Nikki Muncey
In a world where education technology often promises to revolutionize learning but falls short on execution, SchoolAI is taking a refreshingly human-centered approach. Founded by former educator Caleb Hicks, SchoolAI isn't focused on replacing teachers but on enhancing their ability to connect with students in meaningful ways.
The platform's innovative "Spaces" enable teachers to create customized AI-guided learning activities that students can navigate at their own pace, while providing educators with real-time insights into student progress, understanding, and well-being.
SchoolAI addresses some of education's most pressing challenges: teacher burnout, student disengagement, and the struggle to personalize learning experiences. What emerges is a vision of technology that doesn't diminish human connection in the classroom but amplifies it.
The journey from teaching keyboarding to founding SchoolAI
Caleb Hicks comes from what he calls "the family business" of education. With a father who was a university professor, a mother who ran a preschool, and two sisters who became teachers, education was always in his blood. His own teaching career began with seven periods of middle school keyboarding—a subject that isn't exactly known for inspiring student engagement.
Rather than resigning himself to teaching an uninspiring curriculum, Hicks transformed his classroom through two key strategies. First, he introduced a competition: any student who could beat him in a typing test would earn the privilege of playing computer games for the rest of the semester. Second, he began each class with free writing, using blank keyboards to encourage students to focus on content while developing typing skills.
"My classroom was a lab," Hicks explains. He eventually evolved his teaching to include career exploration and teen entrepreneurship, where the grade a student received in his class was based on the percentage of $1,000 they were able to earn by starting their own business during the semester.
This approach reflected Hicks's core educational philosophy: learning should be high-stakes (though not in a punitive way), relevant, and connected to real-world outcomes that students care about. It's a philosophy that would later inform his work with SchoolAI.
After leaving the traditional classroom, Hicks worked at a coding bootcamp and on Apple's education team, and co-founded Lambda School, a tech education platform where students only paid if they secured a job with a salary above $50,000 based on what they learned. Each of these experiences reinforced his belief in mastery-based, objective-oriented learning with strong student support systems.
The birth of SchoolAI and the "Spaces" feature
When ChatGPT was released, Hicks immediately saw its potential for education. He shares an anecdote about using it to help his daughter with spelling: "One of the first things I did with ChatGPT before SchoolAI existed—like week one when ChatGPT existed—I said, 'Hey, my daughter's interested in this thing. These are her spelling words this week. Write a story that uses those spelling words in the context that she's interested in, and bold, underscore, and add emojis around the spelling words.' " The personalized story helped his daughter ace her spelling test.
This experience sparked an idea: what if AI could help personalize learning for every student based on their individual interests and needs?
The first iteration of what would become SchoolAI started as a FERPA-compliant version of ChatGPT for a school district that had banned the technology on their networks due to privacy concerns. Hicks and his team built what they called a "PII Shield" (Personal Identifying Information Shield) that would swap out student names with different characters before sending data to the AI, then change them back in the teacher's interface.
During early testing with teachers, something unexpected happened. A teacher discovered they could override the intended instructions and create something entirely different—in this case, an interactive text adventure about the Battle of Yorktown. Students were engaged, sending hundreds of messages back and forth with the AI, and the teacher gained insights into their historical understanding.
This was the genesis of SchoolAI “Spaces”–the feature that allows teachers to create customized AI learning activities for their students. A Space might involve the AI role-playing as a water molecule to teach about the water cycle, guiding students through a historical event, or personalizing economic concepts based on students' interests—teaching supply and demand through comic books for one student and through sneakers for another.
How AI can magnify humanity in the classroom
Contrary to fears that AI might replace teachers or diminish the human element of education, Hicks believes the opposite is true.
"What is the opportunity that we feel like is missing in schools?" Hicks asks. "Students don't always feel seen or heard by their teachers. They don't feel like their principal does anything other than get them in trouble."
Similarly, teachers feel increasingly disconnected from their students. "As a teacher, you can feel like the students are no longer listening. Their behavior has gotten worse. They've got bigger attention problems. They're glued to their phone. They don't care about you. They don't respect you."
This mutual disconnect, Hicks argues, isn't because teachers or students have fundamentally changed. It's because the cognitive load on everyone in the educational system has increased dramatically. There's simply too much to manage, too many students to monitor, and too little time for meaningful connection.
Knowing how students are doing, feeling, and why
The most powerful aspect of SchoolAI's Spaces is not the content delivery, although that's certainly valuable, but the insights it provides into student well-being and understanding.
When students interact with an AI Space, the system can gather information about their comprehension, engagement, and emotional state. Teachers receive a dashboard showing which students understand the material (green), those who are struggling somewhat (yellow), and those who are completely lost or experiencing other issues (red).
These insights allow teachers to intervene with the students who need them most, precisely when they need them. Without time or space to ask a kid, "How are you doing? How are you feeling today? What's going on with you?" basic needs often go unacknowledged. And without addressing these needs, academic content is unlikely to matter to students.
Real-time data and targeted interventions
One of the most powerful capabilities of SchoolAI is providing teachers with actionable data about student learning in real-time. In traditional classrooms, teachers often don't discover that students are struggling until after an assessment, when it's already too late.
With SchoolAI, teachers can create learning experiences where they've informed the AI with whatever parameters they want. Students self-pace while the AI acts as a coach, asking questions and giving feedback. Teachers have access to information showing which students are struggling with specific concepts and which need more of a challenge, allowing them to pull those students for small-group, differentiated, targeted instruction in real time, then release them back into the activity stream.
