EdTech: Todd Brekhus of Renaissance On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

Create experiences, not features: I have been building products since the 90s and the transformation that has happened in technology since then has been astonishing, but the challenge is that many companies are often just creating more features and more things for people to do. Granted, there are some great features being introduced, but there are so many places to go to it doesn’t enhance the user experience. The number one issue for teachers is time. We have to create experiences that solve for that. We also have to create experiences for multiple audiences — administrators, teachers, and students. Our goal is to constantly consider the experience of everyone who uses our products and to improve that experience in real-life situations.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Todd Brekhus.

With nearly three decades of experience in education technology innovations, Todd Brekhus has a proven record of success in accelerating learning for students. Prior to his current role as Chief Product Officer for Renaissance and General Manager of Nearpod, Brekhus oversaw the creation of myON, a personalized literacy platform.

A former English teacher and technology director, Brekhus has long been focused on the appropriate role of technology in the classroom. Prior to joining the Renaissance team, Brekhus served as the vice president and chief marketing officer at PLATO Learning, president and chief operating officer at Learning Elements, and Education Program Director at MCI WorldCom.

Todd received the Lifetime Achievement Award from SIIA (Software Industry Information Association) and a Visionary Award from AEP (Assoc. of Ed. Publishers).

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I was raised in the suburbs of Minnesota and am a product of the 1980s. I always had a profound curiosity about technology and education, and you could say that my career started with my very first job at the age of 15, when I was recruited by Bloomington Public Schools to assist with

setting up their first purchase of Apple computers. This led to a summer teaching job, where I taught an introductory course on computers to students. This marked the inception of a lifelong commitment to the intersection of technology and education.

In addition to my early professional pursuits, I spent much of my time on the slopes skiing and competed as a giant slalom skier.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

So many transformative moments have punctuated my professional journey, with the transition out of teaching emerging as one of the most significant. Initially, my career path did not include a role as a teacher. I found myself drawn into teaching through my volunteering efforts and the curriculum I developed. In my fourth year as an educator, I formulated a comprehensive business plan aimed at modernizing and computerizing the school, and it was during this period when a pivotal encounter occurred when Tim Price, the president of MCI and a parent at the school, approached me.

Subsequently, I collaborated with the MCI team, contributing to the establishment of an extensive technology program at the Severn School in Maryland. This collaboration led to an enticing opportunity, and I was offered a position at MCI, ultimately assuming the role of Director of education within the MCI Foundation.

During this time, I built a web-based educational program named Marco Polo which really launched the next step in my career in edtech.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Tim Price was clearly a major influence. In addition, Craig and Carol Samuels also had a significant impact on my career when I joined their startup venture, initially named Focus, which later evolved into Plato Education. Craig, recognizing my leadership skills from my tenure at MCI, invited me to contribute to this endeavor. Carol had built a literacy program that I was able to transform into a digital platform, ultimately resulting in the company’s acquisition by Edmentum in August of 2002.

Following this acquisition, I returned to Minnesota and spent six and a half years at Plato, honing my abilities in transitioning educational products to the internet and constructing Software as a Service (SAAS) models. Later, I worked with Tom Ahern, CEO of Capstone, and transitioned to Capstone, where we incubated the innovative educational platform myON. Tom’s leadership and my prior experience at Plato played a pivotal role in this strategic move, marking another

significant chapter in my professional journey. Chris Bauleke, CEO of Renaissance, has been an amazing leader in the latest phase of my career.

The people I am most grateful for though are the incredibly talented individuals I have worked with throughout the years on every product I have ever developed or conceived. It’s impossible to execute on a vision without an engaged, passionate, and committed group of people behind the scenes doing the real work that makes a product successful.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

It would be something my father always said, “Do the best you can with what you’ve got,” and that’s what I grew up with. The idea that you focus on what you have and how you can make it better — don’t focus on what you don’t have — do the best with what you have.

This guiding principle underscores my approach of fostering excellence and quality in all endeavors. I like things to do well, I like quality, I like advancing things forward, and I like achieving a vision.

