New Hampshire Summer Learning Series Session 5: Writing Coach

All right, good, great! Good morning, everyone. So welcome back to our summer learning series with KH Academy for New Hampshire Educators. Just a reminder that this is part of our summer learning path because we are working to enroll all of you into our partnership for back to school that includes Conmigo, the district partnership. If you use MAP Growth and Clever learning paths, that is going to be our last session next Tuesday. But today, we are going to learn from Sarah Robinson, our writing coach.

I just want to remind you who we are again: Danielle Sullivan, senior regional manager, Northeast District partnership; Barbara Campbell is your District Success Manager; and Crystal Hercules. Actually, she was starting, but we have a new PL person who is going to be joining us in New Hampshire. So, after Sarah shares today, I'll just remind everyone how you can sign up for a partnership if you haven't done so yet.

I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen and hand it over to Sarah.

Sarah Robinson: Everyone, thank you for welcoming me. I'm going to be sharing my screen now.

All right, can you all see Kigo Writing Coach? Okay, great! Thank you for welcoming me, Danielle. I'm really excited to be here. As Danielle said, I'm Sarah Robinson. I am the senior product manager at KH Academy for literacy and classroom experiences. I'm also a former middle school ELA and Humanities teacher in New England, where I taught in Boston for six years. I was a curriculum writer and an instructional trainer.

When I was teaching, I think one of the things that really stuck out to me as a teacher in Boston specifically was that I had many students who were reading and writing below grade level. I was responsible for about 100 students each year. I don't know what the student-teacher ratios are where you all are, but being an ELA teacher in Boston meant that every time I assigned one essay to my students, I had about 100 drafts to give feedback on. I had 100 students to support through all stages of the writing process.

In one school year, I had to give feedback on 2,500 essays. When I was teaching ELA, I worked 12 hours a day, nearly every weekend, and still felt like I could never get to all the students who needed help. I could never keep a close enough eye on the students who really needed me because they often weren't the ones asking for it. I couldn't get feedback to my students quickly enough, as hard as I tried, and I never really knew at any given moment exactly where my students stood. I was very burnt out. I loved it, but I was very burnt out.

This was before COVID learning loss; this was before generative AI and its impact on ELA teachers. So I have a lot of empathy for teachers today. I did a little dive into what teachers are experiencing now because I’m now representing ELA teachers in 2024, and I haven't been in the classroom for a while. I often hang around in ELA teacher Facebook groups just to see what teachers are talking about.

On the right side here, you can see some recent quotes from teachers who have been talking about how hard it is specifically to teach writing in 2024. You have teachers talking about kids in sixth grade not being able to write a single paragraph. Teachers saying they do not know how to get grading back on time; it's extremely overwhelming. How do English teachers assign essays at all?

On our side at Khan Academy, we interview teachers and co-create with them constantly. Some things we’ve heard recently are, “You know, with writing, it’s just so hard.” I’ve heard that more than once. It's just so hard! On top of that, we had teachers talk about this new need of wanting and needing proof that a student wrote what they said they wrote.

I think just in the past couple of years, what we’ve seen, in addition to the overwhelm that teachers already had, is how hard AI has made their jobs. Here's a couple of my favorite quotes: “I’ve seen several AI checkers online recently. How accurate would you say those are? They're not.” And another one just says, “I hate AI,” and this one: “It’s going to drive me out of education.”

So this is clearly a new issue that I personally didn't experience when I was a teacher, but I think we all need to pay attention to this. At Khan Academy, we are all very well known for being a wonderful STEM resource for teachers, but our mission has always been to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. So we’ve had this long-standing desire to support humanities content to help ELA teachers, to put out reading and writing resources.

But, you know, as somebody who developed another edtech product for ELA in the past, I know how hard it can be to do that because you need to worry about content. You need to figure out how to integrate this into the teachers’ routines. Specifically for ELA, it can be really challenging.

When we partnered with OpenAI in late 2022, immediately we saw ways that it could help instead of continuing to hurt ELA teachers’ lives. It could help them and help students, too. So we started thinking about writing—students are expected to meet grade-level standards. They are supposed to be writing for 60 minutes per day, if you can believe that! They need support not just with feedback; they need support through the entire writing process from the very beginning of getting that essay concept.

