have to give people feedback or we’ll get implementation drift. So implementation is ultimately the process of supporting adult behavior change to adopt, deliver, and sustain really effective things with fidelity over time so they can produce the benefit that the research has shown.

Because we have a science of literacy. That science isn’t going to implement itself. We need the science of implementation that we apply to the science of literacy and reading so we can actually implement those things. And that’s what’s been missing out of education. We have lots of things.

Lori Boll

07:08

Uh-huh.

Dr. Clay Cook

07:09

We just don’t implement the things and sustain them over time, so they don’t produce the benefit.

Lori Boll

07:16

I see. So how can schools be thinking about this implementation process?

Dr. Clay Cook

07:23

I like to just boil it down to and simplify it in terms of behavior change. Obviously, the before we can expect the adults to do it, we got to create readiness. Readiness is a phase of the implementation process. Over eighty percent of implementation efforts failed due to lack of readiness. We never got the people ready and we never got the systems to support the people once we start doing it ready.

Lack of system and people readiness means we start to roll things out and it’s very uneven and often not successful. And then we end up blaming the thing, and then we get stuck in what’s called the flavor of the month problem, where we adopt things, implement them thinly. They don’t really produce bona fide improvements and kid outcomes. So we bail on the thing and we go to the next new shiny thing. Ultimately, that makes people in a system really calloused.

And skeptical to an implementation effort because they think this too shall pass, because that’s been

Lori Boll

08:25

Right.

Dr. Clay Cook

08:25

the history of how the organization has rolled out things. And so now we got to overcome people’s skepticism to a change process, an improvement

Lori Boll

08:34

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

08:35

process. So ultimately, that readiness phase is so essential to get right because it means that when we transition into active implementation where we’re going to adopt, more people will start doing the thing.

Not only will they start doing the thing, they’re gonna respond to supports to help them at continuously improve doing the thing. Like if you have a PLC, there are people are gonna be more engaged in the PLC to talk about the thing and improve and exchange ideas around the thing. But if people aren’t ready and motivated to do the thing, you can protect time for them to collaborate, but they won’t be on point and invested in using that time well to actually improve the thing. So people don’t respond to all of our implementation supports.

That are really designed to help people get good at doing the thing.

Lori Boll

09:24

Right. And so why why do you believe most of implementation efforts fail at schools? Is it

Dr. Clay Cook

09:34

Yeah.

Lori Boll

09:35

because we’re not giving the teachers time or the the staff time to understand why we’re making the change?

Dr. Clay Cook

09:44

Yeah, I think this is the beauty of having a kind of a science of implementation. It’s kind of of any science. It makes things predictable. And implementation science can, with a high degree of certainty, predict whether an implementation effort will fail or succeed. It’s not just like the the negative side of this, but also what are the conditions? And so we know like lack of readiness is a big one, but we know that the proximal leader, like

the principal or the school administrator in charge of that, if that person isn’t engaging in certain leadership behaviors that create the conditions for adult behavior change, it will not be successful. We’ve done research

Lori Boll

10:29

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

10:29

where it’s called implementation leadership and then basically general climate. So follow me on this one. If we have adults who are

In unhealthy working conditions. They don’t feel valued and respected. They don’t feel psychologically safe to collaborate. They don’t feel adequately supported. They’re that lack of a general healthy climate means they’re not responsive to what we call implementation-specific leadership behaviors. One of the things, if that leader doesn’t work with and through others as part of a team,

To engage in specific behavior so people have are clear on the priorities. They perceive based on leadership that their implementation effort will be adequately supported with time and resources. They don’t bel perceive based on leadership behavior that this is going this thing will stay the course over time. They don’t perceive they’re going get feedback and it’s not connected to their performance evaluations. If staff don’t perceive around an implementation effort,

Those things based on leadership behavior, people don’t invest their time. This is true of any organizational context. And then we have

Lori Boll

11:46

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

11:47

like lack of actual systems that support adult behavior change, like systems that support learning, ongoing distributed professional learning, coaching, mentoring, or modeling opportunities, protected time for collaboration and deeper thinking to continuously improve. We don’t have systems to monitor fidelity and create feedback loops.

