In our eleventh episode, Heejae Lim, Founder/CEO at TalkingPoints, joins Natasha Allen to discuss artificial intelligence as a force for good. While discussion surrounding the intersection of education and AI has focused on negative impacts, how can recent advances help facilitate better outcomes for students? Why is it important for teachers and parents to see AI as an ally instead of an adversary?
Go Deeper:
- Navigating the AI Frontier: Legal and Operational Insights Into Generative AI
- What to Expect in Evolving U.S. Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in 2024
Transcription
The below episode transcript has been edited for clarity.
Natasha Allen
Hi everyone and welcome. My name is Natasha Allen. I’m a partner at Foley and Lardner in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco offices. By day I’m a corporate M&A attorney, but by night I have the benefit of being the Co-Chair of the AI area of focus, which is under the Innovative Technology sector at Foley. In that role it gives me the opportunity to meet with brilliant individuals, such as our guest today, Heejae Lim, and I’ll introduce Heejae shortly.
But just to give a bit of context for the podcast today, I think that we wanted to do an episode that highlights some of the good effects that AI is having on society. Especially given that a lot of things have been happening in this area, we thought that it would be great to invite Heejae Lim, who is the CEO of Talking Points, to talk a bit about her company and what it’s doing with this new technology.
To give a bit of background, Heejae is a founder and CEO of Talking Points. She previously worked in education reform for public schools in the Middle East, and she also served as the chief of staff to a special advisor to the Secretary of Education in the UK. As a consultant at Mackenzie, she advised the Gates Foundation and Teach First UK. Heejae graduated from Oxford, London School of Economics, and has an MBA from Stanford Business School where she was a Arjay Miller Scholar. She was recognized as Ted Fellow, Echoing Green Fellow, Stanford Social Innovation Fellow, Ashoka Changemaker, and Forbes 30 under 30 for Education.
Heejae, you have won a lot of accolades and have done a lot of great work in your career. Can you just give us a little information about what does Talking Points do?
Heejae Lim
Thank you so much for having me, Natasha. So Talking Points is an education technology nonprofit, and our mission is to drive student success by unlocking the potential of families to fuel their children’s learning, with a special focus on underserved communities. So we do this by building meaningful connections between schools, teachers, and families through accessible technology. And what that looks like is a family engagement solution that allows for two-way translator communication between families and schools, as well as capacity building and coaching content around how to work together to really drive student outcomes and student success.
Natasha Allen
That is amazing and a very, very important, I think, way to help the education system. What inspired you to found Talking Points?
Heejae Lim
So I’m originally Korean, well, I guess I’m still Korean, I still have a passport. So I was born in Korea, and when I was eight my family moved to England. I was an English language learner, pretty much for the first time when I moved there, and I saw my mom kind of blossom into a parent spokesperson, parent communicator, translator, and the go-between the school and the parent communities that we were part of.
We went to a public elementary school where it was very heavily Korean immigrant students and families and I saw the impact that my mom’s engagement had on me and my sister’s education. And then, you know, on Monday to Friday, we would go to this public elementary school. And then on Saturdays, we would go to, you know, Korean school with the Korean curriculum, Korean teachers, Korean content, and of course we learned in Korean. And I realized the contrast between Monday to Friday versus Saturdays, even though it was the same friends I had, so same students and same parents, but the interaction between parents and teachers was so different…between Monday to Fridays and Saturdays…and I think that really inspired me to start Talking Points.
And if I think about what my experience of one really shows in terms of how that shows up in academic research, it really shows that family engagement and the extent to which families and schools can build those partnerships for student education is twice as effective at predicting student success than family socioeconomic status. Which is kind of crazy to think about. If you really kind of sit and think about, oh wow, [if there is] a student from a poor family who is highly engaged and can really build this relationship, the school can be more successful than the reverse.
And with that, research really became the genesis of founding Talking Points. It kind of also intuitively makes sense if you think about, you know, a family member or a caregiver or a mom or dad or grandparent, is often that child’s most influential and first teacher. And children spend, you know, more than 80% of their time outside school. So it makes sense that family engagement matters a lot. But you know, there’s not that many blueprints or technology-driven solutions to be able to enable doing that, especially for underserved communities.
Natasha Allen
And so how did you integrate AI, or was AI always a component of Talking Points?
Heejae Lim
AI wasn’t always a component.
So we got started back in 2014, 2015, when I think AI was still in the domain of research institutions and not so much applicable technology. We started using AI back in 2018 when Google released that AutoML model, a machine learning model where you could train using your own data set. So we started using AI to really make our translation quality higher than those, you know, mass market, kind of readily available machine translations. And the way that we do that is through making the translations a lot more education context specific. Because we have a narrow domain, we know that when certain words or phrases are used, it’s more likely to mean something specific than others, and we leverage that to be able to provide the highest quality translations and making the communication that happens on Talking Points a lot more understandable and consumable as well.