This simple principle my father taught me continues to shape my approach to life and work, as I strive to uphold the values he instilled in me.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Integrity — I’ve always believed that people will have confidence in you if you do what you say and live up to your commitments. You have to communicate what your plan is and stick to it. We have been able to tell our teams, our customers, and our investors what we are doing, and we make sure we do it. If we can’t, we tell them.
2. Vision — There’s a Bible verse that says that without vision, people perish. I believe people need to move beyond the status quo. Sometimes education seems very traditional and immobile, but I believe that kids want to learn, and teachers want to teach and our education system can get better. That was part of the inspiration for building myON — which propelled me into the largest edtech company in the industry. It wasn’t overly complicated, but it was something that no one had ever done before. The simple idea of bringing books to kids in an unlimited, all-you-can-read platform. It was the idea that books don’t have to be restricted to a place and time. I realized we could provide unlimited access to literacy, knowledge, and rich reading experiences.
3. Ingenuity — Trying to find simple but elegant solutions to complex problems that lean into technology and innovation strategies has been one of the hallmarks of my career. One example from recent releases is how we created the connection between Nearpod and Star Assessments. These two products were used in very different ways, but it was clear from our conversations with teachers that when they saw their student’s results from Star, they wanted to be able to connect those results to resources students could engage with immediately in the areas where they needed improvement.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

The number one problem we are trying to solve is accelerating learning for all and bringing insights to teachers to help them to truly see every student.

Other edtech vendors’ ecosystems usually start with a diagnostic test, which is used to place students onto a prescribed learning pathway. So, you end up with classrooms where every student is doing their own thing, following their own pathway, which may or may not connect to what the teacher is doing. This is often called “personalized learning,” but it isn’t, really. It’s a lot closer to the experience many of us have probably had of completing an online tutorial, where you’re constantly clicking the “Next” button to advance to the next screen, and you’re presented with a quiz at the end to see what you’ve retained.

Needless to say, education is not about clicking the “Next” button all day — a point that was really driven home during the COVID-19 pandemic. With school buildings closed, many students were stuck on their screens, trying to self-learn with minimal guidance, little interaction with peers, and

no real awareness of where they were going. This is not 21st-century learning and is not an effective use of technology.

Our approach at Renaissance is the opposite one. We provide in-the-moment insights and access to a wide array of learning resources so that teachers can easily adapt and tailor instruction to their students’ needs — without spending hours on planning or having to manually reconcile data from multiple sources.

How do you think your technology can address this?

At Renaissance, we have one of the largest data sets in the industry and rigorous data about how students learn, and how teachers incorporate our products into their curriculum. That data helps us to bring insights that will allow us to transform how teachers teach. Let me give you an example:

When we brought Freckle into the Renaissance Ecosystem, our first step was to map all of Freckle’s math objectives, activities, and resources onto our math learning progression. Our learning progressions are our ecosystem’s “backbone,” showing the progression of skills from pre-K through high school and aligned with every state’s standards of learning. Each program within the ecosystem is tightly mapped to our learning progressions, so that every activity a student completes points back to the same place.

This means that once students complete a math assessment, teachers can easily see each student’s current location on the learning progression. They can then go into Freckle and easily find resources for the particular skill that each student, small group, or class is ready to learn, and they can assign that skill with a single click for targeted practice. We can do that responsively to the curriculum and standards that they need to teach.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

My grandfather taught library science at the University of Minnesota, and he really inspired my passion for education. He was someone I always wanted to impress and emulate. I remember when I was able to introduce the internet to him and show him the Library of Congress and how he could access it from his computer. It was a moment where we were able to combine our passions for technology and education and connect in a new way.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

Simply said, if teachers are able to see data about students instantly and adjust their instruction, we can radically change the education process. We can help teachers to personalize the teaching and the learning in the moment — rather than waiting until students take a test at the end of the year to determine what a student needs and whether the instruction was actually effective.

What we are working on now, and what we are calling Renaissance NEXT, will show teachers how their students are doing right now, using data from across our ecosystem. In some cases, students may be struggling and may require remediation, and teachers will have instant access to lessons and resources to help. In other cases, students will be ready for more of a challenge to promote deeper learning — and teachers will have access to resources for these learners as well.

