The AI Startup Aiming to Help All Students Find Their Reading Mojo

Class Disrupted is an education podcast featuring author Michael Horn and Futre’s Diane Tavenner in conversation with educators, school leaders, students and other members of school communities as they investigate the challenges facing the education system in the aftermath of the pandemic — and where we should go from here. Find every episode by bookmarking our Class Disrupted page or subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or Stitcher. Dacia Toll, co-CEO of Coursemojo and co-founder of Achievement First, joins Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner to share how Coursemojo is using artificial intelligence to support students and teachers in English Language Arts. The conversation dives into how Coursemojo functions in real classrooms and the very human process it took to build the product itself. Toll explains how she and her team started with the core curriculum — high quality instructional materials that build knowledge and vocabulary over time — in schools, then focused on how to ask students the right questions to gauge their understanding, give them the right feedback and then ask the right next question. They then figured out how to surface those insights for teachers in actionable ways. Listen below to hear about the professional development Coursemojo offers teachers and how AI makes it much easier to rapidly incorporate feedback and update the product, but, of course, with limitations. Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows. Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael. Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you and continue to crank on, uh, these, uh, AI tools that are starting to change what learning looks like in schools with you today. Diane Tavenner: Today is gonna be a really fun one. I’m very excited to dive in with our guests today, but before we do that, this is our second time making this ask of our listeners, a second time in like seven seasons. And we never really thought this was important or quite frankly even thought about it, but it turns out it would be super helpful if you all could rate or review Class Disrupted wherever you’re listening to the podcast. And of course, please subscribe to it, and, and we’ve never asked you to do this because this is very much like a labor of love for us, but, but it turns out it kind of matters. A little bit. Michael Horn: Yeah, it’s absolutely true, Diane. And so a good way for other listeners to find out about it. And we of course get tons of private feedback from listeners, so we know you’re all out there. But, you know, if you can rate it, review it, subscribe it, you’ll help other people figure out as well what’s going on here. And while, as you said, this is a passion project for us, we do want it to matter and change the broader dialogue so people are having these conversations. And it turns out those, 5 stars, subscribe, beep, whatever it is. Those are a big deal, right, Diane? Diane Tavenner: Yeah, they are. And then the last thing we’ll say about this is please keep telling us privately the things that we’re asking you to now say publicly, which is like what you like, who we should talk to, what’s working. We really do love the feedback and try to incorporate it every chance we get. And so please keep that, keep that coming. Michael Horn: Keep it coming indeed. This is going to be a fun episode today though. It’s a friend of both of ours who, deep admiration for Dacia Toll, is our guest today. She’s a lifelong educator, school builder. She’s known for her work, obviously in 1999, founding principal of Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, dedicated to closing that achievement gap and then went on to found, of course, Achievement First. A network of many, I think 40-plus charter schools in the country, recognized nationwide as one of the highest performing school systems and so forth. And then in 2021, Dacia left Achievement First and soon after launched this company called Coursemojo, which we’re gonna get to talk about today. We’re gonna break it down. It’s an AI-powered teaching assistant, but we’re gonna actually say what that in fact means, ‘cause it has very, very cool specific use cases that I think people are gonna enjoy learning about. And Dacia, thank you so much for being here. We’re thrilled to have you. Dacia Toll: Very happy to be here with both of you guys. Diane Tavenner: Yeah, super happy. I will say that over the years I have learned so much from Dacia on so many fronts. And so I’m really grateful to be here with you. Dacia Toll: Right back at you, Diane. Diane Tavenner: Yeah. Yeah. Michael Horn: Well, I was gonna say, this is fun, right? We’ve all known each other and Dacia, you and Diane, you have something in common, which is you founded a school, then a CMO, and left a few years back and now both of you running edtech companies. We may come back to that. I should say you both raised venture funding. Like, there’s a lot of interesting things here. Listeners, of course, have a sense for why Diane made her job move, in my parlance. But why, why did you make yours? Like, what’s the founding story behind Coursemojo and the problem you were trying to solve by founding it? Dacia Toll: Yeah, so as you pointed out, I’ve been at this for a while now. I’ve spent a lot of time in my happy place, which is classrooms. Trying to figure out how to create the student experiences and the student outcomes, short-term, long-term, that we all want. And I do think we had a fair amount of, our students had a lot of success by at least the traditional measures. And then importantly, we always anchored in college graduation and launched into a career as part of what we were very focused on. But, it was hard. Like everything, you know, to really get a great teacher in every classroom with high-quality instructional materials and a strong classroom culture and relationships amongst kids and teachers and family and community connections. And then, I got inspired by Diane and tried to pull off project-based learning and expeditions and personal goals. And sort of double down on, I don’t know, I don’t like calling them soft skills, but like the whole package, both as a parent, I now have teenage boys and as an educator. Michael Horn: I always remember seeing your kid in the school, whereas you were making that transformation. It was so much fun to watch. Dacia Toll: Yeah. Yeah. So yes, my own kids went to Achievement First schools. And so it’s just, it’s all very personal and I, I both believe as much as I did in the, in the possibility of success, but if we’re honest about it, it took so many things to line up to be successful. And I just, especially when AI emerged on the scene, I thought, wow, this, I’ve been frankly for most of that time an edtech skeptic. I think there have been lots of promises and it’s sort of overpromise, underdelivering is I think the pattern if you’re honest about most edtech. And AI felt different. Like we refer to it internally, I know others do as well as an electricity. And you still have to build the light bulb or the power screwdriver or, you know, the tools that will leverage that electricity, but you are fundamentally working with something different now. And I found that inspiring. And so how, the problem we are focused on, it does feel like it’s been a lifelong effort, is, uh, reading achievement. Like, as you guys know, the NAEP scores in 8th grade are at the lowest level in 30 years. It does really feel like too many kids are falling off a cliff when it comes to basics of reading and writing. We could debate whether we think that’s still gonna matter in an AI-powered future. I do. And so it, and it feels really urgent. And so we are, we have two big north star goals. We are trying to improve reading achievement. Specifically, we focus at the middle school level, although we’re now expanding to grades 3 through 10 next year. And then second, on teacher efficacy leading to teacher retention. Like we want more great people to stay in this profession. I…