If they are going to grow their writing skills, the feedback they receive needs to be specific, actionable, personalized, and timely. Without that, it is very hard for a student to improve their writing skills. But in reality, what we see, and I'm sure you all are very familiar with these stats, is that only about a quarter of students meet grade-level writing standards. This data is from before the pandemic. Less than 10% are actually writing for 60 minutes a day.

It is basically impossible for one teacher, with the number of students they have, to support every student throughout the entire writing process and give feedback in a timely manner. I used to do this; I would set a timer on my iPhone for 10 minutes per kid. That's it! I would mark up their paper, fill out a very rough rubric—10 minutes per kid; 17 hours for one essay draft—it is impossible!

So when we decided to think about this as a problem that we wanted to solve at KH Academy, the first thing we did in January 2023 was come up with the concept; we developed a prototype. It was part of an internal hackathon. People immediately saw the power of something like this. I think one of our lead developers was like, “I’m not a strong writer; I’ve never been a strong writer. I’m a math guy. I learned how to write a thesis statement; I didn't even know what a thesis statement was.” And we were all like, “Good job, buddy!” It was really inspiring to see the power of what this tool could do.

From there, we started building out more. We launched our college admissions essay activities, which have been pretty popular. We offered feedback on admissions essays and an activity to help brainstorm. In November of last year, we launched our essay feedback activity, and this was exciting because students could provide their first draft, and the AI would generate really high-quality feedback and provide revision support on that first draft.

I’ll show you a little more about how teachers and students responded to that later on. But from there, it became really clear that we wanted to keep building out backwards from the creation of the first draft and submitting that for feedback. That led us to last month in July when we launched the student experience of Writing Coach, which is now available in Kigo. Next month, we are gearing up for the teacher experience launch of Writing Coach, and I'm going to give you a full preview and demo of that in a moment.

So that is kind of how we ended up where we are. When we launched essay feedback, we got a lot of positive feedback. We had teachers say that they were blown away by the quality of the feedback. It gave feedback that matched what they would have provided. This is something we heard over and over again. They couldn't believe the feedback Kigo provided was remarkably similar and sometimes more comprehensive than what they would have given the student. We had a student from Florida, who does IB essays, say that the tool made the most significant difference in helping their students grow than they ever seen. There was one teacher in Ohio who used essay feedback consistently, and she was the only teacher whose every single one of her students passed the state writing assessment.

We have had a lot of positive feedback about this particular first version of this feedback and revision activity. But when we went into school, we did a whole kind of listening tour in Indiana specifically. A lot of teachers said, “Yes, we love essay feedback, but I still have a large number of students, a non-insignificant number of students, who cannot get that first draft. They struggle to produce one draft to submit for feedback.”

Like, this is great for the kids who can do that, but for the many students I have who just cannot, for whatever reason, put pen to paper, they feel paralyzed and like they just can't do it. We need something that does a little bit more. So that's where Writing Coach evolves into. Writing Coach obviously has not been out in front of students yet because the school year hasn't started, and we just launched it.

But in our user tests, these were some of the things that teachers said when we demoed it and gave them a full kind of tour. The purpose of this was to get their feedback on how we could make Writing Coach better. By and large, they had very positive things to say: “This is the answer to all our dreams,” “This exceeded my expectations,” “This brightens my day.” Teachers were chomping at the bit to get access to this as soon as possible.

So before I dive into what Writing Coach is and how it looks at a very high level, I'll actually start right to left here and say what Writing Coach is not because you probably have been bombarded with or heard about many different writing tools and solutions that are out there. I'm familiar with most of them.

It's not just a digital essay writing platform; we do those things, but that's not what it is. It's not an evaluative or grading tool for teachers; that isn't something we’re considering building out. I don’t want to build a solution where students produce essays with an AI; they get feedback from the AI, the AI grades it, and then they're done. Writing is a human practice and a human activity, and I think there should be humans involved in that. That means there is a teacher at the end of the day reading students' writing. Students are sharing their writing with their peers.

But it's not 100% on the teacher for everything. It's not a productivity tool for students. There are many AI writing tools out there, and their goal is to produce better writing. Our tool produces better writers. It’s also not just a feedback generator or a tool that provides easy-to-accept suggestions for improving grammar and mechanics.

