Picture a student teacher the morning of their first formal observation. They’ve prepared for days. The formal observations feels high stakes because in a sense it is: observations are rare. Not because anyone has failed them, but because the math of field placement supervision makes frequent feedback hard to deliver.

A university supervisor managing a full roster of student teachers across a dozen school sites, balancing their own teaching load, can often realistically visit each candidate two to three times a semester. 

Between those visits, student teachers do get support, but it comes with real limits:

• Mentor teachers are present and often helpful, but their feedback reflects a teacher working within one building’s context, not necessarily the frameworks a preparation program is building toward
• Cohort meetings and seminar discussions give candidates space to process, but the feedback is secondhand. No one else was in the room.

What if that gap didn’t have to define the experience? How could student teachers receive specific, framework-aligned feedback after every session? Could supervisors arrive at observations with a semester’s worth of data, rather than reconstructing a narrative from two visits?

Fortunately, there’s a way to augment the traditional model to make this all possible.

The problem with episodic observation

When a student teacher knows they’ll be formally observed once or twice this semester, that session carries weight. They prepare differently, perform. receive feedback that reflects a curated version of their practice, not necessarily the daily reality of their work.

Practically speaking, issues that surface in week three of a placement may not get identified until a supervisor visits weeks later. By then, the teacher candidate may calcify certain patterns that are causing persistent issues in classroom management, instructional planning, or elsewhere. All the while, a small course correction could have prevented the larger issue from emerging. The model also asks supervisors to draw broad conclusions from a narrow slice of evidence: two observations, however carefully conducted, are snapshots, not a portrait.

While issues with infrequent feedback are logically clear, the benefits of frequent feedback are research-backed.

• John Hattie’s Visible Learning synthesis puts feedback at an effect size of 0.70, among the highest-impact interventions identified across decades of educational research. 
• Wilcoxen and Lemke reached a similar finding: ongoing, process-focused feedback raises performance in ways that summative evaluation simply cannot.
• Schaefer and Clandinin found that regular observations with constructive feedback were highly valued by beginning teachers
• Garcia and Weiss reported that the highest-performing education systems in the world provide feedback as part of the regular experience of teaching.

A key theme in this body of research is regular and ongoing. Feedback works when it’s frequent, specific, and connected to real practice.

For student teachers, the implication is direct: a placement evaluated through two observations is, by design, a low-feedback environment, which is less conducive to growth.

What three to four months of M2 looks like instead

M2 gives student teachers something the traditional model doesn’t: a feedback loop that runs alongside their practice rather than interrupting it once or twice a semester.

When student teachers use M2 weekly, they receive AI-powered feedback after every session on:

• Questioning techniques
• Participation patterns
• Instructional pacing
• Classroom dynamics

They start identifying their own tendencies before a supervisor ever needs to name them. Early in a placement, when there’s the most room for improvement, that kind of immediate, low-stakes reflection has an outsized impact.

A typical M2 feedback session might surface something like:

*”Students responded well to your opening question, but whole-class participation dropped during the independent work phase. Consider building in a structured think-pair-share before returning to whole-group discussion.”**

That’s the kind of specific, actionable language student teachers can act on immediately. It also maps directly onto the competencies supervisors are already evaluating. M2 feedback aligns to standard teacher preparation frameworks like Danielson and Marzano, connecting AI insights to the rubrics programs are already using.

M2 doesn’t replace formal observations or human judgment. What it gives supervisors is a richer evidence base: a complete arc of real sessions, real classrooms, real decisions, not two curated clips. When coaching conversations are grounded in session-by-session data rather than one visit from three weeks ago, they become more specific, more productive, and more useful to the student teacher sitting across the table. Dr. Natalie Bolton’s experience shows what this looks like in practice.

The habit that carries forward

The question a pre-service program has to answer is clear: do our teachers leave with the skills needed to teach today, and the mindset to get better tomorrow?

Teaching rewards people who treat their practice as something worth examining. The teachers who grow most consistently over a career are those who stayed genuinely curious about their own work. That disposition is easiest to form at the very beginning, before other habits are established. 

