Feb 24, 2026
Mike Harbaugh
A New Paradigm for In-Class Writing
Picture this:
Mrs. Castellano's 8th-grade class is 10 minutes into an in-class argumentative writing practice session. She opens her Live Classroom Dashboard in EnlightenAI and sees exactly what she'd expect at this point — most students are green, actively writing, their rubric scores ticking up with each submission. But one card stands out: Marcus is struggling to add solid evidence in his essay, and his status shows Needs Help; he's been idle for three minutes, so he might be stuck.
Mrs. C clicks into his draft. He's circling the same idea across two sentences, deleting and restarting. She types a quick comment directly into his document: "Try leading with a direct quote, then explain what it shows. You've got the right instinct — just anchor it." Thirty seconds later, he's typing again.
She pulls up a second student — Priya has written something strong, a crisp piece of analysis that EnlightenAI has flagged as a potential shout-out. Mrs. C opens ShowCall, selects Priya's response and projects it to the class — anonymized, no names visible.
"Look at what this student does after her quote, and how she analyzes the significance here," she says. The class leans in. She didn't have to manufacture a teachable moment. The dashboard handed her one.
She didn't spend the class circling the room hoping to catch problems in time. She knew exactly where to go — before she even stood up.
Introducing: The Live Classroom Dashboard
The Live Classroom Dashboard is a new feature built directly into EnlightenAI's immediate feedback experience. When you launch an in-class writing session, the dashboard activates automatically — no extra setup, no new workflow. Here's what's inside.
STUDENT ACTIVITY WALL
This is your real-time grid of every student in your class. Each card shows you:
Status: Active (writing right now), Idle (not typing), or Needs Help (any rubric trait scoring below 50%)
Rubric scores per trait — Claim, Evidence, Reasoning, Thesis, or whatever rubric you're using
Attempt count and word count — so you can see who's revised and how much they've written
A "View Draft" button to click directly into any student's document
You can filter the wall by status — All Students, Needs Help, Idle, or Active Writers — and sort by any rubric trait to quickly identify who's excelling and who's stuck. The counts update in real time as students write and submit.
VIEW DRAFT & LEAVE COMMENTS
Click any student card and you'll see their draft as they're typing it — updated keystroke by keystroke, in real time. You can watch a student's thinking unfold in front of you without leaving your chair.
From this view, you can leave a comment that goes directly to the student's screen. It's not a notification that gets buried — it pops up while they're working. Think of it as a quiet, targeted check-in: the kind of in-the-moment guidance that usually only happens when you happen to be standing at the right desk at the right time.
SUGGESTED MOVES
One of the hardest things about circulating during writing time is knowing where to go. Walk to the wrong desk and you've used up 3 minutes on a student who was doing fine. Miss the student who needed you and they've spent 15 minutes going in the wrong direction.
Suggested Moves solves this. Based on each student's most recent strength and growth area from their AI feedback, the panel generates a prioritized list of interventions — a mix of shout-outs (public praise for a student doing something well) and nudges (targeted check-ins for students who need a redirect). Five cards at a time, with a "Show more" button if you want additional suggestions.
The shout-outs matter as much as the nudges. Naming what a student is doing well — out loud, in front of their peers — is one of the most powerful instructional moves a teacher has. Suggested Moves makes sure you don't miss those moments.
CLASS TRENDS
The Class Trends panel synthesizes what's happening across the whole class and surfaces it in plain language. You'll see your class's overall strengths, the top growth areas showing up in student work, and three specific instructional recommendations — Turn & Talk, ShowCall, or Circulate — tailored to what the data is telling you.
This is the difference between flying blind and teaching to what's actually happening. Instead of guessing what the class needs and hoping your mini-lesson lands, you can make a targeted mid-session instructional decision backed by real evidence.
SHOWCALL STUDENT WRITING
ShowCall lets you select up to two student drafts and present them anonymously to the class in a clean, full-screen view. You can sort by any rubric trait — highest to lowest, lowest to highest — to quickly find a strong example, a developing example, or a comparison that will spark a useful whole-class discussion.
Student names are never shown in presentation mode. The work speaks for itself.
Good teachers have always done version of this — projecting a student's paper under the document camera or reading a strong sentence aloud. ShowCall makes it instant, data-informed, and available for any trait you want to teach to, in any class, on any day.
Why This Matters
The research on writing instruction is consistent on one point above all others: feedback timing is everything. When students receive specific, actionable feedback while they're still in the act of writing — while the work is live, while revision is still possible — improvement happens faster and sticks longer. The Live Classroom Dashboard puts teachers in position to act on that window every single class period, not just when they happen to be at the right desk at the right moment. More visibility means more targeted interventions, fewer students slipping through, and a sharper use of every minute of instructional time.
Real-time trend data changes something else too: it shifts the decision about what to teach from intuition to evidence. When you can see, mid-session, that 18 out of 26 students are describing evidence rather than analyzing it, you don't have to guess whether a whole-class pause is worth it. You know. The Class Trends panel surfaces exactly these patterns — strengths, growth areas, and specific instructional moves — so teachers can make better decisions about when to circulate, when to stop the class, and when to let the writing continue.
Perhaps most importantly, the Live Classroom Dashboard makes the combination of teacher and AI feedback more powerful than either alone. A growing body of research shows that hybrid models — where a teacher and an AI teaching assistant work together — consistently outperform either human or AI feedback in isolation, with meaningful effect sizes. EnlightenAI has always been built around this principle: the AI drafts feedback, the teacher shapes it. The Live Classroom Dashboard extends that collaboration into the classroom itself, giving teachers the real-time information they need to layer their own judgment and presence on top of what the AI is already doing for students.
