Personalizing teaching and learning is tough. As teachers, it requires so much work and effort to level texts, adapt how we teach to each child, and do everything we can to manage the classroom at the same time. As a teacher, I’ve wanted to customize learning for each student easily and have wished that AI could do that for me more easily. It is great to see companies like the one represented in today’s Thought Leader Thursday, Renaissance Intelligence, who are working to do that. I sat down with Todd Brekhus, who leads Nearpod and is the Chief Product Officer at Renaissance, to talk about their thoughts behind how they designed Renaissance Intelligence.
I like the idea of teacher-facing AI tools that make managing the complexity of personalized teaching and learning simpler. I saw it demoed on the floor at ISTE and recommend checking it out for yourself. Now, I will admit, we did have a fun trip through the 1990’s and 2000’s to discuss what we learned in that time in history and how the lessons we learned about teaching and learning apply to today. (Oh, and Todd worked with Vint Cerf; that is just cool.) Let’s learn!
After listening to the episode, discuss how long it takes from data to reteaching for one lesson. Look at the lesson, the assessment data you’re gathering, and how long it takes to reteach and help students with that content from when you collect the data to when you reteach.
To go deeper: watch the “Discover Renaissance Intelligence” webinar — Todd Brekhus walks through the thinking with Chris Bauleke and Dr. Gene Kerns. Then request a demo and ask them to show you the prerequisite-skills view Todd describes at 13:20 in this episode. That was impressive to me at ISTE.
Todd Brekhus is chief product officer at Renaissance. A former educator, he is the creator of multiple education technology solutions, including the myON digital literacy platform. He is the recipient of the SIIA CODiE Award for Lifetime Achievement and many other accolades in recognition of his contributions to the field of education technology.
1. Todd distinguishes “personalized learning” from “personalized teaching and learning.” Which one does our current practice actually look like — and who decides what a student works on next?
2. When we pull a student for intervention, what does the rest of the room learn about that student? Do we believe that the student is improving or not? What do we think is happening in our room and our school with what we’re doing right now in this? Does something need to change?
3. Renaissance chose not to build student-facing AI because productive struggle matters. Where in our own AI use are we removing struggle we should be protecting? Do we talk to students about productive struggle?
4. Todd says teachers are always agile. What in our current system forces a teacher to be rigid when their judgment says otherwise?
5. If a tool told you exactly which twelve students needed a prerequisite skill tomorrow, would your schedule actually let you act on it?
If this episode gave you something you can use tomorrow, share it with a teacher who is tired of the screen-time argument.
This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki
Vicki Davis (00:00): How to keep the teacher at the center of classroom AI. This is episode 968 for your Thought Leader Thursday.
Announcer (00:09): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (00:14): Today’s show is sponsored by Renaissance. Renaissance Intelligence connects the loop across assessment, curriculum, instruction, practice, and proficiency, so educators can act on student needs in real time. Learn more at renaissance.com forward slash intelligence. Our guest today, Todd Brekhus, has spent over 25 years building the technology our students learn with. And like me, he got his start back in the 1990s helping people figure out this brand new thing called the Internet. Todd Brekhus is the chief product officer at Renaissance and general manager of Nearpod. He’s a former English teacher, technology director, and the creator of the myON literacy platform. So Renaissance is launching something called Renaissance Intelligence, and we’re sitting down at ISTE 2026 to talk about purposeful AI, technology that brings a fragmented classroom back together and keeps us as the teacher right at the center. So welcome to the show.
Todd Brekhus (01:12): Well, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Vicki Davis (01:14): So we both got our start in the 1990s.
Todd Brekhus (01:18): Oh, we’re going to start there.
Vicki Davis (01:19): I know. Teaching people how to use the Internet.
Todd Brekhus (01:21): Isn’t it funny now?
Vicki Davis (01:22): It is. But, you know, there are some similarities because we’ve lived through Web 1, Web 2, now the AI age. Do you see any similarities from when you started teaching the Internet and what’s happening now with artificial intelligence?
Todd Brekhus (01:35): Yes, for sure. And especially in education technology, one is fear, uncertainty. Do I have to throw out everything I learned about teaching to do this? And a lot of technology coming at us at once. So I would say a lot of apps, a lot of things. And in that time, I’d been teaching for eight years and I’m now out in the field and I’m building for MCI and Vint Cerf, TCP/IP protocol. Yeah, I got to run around the country with him for a while in the world. But building a teacher training program that all teachers were able to use at their state level was called Marco Polo, then became Thinkfinity. And that program launched to many, many teachers. But I remember the first worries we had about putting our credit cards on the Internet. That was the fear part of it. Am I going to transact business here? How do I think differently? And then we all watched the Pets.com Super Bowl and the crash and, you know, the dot-com era. But at the same time, I think education was struggling with, oh, wait, how do we put this?
