Welcome back to Teachers in America, where we connect with real educators and ed leaders to provide practical instructional tips and talk about the latest teaching trends to help you stay on the forefront of what’s new in education.
On today's minisode, host Kailey Rhodes sits down with Classcraft cofounder and HMH’s SVP of product management and strategy, core classroom and integrated solutions Shawn Young to discuss education predictions. They cover topics like simplifying EdTech, leaning on AI tech tools to build teacher-student relationships, and bringing the “human element" into technology. For additional education predictions, check out our blog, "10 Trends in Education to Watch in 2025."
A conversation about education trends and predictions with Shawn Young
A full transcript of the episode appears below; it has been edited for clarity.
You can follow Teachers in America wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or iHeartRadio.
Please consider rating, reviewing, and sharing Teachers in America with your network. We value our listeners' support and feedback. Email us at shaped@hmhco.com.
The views expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.
Kailey Rhodes: Hi, I am Kailey Rhodes, and this is Teachers in America. Welcome to our minisode, spotlighting education trends to watch in 2025. Every year we talk with experts in EdTech, curriculum, education leadership, professional learning, and so many other fields, and they share their forecast for education trends in the year ahead.
Here’s a prediction from last year that’s still worth watching. Districts will provide professional development in AI. Fingers crossed, right teachers? This prediction from HMH’s Senior Vice President of Research, Francie Alexander, is still one to watch in 2025. We know from our recent survey that educators are asking for training in AI, and many of them see how it can be useful in their teaching. If you want to hear more about that survey and what educators really think about technology in the classroom, check out our last Ed Trends minisode. The link is in the show notes along with the links to all our other Ed Trends blogs, so you can see how previous predictions panned out.
So, today we’re going to give you a rundown of the latest predictions to keep your eye on in 2025. And a very special guest here to weigh in is Shawn Young, HMH’s Senior Vice President of product management and strategy, core classrooms and integrated solutions. Wow. Shawn, you have your pulse on a ton of things, so can you introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your background and education, and your role here at HMH?
Shawn Young: Sure. Thanks for having me. Currently at HMH, I’m running our efforts around supporting teachers’ delivery of curriculum and instruction within a classroom, and integrating our various broad-based portfolio into that experience. But I wasn’t always doing that.
I started off as a teacher. I’m a physics major, actually. And I realized I didn’t want to work in a lab. I ended up teaching high school for nine years. I got certified with a master’s in Ed during that time and was really extremely focused on making school meaningful for kids.
Kailey: Mm-hmm
Shawn: I didn’t love high school. I found it kind of meaningless when I was a learner. So my mission as an educator was really to respect the fact that my students had to be there and make it as meaningful as possible. And I did that through, you know, I built 180 days of project-based learning for science. We did all kinds of cool stuff like build canons and shoot them off the roof and that type of stuff. Throughout that I was also a developer. So I had a consulting business for that same period where I built applications and websites for customers.
Kailey: Wow.
Shawn: And I was building apps for myself at the same time. So, you know, teacher by day, programmer by night, how do you do those two things? What you do is you get really effective. So, I started building a lot of apps to be a more effective teacher, and that’s how I built Classcraft, which was really a solution for classroom management using the principles of games and motivation to completely transform how students participated in the classroom. That was just a side project, but after three years of tweaking it, I was like, man, this is really changing how kids are showing up in the classroom. And so I made a website to talk about it, just to inspire other teachers. And the day that website went online, 130,000 people came to the website.
Kailey: How?
Shawn: It started trending on Reddit. It was on the front page of Reddit gaming for two weeks. And then the BBC called to do a piece on games and education, and it just took off. That’s kind of how it became a company.
Kailey: Mm-hmm.
Shawn: I started that with my brother and my dad. My dad’s on the finance side. My brother’s a creative director, and we just started that and we scaled that company to 12 million kids in a hundred plus countries.
Kailey: Oh my gosh.
Shawn: Yeah.
Kailey: Now we have the benefit of that at HMH?
Shawn: That’s right. So, that’s where I was coming to. How did we end up here? It’s a really good kind of marriage because our expertise was really on the classroom management. How do you help teachers run the best classroom possible? But we didn’t have any programs or content, so it was a lot of work for teachers.
Kailey: Yeah.
Shawn: They had to copy/paste over their stuff. They had to configure it.
Kailey: An integration problem.
Shawn: That’s it. Exactly. And on the HMH side, we have these really great programs, but up until now we haven’t been supporting them through the digital delivery of those programs, like running the classroom. And so putting those two things together created HMH Classcraft, which we launched last July, and which has all the lessons already built in. The core programs already pre-made for teachers. So, super simple. If you’re a beginner teacher, you just press teach and you get going.