The structure of a field placement helps to shape it. When student teachers receive feedback weekly, they internalize a simple but durable lesson: looking closely at their practice is a normal part of the job. When formal observations are the only occasion for feedback, they internalize that evaluation is rare, high-stakes, and something to prepare for rather than learn from. Whichever lesson they carry out of a placement, they’re more likely to carry forward.

A semester of weekly M2 sessions is a semester spent building that habit. The argument for continuous feedback goes beyond this semester. It’s a foundation for everything that comes after.

The post Why 1-2 observations aren’t enough: The case for continuous feedback in pre-service teacher training appeared first on Swivl.

At Swivl, we take this seriously. This post explains what we’ve done to ensure M2 scores like a trained human evaluator, and how we continue to monitor and refine that accuracy over time.

M2’s Custom Rubrics

M2 provides organizations a way to define the instructional criteria that matter most to their team. Through M2’s custom rubrics feature, organizational leaders can specify performance indicators and scoring criteria that reflect their values and expectations. 

After each lesson, M2 evaluates the teaching activity against those rubrics and returns a score on a 1–4 scale, along with feedback explaining the score, highlighting strengths, and identifying areas for growth.

The promise of this feature is powerful: frequent, consistent, criteria-aligned feedback at scale, without walk-throughs or high-pressure observations. But that promise only holds if the scores are accurate.

The problem we set out to solve

Early in M2’s development, we identified a scoring distribution challenge: the system was returning scores that clustered in the middle of the scale, producing mostly 2s and 3s regardless of actual instructional quality. This is a common challenge when building AI scoring systems. The model hedges rather than discriminates, and the result is feedback that feels generic and uninformative.

We needed M2 to produce a score distribution that looked like what trained evaluators produce, which is an appropriate 1–4 spread that reflects genuine differences in instructional performance.

How we calibrated M2 against expert evaluators

To address this, we built an evaluation dataset using classroom observation videos that had already been scored by highly trained human evaluators. These were not casual reviewers, but evaluators with deep familiarity with professional teaching rubrics and established inter-rater reliability.

We then ran M2 against those same videos and compared the output.

The gap between the two distributions was clear. Our human evaluators produced the kind of spread you’d expect from a well-calibrated rubric: a meaningful range of 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s. M2’s initial output clustered near the middle.

From there, we went through an iterative calibration process: adjusting how M2 analyzes transcripts, restructuring the way rubric criteria are applied, and refining the scoring methodology at each step. Each iteration was tested against the same evaluation dataset and compared to the human baseline.

One key improvement came from how we structured M2’s rubric evaluation process. Rather than evaluating a lesson holistically, we introduced a more structured, criterion-by-criterion approach. Essentially, we gave M2 a more disciplined framework for applying each rubric dimension, similar to how a trained observer would work through an evaluation instrument item by item.

We also differentiated M2’s feedback language by score level. A score of 1 now more clearly focuses on what was missing and what the teacher can do differently. A score of 4 now emphasizes what went well and why it was effective. This mirrors how skilled coaches communicate; the message you deliver to a struggling teacher is structurally different from the message you deliver to a strong one.

After calibration, M2’s score distributions align closely with those of our human evaluators. The gap narrowed substantially, and M2 now produces the range and differentiation that makes feedback actionable.

What the remaining differences tell us

The goal of this calibration was less about achieving a perfect match, and more about understanding where differences exist and why. There are cases where M2 and human evaluators diverge, and those cases are instructive.

Most remaining differences occur at the boundaries of rubric descriptors: situations where a teaching performance sits between a 2 and a 3, for example, and reasonable evaluators could score it either way. This is not a failure of the AI. Instead, it reflects the same ambiguity that human evaluators navigate. 

In fact, inter-rater reliability among trained human evaluators on rubric items like these is rarely 100%, and M2’s agreement rate with our evaluators compares favorably to the agreement rate between two independent human scorers on the same material. 

For now, one unique capability of human evaluators is eyesight. M2 currently relies on class transcripts for the analysis that leads to scores and feedback. However, we are investigating the safe, privacy-centric approach to bringing visual evaluation capabilities to M2 in upcoming releases.