Vicki Davis (02:27): How do we teach?
Todd Brekhus (02:28): Cool.
Vicki Davis (02:28): How do we teach this? I remember everybody saying teaching is over. We’re done. Yeah, the Internet’s going to teach. Yeah. Or YouTube’s going to teach them. Yeah. How did that work?
Todd Brekhus (02:34): Yeah, and I think the AI similarities are, we have fear right now. Are the bots taking over? I mean, is the robot replacing my job? And clearly that’s silly. And I think we all think education is so human, so fundamentally human. There’s some things that will last that will impact teaching and learning in a very positive way. And there’s a lot of noise. And there’s a lot of chaos. And there’s a lot of disruption. And there’s a lot of uncertainty.
Vicki Davis (02:54): Well, and as us teachers do, because I feel like once you’re a teacher, you’re always a teacher. It goes wild west. And then we kind of come in and civilize it. There’s a lot of conversations about, okay, now, lovely tool. But how do we use it with kids?
Todd Brekhus (03:09): What happens Wednesday morning, right?
Vicki Davis (03:10): So I will say this is all the conversation about, okay, take away their screens. And I will admit, because I’ve been using Nearpod since like the beginning. Okay. I love Nearpod. I teach AP computer science principles and I couldn’t live without it because my goal is every six to eight minutes, I’m going to be doing a formative check. And it has to, I can’t like leave my slides and come back to it or whatever. And so time to climb or whatever the tool is, is just part of what we do, even with my seniors. So when people say no screens, I’m like, no, but I use them. Like I use them. So how do we get to, there’s a lot of talk here at ISTE 2026 about meaningful use of the screen. Yeah. And so what’s your philosophy on that? Because we’re going to get into really cool what your product is doing.
Todd Brekhus (03:56): Yeah, well, I think it probably goes back to myON. And in 2009, the iPad hadn’t released yet. And I was hired by a publishing company, Capstone Publishers. And they said, look, we really want to go digital with our products. So we created this amazingly large, it’s now 17,000 books in a digital platform, all interactive. And I think the difference was, it wasn’t just that it went to a screen, but that it went to the screen meaningfully in terms of how do you interact with a book as a student? And one, can I have every version of that book myself? Can I write on the book? Can I interact with the book? Can I clip pieces and parts out of it so I can use it in a citation? Can I connect it to my notes and my learning? And so what we were trying to do there is actually, wait, when you go to the library, when I took my kids to the library as an English teacher, they get two books. And the kids that didn’t check their book back in, they don’t get any books.
Vicki Davis (04:48): That’s right.
Todd Brekhus (04:48): So there was this balance between why are we shielding all this content in the library? How can we make it unlimited and create a better, more efficacious environment for the classroom teacher to use any book you want? So I remember when I was myself, I wanted to do a book report on Muhammad Ali, but I got Amelia Earhart. Now, I love Amelia Earhart. Really cool, really interesting story, but I like sports, Muhammad Ali. And anyway, the point being is, what about kids’ choice? What if you give unlimited access to books? What if you’re not worried about the check-in, check-out, and how do you change and build that model? So that’s just a point of the screen was the ability for us to get this unlimited access. And I think that’s true with Nearpod. You have this unlimited access to connected teaching and learning, and how do you build that rapport and that connection, and how do you get that 100% pass rate if you don’t have those capabilities? Now, flip side of this, I think there’s a lot of screen time. This is not great screen time. And we’ve forced screen time to an effort that hasn’t shown the efficacy necessary. That’s right. So how do we choose the right models and the right pedagogy and the right instructional design approach for when the screen actually has advantages over the physical print? And I think the case of my example with myON or the case of your example with Nearpod are examples like that. I think we’re going to find the same thing with AI and teaching and learning with the new tech.
Vicki Davis (06:07): So I spent time at your booth yesterday with your amazing folks there. And so many teachers work for you, which is refreshing as a teacher. So Renaissance Intelligence kicks off July 1st, 2026. Let’s dig into this screen time piece because it was really something I had never seen before because you’ve got textbooks in there. We do. And then the teacher can drill down into the textbook and then they see where are my students according to the standards. And then they’re able to like say, okay, you get some of this and you get some of this and everybody gets some of that. Like I’ve oversimplified and you know it. So what’s your vision behind how you’re going to bring AI to the classroom through this new product?