Natasha Allen
That’s actually brilliant, because every culture has a different way of communicating, right? And if you don’t hone into that, you know, perhaps my mom who came from Jamaica wouldn’t necessarily understand if somebody’s parent came from Italy, right? Just may have a different meaning culturally.
What are some specific projects or initiatives that you’re currently involved in within the AI space?
Heejae Lim
Yeah, so one really exciting development that we’ve had very recently is we’ve started partnering with OpenAI in releasing what we call a message mentor. So while educators are expected to communicate with families and know that it’s a very important lever to drive change in students, they often don’t get the coaching or the training that they might need or want in how to communicate effectively with families who might look and feel differently to them, or speak a different language, or come from a different cultural background. So what an AI enabled algorithm does is to transform their communication and messages into something that’s positive, that is asset-based, or thinking about families and students as assets to student learning. We developed it based on a dual-capacity building framework, which is a framework for how to do family engagement well. And this kind of mentor already guides the teachers around communicating effectively using AI, and the latest developments in generative AI has obviously really helped a lot with that as well.
Natasha Allen
Absolutely. So always have to ask, is there a way that if people are interested and want to volunteer, or help Talking Points, is there any way that they could do that?
Heejae Lim
Yeah. So one of our goals over the next few years is to really, what we call, get to the tipping point of the K12 education market. So if you’re a parent with a student in the K12 school system please talk about Talking Points. I think that’s the first task to those in the audience. Kind of pause and think about how you, as an adult, can interact more with the school system, learn more about what’s going on, in order to support the students that might be around you, whether that would be your specific child or your family member, and so on. So those are our asks.
Natasha Allen
Brilliant. I want to ask you a few questions. Before we dive into the benefits of AI and challenges, I wo want to focus in a little bit on AI and its use in K to 12 education today.
So I’m sure you’ve heard that most of the discussion around the use of AI and learning has been focused on having a negative impact on learning. Right? So seeing it as more of cheating as opposed to just a different way to learn. What are some of the lesser-known applications where technologies can improve the delivery of education, and not necessarily be considered a negative thing?
Heejae Lim
Yeah, and I think I’m going to just think about and say out loud some AI technologies where they can improve the delivery of education. I don’t know if they are lesser known or more well known, but here are some applications of AI and education which I think will really make a difference.
One is personalizing and customizing according to the student’s needs, or even the family needs, or the teacher needs. I think the latest developments in generative AI really has a huge potential in being able to meet the customer, or the user, where they are. And in this education sense, its educators, its family members, and ultimately students. So I think the way that AI can really tailor to someone’s needs has incredible potential in being able to serve and give, let’s say, real-time feedback about a written assignment, a math test, or even how families are talking about schools and learning to students. So lots of potential there, or even coaching how teachers are teaching and instructing in their classrooms.
I also think about grading as a potential area where AI can really help. Where you can really accelerate the grading and, you know, cut down teachers’ time in doing rote tasks that might really benefit from technology and AI specifically, so that they can focus on the higher needs of students, or areas where that human touch is more important.
I also think about the way that AI can accelerate resource development. So if I think about teaching materials, or coaching, or exercises, or quizzes, I think a lot of that can be generated through AI. Just lots of potential.
I’m just spitting out some of the examples that come to mind immediately for me.
Natasha Allen
Absolutely. But do you think there’s any way that steps can be taken to change the narrative? That it’s actually a good thing in the educational sphere? Or do you think we’re far off from bridging that gap?
Heejae Lim
You know, I think it’s all-around, like change management, right? So change management and changes in mindsets can be hard, but we do see it happening. I don’t think the overall kind of rhetoric or general sentiment is necessarily AI’s enemy, it actually spans the entire spectrum of all the way from AI’s an enemy to AI as an ally. If you talk to educators or school districts, I think the reason that it can be thought of as AI as an enemy is because one, we kind of lack a common understanding of, what do we mean by AI? Like, what are we even talking about when we say what AI is, or applications of AI are? So I think we need to get a common understanding of what is possible and what is not possible, and what technologies are out there. I think that to the extent that we can structure some of the guidance around where AI can be applied versus not, is another good step.
You know, I think about AI as an enemy, and I’m sure when typewriters and the computers first came to be, teachers were thinking, oh gosh, like, they’re typing up their assignments. Like, wow, like they cannot handwrite anymore. They’re typing. Is that cheating? I think about that as an analogy. Or, you know, if you’re doing a report on a topic and, wow, students, instead of going and searching the Encyclopedia Britannica, they went online, like, is that cheating? Not necessarily. So I think it’s really around guiding their behaviors and what’s expected versus not that will be important in shaping that narrative as well.
