If you’ve been through the National Board process, or supported someone who has, you know the scope of the commitment. It’s an exhausting, rewarding marathon of recording lessons, rewatching them, and trying to self-assess against demanding rubric criteria.

For many teachers, the hardest part is the isolation. With Swivl’s M2, candidates gain a comprehensive preparation system that supports them through the messy middle of the process, building the awareness and skills needed to produce a high-scoring portfolio.

Phase 1: Building awareness through structured feedback

National Board commentaries ask candidates to narrate specific instructional decisions. Reconstructing these decisions from memory is a challenge, especially if a teacher is reflecting days or weeks after a lesson.

M2’s My Feedback breaks practice sessions into segments (opener, direct instruction, guided practice, etc.), providing a well-organized map of the lesson. This helps candidates pinpoint exactly when instructional goals were met or missed.

By providing far more structured feedback than teachers would typically get during a school year, M2 helps National Board candidates build their skill of metacognitive reflection, which transfers directly to their submission work.

Phase 2: Targeted self-assessment

The National Board is not only about good teaching; it is also about meeting specific, rigorous standards.

Using the Rubric Builder, candidates or coaches can create criteria modeled directly on National Board standards, such as differentiation or student engagement. Then, a teacher simply turns on M2 at the beginning of any class, and they’ll receive a detailed feedback report based on the National Board rubric criteria.

By self-assessing their practice and making instructional adjustments, candidates can see their scores trend upward over time. When candidates are then ready to record and submit their final submissions, they come to that experience with a sense of confidence built over weeks or months of deliberate practice.

Phase 3: Internalizing the reflective cycle

Reflective practice is the through-line of the entire National Board process. Chat with M2 offers a coaching-style conversation after practice sessions, drawing on transcripts to help candidates talk through their reasoning: Why did I shift strategies there? How would I justify this to an assessor?

M2 provides a unique opportunity for a teacher to have a detailed, evidence-based conversation with a voice that has knowledge of the lesson that was just taught. Furthermore, a teacher can have this experience every day, or even multiple times a day, when they are working with M2.

In early practice sessions, Live Tips act as a digital coach, offering classroom management tips, check-for-understanding suggestions and discussion questions in real-time.

Mid-lesson, a teacher can request a tip from M2, which is tailored to the precise context of the class being taught. The teacher can then implement this adjustment to their lesson and monitor the results. This builds the “muscle memory” for the reflect-adjust-teach loop required by the Board. By the time a candidate is ready for their final submission, these high-impact moves have become second nature.

Phase 4: The final submission

When a candidate has built the confidence and metacognitive skills to meet the standards, the M2 hardware transitions from a coach to a professional recording suite.

For final submissions, candidates can turn off the AI features and use the M2’s high-fidelity audio and tracking to capture the continuous, unedited video required by the Board. Because they have practiced with the same hardware for months, the camera becomes “invisible” to both the teacher and the students, resulting in a more authentic, natural classroom environment.

Preparation that compounds

The National Board process is designed to identify teachers who already practice at a high level. M2 doesn’t do the work for the candidate; it helps the candidate make their practice visible. By the time teachers hit “submit,” they aren’t just hoping for a high score. Instead, they have the data and the habits to know they’ve earned it.

The post Beyond the video submission: Why M2 is a system for National Board success appeared first on Swivl.

From the beginning, we made it clear that teachers knew M2 would not be about evaluating instruction. It’s for ‘making me a better teacher and seeing those results in my student outcomes’.

Brian Teague | Bowie Elementary, Lamar CISD

USE CASE

Instructional coaching and student outcomes

Katherine Lange

Principal

School/District:

Bowie Elementary, Lamar CISD

Grade Level

K–5 Elementary

One new principal, four instructional coaches, and a lot of new teachers

Katherine Lange had never led an elementary school before she walked through the doors of Bowie Elementary in January 2025, and this particular elementary school had been struggling. 

Tier I Instructional practices were inconsistent, educator turnover had been significant, and the year ahead was shaping up to require more than just a few steady hands at the wheel. Katherine has four instructional coaches on her team, but she was also facing how she would effectively support a brand-new crop of teachers.

“Last year was all about triage. We came out of it earning a B, which we’re all proud to accomplish,” she beamed. “Coming into this year, it needed to be less about triage and more about making targeted instructional shifts. Yes, we wanted to sustain the grade, sustain the growth, but we needed to really expand what teachers can do with the kids in the classroom.”

Students first

One of Katherine’s primary goals was to prepare students for extended constructed responses on Texas’s STAAR exam. She was seeing a trend emerge that students could find textual evidence, but they somehow circumvented answering the question explicitly, and on the STAAR, that could give a student an automatic zero on those questions. To help students improve, M2 was given a spot in many classrooms’ studio rotations (aka: small group stations). Set up this way, teachers could define an ECR as a quick station prompt within M2, then students could orate their written responses and M2 would offer immediate feedback to the students directly.

And when studios were over, teachers could later review a full summary of what had happened across every student interaction, using the data to monitor and adjust instruction and ultimately: improve students’ ECRs on STAAR.

For teachers, M2 narrowed the ever-widening gap in academic feedback. Erin Lundberg, a fifth-grade teacher, had tried lots of strategies to offer daily feedback: exit tickets, ghost rotations, checklists. But what it boiled down to was: she just didn’t have enough time each day to check in on each student.

“When I’m fully engaged with the studio I’m running, I’m unable to listen in on the conversations happening at other studios, so I can’t quickly readjust a student’s thinking or address their misconceptions in the moment. That’s where M2 comes in! He is my teacher partner, and the students check in with him when I can’t.”

For Erin’s emergent bilingual (EB) students, M2 helps her keep a fresh list of never-ending sentence stems to increase their language acquisition. For everyone else, M2 drives student inquiry and increases Erin’s higher-order questions.

Carmen Chavero, who teaches fourth-grade dual language math and science, faced similar constraints. Students working independently while she ran small groups had limited access to daily feedback. As Carmen puts it “M2 has been like having a second teacher. I love how it provides meaningful feedback for every student and is constantly offering them new and creative ways to approach and solve math problems.”

Privacy paves the way

Before M2 became employed for a coaching cycle, Katherine established one non-negotiable rule: all coaching data would remain strictly between the instructional coaches and the teachers they worked with – never used for evaluation, never surfaced to administration (and by default, M2 data is stored in a teacher’s account, not an administrator’s).

That decision, made publicly and kept consistently, fundamentally altered the way teachers perceived the tool.

Brian uploaded LCISD’s instructional look-fors and the T-TESS domains and dimensions framework directly into M2’s customizable platform, so every piece of feedback M2 generated was grounded in the language teachers already used and the standards they were already being measured against. What results is feedback that feels comforting and familiar. 

And that’s when teachers really begin to believe in the tool and advocate for it.

“As the instructional leadership team who purchased M2, of course we can say: ‘yes! this is a great tool.’ But when our teachers talk to each other and say, ‘no, really, it is good, you should use it,’ that always carries more weight,” muses Katherine.