Todd Brekhus (06:46): I think, first of all, let me just connect the dots on the screen time piece to the Renaissance Intelligence Launch. What Renaissance Intelligence Launch does for Renaissance is we unify all of our products. We have 20 applications now getting embedded into one singular experience. And in addition to that, as you mentioned, the textbooks, we took to heart what the Council of Chief State School Officers said and encouraged the industry to get to coherence. Where the high-quality instructional material with your textbook would relate to your supplemental, would relate to your assessments, and would provide a more dynamic teaching and learning process. So we took that to heart, and that piece was strong for us in building a coherent connection between the assessment data, the core, and all of our supplemental resources. So now we can create a deep and integrated alignment structure where we can match that student’s information, their data, to maybe a prerequisite skill that came from their textbook or a supplemental tool that we We could give them like a Nearpod lesson, or another print activity that they might need to go do and deep dive in with a specialist. So the benefit is this operating system model. And I think what it’s going to do is remove what we’ve had about 25 years in ed tech is go to the back of the room, put the headphones on and do your stuff and spend 90 minutes on that or 45 minutes and then come back to the classroom. Well, that’s disconnected from the core. That’s disconnected from the high quality instructional process that teachers built. And it almost is this disruption. And it’s kind of the computer lab model that we all taught in for a while.
Vicki Davis (08:14): And you’re almost pulling them out of the classroom.
Todd Brekhus (08:15): Right. And it’s like, wait, let’s stick with the standards. Let’s stick within the flow of the textbook. So really, how do we just bring this closer and closer together? And I think your screen time conversation is going to start to go down because you are the teacher in charge of this classroom. And you know best how these kids learn, and you now have the data and the tools to adapt this learning automatically.
Vicki Davis (08:37): Here’s what I love about doing it inside a tool like this. This student might need this and that. That when you took the headphones and you put the kid in the back, everybody knew that kid needed something extra. Yeah. And it was very isolating. That’s right.
Todd Brekhus (08:50): And very, oh, you. There’s a stigma. Yeah.
Vicki Davis (08:52): But when you’re doing it a true personalized way, which has always been hard, it’s always been a lot of work. And that’s what I like about the product that I saw.
Todd Brekhus (09:00): So, Vicki, just to interrupt you for a second, I’m saying the word personalized teaching and learning. Just personalized learning. Because personalized learning is like, okay, go to the back of the room and do your thing. Right. And then come back with the rest of the class. But if I’m a teacher and I have these kind of Ironman-like tools and I can see and hear and understand and have data, have information, that would be great to adapt to the learning.
Vicki Davis (09:21): Oh, so let’s talk about personalized teaching and learning. Because you’re saying personalized teaching and learning is important.
Todd Brekhus (09:29): Yeah, I think I’m making maybe an important point to put the teaching back into personalized learning. I mean, we’ve been here at ST for 15, 10 maybe years, talking about blended learning, personalized learning. I think what we thought of then was, oh, this is going to be dynamic. Every student gets their own lesson and every student’s individual. But unfortunately, I think What the data shows is sometimes kids are off on their own.
Vicki Davis (09:49): And they get off track.
Todd Brekhus (09:51): They get off track.
Vicki Davis (09:52): Yeah. I mean, if kids sitting at a computer worked, then we would have had the best learning gains ever during the pandemic.
Todd Brekhus (09:58): Yeah, we did. But we didn’t.
Vicki Davis (09:59): We had some of the biggest losses ever. So we know that the teacher needs to be involved.
Todd Brekhus (10:03): Yeah, I think you’re a real proponent of Nearpod. What we’ve learned from watching and by bringing Nearpod into the center, we’ve watched this amazing environment be this collaborative nature of teaching and learning. Of independent, formative, go work on some things, connect this together. We’re going to jigsaw this. We’re going to collaborate. And that’s a richer environment for ed tech and where it, I think, has its benefits in an AI-driven model because now the teacher has adaptation to that lesson for everyone and customized to their individual needs. Now, the difference that we’re building with Renaissance Intelligence, if I could be so bold to say, is we’re providing your assessment data in the mix. There are a lot of magical apps out there today that are doing AI, and I respect them. I think that’s amazing. They built them on the wrappers of ChatGPT and other things. What we’re doing quite a bit different than those apps are we’re first bringing the students data, informing the teacher about what’s working, connecting it back to their core, and then providing the AI recommendations for that teacher to adjust the teaching and learning. And so that’s what I mean by.
Vicki Davis (11:05): Personalized teaching and learning. And not losing anything, because my big question I had to ask privately, I’ll admit it, is, does Nearpod go away?
Todd Brekhus (11:10): Anything, we’re going to increase the focus on Nearpod for the students and schools that are using it independently. But we believe in it so much that we brought it into the entire product. So every product interacts around Nearpod now. So imagine having that digital library where you have Nearpod and you have your assessment data with Nearpod and you have personalized teaching opportunities with our applications like Freckle and myON and Accelerated Reader. This becomes a rich, dynamic environment for AI and for Nearpod.
Vicki Davis (11:39): So can people demo it?