Natasha Allen
I agree. I think you also touched on it too. Part of it is education, right? People understanding what these technologies can do and not just thinking that they’re for bad.
Heejae Lim
Yeah, and anything new, you know, anything new has fear, right? Like people are driven by fear, it’s scary. So anything new and less understood I think will be automatically bucketed into this enemy bucket. So how can we change that? Through awareness and education.
Natasha Allen
Exactly. So how is Talking Points leveraging recent advances in AI? I think you touched on it a little bit with generative AI, but are there any other improvements that have helped with getting Talking Points to more people?
Heejae Lim
I want to go back to AI and human-based translation. I think it’s always been part of our solution to provide the highest quality, contextually relevant, understandable transition between families and schools, and AI has helped us understand the K12 context to ensure that translations make sense. And the latest developments in large language models have really allowed us to capitalize on the human translator inputs that we put into those models, as well as user-feedback and data from our platform.
So give you a tangible example and maybe this will make you laugh. But during COVID, we noticed a lot of communications from the school districts to the families were related to distributing Wi-Fi hotspots. Wi-Fi hotspots are distributed because a lot of students in the underserved communities did not have Internet access at home. And in order to get on Wi-Fi, to get on Zoom or online learning or do their homework, they required Wi-Fi. Now we have to remember, Wi-Fi hotspot might not necessarily even be a phrase that is easily understood if you don’t know what the concept of a hotspot is. Frankly, I don’t know if my parents would know what a hotspot is. So even for native speakers, it’s a hard thing to understand if you don’t know the concept.
But in Russian, we noticed that existing machine translation models were translating it to, guess what? A warzone.
Natasha Allen
Oh gosh.
Heejae Lim
I think its the historical context that Russian as a language provides, and it’s more ironic to think about before the Ukrainian-Russian war, so we quickly modified our models to say “no hotspot should not mean warzone” in the school’s context. Our educational context always means, I mean 99.8% of the time means, a hotspot is a machine that would allow you to get online and use Wi-Fi. So that’s an example of educational context that we can use with existing AI technology.
And then we think about that as a really important piece of going beyond what standard machine translation offers, because it’s such a critical piece to driving impact for us in improving communication and building those trusting relationships, which is, of course, foundational to really meaningful engagement.
Separately, we are also thinking about how we can leverage AI to really build capacity, to drive and provide just in time. So real-time learning and coaching to both families and educators, and school district staff, based on what we know of them, in giving prescriptive guidance or more mentoring and coaching, based on who the students are and where they are at, and based on the best practices that we know to be true through our own research and external research. We’re really excited about this body of work because, as I mentioned earlier, AI can really help us customize and personalize and meet the needs of individual stakeholders of using technology.
Natasha Allen
So I guess a question is how to help the school districts, right? How do they navigate, you know, any risks associated with AI? Or even fears of risk associated with AI, and fit it within their regulatory frameworks, right? So obviously regulatory frameworks have to evolve, but what is existing now? Is there any advice you can give to administrators or directors of school districts?
Heejae Lim
I think continuing to think about the risks of AI, but also potential use cases, where there can be wins using AI for school districts and administrators.
For example, because it is still somewhat of an uncertain technology, you probably cannot use it for anything around compliance or legal that has higher costs. If things fail, or in areas where you need to be more risk averse. But I think embracing AI in a “what can it do for us” versus “what can it not do” and having, again, those structures in place and the expectations, I think will help us leverage more of what it can do, but also shy away from what it cannot do as well. I think we need to do this in a way that really respects data privacy and within the constraints, as well as thinking about what potential biases AI might have. I’m not saying this is an easy thing to do, but it can be done. It will take time as well.
But you know, going back to your question around how Talking Points is using AI, we really believe that we’re able to use the technology to scale the principles and practices that research shows makes the most difference, because we can do it in a way that’s at scale and that saves time for educators to build that capacity. So I do think that there are some wins that we can have in AI and being cognizant of what those limits are would be really helpful.
Natasha Allen
So now I just want to turn to how can AI systems help support students and families? Where I’m unfamiliar with the American public system, what are some tools that can assist with facilitating communications between schools, and immigrant students or families? Like personalized information or education or academic expectations?
Heejae Lim
Thank you for asking that. For example, we can use AI to support tools and provide guidance to schools, teachers, and district administrators to send proactive, productive, positive, best-practice communication that is tailored to the family and student needs. We can use AI to learn from families about their student culture and encourage families to share more information that would then help guide the teachers. We can encourage families to initiate engagement with school staff and teachers and advocate for their children’s needs. We can use templates or generate templates that families can use.