I'm a big Grammarly user; I love Grammarly, but this is very different from that. It doesn't suggest changes for you to just accept and then move on. It's an instructional tool. The primary purpose is student learning and teacher transparency. It’s designed to guide students through the entire process while preventing cheating.

It is a way for teachers to give students more practice writing, to give them the opportunity to get those 60 minutes in a day and to give them real-time support. Tools like this really allow teachers in science class or history class to take a turn asking students to write, and they don't need to necessarily hold their hands the whole way through while kids can still get that feedback and support that they need.

Of course, it’s also data dashboards for teachers, so it has at-a-glance and in-depth insights into student writing processes.

All right, so let's dive into the student experience of Writing Coach. I'm going to show you a demo in just a second. With Writing Coach, students can get support through the entire writing process. So I'm going to show you the very first step, which is understanding the assignment and getting started.

Then there's formulating ideas and outlining. Then there's drafting and getting unstuck from drafting if they need it, and of course feedback and revising that piece that we originally had as well with essay feedback.

I just realized that I haven't pulled up the other prototype yet for the teacher experience, so I'll make sure I do that in a second. But, okay, can you now see "Daylight Savings Time Persuasive Essay"? Yes? Okay, great!

So the essay writing process, as you probably know, is something that takes more than 20 to 30 minutes. I'm going to try and give you a sense of what this looks like without going too deep in the weeds. The very first step of Writing Coach actually starts with the teacher creating the assignment. I’m skipping over that part, but a student can also click "Begin New Essay" here and actually start their own if they want to.

But if the teacher wants that data dashboard, then she can create the assignment herself and fill in the essay information. When the student clicks on the assignment and gets here from their Kigo Learner Activities page or from their Assignments page, the first thing they do is see Kigo here.

Kigo is explaining that they're going to be writing this essay and these are the instructions from the teacher. In this first step, we've programmed the AI to specifically focus on helping the student break down the prompt and understand the essay requirements. This is not really about doing the research or beginning the outlining process at all; this is just about making sure they understand what the expectations are before moving forward.

This is why it’s really important when we train teachers on how to use Writing Coach that they pay specific attention to the essay prompt and instructions. I don’t know what the New Hampshire expectations are for writing or what your specific state rubric looks like, but we have an opportunity here to get specific so that Kigo can make sure it's aligning its feedback and guidance to your specific expectations in your state.

If there’s a certain way of formatting an essay or a certain kind of citation that your teachers prefer or any kind of guidance like that, if your teacher is providing that in the instructions field, then Kigo will take that context and craft the experience to align with whatever it is that you need. That also works at the teacher-level tier.

For example, if you have AP US History teachers doing DBQs or IB teachers, I spoke with a teacher recently who does the Cambridge ACE writing program. If you include that context here, say this is a persuasive essay aligned to this framework, then Kigo will take that into context and tailor it to those expectations.

When the student lands here, the ask from the student is, “Do you have any questions about this?” If the student doesn't have any questions to start off, we have these prompts they can click on just to get a sense of what they’re doing. They can say “Explain the essay type” or ask for the requirements.

One of the things we’ve seen students do a lot is define terms in these prompts that are sometimes unfamiliar. If I may not know the word “articulate,” I can say, “What does articulate mean?”

Okay, it got what I tried to type there. So it defines words for me. I'm also noticing here it's asking for a rebuttal, and maybe, you know, I don’t remember what a rebuttal is. So I can ask, “What is a rebuttal again?” And it's going to give me an explanation of that.

When you respond to an opposing argument to show why your position is still strong in your essay after presenting an argument from the other side, you need to explain why your main argument is better.

Okay, so what do I do now? All right, let's start by deciding whether you support or oppose Daylight Savings Time. What are your initial thoughts on this topic? Once you have a position, we can move on to gathering evidence and organizing your arguments.

Kigo is going to push them in the direction of what they should do next. The AI is asking me, “Do I have a stance on this?” If I don't have a stance, it’ll push me to research. If the teacher has specified, “Make sure that you do research; make sure you cite textual evidence,” Kigo will remind them to do those things.