We don’t create systems, a cue and prompt and remind. The lack of those systems are why implementation. And the antidote to get implementation right is putting systems that support adult behavior change. So, but it begins with that kind of leadership component who really

Lori Boll

12:23

Right.

Dr. Clay Cook

12:23

feels accountable to s for the success of implementation. And if implementation isn’t going well, they don’t blame staff. They blame the lack of systems.

That support adult behavior change. Just like we wouldn’t want a teacher to blame the kid or the family, we don’t play that game as leaders to blame staff when implementation’s not going well.

Lori Boll

12:47

This is so interesting, just because I’m thinking back to so many experiences I’ve had in schools over the years and when there has been a new idea, the pushback that was received was strong. I’m just thinking now of standards based grading and how in one school that I was working

Dr. Clay Cook

13:12

Yeah.

Lori Boll

13:13

at, you know, it was

the the idea was given and it was almost mutiny. You know, people were like, not on it.

Dr. Clay Cook

13:25

Yeah, for yeah.

Lori Boll

13:27

But I think it it and when I compared it to another school who had done the same thing, there had been almost a year’s worth of work behind it before the idea even came up. Yeah. so interesting.

Dr. Clay Cook

13:41

It. Yep. And what you get is buy-in.

Most people say implementation goes well when people are bought in. Now the question is we need to get really precise on and understand what does that mean? How do you get buy-in then? Because lots of people are get stuck. Hey, we don’t got buy-in. So then

Lori Boll

14:01

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

14:02

what are we going to do? We break it down to understand what does it mean? Buy-in is a motivational state. How do we get that?

Well, first people are gonna have to have clarity on what it is. Lack of clarity, lots of times people are confused and they don’t have clarity on the thing. After they have clarity, they have to be aware of the problem or need that exists that warrants that thing they’re clearing clear about. That’s need or problem recognition. I recognize there’s a need or problem that warrants us doing this thing that I’m clear about. The next thing is what we call outcome expectancies.

I need to perceive there’s positive outcomes that will come about as a result of my investment in doing the thing. That’s ROI, return on investment. If people don’t believe there’s going to be ROI, then they’re not going to want to do the thing. They’re going to have lack of buy-in. People

Lori Boll

14:56

Yeah.

Dr. Clay Cook

14:57

also have to see trusted others like them doing it. That’s the social proofing of our buy in. We need to know others are doing the thing and achieving success.

The kicker really is what we call self-efficacy. People have to be confident. With the time and energy they have, can they pull off doing the thing that they’re clear

Lori Boll

15:17

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

15:17

about? If there’s too many competing demands for time and energy, this is one of the barriers, is where you have implementation overload. People say their plates are too full and they’re telling the truth. There’s way too many competing priorities for a precious amount of time and cognitive energy. So we have to de-implement, make room on people’s plates.

in order for them to feel confident they can actually pull off doing the thing with all the other things they’re expected to implement on behalf of getting the kid outcomes.

Lori Boll

15:51

It’s a lot. and

Dr. Clay Cook

15:54

Yeah, behavior changes a lot. And so what we do is try to practically create the conditions for leaders to imp we call it implementation literacy. If an a leader is implementation illiterate, they’re gonna have a really hard time to get to improving student outcomes because they’re not gonna get to s successful implementation. That’s where the science

Lori Boll

16:15

Right.

Dr. Clay Cook

16:15

comes in, just like we could say teaching kids how to read is a lot. Well, we got to break it down for a teacher on the science of literacy to understand.

What does effective literacy instruction and content look like? And we have to break that down and make it doable and feasible. We do the same thing for leaders to really break it down. What is implementation

Lori Boll

16:34

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

16:36

and what do they have control over to create the conditions for implementation success, which means you gotta understand adult behavior change.

Lori Boll

16:44

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s good stuff. and

Dr. Clay Cook

16:50

Yeah.

Lori Boll

16:50

and I think something many leaders probably haven’t thought of. Am I right in thinking that?

