A 5-part series on breaking barriers, building trust, and driving educational equity with AI

Right now, the discussion about AI in education is everywhere—dominating headlines, inspiring hope, and raising tough questions. From breakthrough innovations to concerns about equity and ethics, the conversation is loud and ongoing. And complicated.

So we want to cut through the noise and show some of the real ways AI is improving communities. 

At TalkingPoints, we believe the most important question isn’t ‘How do you use AI?’—it’s: ‘How can we use AI to do the most good for students, families, and educators—especially in communities that have long been under-resourced?’

As we celebrate 10 years of impact, we’re launching a new blog series to explore that question from our perspective as an AI-native organization. Over five parts, we’ll spotlight how we’ve used AI to break down barriers and unlock the superpower of families. We’ll share what we’ve learned along the way and what’s next as we build toward a brighter future in education.

We’re excited to share our reflections, tools, and lessons learned—and to hear from you. What questions are you asking about AI? What possibilities are you exploring? Let’s shape the future together.

📩 Have thoughts, hopes, or worries about AI in education? Send us a note—we’re listening.

Part 2 – From idea to impact: What we’ve learned about supporting teachers with AI

Written by David Golkin

Principal Product Manager at TalkingPoints

When I was teaching, I wanted to do right by every student and every family—but I didn’t always have the time, tools, or training to communicate in the way I wanted. I knew these relationships mattered, but knowing that and acting on it are two different things when you’re managing a classroom full of students, grading, planning, and responding to urgent needs on the fly.

So when our team at TalkingPoints started thinking about how AI can support educators, we didn’t start with the tech. We started with a question:

What’s something that teachers know is essential, but often don’t have time or capacity to do well?

That’s what led us to build a new feature called Message Mentor.

Listening first: What teachers told us

Before writing a single line of code, we spent time with teachers. We listened to educators on our team who have decades of classroom experience, as well as teachers in our partner schools. What we heard wasn’t surprising. 

Teachers are emotionally invested in their relationships with families. They care deeply. But they are exhausted. Many feel unsure about how to communicate with families in ways that are clear, supportive, and culturally responsive–especially when giving constructive feedback, or news that’s difficult for families to hear. 

This type of communication doesn’t always come naturally. We need training, guidance, and time to craft messages that most effectively support children and families, and bridge the gap between home and school.  

So we asked ourselves: 

What if we could build something that takes some of the cognitive load off teachers, while reinforcing what research tells us works best when engaging families?

From research to reality: Designing Message Mentor with educators

As we started designing Message Mentor, we grounded our work in the Dual Capacity-Building Framework created by Dr. Karen Mapp. This framework combines years of research on how to communicate with families in ways that support stronger student outcomes. We wanted to go beyond helping educators craft quick and grammatically correct messages. We wanted to help them to build trusting relationships with families by designing a tool that supports warm, clear, and inviting communication. Above all, that communication needed to be asset-based, honoring families’ knowledge and strengths.

An early partnership with OpenAI enabled us to pressure test new developments in generative AI and envision what responsible, research-informed AI support could actually look like in schools.

The work was meticulous. We spent months refining how AI should interpret the tone of a message (such as whether it’s positive or negative), respond to different scenarios, and enhance messages without altering their intent. 

We were constantly asking: 

Would this message build trust, or erode it? Would a teacher feel supported, or second-guessed? How can we empower educators with agency in their communication while guiding them toward best practices that we know are effective based on research? 

We spent our energy building the values behind the feature, not just the functionality. 

How AI supports teachers in building trust

Today, thousands of teachers are using Message Mentor. The approach is simple – a teacher composes a message to send to a family. With the click of a button, TalkingPoints’ AI rewrites the message using research-based strategies proven to support stronger student outcomes. 

The tool makes language easy to read, asset-based, and positive in tone. Like in this example:

• Original message:
  Your child is failing math because they don’t pay attention in class. Please make sure they study more at home.
• Message Mentor version:
  “Hi [Parent’s Name], I wanted to share an update about [Student’s Name] in math. They’re working hard but could use a little extra support with some of the recent concepts. Practicing multiplication at home would make a big difference—would you like me to send a few simple activities you could try together?”

Teachers tell us they feel less stressed when writing to families and more confident starting sensitive conversations. Many say they didn’t realize how much of their energy was going into trying to “get it right” with tone and language until they got some help.

We continue to receive feedback from our educator community, which helps to evolve our approach to meet their needs. 

And small shifts matter. After using Message Mentor:

• 74% of teachers felt more confident having difficult conversations with parents
• Teachers who thought that they lacked the time to communicate effectively with families dropped by 27%

In this way, we are helping teachers be more effective and supporting students through stronger family partnerships.

See Message Mentor in action – Watch this 90 second video

What’s next for AI and family-school partnerships

The lessons we learned from Message Mentor have shaped how we build AI interventions at TalkingPoints. We start small, stay grounded in research, and never forget that technology should serve people, not replace them.

Today, we’re taking it a step further. We’re exploring ways to provide teachers with suggestions for activities for families to do at home to support student learning, strategies for sustaining conversations over time, and tailoring communication based on what families share. We always do this with privacy and safety at the forefront.

We continue to thoughtfully and responsibly integrate AI technology into our platform to improve the product and help address ongoing challenges we see with schools and districts. Our industry-leading translation is a proprietary model built specifically for K–12 that leverages AI while remaining fundamentally human-designed. Our new Attendance Improvement package applies AI to help schools better understand and categorize absence reasons, enabling them to design more timely and targeted interventions.

Ultimately, we’re learning as we go. But as we make advances in tech and AI, we will always come back to the heart of what we do: centering our teachers’ and families’ needs to drive student outcomes at scale. 

Up next in our series

In our next post, we’ll reflect on how we’re using AI to build evidence and support best practices in the field. We will dig into how we are surfacing real-time insights from family-school communication and helping educators and districts learn not just from data, but also from dialogue.

As always, if you’re a teacher or school leader navigating this space, we’d love to hear from you. What feels hard about family engagement? What kind of support would make it easier?

Let’s keep building together—with curiosity, caution, and hope.

Celebrating 10 years of partnership and impact

For a decade, TalkingPoints has supported students, families, and educators through the power of effective family-school partnerships. As an education technology nonprofit, our award-winning communication and family engagement platform has improved outcomes for districts and students across the country.

We connect 9 million+ educators, students, and family members annually and have facilitated more than one billion conversations—building trust, fostering relationships, and fueling student success. Named by Common Sense Education as “the best overall family communication platform for teachers and schools,” TalkingPoints drives measurable gains in attendance and academic achievement, backed by rigorous, causal research.

Join us in building a future where every child has the support they need to thrive.