If you’re writing an essay where they’re kind of just supposed to write about general experience, then it’ll brainstorm that with them. Again, this is really important for specifying to Kigo what you want from the students. The student can kind of continue this conversation as long as they need to, but when they’re ready to move on, or when Kigo recognizes they're good, they can proceed to outlining.

In the outlining stage, we worked closely with teachers to find an outlining structure and process that fits the needs of many different kinds of writing and ways that teachers teach outlining. The beauty of this is that there really is a lot of flexibility here.

The default has three body paragraphs, but you can add as many more as you want or remove body paragraphs to have fewer. In Massachusetts, we had an open response that seventh graders had to do, and that had typically just one body paragraph with three pieces of evidence inside of it.

It’s just very different, so you can structure it to work with whichever essay structure or type of writing assignment you need. You can remove evidence and sources, and you can add reasoning and explanation and remove those, as well. Kigo is always looking at those essay instructions the teacher provided. If the teacher says, “This has to be five paragraphs, or you need to include at least three body paragraphs, or you need to have cited textual evidence,” when the student tries to move on to drafting, it's going to check the outline and make sure that it meets those expectations.

I'm going to actually jump over to this version because I don't want you to sit through me copying and pasting into all these fields, so I have a filled-in version of the outline here on this tab. One thing I wanted to show you was that at one point, I had a main point in my third body paragraph that was the counterargument, and I didn't provide the rebuttal.

So my argument here is that Daylight Savings Time shouldn't be observed anymore, and in my third body paragraph, my main point was that Daylight Savings Time helped save the environment, and I forgot to include the rebuttal. So I asked Kigo, “Can you check my third body paragraph?”

It told me, “The main point suggests that Daylight Savings Time helps save the environment, which seems to be an argument in favor of daylight savings time since your thesis is against it. This should be presented as a counterargument.” The guidance it gives me is to add a counterargument and rebuttal to the outline so that I can ensure that I'm aligned to the point I'm trying to make here.

This is something I frequently saw with my seventh graders; they sort of forgot what position they took and would sort of flip-flop between paragraphs. If at any point the student is just stuck, they can just click this button or they can say “Help.” That's often what we see when we review chat; kids are just like, “I don’t know what to do; I'm stuck!”

Kigo is going to be there, and something we heard from teachers is that a lot of kids are afraid to raise their hand. They're ashamed to go up to the front of the classroom, and this feels safer for those kids who are too shy and typically don’t ask for that kind of help because they don’t want to be seen as needing help.

It's just another way to get that input. Especially as a teacher, I remember buzzing around the room trying to check as many kids as possible, so this is always there for them; they can use it as a resource. I'm going to move on now to drafting.

Let me go back to... well, I think this is fine. I’ve already filled in the draft here because this is a previous essay, but if I hadn't filled in the draft, obviously this would be empty. You have down here; the outline is the default. So this is the outline I just filled in, and then the chat is here if you need Kigo. You can open Kigo again, and it's always there for the student if they need to get help.

They can also view their assignment instructions if needed. When they’re drafting—let me actually delete this so you can see what they would see if they started here. What we’ve done is allow students to copy and paste from their outline into their draft. Again, if they get stuck, they can ask Kigo for help.

So I'm just kind of pasting here some of the stuff that I had for my outline. I'm going to go to chat and just say, “I'm stuck.”

Kigo will reply, “Okay, let's work through this together. It looks like you're at the beginning stages of your draft. Let's start by expanding your introduction. Your introduction should hook the reader, provide some background, and state your thesis. You already have a thesis statement, so let's work on the hook and background information. How can you grab the reader's attention? Think about something interesting related to Daylight Savings Time. What can you say to introduce the topic before stating your thesis?”

It's prompting me to go back and fill in my introduction. If I were to ask again, it would help me move on. Now I'm going to ask, “Can you please just write that first paragraph for me?”

Kigo replies, "I understand you're feeling stuck, but it's important that you work through this yourself to develop your writing skills. Let's break it down together."

If I wanted to, I could just open ChatGPT in another tab and ask it to write the whole essay for me or an intro paragraph. I come in here and paste it in; it’s going to seem all hunky-dory for me on the student side until the teacher sees the report. You’ll see what happens if a student does that.

