Educators Behind Reading Rooms

Built With Teachers, Not Just for Teachers

Reading Rooms has been developed in conversation with more than 30 educators across public schools, classical academies, microschools, AP programs, and homeschool networks. Their feedback has shaped the rubric work, the weekly cadence, the question generation engine, and the way the platform handles the parts of grading and assessment that traditionally consume the most teacher time. This page lists the educators whose input has shaped Reading Rooms publicly, and a sample of the kind of feedback that has guided the platform's development. Additional named profiles will be added as further permissions are confirmed.

Canon-first reading

Rigor with guardrails

Featured Advisors

Dr. Tim Kane

Dean, Center for Economics, Politics, and History — UATX

Dr. Tim Kane is Dean of the Center for Economics, Politics, and History at the University of Austin (UATX), where he is also a Professor of Economics and a founder of the Polaris Project. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and his Bachelor's degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy. He is the author of The Immigrant Superpower (Oxford University Press, 2022), Balance: The Economics of Great Powers with Glenn Hubbard (Simon & Schuster, 2013), and Bleeding Talent (Palgrave, 2012). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic , Foreign Affairs , The New York Times , and The Wall Street Journal . Dr. Kane has advised Reading Rooms on the connection between high school literacy and the kind of intellectual work students will be asked to do in serious college and graduate programs.

Abby McNeal

Head of High School AP — Alpha School, Austin TX

Abby McNeal is Head of High School AP at Alpha School in Austin, Texas. She holds a Master of Liberal Arts from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Science from Texas A&M University. Before Alpha, she served as a secondary math teacher, department chair, and instructional coach at Meridian School and was a K–12 Education Program Specialist at the University of Texas at Austin. After reviewing the curriculum, Abby noted that "this is genuinely useful and people should be paying for this."

Liz Stepan

Homeschool & ESA implementation — UT, ID, TX

Liz Stepan is an educator focused on homeschool families and Education Savings Account (ESA) implementation in Utah, Idaho, and Texas. Her work centers on helping homeschool families navigate accreditation and access to high-quality curricula through the rapidly expanding state ESA programs. After reviewing Reading Rooms, Liz said simply: "This is what we need." She has been particularly focused on the question of how homeschool families can document their students' growth in a way ESA programs and college admissions readers will recognize.

Russ Lipton

Consultant & long-time AI skeptic

Russ Lipton has been one of the most valuable voices in shaping Reading Rooms, in part because he came in skeptical. A long-time AI skeptic by intellectual disposition, Russ examined the platform with the kind of rigor that a homeschool buyer audience will recognize and respect, and concluded that this particular project is one worth supporting. He has been actively helping us bring Reading Rooms to schools, and the platform's strongest design constraints — teacher authority over AI grading, transparency about how scores are generated, and the principle that the AI tutors rather than judges — all reflect concerns that he raised early and pressed hard on. We list Russ here because we think it matters that someone genuinely cautious about AI in education looked carefully at what we were building and decided it was worth his time.

Dr. Isabella Reinhardt

Assistant Professor of Classics — UATX

Dr. Isabella Reinhardt is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Austin. She earned her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2021, with a dissertation on language and reality in early Greek thought, focused on Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Aeschylus. Before UATX, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on Greek tragedy — particularly the dramas of Aeschylus — and presocratic philosophy. Her work has appeared in journals including Classical World . Dr. Reinhardt has advised Reading Rooms on the 9th-grade Ancient and Classical Literature sequence specifically — the year of the curriculum that asks 14-year-olds to read Homer, Sophocles, Plato, and Virgil seriously enough to recognize them when they reappear in every later year of the program.

What Teacher Input Has Validated

Across more than 30 educator conversations, several consistent themes have emerged. The selected feedback below captures the kind of input that has directly shaped the product. Educators are identified by role and credentials where they have not yet authorized full attribution.

On the gamified debate features

"Fighting AI is unrealistic," a middle-school English teacher with both charter and public school experience told us. She compared the platform's gamified debate feature to Socratic seminars and noted that "debate outside class time is powerful" and that "students could engage asynchronously." She emphasized that "gamification wins students over" and "makes English feel less repetitive," and supported the perspective-shifting writing prompts on the grounds that "perspective shifting is a core academic skill."

On the side-by-side reading and writing interface

An AP Capstone instructor — who teaches both AP Seminar and AP Research — praised the side-by-side reading and writing interface, noting that text on the left and writing on the right "improves usability and reduces cognitive load." He responded positively to the character-based argumentation features, saying his students "would likely enjoy it." On the hybrid grading model, he highlighted the platform's design principle that "AI suggests but does not override" and "never decides for the teacher."

On AI as a thinking partner rather than a grader

A Pennsylvania English teacher and published author on AI in writing instruction shared that he sees AI for formative feedback as "promising and appropriate," and that the tool works when it "deepens thinking, preserves human connection, and respects the lived reality of classrooms." His feedback has been particularly influential in the platform's commitment to formative-feedback-during-thinking rather than evaluative-judgment-after-submission.

On the impact for grading load

A high school English teacher in California noted that the concept is "strong and promising" and that it "aligns well with real classroom needs." She observed that "AI reduces grading load indirectly by improving student work before it reaches the teacher," and suggested practical infrastructure improvements (including no-login trial modes) to reduce friction for districts navigating data-privacy review.

What Teacher Input Has Built

Teacher feedback has shaped four specific design choices in the platform that we want to call out explicitly, because each one came from real classroom conversations rather than from product instinct.

Teacher authority is non-negotiable

Across conversations, the educators who have given us the most useful feedback have been the most insistent that AI feedback should be transparent, rubric-aligned, and overrideable. Reading Rooms is built around this principle. Teachers see exactly which row of the rubric earned which score, and can override any score with a written rationale that becomes part of the audit trail.

Rubric customization matters

Different schools use different rubrics — district-specific, state-aligned, AP-specific, classical, NAEP-derived. Reading Rooms supports the four major rubrics out of the box (SAT, AP Language, AP Literature, NAEP), with custom rubric criteria where needed.

Implementation friction kills adoption

The educators advising us on adoption have been clear that the most common reason a tool fails in a classroom is implementation friction, not concept. Reading Rooms is built for low-setup adoption: a teacher can run her first Reading Room in a single class period without prior training.

The grading bottleneck is the real problem

Every veteran English teacher we have spoken with has described the same problem in different words: the deepest part of teaching writing is the feedback loop between student and teacher, and that loop is the first thing that breaks at scale. The platform was built to take that specific bottleneck off the teacher's plate while preserving the teacher's authority over what counts as a final grade.

A Note on the Educator Roster

If you are an educator interested in advising the Reading Rooms curriculum, or a school administrator considering a pilot, we would like to hear from you. The platform's effectiveness in real classrooms is the next stage of our outcomes work, and the educators who join the pilot cohort directly shape what we publish next on reading-rooms-outcomes.

See What These Educators Have Helped Build

The fastest way to understand what 30+ educators have shaped is to run a single Reading Room with a real student and see the workflow they have validated. The trial takes a few minutes.

Educators Behind Reading Rooms | Reading Rooms