M2 as a coaching partner

One of the more unexpected uses of M2 at Bowie wasn’t in a classroom at all. It was in a coaching conversation.

Brian began bringing M2 directly into his debrief sessions with teachers. He’d start the coaching conversation, work through the normal identifying questions, and then, when a question came up that needed a second perspective, he’d turn to M2. He’d give his input, then ask M2 what it thought. Or he’d let M2 respond first and add to it. Either way, the result was the same: a third voice in the room, grounded in the district’s own framework, providing objective reinforcement to the conversation.

For Brian, who was himself new to the coaching role, this mattered in ways that went beyond any individual teacher conversation. Hearing how M2 framed feedback on engagement, pacing, or rigor helped him develop his own coaching language.

M2 extended into planning time, too. Brian brought the robot into collaborative meetings to generate ideas for differentiation. Certain teachers who might have felt guarded in a one-on-one coaching session found the dynamic felt extremely lighter when these conversations included a third, objective presence.

Greatest risk, even greater rewards

One new teacher came into his first coaching cycle at Bowie hesitant. He was nervous about hearing or seeing himself (video is always optional in M2), uncertain about what he’d uncover after reviewing each lesson.

By the end of the year, he was asking to keep M2 for extended periods of time, to cover entire units. He wanted to see where his engagement dipped, and why. He wanted to connect what M2 was showing him to his own lesson plans, find the gaps, and fix them.

His student data reflected the shift. 

“He was able to go back and look at his trends and find places where he could grow,” Katherine explains. “It really helped him be more prescriptive in the way that he planned.”

He wasn’t the only one. Even master teachers were experiencing their own magical moments with M2. When you walk into a strong teacher’s room, you tend to see strengths but what you can miss are edge cases where strong – but common – instructional moves aren’t quite nailing it, where you need to really try an out-of-the-box strategy.  

“It provided insights for a master teacher that instructional coaches and administrators sometimes even overlook,” Katherine says,

What do Title I funds and screen time limits have in common?

Because M2 addressed objectives embedded directly in Bowie’s campus improvement plan – recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers among them – Katherine was able to fund every M2 purchase through Title I dollars. The investment had a clear, documented justification.

There was one more constraint she hadn’t anticipated finding a solution to: the district had recently implemented screen time limits for early elementary students. This is where Swivl and the district had the same intentions – and stars aligned. With M2, students and teachers are able to interact with the robot conversationally, and its remote microphones prevent anyone from becoming glued to its screen. M2 even intentionally designs its classroom activities and group experiences to promote conversations and emphasize paper-based work time, so it ended up being a natural fit that did not compete with the district’s mandate. 

Bowie’s ‘B’ was for believing

Before M2, some of Bowie’s newest teachers were anxious. About being recorded. About AI in class. About what the data might reveal.

After a few short months, many of those same teachers were requesting M2 on their own, asking to keep it for full units, and encouraging their colleagues to try it. The anxiety hadn’t disappeared because Brian and Katherine reassured them everything was safe and private (though that helped, of course). It disappeared because they saw visible changes in their practice, session by session, trend by trend, unit by unit – and they wanted more of it.

With student outcomes being the primary motivation for Bowie’s teachers, they’ve come to rely on M2 to be their classroom “wing-robot”. Carmen Chavero envisions that next year, M2 will be a permanent workstation: a standing second small group, always available, always ready for the next student who needs a different explanation or a patient ear. Erin Lundberg is already using what M2 shows her to adjust pacing, deepen questioning, and ensure no student falls through the cracks of a busy rotation. And she’ll come back even stronger in the Fall.

This is exactly what Katherine had in mind when she arrived at Bowie mid-year, inheriting a campus in triage. Their mantra has been “keep your eyes on the A and it’ll be ours in May!” They continue to soar because they built a culture where everyone on campus has a chance to grow, become more accountable, and thrive as learners. No small order, but it just so happens that M2 helps them do that.  

The post #OneLittleSpark: How Bowie Elementary kept its flame aglow with M2 appeared first on Swivl.

What does a coaching model look like when you have five middle schools, a limited budget, high teacher turnover, and academic coaches and school administrators who can’t be everywhere at once? 

For Dr. Loralee Price, Instructional Technology and Data Integration Supervisor for Hawkins County School District in rural East Tennessee, finding the answer to this question was the district’s daily struggle.

Like many districts, Hawkins County has dedicated academic coaches and administrators who care deeply about teacher growth. But care and capacity are two concepts that sometimes fail to become compatible. Coaches split across schools could observe a teacher once or twice a month. Administrators walk through classrooms weekly. But by the time a meaningful debrief occurs, that lesson might be a distant memory. 

The district needed something that could close that gap: feedback that was immediate, specific, and available in every classroom, not just those a coach or administrator was able to visit.

The other challenge is one that many districts in the region are experiencing: constant turnover. A wave of newer educators has flocked to Hawkins County’s middle schools in recent years, many with limited classroom experience. For those teachers, the traditional model of professional development: periodic observations, scheduled debriefs, formal evaluations, rinse/repeat, can feel like too little, arriving too late.

Budget constraints compounded the issue. Hawkins County is a small, rural district where, as Dr. Price puts it, “funding is scarce.” Expanding professional development in any meaningful way meant finding a solution that could scale across five schools without requiring a proportional increase in cost or staffing.

When the district learned about M2, they scraped together what limited budget they could to invest in hardware. And upon learning about Swivl’s AI Innovation Grant in 2025, they applied for and won the remainder that they needed to realize their first full pilot year. With the assistance of grant funds, they were able to ensure that every middle school, every core and special education teacher, every coach and administrator, in the program from day one could be supported by M2. Here’s what they accomplished in that first year.

Noticing the unnoticed

The first thing teachers noticed was that M2 was paying attention to things that no one else was able to spend enough time to notice themselves. 

Sydney Allen, from Church Hill Middle School, moved to the far side of her classroom mid-lesson to check in quietly with a student who was struggling with material. It was the kind of moment that is often missed: too small for a formal observation, too easy to forget by the time a coach arrives. M2 picked up the conversation, provided some concrete next steps for the teacher in her post-session feedback, and bam! A situation that could have led to a student falling through the cracks was rescued by M2’s reminder. 

Wesley Thomas, of Rogersville Middle School, discovered something he hadn’t known about himself. “After reflecting on a lesson with M2 advised I use a timer for certain portions of class. I don’t think I would have realized this on my own.” A pacing problem, invisible to him, made visible by a single reflection with M2.

Shawn Swickheimer, in his second year at Church Hill Middle, found a different kind of value. By comparing lesson summaries and takeaways across class periods, he could see which class hadn’t fully grasped the material and adjust before teaching it again the next day.

