Our Take: wins, limits, and implementation considerations

Grading student writing is a heavy lift for teachers, limiting how much writing teachers assign and the amount of feedback students get. Enlighten addresses these bottlenecks so that teachers can increase the volume of writing students do as well as the volume of personalized feedback they get.

Immediate feedback is typically more actionable than delayed feedback. Enlighten shrinks the distance between the first attempt, feedback, and the second attempt.

The highly configurable rubric and calibration approach allows teachers to closely match the rubric expectations to the context of their instruction and the focus for writing they want to set up for a given assignment.

The configurable rubric gives teachers flexibility but also creates room for inconsistent use and expectations across classrooms.

The AI-feedback on a rubric tends to favor a formulaic structure to writing.

Enlighten’s feedback can be overwhelming to students—leading students to give another attempt without processing the feedback.

All AI products, particularly writing focused products, are inconsistent in their ability to catch when students use other AI to generate their initial entry.

Enlighten shares the standard school-based implementation considerations: scheduling (within the class schedule and the scope-and-sequence for instruction), teacher and leader training, tech set up, expectations for use.

Leaders need to think through whether to use a consistent rubric across classrooms or encourage teachers to use their own rubrics as well as whether to calibrate feedback centrally or have each teacher calibrate individually.

Leaders need to think through their expectations for teacher-student engagement during writing activities.