Kailey: Oh, that’s awesome.
Shawn: If you’re a more experienced teacher, then you get the benefit of all these tools where you can leverage the data coming in from students’ responses, to be able to, on the fly, adapt your instruction. So, really being able to blend the gap between the print world, the analog world of education.
Kailey: The curriculum world, and the classroom management world
Shawn: Right. Exactly.
Kailey: We can’t just keep giving teachers discrete tools. We have to help them integrate, because we have to remember that teaching is one big improv game, and moment to moment is fast. They don’t have time to wrangle all these separate experiences.
Shawn: Exactly.
Kailey: Well, so you’ve got—
Shawn: It’s interesting. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.
Kailey: No, you just said it’s interesting. So you got me.
Shawn: It’s interesting because one of the things you could do by creating tools that help teachers run their classroom is start creating very rich data sources of what’s happening in the classroom.
Kailey: Hmm.
Shawn: I’ve been calling it stealth assessment, where you’re not actually assessing students. It’s not a quiz or anything, but you’re gathering a lot of information about them that you can use to if you’re part of an integrated whole, like HMH is, you can start doing things like recommend the next step in a lesson. You can recommend differentiation resources. You can recommend teaching strategies. And you’re able to do that if you know what a teacher has taught, how they taught it, and how students are receiving it, and how they’re doing against it. And so that data becomes the connective tissue between being able to help teachers run their classroom, but also do it in a way that is super easy and helps them make the best decisions for their students.
Kailey: And helps prevent students from falling through the cracks. I’m a middle school math teacher, that’s my background. And I always had these moments where I would be brushing my teeth or going to sleep, and I would be like, “Oh my gosh, Elliot needs this workbook page!”
Shawn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Kailey: And it would just be like, I really need someone to help me. And it would be really great if that help was linked to Elliot’s actual experience in addition to my own classroom observations. It’s an ecosystem, right? And the more we create digital tools that mimic and support an ecosystem and not just these discrete experiences, the more we’re gonna make a difference in the classroom.
Shawn: That’s right. I think we’re in a super unique time to be able to do that. I think the kind of the linchpin to being able to do that is to provide teachers with tools they really want to use so that make their life easier.
Kailey: Yeah. That they wanna use. Yeah.
Shawn: Yeah. Because it’s not like, “Oh, you have to use this.” It’s like, “Oh, cool. I do want to teach from here.” And in the background I’m getting data, “for free”. I don’t have to collect it.
Kailey: And data that I know what to do with it. I don’t have to then go, what do I do with this? Yeah. ‘Cause they’ve got too much to figure out.
Shawn: And that’s where AI becomes super interesting. That’s why I think we have a very unique opportunity right now. AI is being used in a lot of ways to help teachers create resources or give students feedback. We’re seeing a lot of those use cases. I’m really excited about the capacity that we have with the data to be able to do things to unlock instructional contexts that actually wouldn’t be possible. So, one of the tools we built into HMH Classcraft is we have all these learning routines, right? It’s not just about deliver content. It’s about helping teachers teach better. One of them is Turn and Talk. Turn and Talk, as you can imagine, is pretty exactly what it is.
Kailey: Yeah.
Shawn: You have students turn and talk about a topic and we know that that’s super effective. That very high effect size on the Hattie Scale.
Kailey: Yeah. And also a really interesting volume meter. It starts out real quiet. And then by the end you gotta turn off the lights to get the kids back because they’re chatty.
Shawn: Exactly. What you’ve described is exactly right. So a teacher that’s not sure of themselves will do that once and then they’ll be like, “Oh my God, I just lost control of my classroom.”
Kailey: Uh-huh.
Shawn: Oh my God. How do I know they even talked about Edgar Allen Poe, because they’re chatty. What we’ve done is we’ve created a tool set where students can enter their answers, the response of that conversation, which is great. So kids know that the teacher’s expecting an output from them. We’re getting data. We’re holding kids accountable. But now the teacher has all these answers she needs to look at in real time.
Kailey: Uh, we don’t have time.
Shawn: So we’ve built an AI tool that just summarizes that and says, here are the top three things your kids discussed. Here’s where they didn’t answer the prompt, and here’s some feedback you might want to give them.
Now, all of a sudden, we’ve created the possibility for her to effectively eavesdrop on all these conversations in a way that’s not really possible. And then in real time she could say, “Hey guys. Here’s the recap.” And we see teachers doing this. They’re literally saying, “Hey, the AI recap said X, Y, Z.” And now kids are like, “Oh, I want to make sure my answer gets into the recap.” And we’ve seen completely different behaviors.
Kailey: Or, “That’s not quite what I said.”