Elizabeth Saxena at Church Hill Middle used M2 during a formal evaluation. M2’s scoring aligned closely with the formal evaluator’s score. For teachers like her who can feel anxious about formal observations, that reassurance can make all the difference to preparing for the real thing.

M2 in the classroom: Real examples

The impact wasn’t limited to teacher growth. In Jeffrey Klepper’s ELA classroom at Surgoinsville Middle School, students used Ask M2 to strengthen how they cited evidence from texts — a literacy skill that Klepper was actively building, with M2 reinforcing it in the moment students needed it. 

In Hannah Price’s science class at Church Hill Middle, students weren’t waiting to be called on. They were asking M2 questions on their own, driven by curiosity that the lesson had sparked. 

At Clinch School, Jessica Drinnon’s ELA students worked through small group discussions with M2 providing support alongside them.

Skepticism turned into a superpower

Before any of these gains could be realized, teachers had to trust the tool. That’s rarely a given, especially with technology that assesses instruction.

Heidi Hesoun at Surgoinsville Middle School was one such teacher whose trust M2 needed to earn. “When our district team introduced M2, I initially had a lot of reservations, but I gave it a chance, and I immediately found value in its feedback and instructional ideas. In fact, I look forward to bringing it to my class because I know it will give me inspiration that is actually relevant and helpful for what I am teaching that day. The best part is the instant feedback I can get after every lesson. I don’t have to wait to schedule a meeting for someone to observe me, it’s my own little ‘coach.’”

Heidi’s principal, Karen Bear, also noted the initial hesitation around the school. “Teachers in my building were initially skeptical due to various concerns about who might see the lesson; however, through consistent use and an understanding that all of their lesson data would remain private, they have come to embrace it as an everyday tool that enhances their instructional practice.”

Many teachers felt like Heidi at first, so during one of the district’s onsite trainings, Swivl’s professional development team ran an exercise called “What M2 is NOT Saying.” The goal: help teachers understand how to read M2’s feedback without getting stuck on the details and inevitably spiraling. For example, feedback from M2 that surfaces a pattern in someone’s pacing or questioning isn’t a verdict. It’s simply a data point to grow from. And the point was driven home: your lesson – your data – your privacy. You choose what and when to share. The exercise reframed what M2 observed from something evaluative into something useful.By the end of this crucial session, every teacher had created a personal goal tied to their own data and a concrete coaching plan for acting on it. The room that had walked in with questions walked out with direction.

What’s next for Hawkins

Dr. Price can attest that “by piloting this technology in our middle schools, we’ve moved from a model of occasional observations to a culture of continuous reflection and improvement.” Her vision for M2 extends beyond just a middle school pilot. 

What she has found most encouraging is how the ‘privacy-first’ design of M2 shifted teacher mindset from evaluation to empowerment. Dr. Price notes “our novice teachers, in particular, are using this non-biased feedback to master instructional skills in a low-stakes environment. As we look toward scaling—even amidst budget constraints—we are prioritizing our early-career educators. We aren’t just giving them a tool; we are giving them the autonomy to own their professional growth.”

For any district, rural or otherwise, where budget constraints are constant and capacity is finite, the value of a tool that’s present in every classroom cannot be understated. Catching the quiet conversation in the corner, surfacing a pacing problem the teacher didn’t know they had, helping someone see what’s working and what isn’t before another week passes. Without a constant companion to help teachers grow, these issues pile up, feedback falls through the cracks, and students ultimately suffer.

Teachers can’t see everything happening in their classrooms. Coaches can’t be everywhere all the time. Admins can’t be clairvoyant every day. But M2 can.

The post From grant to growth: How Hawkins County brought AI innovation to every middle school classroom appeared first on Swivl.

The M2 score measures participation as the foundational condition for learning.

It captures whether a classroom consistently creates, sustains, and distributes opportunities for thinking—moment by moment, across an entire lesson.

Participation is not a side effect of good instruction. It is the primary result of good instruction. When participation is strong, curricula come alive for teachers and students. When participation is weak, even the best materials fall flat. M2 exists to make that invisible truth measurable.

Why participation and not engagement?

Engagement in learning matters, but not all of it is objectively observable. Participation is the observable layer of engagement. It is behavioral and concrete, spans many dimensions—speaking, writing, questioning, persisting, building—and, we believe, can become a durable capability students carry beyond any lesson into the real world.

That’s why we focus on participation.

Why Participation Is What Makes the Difference

Participation is the engine of effective instruction. It’s what separates strong teaching from exceptional teaching and determines whether curriculum is truly being implemented or merely covered.

Instructional frameworks like Danielson, Marzano, and Teach Like a Champion all recognize this. They emphasize participation through domains, components, and moves. But their complexity makes participation hard to see clearly and even harder to act on consistently.

M2 cuts through that complexity with simplicity and focus, and treats participation as the single, fundamental indicator of instructional success.

By making participation measurable, M2 gives teachers clear goals and actionable feedback, turning improvement into something practical, repeatable, and achievable every day. feedback, turning improvement into something practical, repeatable, and achievable every day.

What the M2 score measures (at a high level)

M2 does not measure student learning after the fact. It measures how classrooms make learning possible.

Specifically, the M2 score captures participation as a collective, time-based property of instruction: how thinking emerges, spreads, deepens, and recovers throughout a lesson. These patterns reveal the conditions the teacher has created for student learning.

Across thousands of classrooms, M2 organizes participation into three essential attributes:

1. Participation is made possible
   
2. Participation is sustained
   
3. Participation is distributed
   

Each attribute shows up through observable instructional signals. M2 detects and interprets these signals during class, displaying participation status in real time. When the meter is above the line, it indicates that everyone is on task and that opportunities to share and participate are being created and sustained.

How M2 makes participation possible

Participation must be possible before it can happen, and teachers create those conditions.

M2 looks for whether the teacher invites thinking through:

• Clear routines and norms for participating
  
• Questions and tasks aligned to the learning objective
  
• Structures that allow students’ voices and ideas to surface (whole group discussion, small group collaboration, focused independent work)

Whenever students are applying their minds toward a learning activity, whether that’s speaking, writing, problem-solving, or reading, they are participating. M2 captures whether instruction consistently opens the door for that to occur.

How M2 measures sustained participation

Participation that flickers but then dims doesn’t lead to learning. It has to persist for the whole class.

M2 measures whether participation holds across time by observing:

• Dwell time after questions: How long does the teacher allow students to sit with uncertainty? Is silence tolerated? Does thinking have time to emerge?
  
• Return to ideas: Do students and teachers revisit and build upon earlier ideas, or does the lesson reset every minute?
  
• Recovery after struggle: When the class gets stuck, do they give up or persist with teacher support?

These signals show whether participation is brittle or resilient, shallow or cumulative.

How M2 measures distributed participation

Learning improves when thinking is distributed across the class. When students expect the same few classmates to answer every question, the learning stops with those few kids. M2 helps ensure everyone is involved in the cognitive participation required to move the lesson forward.