Understanding boundary cases and the work process of AI vs. humans helps us continue to define clear paths for improvement.

Ongoing monitoring and refinement

Calibration is not a one-time event. As M2 is deployed across diverse classrooms, grade levels, and instructional contexts, we continue to monitor scoring accuracy and precision.

We define accuracy as how closely M2’s scores align with a trained human evaluator. We define precision as how consistent M2’s scoring is across similar lessons. In other words, whether it gives comparable scores when evaluating comparable teaching. Both accuracy and precision matter.

Our team runs ongoing comparisons between M2 output and human-evaluated samples, identifying drift and opportunities to improve. When we find systematic gaps, we refine our approach and re-validate. This continuous loop is what allows M2’s scoring to remain trustworthy over time, not just at the point of initial release.

The result: consistent, trustworthy feedback

When an organization deploys M2 with custom rubrics, they are not getting a black-box AI generating arbitrary scores. They are getting a scoring system that has been explicitly calibrated to match how trained evaluators apply rubric criteria — and that is continuously monitored to stay that way.

This is what makes M2’s frequent feedback valuable. Not just that teachers receive more of it, but that the feedback they receive is grounded in the same framework a skilled evaluator would apply. The score of 3 a teacher receives on Monday should mean the same thing as the score of 3 they receive two weeks later, because M2 applies its criteria consistently.

When teachers and leaders can trust the scores, they can use them. Coaching conversations become more specific. Professional development becomes more targeted. And leaders gain a reliable, ongoing view of where their organization is performing and where it needs to grow — without the cost and inconsistency of traditional evaluation systems.

M2’s AI rubric scoring is built to earn that trust. And we’ve done the work to prove it.

The post How M2’s AI rubric scoring aligns with expert human evaluators appeared first on Swivl.

This creates a serious assessment problem. When an ELL student struggles in math, is it a math problem or a language problem? If a student stops participating, are they disengaged or simply unable to follow along? Without the right tools, it’s nearly impossible to tell.

The result: many ELL students end up in Tier 2 and Tier 3 MTSS interventions when what they actually need is better language support. Schools consume intervention resources on the wrong problem while the real need is treated as secondary.

Considering the scale of the ELL population, the stakes to this challenge are real. Performance on language proficiency assessments like TELPAS and WIDA ACCESS influences funding, program placement, and how schools allocate resources. Schools need a way to support both language learning and academic learning at the same time without adding more to teachers’ plates.

M2 supports the whole learner, not just the language learner

M2, Swivl’s AI-integrated classroom robot, listens during instruction and turns what’s happening in the classroom into meaningful support for both teachers and students.

Through translation, speaking practice, small group learning, and more, M2 supports ELL students across both aspects of their learning journey: English and academics.

Keep kids connected to academic content

In-ear language support

With M2’s in-ear audio support, ELL students receive immediate translated summaries of instruction, delivered privately through an earbud without interrupting class. Students grab their assigned M2 remote, plug in an earbud, and tap to hear a brief recap of recent instruction in their home language.

This keeps students connected to the content of their daily lessons while they continue developing proficiency in English. They can follow along, participate, and build comprehension all while their English skills grow through immersion.

Out loud translations and summaries

The Ask M2 feature allows teachers and students to request summaries or translations of class content at any moment. Then, those responses are played aloud in high-quality audio for the whole group. 

This means students can get the clarification they need to keep following the day’s lesson, and teachers can offer immediate language support without needing to speak the student’s native language themselves.

Offer more reps to build communication skills

Proficiency assessments like TELPAS are so challenging because speaking and writing are the hardest domains to develop. Students need to practice communicating, not just listening and reading. M2 creates natural opportunities for that practice.

Adaptive, standards-aligned speaking activities

Talks are M2’s adaptive, standards-aligned verbal assessments that let students process learning in their home language or practice expressing ideas in English.

Imagine having the time to assess every multilingual or Tier 2 and 3 student’s learning in a one to one conversation after any lesson. That’s what Talks can do.