If you're pasting from your outline into your draft, that's fine, but if you're pasting from somewhere else, that’s something we flag for teachers. Let me jump back over... oh, yeah, let's see.

This was the one I was letting you see; let me just grab the sample essay so I can move on. I'm going to show you now what it looks like to move on to revising. I had actually already submitted this essay.

It was very quick, but you can see here that Kigo generated 12 suggestions for this first draft. Those are organized into five different categories: introduction, which is about their claim—do they have a thesis and a claim aligned to the essay prompt? Have they fleshed out their introduction? Does it have enough context?

Evidence is about the alignment of the evidence to the points they’re trying to make and the way they've chunked their evidence if they've cited it. Structure is about organization and structure. Conclusion is just the conclusion paragraph, and style is really about tone, vocabulary, and the formality of the writing. It’s where Kigo will point out grammar issues or awkward phrasing, too.

So I'm going to let you see the essay feedback activity. In the revising portion, not only does Kigo generate the feedback, but it's also there as a revising tool. We're working on something right now where we are breaking out the ways that students can chat with Kigo because students were not really understanding why they would chat or what they could do if they chatted.

We’re going to show them things like “Give an example of what you mean,” “Explain this suggestion,” and “Check my revision.” Students can say, “I don’t have enough context in my introduction.”

In my introduction, I do the classic thing that my seventh graders would do and start it with a question; that was their favorite kind of hook. Then they just jump right into it. “Daylight Savings Time shouldn’t be observed anymore."

I’m not explaining anything about what Daylight Savings Time is, where it comes from, the history behind it. Kigo points that out to me like a strong essay would give a very quick summary. Now I'm like, “Okay, what do you mean by context? How do I add context?”

I’m going to say, “Give me an example.” It’s not going to give me the sentence to provide context; it will give me an example from a different kind of essay. Here’s an example of a weak intro for the benefits of recycling. Here’s a revised one where they give an example of how you could provide context on recycling before just plopping in your thesis statement.

From here, I could add in a sentence and say, “Daylight Savings Time, or DST, was founded because…” After I’ve done that, I can now go back and say, “Is that better?” or “Did I fix it?”

If I do that straight from this section, I’ll be able to say, “Check my revision!” Kigo will open the chat and say, “Yes, you did it; very good job!” or “That context really wasn't enough; maybe add a little bit more.”

Once Kigo has assured me I've addressed the suggestion, I can mark it as resolved. The student can go through each of the paragraphs, review the feedback, and also give some positive feedback, too. There’s a mix of praise and actionable critical feedback.

Once the student is done resolving all their suggestions, they click "Mark as Complete." This allows them then to export the essay because, again, the end result of this process is not the student just saying, “Okay, I wrote an essay; now I'm just going to move along my merry way.”

We care about teachers reading students' work and what they have to say; that’s the entire point of writing: communicating. So we allow students to export their essay to Google Doc in Google Drive. They can save it as a PDF or MS Word. These are the different ways that we allow students to upload them to an LMS if teachers are going to grade the essay in an LMS.

I actually think one of you—yeah, I spoke to one of you at a school visit at one point, and the feedback I got was that it has to work well with Google Classroom. That was something we really took to heart as we heard we have to find ways to make this work with Google Classroom. So exporting to Google Drive and Google Docs—allowing teachers to annotate and link it to Google Classroom and provide their own feedback and grading—was something we wanted to prioritize.

Thank you to whoever that was. Okay, let me jump back. Actually, I'll show you, too. This is the main student essays page. So from Writing Coach, again, you get here as a student just under your Kono activities. For Writing Coach, you have this base to manage the essays that you've written.

You can go back and review your progress, and you can jump back into an essay if you are kind of working on multiple ones at the same time. But it will save your progress, and you can pick something up because oftentimes ELA writing is a multi-day process.

Okay, now I have to make sure I open the right tab. Let me just ensure I get the correct one for the teacher experience. While I'm doing that, actually, I will just show you a quick summary of the teacher experience. Beautiful! That was on the first try!

With the teacher experience and Writing Coach, a large part of how we designed it was focusing on supporting students. How do we create something that is going to be Socratic? It’s not going to do the writing for them; it’s not going to just regurgitate a bunch of their writing with feedback and expect them to do something with it.