This ability to identify and address learning gaps as they happen, rather than days or weeks later, represents a significant advancement in how teachers can support student learning. It aligns with research on the importance of timely feedback and intervention in effective education.
The middle 80%
Hicks reflects on his own experience as a middle school teacher: "I knew basically the top 20 kids, the most engaged 20 kids, and the hardest 20 kids really well And I believe I was a good teacher. I knew my students as well as I think anybody does. But that middle 80 percent of students, I didn't really know them well. I didn't really know who needed me on a given day or what one comment could have changed for someone in the moment."
This challenge—how to effectively reach and support the "middle 80 percent" of students every day—is one that many teachers grapple with. SchoolAI aims to make these students visible by surfacing information about their understanding, engagement, and emotional state that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Addressing burnout and disengagement
There is a crisis of burnout in the education system. According to Gallup polling, K-12 teachers report the highest levels of burnout of any U.S. profession. Meanwhile, nearly 75% of high school students report having negative feelings about school.
The traditional model of teachers at the front of the room transferring information made sense in an era when teachers were the primary source of knowledge. But in today's information-rich environment, that model needs to evolve. The most valuable role for teachers isn't to "spew all this knowledge and information all over everybody," but to design meaningful learning experiences and provide targeted support to students who need it.
AI can help address burnout by assisting teachers with more rote tasks like lesson planning, and giving them more time to make meaningful connections with students and see the impact of those connections.
"When you can put the technology to work for things that address the deeper causes of burnout... I think the role of a teacher is going to be the person who can look you in the eyes and say, 'You got this.'"
The guidance counselor example
To illustrate the challenge of human connection in modern schools, Hicks points to guidance counselors, who may be responsible for 600 to 1,000 students each.
"How many minutes, if they spread that evenly across every student, every minute that they're working the entire school year, how many minutes are they going to get to spend with every kid? It rounds to zero," Hicks says.
This makes it virtually impossible for guidance counselors to fulfill their intended role: helping students plan their educational and career paths based on their interests and abilities. Instead, they're often consumed with logistical tasks like schedule changes.
Similarly, teachers with large class loads struggle to provide individualized attention and support. AI tools like SchoolAI can help by automating routine tasks and providing insights that allow educators to use their limited time more effectively.
Getting started with AI in education
For educators who are nervous about incorporating AI into their teaching practice, Hicks offers some simple advice: "Think big, start small."
He recommends two easy ways to begin getting comfortable with AI in your personal life:
Use Claude (an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT) to take a picture of the contents of your refrigerator and ask for recipe suggestions. You can include dietary restrictions or nutritional goals for even more personalized recommendations.
Try Perplexity instead of Google the next time you need to research something. Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity uses AI to search multiple sources, read and process the results, and provide a synthesized answer with citations.
These low-stakes activities can help educators become more comfortable with AI before implementing it in their classrooms. When teachers start using AI in their personal lives and experience how it makes things easier, those small wins can help them lean into the power of AI.
Hicks also suggests trying a "pulse check" with colleagues or students—an activity where an AI asks questions about what's going well, what's challenging, and what support people need. This can provide valuable insights and create opportunities for meaningful connection.
The AI as a thought partner
AI has become a supportive presence for many educators. When struggling with a response to somebody or trying to wrap their head around something, they don't feel so alone in those moments anymore because they can literally pick up an app and talk to it: "OK, I got this message and the tone of it was this, and I'm really struggling to figure out how to frame a response." And the AI can help them think through the situation together.
This relates to the limitations of internal monologue: "If you are struggling with getting up and going to the gym, you're probably not in a mental headspace where you're going to be really great at telling yourself why and what you need to do about it... But if you say the same thing out loud to voice mode AI, you're going to get an actual helpful response because it's not tired."
This "thought partner" aspect of AI can be particularly valuable for educators, who often work in isolation and have limited opportunities for collaboration or reflection during the school day.
The future of teaching with AI
Throughout education circles, the emphasis remains that AI isn't meant to replace teachers but to enhance their capabilities and free them to focus on the most human aspects of education.
The vision for the future is one where teachers use AI to handle routine tasks and provide personalized learning experiences, while they focus on building relationships, providing targeted support, and creating those "light bulb moments" that can change a student's trajectory.
This shift aligns with what we know about effective teaching from educational research. As technology evolves and AI advances rapidly, it should free educators to focus on the human side of teaching.
Empowering teachers, engaging students
SchoolAI reveals a vision of AI in education that's fundamentally human-centered. Rather than replacing teachers or further isolating students behind screens, SchoolAI aims to create more opportunities for meaningful human connection in the classroom. By automating routine tasks, providing personalized learning experiences, and surfacing insights about student needs and understanding, AI can help educators focus on what matters most: building relationships and providing targeted support to students who need it.
As schools continue to navigate the challenges of burnout, disengagement, and information overload, tools like SchoolAI offer a promising path forward—one that uses technology not to diminish humanity but to magnify it.
If you want to hear more on this topic, you can listen to the full conversation between Caleb Hicks and Dr. Caitlin Tucker on the The Balance podcast. Ready to explore how AI can transform your classroom? Visit SchoolAI to learn more about our tools and start creating personalized learning experiences for your students.
Key takeaways
SchoolAI takes a human-centered approach to education technology by enhancing teacher-student connections rather than replacing educators.
The platform's "Spaces" feature allows teachers to create customized AI-guided learning activities that students navigate at their own pace.
Real-time analytics help teachers identify which students need immediate support, making the "middle 80 percent" of students more visible.
AI addresses teacher burnout by automating routine tasks and giving educators more time for meaningful student interactions.