Dr. Clay Cook

16:59

Yeah, what we have, I think, you know, some of the work I do on the the student practice side is effective behavior supports for kids as enablers to

Lori Boll

17:09

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

17:09

their academic engagement. Most teachers haven’t been trained in really effective evidence-based classroom managed be behaviors. There’s something like less than 35% of teachers. Then we have admin prep. They’re not getting trained in this. And so

Lori Boll

17:24

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

17:24

we have a big gap. So then that’s where professional development and professional learning

in service, not pre-service, because our pre-service prep programs don’t always equip people with the day-to-day practices that are relevant to their roles. So then we got to fill in the gaps here. and I mean a little bit of a prelude for the conferences. We’re I’m gonna just talk about hopefully make it very practical, just adult behavior change. And why is it all about us to get to outcomes for students? And then how do we actually get the us piece right?

And where do we sometimes get off the off track a little bit with the S piece and then we get we we fail to kind of get to the c student outcomes that are ultimately are aligned with our values. Why we get up in the morning and choose what we do is to impact young people’s lives.

Lori Boll

18:15

So let’s switch a little bit to international schools. Is it any different for international schools? So we bring together educators with different cultural backgrounds, professional training, languages, beliefs about teaching and student behavior. And I’m just curious how leaders can build shared ownership of change while respecting that.

diversity and adapting implementation to the local context.

Dr. Clay Cook

18:47

Yeah, I mean there is no successful implementation without adaptation to the context. So that’s that’s kind of a general rule of thumb. You gotta understand the context and people, and then within that, we gotta facilitate a process of going through kind of what the stages of implementation. So we gotta get really clear. And one model I like is called the EPIS model, exploration, preparation.

implementation and sustainment. We got to go in and explore and help people kind of collectively recognize what are the problems or needs that exist, what are the root causes that explain why those needs exist. And then we’re going to have to work together and do with and not to. It’s just like with kids do do with and not to. We don’t have rules and enforce them. We get community agreements where we activate student voice and ownership. People are more likely to invest in something they co create.

So we engage in a collective process to then select the things that are going to address the identified need. That’s the exploration. But we’re trying to select and get clear on what things. And then preparation is getting people in the systems ready. And we we make that transparent and we let people represent their perspectives, but also into like work towards this idea of collective impact, us all getting in the same boat, rowing in the same direction. We’re just working in Hawaii.

Around some work and they have a word for this. It’s called Neapapa. It’s a beautiful

Lori Boll

20:20

Hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

20:21

language. What it means is everybody get in the same canoe because we got to work together to get to this destination. We can’t, even though our diversity brings in in an international school what our excellence, but we all have to be able to find common ground within that and work together because this is about collaboration and creating a culture of excellence. Culture is collective.

behavior that produces climate. Climate is how people feel and the outcomes we achieve around that. So I I would say that we have to understand the people and what they’re bringing to the table and we have to use a process. But at the end of the day, implementation says there are effective things humans need, regardless of kind of the the geographical or cultural context.

Kids are going to need to feel connected relationally. We’re going to have to have actively engaging instructional practices. All these types of things we start to use and say, at the end of the day, we’re doing human work. How do we actually work together to do that human work, to select those effective things so we can organize ourselves and then build the systems that support the implementation of those things? But we would have to understand the context and the people.

in order to understand how best to facilitate that process that honors people’s perspectives, but also nudges people to do that collective impact work.

Lori Boll

21:52

Hmm.

Dr. Clay Cook

21:54

Implementation,

one pa thing about it doesn’t find much success in what we call like everybody gets to be an independent kayaker and go in different directions. There’s not many successful implementation models where each people, just beca based on their own autonomy and independence, get to go off and do their own thing. There is not

Lori Boll

22:14

Right.

Dr. Clay Cook

22:14

a successful implementation model using that. It’s more about collaboration, teamwork.

Finding common ground. What are our core practices? What what are the menu of interventions we’re gonna organize all of ourselves around? So it really is getting in and defining it, what are those effective things in our system and realizing that has to be team collective work, not people going rogue and kind of doing their own thing.