After each Talk, the teacher gets a concise yet informative report on students’ understanding of the standards, skills, and/or content related to the assignment, helping teachers understand what students actually know, not just what they can express in English.

Guided small group learning with language and content support

Guides are small group learning activities that M2 can generate live during class or that teachers can pre-plan for the day’s lesson.

M2 speaks aloud to share each step of a Guide to students, and is available to translate or answer student questions about the content or the activity during the experience. 

Unlike traditional group work that can lack structure and scaffolds, Guides ensure students progress through a learning activity at the appropriate pace and with the support they need, both for language and academics.

When ELL students are paired with native English speakers for a Guide, there is an additional benefit of academic conversation practice in a low-stakes setting.

Use leading indicators to provide proactive support

Traditional MTSS relies on assessment data that often arrives too late. By the time test scores reveal a student is struggling, weeks or months have passed.

M2 changes the equation by providing leading indicators that can help educators flag potential issues before they become entrenched problems.

Data-driven grouping and differentiation 

M2 enables smarter targeted support through grouping students by today’s needs rather than weeks or months-old assessment data. Teachers get a tier-based breakdown after the class completes a Talk.

Admin dashboards for empowered decisions

M2’s admin dashboard offers leaders an organization-wide look into student learning trends and a snapshot of progress on initiatives that affect special student populations.

Importantly, the admin dashboard gives leaders insights without sharing classroom transcripts nor identifying individual students or teachers.

Shape teacher feedback at the org level

When you devote resources to ELL support and MTSS, providing ongoing feedback to support implementation is essential but time-consuming. M2 offers two powerful ways for leaders to scale the strategies and priorities that help ensure everyone in the organization is moving in the same direction. 

The system prompt allows admins to provide high-level guard rails, look-fors, and directions for all teacher feedback, making each M2 a classroom champion for your organization values and goals.

Custom rubrics enable automated, low-stakes teacher feedback and scoring on how daily instruction aligns with your initiatives. Simply upload a document or add the rubric criteria that matter to you, and M2 begins providing feedback and scores focused on that area after every class session.

Real impact in real classrooms

Schools using M2 are already seeing the difference in their ELL populations:

“Our multilingual students feel empowered when M2 responds in their native language, making them feel seen and valued.” – Erika Inka, Instructional Coach, Barrington School District 220

“Students see M2 as a helpful friend, especially those learning English who can now engage more easily.” – Meagan MacDonald, Instructional Coach, Barrington School District 220

When students feel included and supported, everything changes. Participation increases. Confidence grows. Academic performance improves. And schools see better outcomes on the assessments that matter—not through test prep, but through genuine learning.

Better outcomes and smart resource management

Supporting ELL students effectively is the right thing to do and the smartest choice for leaders with a focus on resource management. With the right tools in place, schools can position themselves to:

• Reduce the number of students who need intensive Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions
• Allocate MTSS resources more strategically
• Improve school performance ratings as student outcomes rise
• See gains on assessments like TELPAS and WIDA ACCESS—along with the funding tied to those scores

M2 gives schools a path toward proactive, integrated support that addresses the whole student, not just the language learner.

The post Supporting multilingual learners beyond language: How M2 connects English development and academic learning appeared first on Swivl.

Mirrortalk 2.0 is coming March 18th, it is the next evolution of Mirrortalk and we’re calling it M2. It brings together instructional support, feedback, reflection, and boosting participation into a simpler, more coherent experience across web, mobile, and the M2 device.

This release helps teachers make every tier of instruction great and participation visible, giving stronger support in the moments that matter most, both during and after class.

Real-time support

M2 will deliver immediate, actionable tips, on-demand. Throughout the class, teachers can click for immediately actionable tips based on best practices to support Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction. Based on the context of the class, M2 can generate a guided high-impact learning activity for teachers to walk students through or opt in to have M2 guide the class through an audio experience.

Teachers can also have input on the types of tips or interactions they need at the moment to support all student needs. Now, teachers can request a check for understanding, a discussion question, or classroom management suggestion as tips with the tap of a button.

A dashboard that turns class into next steps

After every class, teachers need clarity–not just more data. 