M2 looks at the distribution of participation over time:

• Is thinking concentrated with the same few student voices all class, or does it broaden to include everyone?
  
• Does the teacher work to bring new contributors into the discussion as the lesson progresses?

M2 does not track who spoke, how often, or how loudly. It observes whether the lesson structure invites many minds into the work.

Distributed participation also shows up during:

• Transitions between modes: Some students succeed in whole-class settings, while others thrive in a pair activity. Certain kids thrive when giving factual explanations while others jump in to offer synthesis.
  
• Moments of social learning: Is the room focused on a common idea, or fragmented across individual tasks and distractions?

These are fragile moments where participation often collapses, and where strong instruction keeps it alive.

What the M2 score does not measure

To stay meaningful, M2 is intentionally limited.  It does not measure:

• Individual student behavior
  
• Who spoke how much
  
• Compliance proxies (posture, eye contact, stillness, hand-raising frequency)
  
• Emotional states, moods, or affect
  
• Permanent student records, rankings, or behavior histories
  

Feelings fluctuate, and behavior can vary day to day, but participation persists in a classroom focused on learning. As a result, M2 provides insight without surveillance and feedback without labeling.

The M2 Participation Rubric

Our work as the creators of M2 involves distilling the philosophy laid out above into a repeatable rubric that can be used to measure and report on instruction in a variety of teaching and learning contexts. When a teacher begins a new class with M2, we use this rubric to measure the participation occurring:

• 1: Minimal student voice; mostly teacher talk; few or no student responses.
  
• 2: Some participation but uneven; short or prompted responses; limited peer-to-peer.
  
• 3: Many students contribute; responses show thinking; teacher facilitates distribution.
  
• 4: Broad, sustained participation; students build on ideas; evidence of collaboration and ownership.

This rubric powers the real-time participation meter and post-class scoring and feedback. Together, these give teachers a granular yet actionable measure of how they are helping to create, sustain, and distribute opportunities for participation in their classroom.

Why the M2 score matters

The M2 score makes participation visible without turning classrooms into compliance systems. It gives teachers feedback they can act on immediately. It reframes instructional improvement as something grounded in daily practice, not abstract evaluation.

When the class centers on frequent, shared, quality participation, a shared goal emerges, and student and teacher incentives align. Students transform from passive consumers of information to active cognitive participators in their own learning. The teachers mindset shifts from covering curricular to creating the conditions for deep understanding to emerge.

M2 measures those conditions, so great teaching can be built deliberately, not left to chance.

The post The M2 score: what it measures and why it matters appeared first on Swivl.

When we talk about MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports), the conversation often revolves around what adults are doing—interventions, progress monitoring, and data collection. But the true measure of MTSS success is the experience of the student. Are they receiving the right support at the right time? Do they feel seen and understood?

M2 isn’t just a tool for teacher feedback; it’s a powerful, AI-driven co-teacher that works directly alongside students to support their learning journey across every tier. Here is how M2 aligns with your MTSS framework to empower learners.

Tier 1: Strengthening universal instruction with voice and agency

At the universal level, the goal is high-quality core instruction that engages all students. M2 enhances Tier 1 by acting as an always-available resource that clarifies confusion and builds metacognition without requiring immediate teacher intervention.

Building voice through reflection

• The “confessional booth” for reflection: Susan, an AP Computer Science teacher, found that M2 gave a voice to her quietest students. She described it as a “confessional booth” where students could privately reflect on their learning. This builds student agency—a core component of strong Tier 1 instruction—by allowing every child to articulate their understanding in a low-stakes environment.

• Instant clarification: We’ve all seen a lesson stall because a student missed a key instruction. With commands like “Hey M2, summarize that” or “Hey M2, what’s our objective?”, M2 keeps the entire class on track, reducing the cognitive load on the teacher and ensuring students don’t fall behind due to simple misunderstandings.

Whole Group Guides: Teaching the whole class better

Whole Group Guides take Tier 1 to the next level by ensuring every student experiences research-backed instructional strategies consistently. While M2 guides the entire class through engaging activities, teachers are freed to circulate and provide the high-leverage feedback that moves students forward.

• Research-backed strategies: Whole Group Guides use evidence-based approaches grounded in Marzano’s Nine Strategies, Hattie’s Visible Learning, and cognitive science research. Whether it’s retrieval practice to strengthen memory, dual coding to combine words and visuals, elaboration to deepen understanding, or interleaving to build flexible thinking—every activity is designed to enhance learning.

• Teacher freedom to teach: When M2 leads a Whole Group Guide, teachers aren’t managing technology—they’re teaching. They circulate the room, offer formative feedback, facilitate peer conversations, and provide instructional cues. Students get more access to their teacher, not less.

Consistent excellence: Every student in your district experiences the same high-quality instructional strategies. No more variation between classrooms in what “good Tier 1 instruction” looks like. This consistency is the foundation of true universal support.

Tier 2: Targeted support for small groups and ELLs

For students who need more targeted support, M2 acts as a force multiplier, allowing the teacher to “be in two places at once.”

The virtual teaching assistant

Kerri Bell shared how a student teacher used M2 specifically to support English Language Learners (ELLs). He placed M2 at a small group table and taught students to use the “Rephrase that” and “Translate that” functions. This provided immediate, personalized language support, allowing these students to access the curriculum independently while the teacher worked with another group.

Small Group Guides: Differentiation without stretching your team

Small Group Guides are the secret weapon for Tier 2 implementation. These flexible, student-paced activities allow teachers to deliver targeted instruction while M2 facilitates differentiated learning for specific groups.

• Flexible, zero-prep options: Teachers can pre-plan detailed Small Group Guides for predictable intervention needs (struggling readers, math fact fluency, language development) or launch zero-prep activities on the fly when a teachable moment arises. A small group needs extra practice with fractions? A cluster of ELL students needs targeted language support? A group of advanced learners needs an enrichment challenge? Teachers tell M2 their objective and launch an activity instantly.

• Student-paced progress: Unlike whole-group activities, Small Group Guides let students progress at their own pace. Each student’s answers are captured and scored, giving teachers concrete data on what they’ve mastered and where they’re still struggling—critical information for Tier 2 decision-making.

• Teacher flexibility: While M2 facilitates one small group, teachers work with other students. They might provide intensive one-on-one support to a struggling reader, monitor multiple learning stations, or coach a group through a complex project. Your limited Tier 2 interventionist time goes further because it’s strategically deployed where it’s most needed.

Facilitating group work

Dr. Darcel Hogans discovered that her students loved collaborative work when “M2 is watching.” The presence of the device didn’t just monitor them; it engaged them. Students actively asked M2 questions during research—like science students who used M2 to dive deep into topics like the tongara frog. M2 becomes a station facilitator, guiding group inquiry and ensuring that “independent work” is truly productive.

Tier 3: Intensive, personalized scaffolding

At the most intensive level, students often need significant scaffolding and immediate feedback. M2 provides a non-judgmental space for students to struggle, fail, and try again.

