Helping Teachers Make the Grade

Teachers, Teryn Phillips Thomas believes, have superpowers. They just need the technological tools to help them identify and nurture their students’ potential.

Thomas, BSBA ’10, is devoting her career to unleashing educators’ maximum potential. She is the founder and CEO of EdLight, an education company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help teachers put student work at the center of teaching and learning.

“We’re trying to transform classrooms so that students — regardless of their demographics — are getting the feedback that they deserve every single day,” she says. “The goal is to create equitable classrooms through feedback that’s meaningful, pedagogically driven and based on content expertise.”

A proud South Jersey resident, Thomas didn’t set out to change the world of education. Her original ambition was to start a nonprofit to help teenage moms. But working at American Water and at Drexel’s Stephen and Sandra Sheller 11th Street Family Health Services as part of her co-op piqued her entrepreneurial spirit. She was still focused on nonprofits when she joined Teach for America and was placed in a fourth-grade classroom in Northeast Philadelphia.

“I fell in love with the classes and the students and never looked back,” says Thomas, who earned an MS in education at the University of Pennsylvania.

After two years in Teach for America, Thomas became a teacher in Newark, New Jersey. This led to her become a founding principal at a KIPP public charter school, part of a nonprofit network of college-preparatory schools educating early childhood, elementary, middle and high school students. The spark that would eventually lead her to launch EdLight was lit while she was chief schools officer.

“It started by looking at some individual pieces of student work,” she says. “We’re all being told stories every day that kids are wildly far away from being proficient or doing well in school, and that’s just not true. What you learn is that kids are making these really tiny mistakes, and if you’re able to intervene, they don’t have to turn into big mistakes.”

Enter EdLight. The company Thomas founded in 2019 aims to save teachers time and stress by using AI to identify misconceptions in student work instantaneously. Teachers, who use the app for free because schools pick up the tab, scan a student’s assignment using their phone, and the AI will analyze the student’s answer and point out strategies that would help the student improve.

“We were doing AI before it was cool,” Thomas says, laughing. “It is a very interesting moment in time to watch everyone else kind of catching up to where we are, which has been really exciting. We’re not trying to eliminate that human aspect that is beyond a dynamic that any robot could ever create. Teachers shouldn’t have to spend their time on things that are causing burnout.”

The company, which garnered support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund, has four full-time employees and a network of more than 50 part-time teachers who annotate datasets to ensure the AI is pedagogically rich and content-driven. EdLight has been an important tool for many teachers, Thomas says, including a Philadelphia educator who desperately needed help.

“She was in her first-year last year, and she was burning out,” Thomas says. “She was trying to grade all of these student papers, was super exhausted, didn’t really have content expertise because she’s a first-year teacher. We asked her to try a pilot using EdLight in her classroom for her sixth and seventh graders. We saved her somewhere around 2,000 minutes a week that was previously being spent on grading papers and giving feedback. And now she was just like taking pictures on her app and getting that automatically done for her. As a result, she was able to move into her second year of teaching because she wasn’t constantly overwhelmed with all of the menial tasks that don’t bring meaning to the work. She said, ‘EdLight kept me in the classroom.’”

Through entrepreneurship, Thomas found a pathbreaking way to make a difference in public education.