The new M2 dashboard is organized around My Takeaways: a concise summary of what went well and what to improve next time. Feedback is broken down by chunks of the lesson (warm-up, instruction, group work, wrap-up), so teachers can connect insights to real moments they remember. Each activity is also given a participation score, teachers can use this as feedback for how Tier 1 and Tier 2 instruction is landing with students.

Teachers can:

• View feedback alongside the class transcript, in context
• See which instructional moves mattered most and where engagement was visible
• Receive auto-suggested Reflections, all tied directly to what just happened

Each visit to the Dashboard now becomes a momentum builder for the growth of the teacher and the entire class.

A simpler way to start and organize teaching

M2 simplifies how teachers move from planning to teaching.

Teachers now start activities from within Groups, such as “Period 3 Algebra”. All activities that are created within a group can be managed and revisited within the group.

Activities that aren’t tied to a specific group live in a single General group, which means there’s no more cluttered personal activities to manage.

Even though your teaching activities will now live in Groups, they are not visible to any students within the group. Students only ever see the work you assign to them, like Guides and Reflections.

Teaching with M2, now from your phone

Sometimes the easiest device to use is the one already in your pocket. M2 app helps support teachers, making tiered instruction easier with just a mobile device. 

With M2 app, teachers can now run M2 teacher activities from phones and tablets:

• Start an activity
• Receive immediate tips to improve tiered instruction and suggested Guides 
• All through a simple, mobile-friendly chat experience

During class, teachers can request a check for understanding, discussion questions or classroom management tips with a single tap. After class, they can continue the conversation with M2—reflecting, clarifying feedback, and revisiting important moments, all through a text-based chat. 

This mobile experience is intentionally simplified for use during instruction, with no audio output. This keeps the attention on student instruction and participation, not screens.

Reflection to bring clarity 

Reflection works best when it’s immediate and conversational.

After class, teachers reflect by talking with M2 via text—on web or mobile—while the lesson is still fresh. They can dig into specific moments, revisit feedback, and analyze strengths and weaknesses of participation.

It’s a reflection that brings clarity and helps teachers come prepared for deeper conversations about their instruction, either on their own or with a coach. 

What’s been removed?

To keep M2 focused, several features have been retired:

• Whiteboard
• Personal groups and personal verbal reflections for teachers
• Time-based tips
• Verbal Ask M2 inside chat

These changes reinforce a single goal: helping teachers create the conditions for meaningful engagement, every day.

Why M2 matters

M2 isn’t about adding more features. It’s about aligning everything around what actually improves instruction: tiered supports, actionable feedback, and visible engagement. 

The post M2: Improving instruction at every tier 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.

We built M2 with a feedback focus on engagement, questioning, and pacing. Why? Because insights in these three areas make a difference for every teacher we know. 

Many districts have also adopted their own high-quality instructional frameworks and initiatives. Turning those priorities into consistent, scalable classroom support, though, is challenging.

This is where M2 can help.

Introducing Rubric Builder

Rubric Builder is a new tool that lets administrators customize the criteria used in M2’s feedback during activities and in teacher reports afterward. With it, schools can add their own scoring criteria to sit alongside M2’s built-in Engagement, Pacing, and Questioning rubrics. 

Unlike traditional rubrics that live in documents or observation tools, these criteria shape what M2 looks for, responds to, and reports on during and after instruction every single day. This means the feedback teachers receive through M2 can now be fully aligned to district priorities, instructional frameworks, or coaching goals. Teachers get more meaningful insights, and administrators get consistency across classrooms.

Because initiatives shift and frameworks get updated, Rubric Builder supports the need for flexible instructional leadership. Admins can toggle custom criteria on or off at any time, and changes apply only to future activities, ensuring that all past feedback is preserved.

What does this all look like in practice? Here are three ways Rubric Builder can support your organization.

Align to teacher evaluation frameworks

Whether your district uses Danielson, Marzano, CLASS, or a local district models, M2 can now take on the same perspective as your organization’s coaches or administrators. After customizing your rubric, M2 will spot and comment on the detailed look-fors related to rigor, differentiation, classroom environment, or academic discourse that are part of your preferred approach to evaluating instruction.