Scaffolding complex thinking

M2 doesn’t just give answers; it prompts thinking. When a first-grader in Megan Rozzana’s district was learning about stars, M2’s feedback helped her make a complex connection between the Big Dipper and navigation—a “lightbulb moment” that might have been missed in a busy classroom. For Tier 3 students, this immediate validation of their thinking is crucial for building confidence and persistence.

Differentiation on-demand

With Guides, M2 can create standards-aligned small-group or individual activities connected to the day’s lesson. Each Guide is centered around a research-backed instructional strategy from Marzano, Hattie, Lemov, and other instructional experts. Guides can provide extra support when intervention needs arise quickly, or free up teachers for one-on-one intensive support while other students work with M2.

Assessing understanding automatically

After the day’s lesson, M2 can help teachers understand where their Tier 3 students have knowledge gaps and where they’re making gains. M2 can generate Assessments, score them automatically, and provide feedback to both the teacher and the student. Because M2’s questions are adaptive and voice-based, responses are authentic windows into student understanding—not surface-level answers to traditional multiple choice questions.

This real-time insight helps teachers know: Is this student ready to step down to Tier 2? Do they need a different intervention strategy? Are they ready to return to Tier 1? These decisions are no longer based on gut feeling; they’re based on data.

The student-centered MTSS

By integrating M2 into your MTSS framework, you aren’t just collecting data on students; you are providing support for them.

Whether it’s:

• A shy student finding their voice in a private reflection (Tier 1)
• An ELL student getting instant translation and support in a small group (Tier 2)
• A struggling learner getting immediate, non-judgmental scaffolding and feedback (Tier 3)

The post Empowering every learner: Using M2 for student support in an MTSS framework appeared first on Swivl.

M2’s purpose has always been simple: to support great teachers in the work they do every day. Since then, we’ve seen the same pattern in classrooms across the country: teachers are resourceful, dedicated, and creative. What they’re often missing is time. With so much to do, understanding which instructional moves are aligned with the research is something that can quickly fall by the wayside.

Administrators see it too. They know strong instruction depends on consistent structure and rigor. But most teachers don’t have a coach in the room to encourage the use of the most effective strategies. Many are teaching new subjects or grade levels with less training than they’d like. This is where the M2’s latest feature can help.

Introducing Whole Group Guides

Whole Group Guides let teachers launch structured, interactive learning activities for the entire class without any student devices or setup time required.

With a few taps, and a chance to share the day’s objective, M2 gets to work. Whole Group Guides include clear verbal directions that lead students through a learning experience aligned with both the lesson of the day and sound pedagogy. As M2 shares directions out loud, the teacher stays in full control, advancing the activity with just a quick tap. 

Here’s how a Whole Group Guide might look in an elementary Math class: 

The teacher walks up to M2 and taps to request a Guide. She says, “I want my students to practice adding fractions with unlike denominators.” That’s the only prep required. 

Seconds later, M2’s voice grabs student attention by introducing the activity. Today, we’ll practice adding fractions by finding the least common denominator. You’ll need a pencil and paper. Let’s get started! 

From there, M2 guides students through a few questions and problems aligned with the objective. Today, M2 notices that students can benefit from interleaving, or mixing several problem types together to build flexible thinking. 

After each step, students turn to a partner to discuss their thinking. The teacher is free to walk the room, checking in with students, coaching, answering questions, or pulling students aside who need some extra help.

When the Guide ends, the teacher smoothly transitions back to the front and decides to review one problem that sparked extra discussion.

What makes Whole Group Guides different?

• No participant setup. Every student is included without extra steps.
• Teacher-controlled pace. M2 provides the directions, but teachers shape the timing.
• Designed for real classrooms. Activities include individual work, turn-and-talks, and whole-class moments to keep everyone engaged.
• More access to the teacher. With M2 managing the flow, teachers can spend more time giving feedback instead of handling logistics.

For administrators seeking stronger instructional consistency across classrooms, Whole Group Guides model well-structured learning in real time. Teachers participate in the experience alongside their students, gaining a feel for the strategy as it unfolds.

Three forms of Whole Group Guides: Practice, projects, and something new

Practice Guides

Students work individually through repetitions of a skill, often pausing to check thinking with a partner or discuss as a class. Useful for reinforcing learning without relying on worksheets.

Project Guides

Collaborative activities where the entire class moves into small groups at once — helpful for hands-on work, labs, shared problem-solving, or building something together. And then there’s the newest option:

Instructional Strategies: research-backed teaching, available in the moment

We heard the same theme from teachers and administrators again and again: they value strategies like Retrieval Practice or Elaboration, but during a lesson, it can be hard to launch them with clear steps and language. Instructional Strategies help with that challenge. When teachers select Instructional Strategy, M2 looks at the lesson objective and materials, then generates a Whole Group Guide built around a proven learning approach. These strategies draw from the work of researchers like Robert Marzano, John Hattie, and decades of cognitive science:

• Retrieval Practice to strengthen memory
  
• Elaboration to deepen understanding
  
• Dual Coding to connect visuals and ideas
  
• Concrete → Abstract to build conceptual thinking
  
• Interleaving to support flexible problem solving

M2 provides the structure and directions. The teacher brings the expertise, judgment, and support that only a person can provide. For administrators, this means teachers at all levels of experience can model strong instructional practices throughout a lesson. For teachers, it feels like having a prepared partner who can help launch a strategy right when the moment calls for it.

A sustainable way to make every lesson great

Whole Group Guides give teachers more freedom to focus on students. By removing setup, simplifying structure, and offering research-backed steps in real time, M2 helps teachers stay present with their students: circulating, giving feedback, listening in on conversations, pulling small groups, and offering the kinds of support no device can replace. It’s a vision of the classroom where great teaching becomes achievable across the school day because the scaffolding is already built into the experience.

Talk with us: Let’s discuss how M2 can support your goals and explore options to demo, pilot, or purchase.

See it in action: Join one of our upcoming 15-minute webinars to experience M2 firsthand and hear stories from educators already co-teaching with it.

Share your story: We want your voice in the conversation. What makes differentiation sustainable in your school? How are you moving beyond screen dependence? Share your insights with us at community@swivl.com.

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M2 provides a wealth of information outside of what you already know. It’s a form of differentiated instruction. Every day, I am learning how to be a better teacher because of M2.

Danica Rose Garay | Kankakee School District, IL

USE CASE

Supporting differentiated instruction in special education

Danica Rose Garay

Special Education Teacher

School/District:

Kankakee School District, IL

Grade Level 9-12

Everything, everywhere, all at once

Danica Rose Garay teaches instructional sciences in a self-contained special education classroom, a complex setting to say the least. Throughout her day, she guides students from freshmen through seniors through biology, chemistry, physics and engineering, and environmental science.

Her students have diverse needs: some have autism, others have specific learning disabilities or intellectual disabilities. Many are English language learners navigating both a new language and complex scientific concepts simultaneously. Each student’s Individual Education Program (IEP) requires different accommodations, different pacing, different approaches.

