Michael Harbaugh
Introduction
We got the chance to chat with Kellen Smith, a 5th grade teacher at W.R. McNeill Elementary in Bowling Green, Kentucky, about his experience with EnlightenAI. If you ask Kellen, he was just looking for a better way to help his kids write more. What he got was a tool that became a partner to him so he could build on foundations of writing that he was teaching.
The first thing Kellen noticed wasn't the time savings — it was the specificity.
Every teacher knows the feeling. You sit down with a stack of on-demand essays — 80 of them, five paragraphs each — and somewhere around the 40th one, your mental stamina starts to flag. Not because you've stopped caring, but because you're human. There are only so many hours in a day, and only so much a single teacher can hold in their head at once.
Kellen Smith, a 5th grade teacher at W.R. McNeill Elementary School in Bowling Green, Kentucky, felt that friction every time he assigned a writing piece. He cared deeply about giving each student targeted, meaningful feedback. The reality of doing it by hand for all three classes was almost impossible to sustain. "Your brain just becomes numb on the specific areas where each student needs to focus," he shared.
That changed when EnlightenAI came across his desk. He heard about our partnership with the local high school, and he was curious enough to try it with his elementary students.
EnlightenAI didn't just score his students' on-demand writing. It broke down what each individual student needed to work on: this group's thesis statements aren't landing, that group needs to work on citing evidence more precisely, these kids need help with their conclusions. Suddenly, instead of doing his best to hold 80 essays in his head simultaneously, Kellen could see exactly who needed what — and group them accordingly.
"With EnlightenAI, it grouped them. And I could really focus my instruction…Each classroom, it would break down what each class needed to work one. Then I could group the students."
He used that grouping to run targeted small-group work after every on-demand writing assignment after he graded. The result was that students got personalized written feedback in language calibrated for fifth graders that they were able to read, internalize, and then implement quickly on a new assignment.
That quick ability to differentiate instruction for students and ensure they could get more writing practice with personalized feedback has been the key to Kellen's success.
Hear more from Kellen:
The more Kellen put in, the better EnlightenAI did.
One of the most crucial things Kellen shared was that EnlightenAI isn't a magic button. Early on, he loaded in a rubric, ran some assignments, and thought the scores were just…okay. It wasn't until he started putting in exemplar writing samples, detailed instructions, and grade-appropriate feedback preferences that the tool really clicked.
"The more information I feed it, the better off it is," he said. By the end of the school year, the feedback was accurate, consistent, genuinely useful to his students. This was a crucial lesson for him, that EnlightenAI worked best when he was putting his expertise as a teacher into the tool, coaching and training EnlightenAI just like he would with a real TA.
Kellen was also able to extend using EnlightenAI beyond his ELA subjects; he was able to train the platform to give feedback on science CERs and cross-curricular writing. Anywhere his students needed to write and get better, EnlightenAI came with him.
The results speak for themselves.
Kellen has been able to see tremendous growth in writing proficiency from his students this year. As of our conversation, the official numbers aren't public yet, but early data shows that Kellen's students have seen huge increases in their writing proficiency. He credits a lot a lot of this growth to what EnlightenAI enabled him to do.
"Was that group of students more intelligent, or better writers? No. What did I use differently? I think the feedback and probably EnlightenAI had a lot to do with me being more intentional in pinpointing where students need to focus."
We can't wait to follow up and publish Kellen's official results to celebrate his success, but the key takeaway here from our conversation is really how simple Kellen's approach was. Once EnlightenAI enabled him to assign more writing and gave him the ability to pinpoint areas of growth, he just needed to keep working through the writing cycle: assign writing practice, give fast feedback, analyze the data, create new practice, and assign new writing. Give students more at-bats and they're going to grow.
What Kellen wants other teachers to know
Kellen made it clear that EnlightenAI works best after the fundamentals are in place. It's not a replacement for teaching the writing process — it's what makes the writing process stick. Once students understand how to structure an argument, how to cite evidence, how to write a thesis worth defending, EnlightenAI helps them get feedback fast enough to actually use it before the next assignment.
"It's one of those things you've got to make sure that you teach the writing process first," Kellen said. "But once you do, Enlighten really helps the kids take that feedback and shape their writing to where they're reaching proficient and distinguished."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. EnlightenAI is meant to be a powerful tool for teachers – not to replace them. Our platform helps teachers amplify their expertise and get their students more practice writing than ever before, so they can spend more time on the personalization and analysis that makes them great educators.
We're so proud to partner with teachers in Bowling Green Public schools, and excited at the amazing progress Kellen Smith is making in his classroom!