For example, if your framework emphasizes academic language development, you can add a criterion like “Use of Academic Vocabulary.” When a teacher starts an activity, M2 scores and provides feedback using that criterion, and even appropriately mirrors the language used in your rubric.

Teachers get more frequent, more targeted insights, while administrators gain more consistent data. This moves the evaluation from a one-off event to a year-long support plan. 

Support instructional coaching programs

With large teacher rosters and staffing constraints, coaches can only visit a fraction of their teachers each month. Coaches can extend their impact when teachers use M2 weekly or even daily.

By bringing coaching criteria into Rubric Builder, districts can:

• Reinforce the same language coaches use
  
• Give teachers immediate feedback tied to the strategies they’re working on
  
• Support new teachers or teachers in new roles with higher-frequency feedback

Imagine a team focusing on improving questioning techniques. A coach can add a criterion like “Use of Higher-Order Questions” to the organization’s rubric. Each time a teacher uses M2, they receive a score and written feedback tied to that goal without waiting for the next coaching visit. This helps coaching criteria show up consistently in practice, not just during scheduled observations.

It’s a simple way to extend a coach’s impact across classrooms.

Advance district initiatives with consistent feedback

M2 is now your partner in championing district initiatives, ensuring that momentum stays high by massively increasing feedback teachers see on practical implementation of your organizations’ areas of focus. 

Because M2 provides feedback in real time, teachers receive many more touch points to reinforce the initiative each day instead of just on PD days.

Imagine rolling out an initiative knowing that teachers have not only heard about your organization’s new priority from leadership but will get daily reminders, feedback, and coaching about what that priority looks like in practice with every lesson they teach. That vision is now a reality.

This is especially valuable for new teachers or those adapting to new district priorities. M2 helps them know exactly what to look for and how to improve.

A more aligned future for instructional feedback

When teachers receive feedback aligned to their team’s goals, growth accelerates. Coaching conversations become clearer and are grounded in shared context. Expectations stay consistent even when you don’t have the chance to meet. Important initiatives have a greater chance of taking root for the long term.

By embedding rubric criteria directly into live observation and post-class feedback, M2 helps existing frameworks influence daily teaching at a scale that was never possible until now.

Rubric Builder brings alignment between organizational priorities and the daily rhythm of teaching. It’s another step toward a future where every classroom gets the support it deserves, and every teacher has a clearer path forward.

The post Turning district priorities into consistent classroom feedback: M2’s Rubric Builder appeared first on Swivl.

What is MTSS?  Why do districts struggle with it?

Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) is designed to be elegant in theory: a three-tier pyramid where Tier 1 provides strong universal instruction for all students, Tier 2 offers targeted interventions for students who need extra support, and Tier 3 delivers intensive, specialized services for those with the greatest needs.

But elegant theory doesn’t always translate to classroom reality.

Districts across the country have invested in MTSS frameworks. They’ve trained their staff, bought intervention materials, and hired interventionists. Yet many report the same frustration: inconsistent implementation across schools, staff stretched too thin to provide quality support, and data scattered across multiple systems—making it hard to know if the system is actually working.

The problem isn’t the framework itself. The problem is the logistics of making it work at scale.

Now, with M2, that’s changing.

The three barriers to MTSS success and the M2 solution

Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) is designed to be elegant in theory: a three-tier pyramid where Tier 1 provides strong universal instruction for all students, Tier 2 offers targeted interventions for students who need extra support, and Tier 3 delivers intensive, specialized services for those with the greatest needs.

Barrier 1: Fidelity – The consistency challenge

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you can’t measure what isn’t consistent. A major implementation concern for many districts is the lack of uniformity in how MTSS is actually practiced.

What “Tier 1 instruction” looks like at Elementary School A might be completely different from Elementary School B. One teacher is checking for understanding every five minutes; another assumes all students are keeping up. One school has clear classroom routines; another is constantly managing behavior. This drift in practice means that students don’t experience consistent support—and your MTSS framework becomes more of an idea than a system.