Before M2, Danica managed these intersecting challenges largely on her own. When a Spanish-speaking student needed help understanding instructions, she would stop teaching, pull out her personal phone, type into Google Translate, hand the phone to the student, wait for his response, and pass the device back and forth. The back-and-forth ate up precious instructional time. Meanwhile, the rest of her class waited.

The pattern was apparent with conceptual questions too. A student would ask for more examples of chemical compounds, and Danica would cycle through the same familiar ones: water, carbon dioxide, maybe a couple others she could recall in the moment. With four different science subjects to teach across multiple grade levels, she couldn’t always hold every example at her fingertips.

Curiosity is a catalyst for learning

The real cost was not just loss of time but loss of opportunity for her students to go deeper with their learning. Danica shared a simple, but fundamental philosophy about how she analyzes student learning in her classes:

When students are curious enough to ask, that’s when real understanding begins.

But curiosity can be fleeting if the flame gets extinguished. When a student asks a question tied to what they’re learning right now, and the teacher has to say “I’ll get back to you tomorrow,” oftentimes by the next day, the student has often forgotten what they wanted to know. The spark is gone.

“It’s disheartening when I don’t have time to answer all of their questions,” Danica explains. In a class where students already face extra barriers to engagement, losing those moments felt like losing the students themselves.

The promise of equitable education for students with disabilities is that they’ll receive the support they need to access learning alongside their peers. But when one teacher is responsible for an entire classroom of individualized needs, that promise gets stretched thin—not because of lack of care or effort, but because of the limits of time and human capacity.

So long Google Translate

When M2 arrived in Danica’s classroom, it addressed both challenges at once: the language barrier and the knowledge gaps.

During a lesson on elements and compounds, Danica explained the instructions to her class. Then she turned to M2: “Can you please translate that into Spanish?” Instantly, M2 repeated her instructions in Spanish–no phone to fumble with, no broken flow, no student left waiting while others moved ahead.

Her Spanish-speaking students could hear the translation in real time, ask his own questions to M2, and stay engaged with the lesson without falling behind. Danica recalls:

And when students asked for even more examples of chemical compounds, M2 provided them: methane, sulphuric acid, and so on, beyond Danica’s immediate recall. M2 could also repeat and review content while students worked independently, reinforcing concepts without requiring Danica to pause her one-on-one support with other students.

Curiosity for the curator too

Another benefit for Danica was M2’s real-time coaching feedback. After her first period class, Danica read M2’s suggestion: she could increase engagement and elevate her questioning skills by asking students to provide more examples rather than providing most of the examples herself.

“I can’t believe I forgot about this fundamental technique,” she realized. She had been so focused on optimizing her pacing and delivering content efficiently, she had missed opportunities for students to demonstrate their own understanding, too.

In her second and third period classes that same day, Danica incorporated the feedback. Instead of listing examples herself, she asked students to generate their own. The difference was immediate:

Letting teachers be teachers

Looking ahead, Danica sees M2 as part of a larger shift in how teachers can support diverse learners. “This is a great innovation for us. It takes loads off of teachers’ plates: constantly needing to prioritize, process, and execute based on individual learning plans.

But she’s also thoughtful about the boundaries. “We should strive to find our balance with AI. Teachers don’t always know where to draw the line.” She sees M2 for what it is: a partner that isn’t meant to replace her or take over her instruction entirely. It’s supplemental and an extension of what she is already trained to do, providing the extra voice, extra language, and extra set of examples when students need them.

“Some teachers – including myself, sometimes – are really scared to find out what we don’t know,” Danica acknowledges. 

“It boils down to this: M2 can provide a wealth of information outside of what you already know. It’s just a form of differentiated instruction. Every day, I am learning how to be a better teacher because of M2.”

For Danica, the vision is clear: use M2 to ensure that no student is left at surface-level understanding simply because she could not address it in that very moment. Keep the questions alive. Keep the curiosity alive. Keep the evidence of learning alive.

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After explaining the differences between assets and liabilities for the umpteenth time, I asked M2 and BOOM. It gave us relevant and interesting examples I had never thought of before.

Travis Paulsen | Owatanna Senior High School, MN

USE CASE

Turning “busy work” into deep learning

Travis Paulsen

CTE Teacher

School/District:

Owatanna Senior High School, MN

Grade Level 9-12

“Accounting isn’t fun.”

Travis Paulsen teaches business and accounting classes to 9th through 12th graders at Owatanna Senior High School, and he’ll be the first to tell you that making accounting seem interesting is no small feat. Like many Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers, he faces a unique challenge: “Accounting isn’t fun,” jokes Travis.

He knows accounting concepts—debits, credits, financial statements—don’t naturally generate excitement for teenagers. And business classes aren’t the only options competing for student enrollment. “We’re constantly competing with band, choir, arts, and other electives,” he notes. Those programs offer built-in opportunities for students to showcase their hard work and skills: concerts, performances, and other forms of creative expression. Completing an accounting course, by comparison, doesn’t get you bouquets or award ceremonies at the end of the year.

The double-entry dilemma

Accounting is also challenging. “The hardest thing for students to grasp is that in every transaction, two different parts of an equation are affected,” Travis explains.

Travis is describing double-entry accounting: the principle that every financial transaction affects at least two accounts. It’s fundamental to the discipline. It’s also abstract and difficult to visualize for students encountering it for the first time.

“We’re constantly trying to think of different examples to explain this concept,” Travis says. But coming up with fresh, relevant scenarios on the fly, multiple times per day, across multiple class sections? That’s a tall order even for a seasoned veteran like Travis. 

M2 balances the books

M2 made quick work of the double-entry dilemma. Travis recalled:

Another breakthrough came when Travis reimagined how his end-of-chapter questions  (something he calls “busy work”) could become meaningful learning opportunities when delivered by M2. 

The incentive is simple but powerful: if a student successfully argues their logic out loud with M2 then they don’t have to complete the end-of-chapter written assignment. It’s a win-win for everyone.

M2 also freshened up the feedback cycle in his classes.

He admits: his feedback to students was starting to feel perfunctory every time he graded those end-of-chapter worksheets.

He knew students deserved something more genuine, but the reality of teaching multiple classes with virtually no prep time was making that level of individualized attention impossible.

Now, students receive in-depth, personalized feedback through their conversations with M2 and it’s not all sunshine and daisies. M2 keeps rigor high, asking follow-up questions with every piece of encouragement, e.g., “Have you thought about it this way instead?” “What might change your mind about this topic?” M2 challenges students to work through their misconceptions and provides scaffolding that deepens their understanding.

This tech just hits different

It was clear that M2 was making accounting the most popular CTE class offered in his program and Travis has a theory as to why. He jokes:

It may sound self-deprecating at first, but there’s awareness and honesty here. When we chatted with Travis he shared some light-hearted examples of back-and-forth banter he has with his students every day. Their rapport is strong. But this technology just offers a different kind of engagement.