Because imagine if you’re a family who’s new to the country. You don’t understand the U.S. education system. You’re working 2 or 3 shifts, you’re not familiar with English as a language, like how do you even begin to craft a message that might inquire about how your student is doing? Especially when you have a culture where you’re not used to questioning school or having that conversation with teachers.
I think there’s a lot of potential in guiding and coaching both the educators and families in kind of lubricating the relationship and building those positive connections in a meaningful way that’s guided by technology.
An example that we have is tools like what we call Education 101, which demystifies educational terms that schools use a lot, like IEP, which stands for Individual Education Plan, or assessment. Or concepts that might be new to them, like field trip, that may not exist in other school systems. So we provide that through a one-click definition and if a family clicks on it, they can learn a lot more about what those concepts mean and what their expectations are, and that way they can feel included and supported and just more encouraged to engage with teachers in the schools, and feel like teachers and schools are more welcoming to them as a family member.
Natasha Allen
And so how can AI be used to leverage and provide resources to help children and families navigate the social aspects of school in a new environment?
Heejae Lim
I mean, I am sighing a little bit because a student’s mental health and wellbeing is probably one of the top three challenges that school districts are navigating, especially in a post-COVID environment, where a lot of the kids and students stayed home and, you know, experienced trauma, and that trauma was disproportionately the case in underserved and less-privileged communities. So student mental health and wellbeing are a huge barrier for our school districts to be successful in supporting students right now.
We believe that family engagement again, you know, if children are spending 80% of their time outside school, then again, those relationships between schools and families are incredibly important in solving and starting to address the student wellbeing and student mental health needs. Families, we think of them as often a big source of information because families live with the kids and they can observe what they are like, so it can really provide information to the teachers in what might allow them to adjust their teaching, make the pedagogy more relevant, or just keep an eye on the student who might need more attention because of what they’re going through. And we believe, again, that building relationships can be helpful to student wellbeing, and as a foundational piece, can be technology and AI supporting that in the various ways that we just talked about.
Natasha Allen
That is so important, right? Especially touching on mental health. Given what a lot of these children have gone through, I’m sure we’ve only seen a portion of what the impact will be.
So then, considering the diversity of learning styles and educational backgrounds amongst students, immigrant students, how can teachers use AI to differentiate their support for these students?
Heejae Lim
So we talked about in the moment guidance that AI can help Talking Points build to support teachers in transforming the everyday communication into best practice engagement. We can guide teachers in the moment on how to embed best practices, based on what the research shows, and building those positive relationships with parents so that they can get the knowledge and leverage families as a resource in supporting their teaching. So communicating effectively by also looking at an analysis of where the students are at in terms of their attendance or behavior, or the frequency of communication of families.
Talking Points can also guide the teachers on who they should be reaching out to versus what kind of content or exercises of support the families might need based on that student and their preferences.
I’ll give you another example. Let’s say, if teachers were wanting to send a communication about how a student or class learns double-digit multiplication. If we know that the students are into, let’s say, basketball, and the parent comes from Mexican culture, then we’re able to guide the teacher to say, hey, instead of sending a message around, “we launched double-digit multiplication today” we could (we, being Talking Points) recommend an exercise that includes basketball and something that is more culturally relevant to Mexico and also includes, of course, double-digit multiplication to send to that family. And of course, this is with the support of the teachers, but I think AI can really make that process easy and super light lift so that teachers don’t really have to do anything extra other than press send or copy and paste, but it really makes that best-practice engagement a lot easier, taking the work out of the writing and thinking by relying on generative AI to be able to do that.
Natasha Allen
That kind of touches on the other point I was going to ask you about – how do you customize learning for students, right? And that’s a great way, as you said, to apply cultural relevance or things that interest the child. You can apply that to any type of education system, you’ll probably get better traction.
Heejae Lim
Exactly. And that goes back to what we discussed around meeting the needs of stakeholders exactly where they’re at in terms of whether they’re students, educators, or families, with the latest technology and AI, it’s a lot easier and faster and scalable to do. And if I turned the clock to five years ago, this is something that was always the vision for Talking Points, in supporting the family, student, teacher triad, or as we call it the tripod, in collaborating around the student learning. But to do that effectively and make it more relevant was really hard to do. It was going to be extremely manual. We were envisioning a human instructional coach sitting in the Talking Points’ office, customizing it for every student, or every triad or tripod. And now with AI, I think a lot of what we were trying to do initially can be scaled pretty efficiently, so we’re really excited about that potential.
Natasha Allen
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve learned a ton. I’m very excited about how this can be applied to the education system, and I’m excited to see what else AI can do in this area, because I do think it’s an area that can benefit the most from AI technology. Especially because teachers are so under-resourced, right, it would really help them to do their jobs and give them a bit of a reprieve. So again, thank you, Heejae. Looking forward to the exciting things that Talking Points will be doing for everyone out there. Thank you for joining us, and until next time.