It's going to be there through the whole process and help them as they need it without being intrusive and annoying. But on top of that, we also thought deeply about what teachers wanted and needed.

Not only does Kigo allow Writing Coach to provide insights into the students’ entire writing process—so all of their chat histories, their outline, their draft histories, the feedback they got, their moderation, and their conversations—but teachers also get high-level insights.

We don’t want to create more work by saying, “Okay, teachers, here are a hundred different essays, and now you have a hundred chat histories to read and a hundred outlines to review.” We thought about the high-level insights.

Before the teacher begins the process of reading what kids have to say and grading themselves, we wanted to surface things that were insightful or useful, and then they can decide how deep they want to dig into those different processes.

So I will show you what that looks like. Let’s pull this tab in here. All right, so “Daylight Savings Time Persuasive Essay.” This is the teacher's manage assignments page. I’m going to pop over to the insights page for Writing Coach.

Again, this is the report we’ll be releasing; it’s technically in a couple of weeks, but we’ve been saying September, so this will be coming then. What I’m showing you right here is more of a prototype than the actual experience, and this is what we’re calling the class report for Writing Coach.

When you as a teacher create a Writing Coach assignment, you see all of the students in the class that you assigned it to; you see where they are in their writing process. I can see if someone hasn't started or somebody's really far behind compared to their peers. I know to check in with them; I know to figure out what’s going on.

I can see when students in the class last modified their essay or their draft or their outline, whatever they’re working on. I can see their total time spent and see a breakdown of how much time they spent during each of the writing stages.

If I’m just trying to get a sense of, you know, if a student spent 68 minutes, and most of it was chatting with Kigo—they spent five minutes drafting—that’s going to raise a flag for me. That’s something I'm going to want to dig into a little more.

This really allows teachers to see the balance of how that time is being spent and whether they should look closely at this student's full history. I see the word count of their latest draft and high-level feedback, so however many suggestions they got from Kigo, how many they resolved, how many they haven’t resolved.

Or if they’re completed and didn’t resolve some feedback, I might be interested in seeing what feedback they chose not to resolve. We also have originality flags, which I mentioned earlier.

If the student is drafting in a way that indicates they didn’t write it themselves, we will raise these flags. There are different levels of the flags here. If the student didn't do anything concerning, you see this “No Concerns” flag. If they may have pasted about twenty words, we include the guidelines for how the flags get created; it's all in this hover-over section.

If they pasted a smaller number of words, that might raise a yellow flag. But if they paste a larger number of words or paste multiple sections of their draft, this could also raise a certain type of flag.

We’re also taking note if they’re pasting into their evidence or their source—that's not a concern; that’s what we expect them to do. This is really meant to identify things the student is doing that are worth the teacher taking a closer look at, so the teacher isn’t just having to go back into Google draft history and manually check every student’s draft or look at that version history for every single kid because that’s just too time-consuming.

I can then, if I want to dig deep, see that this student pasted 522 words from an unknown source into their draft, and during revising, I’ll click to view writing history, which will take me straight to that originality flag.

Here, I can open it; it will show me what they pasted, highlighting it in the student’s draft, so I can see exactly where they pasted it in. At the same time, I can see what their chat history was. Here, I can see the student also just asked Kigo to write it for them, and so that’s another flag for me.

I’m going to definitely check in with this kid and see what happened, why they did this, and where they pasted it from because this is just not one chunk of evidence. If I look at it and it's a yellow flag because it's not a very large amount of text, and I see the student pasted maybe some new evidence they found, and it wasn't from their outline, which is why it was flagged; I can look at it and say, “Oh, okay, that was new evidence. It's in quotation marks; I see they cited it; we’re all good; this is fine,” and I can kind of dismiss that one.

What this does is it allows teachers to see at a very high level where to focus most of their attention. When they need to, they can really zoom in and look closely. Even if they’re not as interested or if originality warnings aren’t the main thing they’re looking for, maybe I have a student on an IEP or students who are struggling; I can still go back through their whole process to see where they got tripped up or what they struggled with most because it’ll start right here with their final draft.

I can go through understanding; I can see if they chatted with Kigo at all, what kinds of questions they asked in outlining. I can see what their outline looked like and if they asked for any help or what kinds of things they struggled with. I can see the different chunks of time they spent typing and inserting things from their outline, and I can see any flags they received during revising, as well.