M2 provides novelty, patience, and a judgment-free space for students to work through complex concepts. Students can ask questions they might hesitate to raise in front of peers. They can take their time without worrying about holding up the class.

And Travis is strategic about deployment. “We don’t use M2 for everything,” he emphasizes. During regular instruction, “we’re still analyzing transactions and still having real discussions in class.” But M2 is there to make the grind of drilling tough concepts more relatable and easier to digest for learners.

The approach maximizes M2’s impact while maintaining Travis’s essential role as teacher and mentor.

Making CTE relatable for all

Ever since Travis brought M2 into his class, he’s witnessed a remarkable shift in his own teaching practice and his students’ attitudes toward learning, so his advice for fellow CTE teachers on where to start? Use M2 to provide real-world, relatable examples for challenging concepts. Whether it’s assets and liabilities in accounting, legal precedents in business law, or case studies in management, M2 can generate contextual examples instantly.

The result? “An instant launch pad for deeper discussions in your classes,” proclaims Travis. “This will put you on the map,” Travis says, speaking to the competitive reality of elective programs, “and students will want to sign up for your classes.” 

But beyond marketing advantages, M2 addresses a fundamental challenge in CTE education: how to make technical content accessible, genuine, and relevant for students who are still discovering their future selves. 

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Now when I ask them a question, they go deeper asking ‘who, what, when, where, how’? So it’s definitely driving deeper inquiry.

Kandice McGlaun | Chattahoochee County School District, GA

USE CASE

Driving student inquiry, redefining classroom engagement with AI

Molly Allen and Kandice McGlaun

Instructional Technology Specialists

School/District:

Chattahoochee County School District, GA

Grade Level

Elementary, Middle, and High School

Tech that missed the mark

We’ve all seen it happen too many times. A student raises their hand with a question that sparked genuine curiosity—the kind of question that could unlock deeper understanding. But in a classroom of 25 or more students, with limited time and an ambitious curriculum to cover, Molly Allen found herself conflicted on whether to slow the roll or keep the class on track. She’d try to be encouraging and tell that student: “That’s a great question! But we’ve got to keep moving today. Why don’t you look it up for homework and bring it back tomorrow?”

The problem? Tomorrow often never came for that moment of curiosity.

“When they have a question and they don’t have the answer right away, you tend to lose them,” Molly explains.

As instructional technology specialists for Chattahoochie School District, Molly Allen and Kandice McGlaun have been trying to bridge the engagement gap with all sorts of AI tools. Last year, they piloted Magic School with their fourth graders. They felt the platform was well-designed and, when effective, elicited thoughtful responses from students, but they found a critical flaw with the structure: everything was text-based.

“It was great,” Molly recalls, “but it pumps out written responses, and I noticed, especially with our younger kids, that they just weren’t reading or able to follow along all of the time.”

Kandice faced a different version of the same challenge. Teachers throughout her middle and high schools wanted the equivalent of Alexa in their classrooms—a voice-activated assistant that could provide instant answers and keep students engaged. But commercial smart devices aren’t allowed under school policy, and for good reason. Students need something to inspire creativity, encourage collaboration, and not just something for rote information retrieval.

“I feel like students today always expect an instant answer, because the internet is always at their fingertips,” Kandice explains.

They needed something in between—not a 1:1 device that isolated students behind individual screens, but a collaborative classroom tool that could engage students together through conversations.

While M2 worked for everyone

When Molly and Kandice discovered M2, they immediately recognized its potential. Here was an AI co-teacher that could interact with students, facilitate discussions, provide real-time feedback on instruction, and support both academic and social-emotional learning—all while bringing students together rather than isolating them behind individual screens.

They started with a small pilot, rotating a couple of devices among their elementary, middle, and high schools. What they didn’t anticipate was just how quickly it would become the most in-demand tool in the district.

I can’t keep M2 in my room! My high school and middle school teachers keep fighting over it.

Kandice McGlaun

From Jeopardy to the American Revolution

The academic applications emerged organically as teachers experimented with M2’s capabilities. In a sixth-grade social studies classroom, a teacher wanted to review latitude and longitude concepts but knew that traditional worksheets wouldn’t engage her students. She decided to try something different.

So Kandice suggested that M2 set up a Jeopardy game. What happened next surprised everyone. M2 created a full Jeopardy-style game, complete with point values and encouraging feedback. With a map displayed on the classroom’s main display, M2 would ask questions like: “For 100 points, this is the latitude, this is the longitude—what country am I?”

Students worked in small teams and when they answered correctly, M2 awarded them points. When they were close but not quite right, M2 encouraged them: “You’re really close, can you guess again for 50 points?”

“I loved that it was positive and never took all the points away,” Kandice notes. The students were so engaged that they’ve been asking to use M2 again ever since.

But perhaps the most powerful example of M2’s impact came during an American Revolution unit with Molly’s fourth graders. After a VR exploration, students gathered around M2 with its remotes in hand, ready to ask their questions. They had written their questions on mini whiteboards beforehand, ensuring they weren’t all asking the same thing.

“They thought they were movie stars talking into the microphone,” Molly smiles.

One student became fascinated with a particular historical figure. “Did he sign the Declaration of Independence?” the student asked.

M2 explained that no, he hadn’t signed it because he was fighting in the war at the time.

“Why didn’t he sign it?” the student pressed.

What followed was a deep dive into Revolutionary War history—the kind of extended, student-driven discussion that rarely happens when questions get deferred to homework. The student kept asking follow-up questions, and M2 kept providing context, always following up with its own questions to push the student’s thinking deeper.

“We wouldn’t have gotten as far if M2 had just given a direct answer and left it at that,” Molly reflects. “It just kept going and going and going, and we really deepened our class discussion.”

More than just a robot – a safe space

While the academic applications were impressive, Kandice saw potential for M2 to address an even more critical challenge: creating safe spaces for students to discuss sensitive topics. “So many times, students do not want to talk to a person,” Kandice notes. “They’re confiding in AI, and unfortunately, that’s not always safe. But with M2, we tried it ourselves—it worked beautifully.”

Working with her school’s social worker, Kandice planned a “positive affirmation station” for suicide prevention week. They tested the concept, with Kandice role-playing a student who is being bullied.

“I told M2 that I’m a sixth grader and I’m being picked on,” Kandice shared in an example. M2 responded with empathy and practical advice, asking if she wanted to role-play ways to respond to the bully.

Throughout the conversation, M2 consistently reminded her to talk to a trusted adult while also providing the immediate support she needed in the moment.

It reinforced positive affirmations about my situation while also reiterating the goal: ensure you confide in an adult who can further support you.

Kandice McGlaun

“Students need to hear affirmations several times, because the more they hear something, the more it becomes prevalent, and they start to internalize it.”