How M2 solves it:

M2 standardizes the feedback loop by allowing you to upload your specific district frameworks—whether it’s Danielson, Marzano, or your own custom “Great Teaching” rubric—directly into the M2 Admin Dashboard. Now, every piece of feedback a teacher receives is aligned to your standards and your vision of excellent instruction.

When a teacher at School A and a teacher at School B both use M2, they’re not just getting generic coaching. They’re receiving feedback grounded in the same language, the same expectations, and the same district priorities. It’s not about robotically enforcing rules; it’s about creating a shared language of excellence. That consistency is the foundation of true MTSS fidelity.

Barrier 2: Capacity – The staffing and burnout crisis

Most districts have robust MTSS plans on paper. But executing them? That requires people—coaches, interventionists, specialists, and leaders who can observe, analyze, and support every teacher in the system.

In reality, instructional coaches are stretched impossibly thin. A coach might be responsible for 20, 30, or even 50 teachers. That means classroom observations happen once or twice a semester. Teachers get feedback weeks after a lesson. Critical gaps in professional development go unaddressed. And staff burnout skyrockets because educators feel unsupported and isolated.

This capacity crisis creates a vicious cycle: without consistent feedback, teachers don’t improve. Without teacher improvement, students don’t thrive. And Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventionists find themselves overwhelmed because Tier 1 instruction wasn’t strong enough in the first place.

How M2 solves it:

M2 acts as a force multiplier. By giving every teacher a private, AI-powered co-teacher that delivers immediate, non-evaluative feedback, you’re effectively extending your coaching team’s reach exponentially.

Consider what happened at Newnan High School in Georgia. Their instructional coaches found that M2 transformed their work. One coach said, “It’s almost like it clones me. I’m able to be in more places at once.” Instead of spending hours on observation logistics and writing notes, coaches could focus their expertise where it was most needed—on Tier 2 and Tier 3 support, knowing that Tier 1 instruction was being strengthened daily for every teacher.

Teachers also reported that M2 felt less threatening than a formal observation. It was private, focused on growth rather than evaluation, and available 24/7. This creates a culture of continuous improvement instead of occasional judgment—exactly what sustainable MTSS requires.

Barrier 3: Data – Moving from guesswork to action

MTSS is supposed to be data-driven. But for many districts, the data doesn’t actually drive anything.

Progress monitoring data is scattered across multiple platforms. Some metrics are subjective (notes from walkthroughs). Others arrive too late to matter (semester grades, end-of-year test scores). And collecting it all is incredibly labor-intensive, pulling teachers and coaches away from the work that actually moves the needle.

As a result, leaders make decisions based on incomplete information. They can’t pinpoint where professional development dollars should go. They miss the bright spots of excellence that should be celebrated and scaled. They can’t objectively measure whether their “checking for understanding” initiative is actually happening in classrooms—or if it’s slipping because teachers revert to old habits under stress.

How M2 solves it:

M2 provides objective, real-time data on what’s actually happening in classrooms. It captures engagement patterns, questioning depth, instructional pacing, and student talk time—without bias or subjectivity.

For district leaders, the dashboard offers a bird’s-eye view of these trends across all classrooms. You can see, objectively, whether the practices you’re prioritizing in professional development are taking root. You can track progress over time and identify which schools need more support. You can celebrate the teachers who are crushing it and learn from them.

This turns data monitoring from a compliance burden into a strategic asset. You know exactly where your resources should go. You have proof of what’s working. And you can adjust your MTSS approach in real time, not months later.

From framework to reality

Implementing MTSS with genuine fidelity is heavy lifting. It requires consistency, capacity, and clear data—three things that have historically been hard to achieve at scale.

But M2 changes what’s possible.

By ensuring every teacher receives feedback aligned to your district’s standards, by extending your coaching capacity without burning out your staff, and by providing objective data that informs every decision, M2 bridges the gap between the elegant MTSS framework on paper and the real, thriving support system that students and teachers actually experience.

That’s not just better MTSS. That’s MTSS that works.

The post The missing piece in your MTSS framework: How M2 closes the gap between theory and practice 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.

The post Whole Group Guides: A new way to move the whole class forward appeared first on Swivl.

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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