Lori Boll

22:46

Thanks. I’m curious about your organization, Character Strong, and what it exactly you do. My understanding is it’s involved around MTSS. So let me know, let us know what what you all do over there.

Dr. Clay Cook

23:06

Yeah, so we do a couple of things. Some things are a little more com confusing to understand because of our name. So like

Lori Boll

23:14

huh.

Dr. Clay Cook

23:14

our we consult on implementation and MTSS that is what we call product agnostic. It it’s not about we also develop effective things. I’ll talk about that. That’s what we’re most known for, but we have this arm that’s about serving the work.

It doesn’t care about what the thing is. It it partners with systems to increase capacity to implement the most effective things. It’s honing in on as priorities to get to kid outcomes and then engages in that leadership support, provides coaching. We like to say that work. When you’re getting implementation right, you have more adult data than you do student data. We help systems gather adult data that spurs continuous improvement because most systems.

Have tons of student data, but are so lean and the adult data is virtually non-existent, like fidelity data or culture climate data on our adults, or a variety of system level. How effective are we teaming? What’s is that process of teaming of that’s adult system data that drives it? So we help with that. So that’s one side of our house. The other is we build multi-tiered solutions. So more on the social emotional behavioral side.

We have a tier one solution. What we’re trying to do is one key into one door. So if a a school wants one partner, they don’t have to go work with a bunch of different organizations. They can work with one organization to bring to bring to life a continuum of care. It does social emotional learning things, behavior support things. We also have like policy prevention programs, bullying prevention, suicide prevention, abuse prevention, and substance use prevention. So

Schools don’t need to adopt a program for every practice, and we’re trying to solve for the problem in implementation, which is too many fragmented solutions that schools have to piecemeal together and it overwhelms

Lori Boll

25:11

Yeah.

Dr. Clay Cook

25:12

the capacity. Then we have tier two, we have screening procedures, menus of interventions. How do you match kids to the right interventions, providing the actual evidence-based content, progress monitoring tools, fidelity tracking tools, and we have the same thing at tier three. So schools can

they wanted to, they can partner for the whole continuum of care on the social, emotional, behavioral side. So we d we have kind of

Lori Boll

25:34

Nice.

Dr. Clay Cook

25:34

those two kind of sides of our business, both trying to serve the work because we’re all former educators at character strong.

Lori Boll

25:43

It’s kind of a perfect, perfect combination. I just think about, you know, there we have so many international schools right now that they’re bringing in MTSS or they might be in the middle of it, but they’re you know, the implementation piece of it and it’s been years. but it’s I think overall it’s it’s something that is has become this huge thing that

they’re struggling with, you know, just because staff turnover or or they’re, you know, people are really struggling at the teachers at the school are struggling with the thought that these are all our students. So it’s not the learning support teachers problem or the counselor’s issue. it they are all our students.

I’m just wondering if if you see that often in the schools with whom you work.

Dr. Clay Cook

26:46

I’m sitting there shaking my head because yes, I mean this is belief work and mindset work that you know and it’s shared ownership work that obviously if if a system we often go in and first with like with the MTSS work, we have to have shared clarity in what we mean by certain language we’re gonna use because MTSS is organizational culture work. Tier one means what? Who owns Tier One?

And we need that shared understanding that that’s all of us. It’s every kid, and we’re including, and differentiated support lives within tier one. That’s not a tier two or tier three intervention. There needs to be ownership, and then we need a workflow we build so people can engage in conversations to identify differentiated support for kids, but that lives within tier one. But if you conflate identifying kids for tier two and tier three in the same conversation, most people are gonna wanna hand off the kid to someone else so they own the kid.

Lori Boll

27:44

Right.