Shawn: Yeah, exactly. And then one of the benefits, and one of the transformative things we found out. So we hadn’t designed it for this. We only found out recently that in multilingual classrooms, we have students who are answering, not in English, but the AI is smart enough that it can take those answers, parse them as well, and summarize them into the English summary. So you can have students answering in whatever language.
Kailey: That’s a game changer.
Shawn: It’s crazy!
Kailey: That is a game changer.
Shawn: What’s really exciting is that we’re able to benefit from this technology in ways that we hadn’t anticipated as we were building it. And again, create really new instructional contexts that, you know, this is super simple. It’s not like the teacher needs to chat or needs to upload anything. It’s literally just press that button, you know?
Kailey: It’s actually, don’t change anything. Do more of those kind of challenging, but necessary teacher decision moments. You know, those moments where you do hand over control to the kids to have a conversation or go in the hallway and chat. All these different things, all those moments that you’re rolling the teacher classroom management dice. I think AI is helping you roll it a little easier.
Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. And you know, you get sixes more often.
Kailey: Yeah, so first of all, you’re still totally on fire for teaching, which is incredible. I’m so glad that you’re our Senior Vice President because, I just love working for a company that has people at the leadership that have that real pulse on teachers and learners and are just so on fire for learning. I think it’s awesome.
So, Shawn, you know that we’re doing this education trends to watch in 2025. It’s early in the year. We always wanna know kind of what’s on the horizon. With your expertise, do you have a prediction or a trend to watch?
Shawn: You know, I do. However—
Kailey: Should put it on 22 black.
Shawn: Yeah, here’s why I am pausing. The world is changing really fast right now, both societally and from a technological space. You heard me talking about AI and how we can build in solutions that we hadn’t even anticipated. I will make some predictions here, but I will put a grain of salt here that, you know, really the only constant right now is change, and in an accelerating way that is really hard to predict.
If you had looked at any predictions in 2019 about education, you would’ve been completely wrong. And then coming out of the pandemic, you would’ve been, again, completely wrong because, you know, ChatGPT happened. We’re moving towards reasoning models very quickly. So, let’s just take any of this with a grain of salt. Now I will say that I do believe that there’s a strong desire from teachers to go back to kind of the foundational elements of teaching. And by that I mean we were just talking about classroom management, talking about relationships between students.
I think we’ve reached a point where there’s a tool for everything that you might want to do. So now it stops being about X, Y, Z tool is super cool. And it starts being really, truly about how does using this tool, how does using this technology, how does using an ecosystem of products like HMH truly help me be a better teacher and lead to student outcomes? I think we’re gonna be seeing a continued refocus towards highly impactful solutions. And not just from decision makers. Actually from teachers themselves saying, you know what? I don’t have time. I don’t wanna learn new tools. The good news is tools are easier than ever to use.
This moment in time that we’ve reached where tools have gotten super simple, where we have some of these power tools like ChatGPT, has kind of brought us back to teachers being able to focus on what really matters and that’s supporting students, understanding them, delivering engaging experience, building relationships. And so it really does become about creating the experience in the classroom. And I think we’re gonna be seeing a lot more of that.
Kailey: Yeah. I kind of love how your prediction is that as technology gets more advanced, we’re probably gonna see fewer
Shawn: Yeah. We’re going back to human pieces of it.
Kailey: Yeah. And also because there’s so much choice, we’re giving teachers and educators and purchasers of that technology more incentive to say, okay, in the technology world, we talk about the click path, right? How many clicks are you going to have to make to get to what you want?
Well, how many things are you going to make teachers touch while they’re in a classroom full of 35 humans? You got a human with other humans and you keep on giving them more buttons to push, they’re eventually going to realize, if you just give me one button that does it all, that’s what I’m going to pick. And so I love that you’re kind of talking about maybe separating, what is it, separating the wheat from the chaff.
Shawn: The chaff. Yeah. And it’s interesting because, you know, part of it is about excellence. Solutions that are excellent obviously are going to be used more, rise to the top. But there’s also a bit of a less is more mentality.
Kailey: Yes, completely.
Shawn: And I think that teachers are becoming more and more sophisticated. And it’s interesting because at the same time we have a massive issue, which is teacher turnover. A lot of teachers that are new to the profession, a lot of them who are untrained.
Kailey: Mm-hmm.
Shawn: On the one hand, there’s this body of educators that really needs support to do their work effectively. They’re coming in real hot in, as you know.
Kailey: On fire. Passionate.
Shawn: Or like a week ago I used to work in a coffee shop and now I’m in a classroom. We’re seeing that happening. For better or for worse, that’s what’s happening. So those teachers need super simple, effective solutions that solve their problems.
Kailey: Yeah.