The approach will give students three options during designated weeks: they can speak with one of two adults present, or they can have a private conversation with M2. Students who aren’t ready to talk to an adult yet can work through their feelings with M2 first, building the confidence and clarity they need to eventually seek help from school counselors.

The trickle that turns into a flood

The impact on student engagement has been undeniable. Students have become so attached to M2 that middle schoolers have been naming it, personalizing their relationship with their classroom co-teacher.

But most importantly, it’s advancing inquiry and developing higher-order thinking. Students who interact with M2 are approaching questions differently than ever before. Kandice noticed the change with her own daughters who are in fourth-grade and have also interacted with M2.

Now when I ask them a question, they go deeper asking ‘who, what, when, where, how’? So it’s definitely driving deeper inquiry.

Kandice McGlaun

This transformation in how students think about learning has created what Kandice calls a “trickle effect.” Students who experience M2 in one class go back and tell other teachers about it. Those teachers, intrigued by their students’ enthusiasm, check out the device themselves. And the cycle continues.

Teachers throughout both schools have started saying they want “an M2 in every classroom.”

Cultivating the future with M2

As Molly and Kandice look to the future, they see M2 playing an even more central role in transforming their schools from teacher-centered environments to truly student-led learning spaces.

Molly is developing a “Lunch with M2” incentive program, where students who achieve certain goals—whether academic, attendance-based, or behavioral—can bring their lunch to the STEAM room for a tabletop discussion with M2 on a topic of their choice.

“It’s about cultivating curiosity,” Molly explains. “Letting them explore what they’re genuinely interested in, with immediate support for going deeper.”

Both specialists are working to expand M2 access across all grade levels and subject areas, ensuring that every student has opportunities to experience this new paradigm of learning—where questions don’t go unanswered, where curiosity drives discovery, and where collaboration happens around a shared “bigger brain” rather than through isolated screens.

“That’s where the real growth happens,” Molly says. “In that space between the question and the next question, and the one after that.”

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Validation from a veteran coach

Leanne NeSmith, an Instructional Technology Specialist at GA Coastal Plains RESA, has witnessed the incredible evolution of educational technology for 36 years—from implementing gradebook programs loaded onto 5 ¼ inch floppy disks all the way to powering modern classrooms with AI-infused technologies, she’s seen it all.

She supports teachers across 12 school districts in rural Georgia and is always looking for ways to leverage her tech stack to help teachers reach their maximum potential. But like so many instructional coaches around the country, Leanne is also witnessing something troubling.

“Teachers feel incredibly stressed. They feel unprepared for what they’re facing in education today,” Leanne explains. “They’re so overwhelmed by all the non-teaching responsibilities they have, they fail to become the great teachers I know they can be and struggle to keep students engaged.”

The statistics tell a sobering story. Across Georgia, teachers are leaving at alarming rates, particularly in at-risk schools like the ones in the Coastal Plains region. Many educators are entering through alternative certification routes without proper preparation.

Many of these districts don’t employ enough instructional coaches. And those employed are responsible for supporting 60 to 80 teachers while juggling supplemental campus-based responsibilities like bus duty, parent pickup, and administrative meetings.

“Sometimes, I find that the critical piece that is left out of an instructional coach’s job is simply to be the instructional coach,” Leanne reflects.

When support is stretched too thin, newer teaching populations often fall through the cracks first. Many new teachers are afraid to ask for help, worried that admitting their shortcomings could put targets on their backs. So they close their classroom doors and face their challenges alone.

Validation from a master teacher

Enter Kathryn Bailey, a high school English teacher Leanne supports in Lanier County Schools. She’s a master teacher who previously served as an academic coach and knows her curriculum inside and out. But even master teachers like Kathryn exist in this education landscape with daily uncertainties. She wonders: Am I reaching every student? Could I be asking better questions? Am I managing my classroom as effectively as I could be?

When Leanne brought M2 into Kathryn’s classroom, the stakes were clear—any tool claiming to provide teaching feedback and boast student engagement needed to prove its worth immediately. If it couldn’t support someone like Kathryn, it had no business aiding a new teacher.

Neither Leanne nor Kathryn knew exactly what to expect. Would this AI co-teacher understand the nuanced discussions about literary themes? Could it follow the complex dynamics of a veteran teacher managing both honors classes and difficult behavioral situations?

From the first lesson, M2 proved it belonged. As Kathryn guided her students through a comparative analysis of Animal Farm and Frankenstein, M2 quietly observed, analyzing not just her delivery of content, but her questioning techniques, student engagement strategies, and classroom management approaches.

“M2 was 100% correctly following her lesson and understanding what was going on,” Leanne recalls. “I was in the back monitoring the feedback as it rolled in live on M2 and it was spot on.”

The validation was immediate and powerful. M2 would suggest advice like, “That’s a great idea, now ask students a question about____.” And in the front of the room, without even looking at M2, Kathryn would ask that exact question.

“It just gave me chills to see that here’s this AI device mirroring the exact questions that a master teacher is naturally asking,” Leanne explains. “That’s when I realized: this thing is for real.”

Validation for engagement, not evaluation

Beyond delivering stellar feedback, Leanne also wanted to ensure that new teachers felt like they had a partner in class to keep energy high when they’re feeling like the content might fall flat. While working within the Animal Farm and Frankenstein unit, Kathryn discovered another unexpected use for M2 that made engagement soar. After students completed their essays, she simply asked M2 to respond out loud to the same prompt.

“She told students that if they included some of M2’s key points in their own response, they would receive a top score,” Leanne observed. “The students were immediately excited to hear an exemplar to gauge their own responses by.” By modeling out loud, M2 gave them a platform to self-assess their thinking and provided them with a big confidence boost on the spot.

And the best part? M2 integrated itself naturally within the classroom ecosystem. “By the end of the day, she was interacting with M2 and having students ask questions as well,” Leanne recalls. 

Students were curious by it, but not distracted. The technology, enhanced-rather than interrupted-the flow of class. It’s exactly the kind of technology that Leanne hunts to share with teachers.

Validating teachers’ struggles and breaking the cycle of isolation

For too long, teachers have faced a painful paradox: they need support to improve, but they’re afraid to ask for it. They close their classroom doors each day and struggle alone, worried that admitting challenges might threaten their job security.

M2 breaks this cycle by providing private, non-judgmental feedback that pin-points every ounce of good teaching while offering specific, actionable suggestions for improvement. It’s the trusted colleague every teacher wishes they had—always present, always supportive, never evaluative.

“This is the real deal,” Leanne reflects. “It’s asking and following very high-level content and able to understand many different components of a classroom, giving what an administrator and career teacher would say is very good advice.”

Wherever you are, M2 is ready

For the countless new teachers entering classrooms, feeling unprepared and overwhelmed, M2 offers the immediate support they need. For veteran teachers like Kathryn, it provides validation and refinement opportunities that can elevate already strong practice.

For Leanne and coaches like her across the country, M2 represents the solution to an impossible equation: how to support every teacher when resources are stretched beyond limits.

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