All of it is here for teachers; it's all transparent and visible to them, but again, the expectation isn’t that teachers go through this for all 100 or however many students they have; they’re just doing it where they need to. If they need to, it’s here, and they can use it.

We’re also excited to continue adding more kinds of insights to this report. One of the things we’re looking into next is ways to generate a summary of the entire class. You know, we noticed most of the students did well with outlining, while a few students struggled with revising. They really weren’t engaging with that as much, or it seemed, in the writing feedback that was generated, most of the feedback given to students was related to evidence.

That might be a skill you would want to dig into and produce at the student level. We’re really excited to have teachers use this and continue getting feedback from partners, teachers, and students to keep building this out because we really think that this is going to be powerful for teachers who are extremely tired and looking for things that will save them time, help their students improve, and allow them to assign more writing without actually increasing that workload.

One last slide for you, and then I think I may have a few minutes for questions. In summary, how is Writing Coach different from some of those other writing solutions you might be familiar with or might have heard about? The focus with Writing Coach is on the writing process and not just on that final draft.

It’s not just a tool for how to deal with that final draft; it helps students work through that process and gives teachers insights into that process. It allows for personalized, one-on-one support for students and differentiation—not just in feedback but from the very beginning from that understanding and breaking down the prompt.

It’s an instructional tool with the purpose of producing better writers, not a productivity tool or an evaluative tool. It produces authenticity flags and other high-level insights for teachers. Again, it allows teachers to assign more writing and gives students more writing practice, not just in English class but in social studies, science, and other domains while simultaneously reducing burnout by not requiring them to give kids feedback on multiple drafts or hold their hands in all 30 or however many students are in a single classroom at the time.

It gives them that first layer of feedback to improve their writing. So with that, I’m happy to answer questions. I've also put my email here. I know Danielle is available to you, but if you have any questions specifically about Writing Coach, you can reach out to me there.

I think we're close to time, but I'm happy to take any questions.

Audience Member: I'm just flabbergasted in a good way! I’ve been, I think I just missed last week's training, but I've gone to all these. I’m a director of adult ed for Nashua, and I’m wow, that’s great! Thank you as well! You are making a huge difference, and I just got to convince all my teachers to do this.

Sarah Robinson: That’s our goal too! We’ve really been developing this part of Writing Coach. We launched essay feedback in November, and it gained a lot of traction, and then the school year ended. We’ve been developing this year this product over the entire summer, and we’ve been working with teachers on break. But we are so eager for a class of students to begin using it and to start receiving their input!

So yeah, if you do get your teachers to use it, please have them send us feedback.

Audience Member: My only question would be: In math, we have a competency called communication. How easily could you import math symbols into this writing?

Sarah Robinson: Ooh, that is such an interesting question! Actually, in the essay itself, I don’t know, but you can chat because all of our Kigo chats support math symbols; there's a math input. So you can chat about the math. I’d have to try that out and see what happens. It is created so you can do the highlighting and everything like that where the feedback is highlighted. It’s meticulously developed to make sure that works properly because of how it constantly gets passed in and out of different AI prompts.

I wonder what that effect would be, but it’s going to be a very interesting thing to test!

Audience Member: Something to look into!

Sarah Robinson: Yes, absolutely! I didn't know that was a standard for math in Nashua.

Audience Member: Yeah, it's one of our standards for math. We care about communication to represent and solve. Once upon a time, if you could get the right answer, they didn’t care beyond that! We care beyond that now.

Sarah Robinson: You’re on the call! Jody and I had met yesterday, and I told her about the U; she was interested in Writing Coach, and I told her about this. Hopefully, you got all your questions and more answered!

Audience Member: Yeah, I'm looking forward to the recording. I’m definitely thinking about our first department meeting to play it, and then at that point, as an intro, as we get users who are doing it, more kind of in-depth training—maybe with questions that teachers could ask at some point in the early fall.

Sarah Robinson: Absolutely! You guys have a lot of PL hours, so we can definitely do that!

Audience Member: Yeah, great! Thank you!

Sarah Robinson: Thank you! Thanks so much for this!