Todd Brekhus (11:41): Yeah, 100%. Well, you saw one of our folks demo it, but can customers pilot it? Yes. As of July 1st, we probably already have about 400 districts or we’ll be starting in July.
Vicki Davis (11:52): Yeah, that’s wonderful. So what are your thoughts about purposeful AI with teachers at the center? Because you keep talking teachers and it sounds like your team won’t let you get away from teachers because you aren’t.
Todd Brekhus (12:04): Well, this whole launch has been about the teacher. So we experimented with some student side of the apps and we decided it wasn’t time to build an AI driven student model. And we just felt the AI tries to get to an answer too quickly. And that struggle for learning, that curiosity, that peer productive struggle, that curiosity, that giving a student a sense of getting to their knowledge of information and synthesizing it themselves before they’re sick in the box. At this, we thought was more important. And so we pushed that development to the future and we zeroed in on the teacher in the classroom. What we found is that the teachers were saying, we want to be closer to our core. We want to deliver our core with efficacy and we want to use our STAR or FastBridge data to influence that. And then we want to use Nearpod and our practice applications to embed that instruction along the way at different levels for different learners.
Vicki Davis (12:59): Silos have been the problem for so long. And so you’re kind of getting rid of those silos are not
Todd Brekhus (13:04): Only that but we’re bringing others into our into our world so we’re creating more of an open environment for publishing and teaching and.
Vicki Davis (13:11): Learning how do you if you went back to your english classroom today and you were using renaissance intelligence what’s the first way you would use it
Todd Brekhus (13:20): Let me see my students in light of the assessment data that I know about them. Let me see last year’s test scores. Let me understand the granularity of what skills they might miss. Because I don’t want to just teach a lesson because I’m told to teach a lesson. I want to teach a lesson because these students will accelerate their learning. And so if I know that 12 of these students already have this information, I want to challenge them with tomorrow’s lesson and give them a hint of what’s come or put a bit deeper thinking process together and let me hone in on these other 12 students who may not have that. Background and I can adapt my teaching and learning. I can maybe center that, move to between my two centers. I might be able to adapt the specific prerequisite skills and give you some remedial tools to get some tips. I would adapt my learning much more than open up to, oh, it’s Monday, I’m doing this lesson. It’s third period, I’m doing this thing. No, let me be a little more agile. And so I think the word, that there’s two words that come out of this experience. Coherence. It connects together. It makes sense. I can unify around my standards or my textbook. And the second word is agility. I can be agile. And teachers are always agile. They have to. You’ve got somebody freaking out over here. You’ve got somebody who won’t do a thing for you over here. You’ve got a bunch of kids fighting over here. And, you know, that’s our classroom management techniques. But agility of instruction is different than one size fits all instruction. We’re going to give it to you. But I think we’ve misinterpreted as ed tech to go, oh, if it’s not one size fits all, that means it’s on a computer given to themselves. Well, how about the teachers differentiating in the moment?
Vicki Davis (14:53): That’s right.
Todd Brekhus (14:53): And that’s, I think, where the power of the human and the AI and the data come together.
Vicki Davis (14:58): So, Todd, as we finish up, what is your dream for this product?
Todd Brekhus (15:03): Well, gosh, I mean, my dream for this product is that the students in Georgia, South Georgia, where you live, will read on grade level, will grow faster and accelerate their learning and their math skills. And we will start to see confidence in teachers and more smiles and more happiness in the classrooms because people are feeling success and they know it’s the impact that they’re making on students. Because when you see impact, you feel like you love your job. You feel like you can do your job better. Well, at the end of the day, let’s see learning get accelerated.
Vicki Davis (15:34): We’ve been talking to Todd Brekhus, Chief Product Officer at Renaissance and General Manager of Nearpod. And you can tell that he is a former English teacher, still has that teaching part. I love these applications that artificial intelligence is finally coming into the tools we’ve been using for a long time, making them more useful in safe places and helping us teachers, which I appreciate. Thanks for coming on the show.
Todd Brekhus (16:00): Appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Vicki Davis (16:01): Thank you to Renaissance for sponsoring today’s show. Renaissance is proud to introduce Renaissance Intelligence, a connected system that unifies assessment, instruction, practice, curriculum, and trustworthy AI. It’s built on 40 years of learning science and educator expertise. It keeps teachers at the center of instruction and is designed for how our K-12 classrooms actually work. Learn more at renaissance.com forward slash intelligence. Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.
Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a sponsored episode and blog post. Renaissance has compensated me to share information about Renaissance Intelligence. However, all opinions expressed are my own. I have personally reviewed these resources and only recommend tools I believe offer genuine value to classroom teachers. My endorsement is limited to the educational products and services discussed in this episode. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The sponsor has no impact on the editorial content of this show.