Dr. Clay Cook

27:44

And

so we really work on these kind of common but yes, we see it because we do see a lot of the the cultures of how people are doing business is a fix it or refer out culture and not an a shared ownership. Like regardless of whether we a kid requ

Dr. Clay Cook

28:37

Yeah, I mean it’s it’s a shared ownership situation when we’re talking about people wanting to own kids and they need to recognize even if a kid receives tier two and tier three, that’s supplemental to in addition to tier one, all kids are still gonna receive tier one. And if I’m a classroom teacher, that means I have to continuously improve tier one and differentiate supports. I don’t get to opt out and

and hand a off a kid to someone else to who’s gonna then own the kid. And so we do really deep kind of clarity work, but I do see that what you’re labeling as a common kind of issue that’s undermining. And then I also see MTSS is ambitious and we go, we over implement things.

And we have way

Lori Boll

29:22

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

29:22

too many things that there’s not even a human on the planet that could implement all those things. We’re rolling out PBIS, SEO, restorative practices, equity-based, culturally responsive instruction, science of reading, standards-based grading, and we’re just piling it on and we expect an adult human to actually connect all those dots and figure out how to execute it because we’re siloed in how we roll things out. And if we’re siloed,

Each person in charge of the silo acts like their thing is the most important thing without

Lori Boll

29:55

Yeah.

Dr. Clay Cook

29:56

factoring in the other things that people are being exposed to. And so that’s there’s only one way out that I’ve observed, and that’s teams that come together cross-functionally to come up with one implementation plan and one set of priorities. I often say we should have one academic priority and one social emotional behavioral priority.

I’ve worked with systems that have nearly eighty priorities and you know, and the competing demands, the adults are just overwhelmed. Be and it’s under

Lori Boll

30:28

Yeah.

Dr. Clay Cook

30:29

the veil of MTSS though.

Lori Boll

30:32

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. This is all so good. I want to keep talking to you, but we are almost out of time. I you mentioned a little bit about what you’ll be doing in for us in Jakarta. You are one of our keynote presenters and a pre-conference presenter. So just talk a little bit more about what you’ll be talking about.

Please.

Dr. Clay Cook

31:01

Yeah,

number one, I want to bring kind of hope and optimism to our work. I want

Lori Boll

31:07

Mm.

Dr. Clay Cook

31:08

I really want to think about young people who we’re currently maybe not meeting their needs as best as we possibly can. And we as the adults, we have to be in the right mindset and then we have to engage in kind of collaborative work. And that if we get the adult

piece right, we get the student outcome piece right. And I wanna in a practical way try to translate kind of this knowledge base, that implementation science and make it digestible and usable. And I I firmly believe when communicated in the right way, people have a lot of hope and optimism that no matter what needs kids bring to the educational table, we can we can meet their needs.

based on what we have control over and what we can implement, regardless of outside circumstances that are happening in kids’ lives, we have the ability to and to put in place really effective practices. So it in a nutshell, it’s all I’m gonna talk a lot about the adult behavior change piece, but in a way that hopefully people will laugh, hopefully people will feel really hopeful and optimistic about what can be accomplished, especially when we come together and we collaborate in that work.

Lori Boll

32:25

Well, I’m really excited you’re going to be joining us there. have you been to Indonesia before?

Dr. Clay Cook

32:32

Well, no. and I’m someone who once you catch a travel bug bug or it take in new cultures, you develop a deeper appreciation for humanity, and understanding how good difference is. I’m appreciative of the opportunity to go

Take in a new culture, be part of a really meaningful event and partner with such an incredible organization like you all.

Lori Boll

33:09

Well, awesome. I I will say I lived there for several years in the early two thousands and it is an incredibly beautiful culture. And I know that all of us that attend are going to have a an incredible time. And we’re celebrating our twenty fifth anniversary of Senya. So we’re excited about that. I know.

Dr. Clay Cook

33:31

I saw that. Yeah, that’s cool. Twenty five years, that’s an accomplishment.

Lori Boll

33:37

Amazing. That makes me really old though. well Clay, thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed talking about this topic. I hope that I can join and see some of your pre conference as well because this is quite a fascinating topic and we all can learn so much from you. So

Looking forward to it.

Dr. Clay Cook

34:08

Yeah, thank

you. Yeah, I look forward to being able to spend time with folks at the event, pre conference keynote and the like. And yeah, thanks for having me on, Laurie.