Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Postcard from Stanford: TeachFX CEO Jamie Poskin
In this short episode, we talk to Jamie Poskin, CEO and founder of TeachFX, about TeachFX's new $10mm funding round and how the company is finding a completely new source of classroom data in the 'talk' that happens in both online and in-person classes.
Welcome to Season Two of edtech insiders, where we talk to the most interesting thought leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, educators, and investors driving the future of education technology. I'm your host, Alex Sarlin, an edtech veteran with over 10 years of experience at top tech companies. Today, we have a really special guest. It is Jamie Poskin, who is the founder and CEO of teach FX Jamie, welcome.
Jamie Poskin:It's great to be here.
Ben Kornell:Thank you, Jamie and I are actually at the Stanford learning accelerator conference. So this is an addendum to our New York edtech postcards. We've got a postcard from Stanford learning accelerator.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, we're talking to teach effects on both coasts. It's pretty exciting time. So Jamie, give our listeners a quick overview of what TF X is all about. It's a really unique and interesting company.
Jamie Poskin:Yeah. So you know, I'm a former teacher. And what TF x is, is a product for teachers to help us grow and learn. And the way it works is teachers record their class. And then we use our app uses voice artificial intelligence, to analyze that class for kind of learning dynamics that are happening in the classroom. So we're looking at things like, are you asking open ended or closed questions? Are you using high leverage teaching strategies like wait time uptake of student contributions? What is the diversity of participation look alike across your class, and a whole host of other kind of metrics for the teacher, very similar to what an instructional coach or a principal might do if he or she were sitting in the back of your classroom? But we do it all automatically. And in a way that's private to the teacher?
Ben Kornell:Tell me a little bit about the journey. Where did this idea come from? You know, many people have thought about how do we ramp up or accelerate the efficacy of educators? What's the origin of it? And where have you seen it get the most traction?
Jamie Poskin:I think so. The earliest origin way before I even had the idea for the company was, was just that this problem of like, man, teaching is so hard. And there are so many of us, and how do you make an impact on, you know, teachers, like teachers are the big leverage point in the system? How do you help teachers at any kind of scale, it just seemed like an impossible challenge. So that was something that was in the back of my head. And it partly came from my experience as a teacher, like, I joined the school that was only two years old, they didn't have an AP, they didn't have a lot of other support other than the principal, the principal was so busy, you know, I taught math in English, the main subject I taught was English. My English classes were never observed my entire teaching career by another adult. And it was just like, it was a really tough thing to have that as a teacher, but you know, I totally got it, there are huge human capital challenges in the profession. So, you know, that was always something that I had thought about over the years. And then it really wasn't in you know, 10 years later, I'm in grad school, I'm doing my, my MBA, and my MA in Education at Stanford. And I was doing a research project on why teachers leave the profession. And I was interviewing a principal, and we kind of got off on a tangent where he was, you're talking about video and using video to, you know, record classes and give feedback. And he was like, you know, video is great, but it doesn't solve my core problem. And of course, as somebody who was like an aspiring like, Oh, I'd love to start a company, maybe that my ears perked up. And I said, What's your core problem? And he said, you know, it doesn't like, I could watch the video in my pajamas. Instead of being there in person. That's kind of nice, but it doesn't save me time. Like, I'm supposed to be this instructional leader that's giving feedback to all of my teachers. But that ends up being the last thing on my list. Just because everything else takes up all my time. And, you know, you got Stanford, don't you have all these fancy computers there? Couldn't you just run a recording through some fancy computer and spit out all the metrics I want to know? And I was like, I had, honestly like, no idea. Sir, metrics like this. Teaching is an art form, you know, I mean, that was what was in my head. But I said, What do you mean by metrics, and he essentially listed out, you know, 12, or 15 metrics, that is essentially what our product is today.
Alexander Sarlin:Everything that somebody gives you an entrepreneurial idea on a platter like that you gotta run with it. I think that's an incredible story. So I think you have some really exciting news about what's going on with Teach effects right now. What has been going on recently, and what's your growth path right now?
Jamie Poskin:Well, yeah, so not to bury the lead. We just raised our Series A Yeah. Led by reach capital, who was also the first money into teach effects and are sort of even precede round. And so yeah, that's like the big news. I think it comes for us on the heels of a lot of interesting developments, as, you know, our core customers, you know, all of our partners, our K 12, schools and districts moved online. That was challenging for our business, but we ended up building integrations with online learning platforms and you know, really survived the pandemic I would say, but as people are coming back out of virtual learning, embrace In our solution again, and RT, we've seen a ton of growth in the last 12 months. And then that online learning product we built, we're now working with partners in sort of live online learning. So tutoring companies, extracurricular online companies, some in higher ed, some corporate l&d, so that kind of both markets are really kind of taken off, but at different stages. I mean, the, our K 12 work is definitely, you know, we've been doing it longer. It's a little bit more established. But that's really, I think, what prompted this series set?
Ben Kornell:Yeah, and you know, a lot of our entrepreneurs that reach out are trying to scale things in K 12. And the classic venture capital, pushback is long sales cycles, small total addressable market, you know, how do you really, you know, create low high leverage growth, but I often tell them, like, professional development as a category is like eight to 9% of the budget, whereas the app tech is 1%.
Jamie Poskin:So yeah, and we're a professional learning solution, not a tech solution.
