Dacia Toll, Co-CEO of Coursemojo and the co-founder of Achievement First, joined me and Diane Tavenner on our latest episode of Class Disrupted to learn about how Coursemojo is using AI to support students and teachers in English Language Arts. Our conversation dove into how Coursemojo functions in real classrooms and the very human process Dacia and her team took to build the product itself.
Dacia spoke to us about how she and her team started with the core curriculum—high quality instructional materials that build knowledge and vocabulary over time—in schools and focus on how to ask students the right questions to gauge their understanding, give them the right feedback, and then ask the right next question—and surface those insights for teachers in actionable ways. We learned about the professional development she does with teachers in schools and how AI makes it much easier to rapidly incorporate feedback and update the product. It was also interesting to hear the limitations of large language models today in doing this kind of work.
The care that Coursemojo has been put into building their product is evident—and I look forward to your thoughts on the third in our miniseries profiling different AI tools in schools.
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 7 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?
Teaching, Outcomes, and Challenges
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 think a lot of AI tools are trying to save teachers’ time. We certainly do that too, but we think we are in this profession because we wanna serve kids well, and that what will motivate you is if you feel like I’m doing a really good job at this thing that I care a lot about.
Michael Horn
So let’s dig in then, and just Coursemojo, obviously that tool, as you were saying, that you built using the electricity of AI to help solve that reading problem and boost teacher effectiveness. How do you describe what it does today in middle schools? What is Coursemojo?
Dacia Toll
So, there’s a student-facing side and a teacher-facing side. On the st— well, let me just say, take one quick step back before I dive in. You guys have been having so many fascinating conversations. Thank you for that. and people should like and subscribe and rate.
Michael Horn
Thank you.
Dacia Toll
Favorably, but what I, you know, I think it’s Bob Hughes and others who’ve talked about like multiple levels of AI in schools or models or paradigms. There, there is the one that I think is happening the most, which is finding efficiencies in small ways for teachers, whether that’s grading or on the operational side. And I’m, again, that’s great, but it’s sort of at the margins. And supplemental or not actually touching students at all. Then there’s this second model, which is more transformational when it comes to the teaching and learning experience. I think that’s at the moment where Coursemojo sits. And then there’s the third model, which is the AI-native schools. And I did listen to your episode with John Danner, and that I think is so.
AI’s Impact on Future Schools
Dacia Toll
And my personal belief as somebody who spent a lot of time in schools is that some people will want to and be able to make a leap to an AI-native school that’s an entirely different design, including in the, the goals that it’s trying to achieve with young people. But I think a lot of folks are gonna, hopefully make this transition into the model 2, work where it is meaningfully, it’s transformative in terms of what the experience is like, but it’s not a different universe. It’s like you’re still in schools, you’re still trying to do the core jobs, many of which I think are still important, although we could have that conversation if you wanted. So we’re going into the ELA classroom as it current— mostly as it currently exists, where you, especially in middle school, generally have content expert teachers who are trying to help kids improve their critical thinking about text and their writing skills, discourse, collaboration among students. And we start with the high-quality instructional materials. As you all know, it’s been one of the, I think, most positive steps forward to really have a quality curriculum that’s anchored in building knowledge, vocabulary, and reading skill over time. But that’s another one of those things that we all believe in, but is hard to execute effectively. And as a result, we have not universally seen the gains that we all believe we could. So we start there.
The first thing our team does is identify the hardest thinking part of every lesson. Which we know from the national research on these core curricula is often the part that gets a little watered down or skipped. Teachers run out of time, or frankly, they’re worried about the diversity of learners that exist. I think there’s on average a 5-grade-level span in a typical middle school classroom right now, so you can understand why teachers are anxious about giving the rigor of the text and task. So we identify the hardest thinking part of the lesson. Then for that part, not the entire thing, but for that 25-minute chunk. That’s where, for the kids, as a student said to me, it’s like the handout is talking to me. So it’s the same rich, wonderful text we’re already trying to read.