Providing teachers with insights in the moment to help them match each student with the right support at the right time for success — this is how our technology can truly have an impact on the world.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

I think the drawbacks are if we (1) use data from assessments for the wrong purpose, or (2) we don’t look at all of the data that might apply to the individual student. The danger for teachers is taking the data from one assessment to inform what a student can achieve, rather than looking at data beyond the one assessment — information about a student’s well-being, instructional data, and other information about a student’s background. You have to look at all aspects to truly personalize teaching.

A great example of this is bilingual learners. One of the things we are working on right now is biliteracy trajectories to ensure that biliterate learners are being assessed correctly. Biliteracy is a superpower (to learn to read in two languages at one time), but these students are often assessed exactly the same way as other students, which isn’t necessarily going to be accurate — it isn’t taking all of the aspects of how that student learns into account.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

Clearly, AI is going to be a rapid growth opportunity for the tech industry. The challenge is that many of those models are trained using poor data sets. With our data set, we can empower those engines to provide personalized and rich learning opportunities. This change is going to occur really quickly, but bringing it all together is really important.

Renaissance NEXT aims to build a rich data set to inform teachers about what they need to do next ‒ driving instruction and learning for every student.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. Create experiences, not features: I have been building products since the 90s and the transformation that has happened in technology since then has been astonishing, but the challenge is that many companies are often just creating more features and more things for people to do. Granted, there are some great features being introduced, but there are so many places to go to it doesn’t enhance the user experience. The number one issue for teachers is time. We have to create experiences that solve for that. We also have to create experiences for multiple audiences — administrators, teachers, and students. Our goal is to constantly consider the experience of everyone who uses our products and to improve that experience in real-life situations.
2. When building for edtech, consider all users — especially the students: There isn’t just one type of teacher, student, or administrative user. Whether it’s a student struggling with math or a bilingual learner, every student’s brain is developing along a different pathway. We have to consider every type of user and every type of learning option. You have to know the pain points and objectives, and see through the “noise” to create technology that truly has an impact.
3. Teachers have hard jobs, so try to make something easier: It’s honestly as simple as that when it comes to developing products used by educators. If we aren’t making products that are helping teachers to personalize their teaching, without requiring additional steps and work, then we aren’t creating a product that is adding value or impacting student growth.
4. Interoperability matters: Our industry is notorious for having logins all over the place. It’s difficult to get all of the data to connect and inform next steps. At Renaissance, we have the benefit of having a multi-product platform to provide teachers with insights in the moment with our assessments, and that then help them to match each student with the right supports at the right time for success within our practice and instruction products. Without that customized experience, teachers are trying to make those connections themselves in multiple products and platforms that don’t talk to each other.
5. Utilize data and models, but assume a human is always in the loop: The web browser revolutionized edtech, and we think AI may have the same impact going forward. However, educational tools always need to be guided by human excellence. AI will almost certainly help cut down on extra work for teachers, and will help simplify technologies, but it will never replace the educator in the classroom. We need that human connection to know what’s behind the scenes of the data, to know what’s deeper, and to know what drives the motivation of a student.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

Data protection and student data privacy are so essential that they need to be built into edtech systems from the very beginning, not treated as an afterthought. At Renaissance, we have access controls at multiple levels to ensure that sensitive student data is only accessible to the staff members who need it, and these safeguards are present in our systems from the outset.

We also make extensive use of deidentified data that can’t be tied back to a particular student. This is especially important when we’re thinking about using AI tools and machine learning with the large data sets I mentioned earlier. For example, Renaissance has data on thousands of fourth graders who’ve had the same misconception about place value, so we can show teachers the best steps to take to address this. Similarly, we’ve seen tens of thousands of ninth graders with similar patterns of poor attendance and low grades, and we can pinpoint the interventions that are most likely to be effective in reversing this.

In each case, we’re interested in patterns and outcomes, not in particular students’ names or ID numbers. Working with deidentified data is a further safeguard, ensuring that the most sensitive data is never in a position where it can be accessed accidentally.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Having done hiking, canoeing, and backpacking trips in the Rockies and the Boundary Waters, my advice is similar to the campsite signs you often read: “Leave it better than you found it.”

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Bono — I grew up listening to all of U2’s music and have seen the band throughout the decades, including their recent tour at the Sphere in Las Vegas. I really appreciate his mission-driven life philosophy and how the band creates amazing products.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

X: @toddbrekhus

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.