Ben Kornell:That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So how did you Yeah, tell us a little bit about how you position that? And did you have to have different positioning for the venture capitalists than what you would for schools and educators
Jamie Poskin:know, I've always been? Yeah, I mean, it's the same. I mean, you know, we're, we're incredibly mission oriented company, I'm a very idealistic person, to me, really. And I said this to the potential investors, like, the biggest argument for why we needed to raise our Series A was, you know, we had some research group, actually, out of Stanford, Harvard and the University of Maryland, do a large scale randomized control trial on on one of the insights that's in our app. And it showed that not only the teachers who were randomly selected was like 1100, something teachers, the teachers who were randomly selected to receive are that insight, increase their over five week course increase their use of pedagogical uptake. So building on student contributions by 24%. Okay, great. It also had an impact on the students. So student outcomes, students rated the course higher, they rated their teacher higher, they turned in more assignments, they had higher academic achievement. So starting to see like, Oh, my God, we're sitting on this intervention. That is incredibly low cost. From a time standpoint. I mean, this is like a teacher looks at our feedback for like, a minute or two. It's very, very low impact. And we're very, very low impact on their time, but high impact on the students. And yeah, so it just felt like oh, my god, like we, we need to bring this to scale, and really leading like, it's that lens that it's our mandate. Really,
Ben Kornell:yeah. And I, this makes me think of the books on like, the power of a nudge. And one thing I love about your program is it actually encourages reflection, it's not some sort of play by play prescription, you know, when I was teaching, yeah, they were like, Okay, here's your scripted curriculum, that's a great way to drive good teachers out of the profession, right. But if they're actually getting professional insights, kind of back to your original thought, which is, you know, the principal just doesn't have time to give that like suggestion,
Jamie Poskin:as the expert I mean, that's the thing. I think, we're not leveraging teachers knowledge and expertise as much as we could. And you know, the teacher knows his or her students, right. And so what we want to do, we're not telling anybody how to teach, right, like, That's ridiculous. What we're showing teachers is, what are the learning dynamics that are unfolding in your classroom? And does that match what you want? And so often, I'll use a very simple example, like wait time, we all learn about wait time and the power of sort of pausing after you ask a question, pausing after a student response. We learned about that in grad school, right when we're training, but it's the kind of thing that you just you don't do in real life, every day, because you're just not thinking about it, you're not measuring it, you know, and it has such a huge impact on how discourse unfolds in your classroom. And so just being reminded of that being shown when you're doing it showing you're not like it allows the teacher to really lead their own learning and decide what they're going to focus on. And, you know, there's just so much expertise in every teacher out there that we need to. We're trying to help unlock as much as possible.
Alexander Sarlin:Yeah, one of the things that I found really interesting about the feedback, I've had a chance to talk to a couple of people on your team in the last few weeks, is that idea of there being these sort of word clouds of like, here are the words that you said as a teacher are the words that the students said, and showing the sort of breakdown of who talked the most and who didn't contribute. And it strikes me as you know, you mentioned how having to pivot or not pivot but sort of adapt during the pandemic. And the shift to online learning is such a tricky thing. But for Teach effects, it almost feels like you've got a chance to bifurcate the product in a kind of a positive way, because nobody knows how to do that on Zoom. Right? And online learning has never had that level of feedback and that level of specificity. And so it's exciting to think about how that kind of data could help both online learning and in person. I'd love to hear your thoughts on sort of those two parallel paths.
Jamie Poskin:Yeah, I think your insight is really spot on. You know, when teachers had to move into the online setting, it was I mean, it's challenging to get students to engage. You know, John Hattie has shown that, you know, teachers are usually talking about 75% of the class and the other 25% is not you know, might be you're doing worksheets or something, right. So a very small amount of traditional classrooms is really reserved for student discourse. Well, when teachers moved online, it's like, you're now in this uncomfortable setting, kids have their cameras off, it was tough. And we actually, you know, as a part of this initiative, to try to support our partners, we built this new product, we call it equitable classrooms, we gave it away for free. And what it did was it measured, not just people using teach effects, but the whole district had their zoom cloud accounts. So we just analyzed all that audio, and looked at equity of voice, we did it all anonymously. So no teachers, you know, teachers privacy and protecting that is kind of a number one for us. But we were able to look and see like if students have, you know, different races, different gender in different grade levels, like how participation varied. And I mean, one of the big overarching stats we saw was, you guys can maybe guess, how much do you think the average student so we measured about 100,000 hours of classroom audio K through 12, from January 2021, through May 2021. So, virtual learning how much you think the average students spoke and an average hour of instruction?
Alexander Sarlin:Oh, my God, seconds, five minutes,
Jamie Poskin:seven seconds an hour. That's insane. Now, you know, for teachers using TJ Maxx, it was, you know, several times higher than that, but still, you're, I really love the
Ben Kornell:power of data. Because what you're saying is like, intention, and action are not matching. How do we surface the data so that we can better match our intentions? And, you know, I'd say writ large, this is where k 12 Is, is everybody wakes up everyday trying to do the best for kids. And yet we have decades long systemic inequity. So how is it that our intentions, our actions aren't lining up?
Jamie Poskin:There's so much that gets in the way I think is the problem. Talk to any educator, whether it's an admin or a teacher, and they're just going to talk about all the things that crowd in, and in my opinion, take away the focus on what really matters, which is instruction, and like how the teaching and learning is happening with your kids.
Ben Kornell:Well, I really appreciate the time. Congratulations on this series, a I'm inspired and also, by the way, as a school board member, I'm like, how do we get teacher backs in our going What are you saying Carla? And Carla? Yeah, let's do it. For listeners out there. What's the website that our listeners can check you out on?
Jamie Poskin:Just teach fx.com
Ben Kornell:Awesome. Thanks so much, Jamie, for joining us today. And thank you all for tuning in to postcards, this time from the Stanford Transforming Learning accelerator. Talk to you all soon. Thank you both.
Alexander Sarlin:Thanks for listening to this episode of edtech insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more edtech insider subscribe to the free ed tech insiders newsletter on substack.