Shawn: Yeah, so that exists. At the same time, we have these teachers who’ve been there longer, who really understand the space, et cetera, who’ve seen tools come and go. And it turns out they also want seamless and simple. So on the one hand, I need seamless and simple. On the other hand, I need seamless and simple for different reasons. We can actually, through a convergence of really good user experience, really good data, surfacing, taking data and not bringing teachers to reports, but actually surfacing insights at point of views. Like, here’s what you should know now, as opposed to go look at these spreadsheets of whatever and try to figure it out.
Kailey: Yeah. And come back when you have an answer.
Shawn: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.
Kailey: Grading is taking up less time because of AI solutions and interpreting data is taking up less time. And so what we’re really getting back to, kinda what you’re saying is that sometimes the most helpful tool is the one that’s just outside your peripheral vision. You know it’s there, but you’re not focused on it.
Shawn: Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.
Kailey: And that lets our teachers really focus on building those one-on-one relationships with students, and that really is what impacts growth. HMH’s CEO, Jack Lynch, his prediction was that we should expect EdTech to deepen teacher-student connection, and that’s kinda what you’re saying. Get it out of your focus, get it out of your hands, and really focus right back on the things that only humans can do, which is relate, connect, encourage growth, and learn.
Shawn: Absolutely. It’s interesting because Jack has a maniacal focus on this human relationship connection. That’s part of why I was excited to join HMH was that that’s our mission. That’s not true of every company, or of every EdTech leader. A lot of them are talking about how can we make systems more effective? How can we, you know. As someone who is an EdTech founder, who was an educator for a long time, I met a lot of EdTech founders who were programmers with an idea or somebody who kind of said, “Oh, I can go fix that in education.”
Kailey: Yeah, I went to school, so—
Shawn: Yeah. Exactly. I talked to 50 teachers, therefore I know all of their problems. You don’t necessarily, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, anybody who’s trying to solve these problems deserves a commendation.
Kailey: That’s true.
Shawn: But deeply understanding teacher’s reality, and making that really the heart of how you are building these tools is really important. We have this huge opportunity at HMH with AI to do that. Because we have the capacity to have the full picture. We have enough data about students. We have enough resources for teachers. We have enough sophisticated understanding of the skills and how they connect to one another. We have enough solutions for supplemental and intervention. So we can actually look at all the different pieces and really connect them in a way that really elevates teachers. As you can tell, I’m really passionate about it.
Kailey: Yeah. I think what’s interesting about you is you’ve got this background in physics education. You’ve got this background in starting a company to really I mean, your company was itself a project-based learning venture. You had a real problem and then you put it to real use. That’s what that is. And I think that what is interesting about your perspective that I think a lot of teachers, including myself, don’t really understand sometimes is how data and more personal deep interactions with students exists in the same sentence I think that a lot of times when we hear data, we think either a wall of scores that are a little intimidating to decipher or maybe disappointing, just those scores in general.
Or maybe we hear like big data, or maybe we hear a forgotten password. But I think what’s really beautiful is that your ed prediction is touching on this deeper level of personalizing instruction, because you’re freeing up teacher time by using data to make sure that they aren’t. Teachers don’t realize how much data they are keeping track of in their head informally.
And when we make that formalized, and when we take that guesswork out of it, it’s not that we dim the light of a teacher, we actually free up and kind of like throw more grease on your system to be that teacher that you already are. Amit Patel is the managing director at Owl Ventures, and they’re an EdTech venture capital firm, so they’re investing in these ideas. And he brought up this idea that gaming, like introducing games on the fly, can generate new worlds or experience based on how the gamer is reacting in real time. Kind of like, maybe what we would even say with MAP Growth, you know. It’s adapting to that particular, it’s creating this bespoke experience. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. He sees this kind of gaming experience adaptability technology being applied to learning, not only to personalize that experience, but to motivate students as well. And so further humanizing them specifically, and so getting away from just games for games’ sake, but really getting into games because it can be a personalized motivator. I’m curious to hear your prediction and your take on that. And it’s okay if you are like, "No, I don’t agree with games."
Shawn: Well, I built a gamification company, and I’m a lifelong gamer. I have a lot of opinions and firsthand experience about games in education. I think, so there’s game-based learning, there’s gamification. This idea is super interesting because we’re talking about making game-based learning more and more sophisticated.
Kailey: Mm-hmm.
Shawn: One of the challenges with game-based learning is, hey, if I make a really great game to learn fractions, that’s awesome because kids will learn. It’s experimental. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that a well-designed game can really lead to very strong learnings. But then, what if I want to move on to geometry? Well, now I need a whole new game. The production cost. Why don’t we have AAA games working in the education space? Because the cost to make these games is really, really high—
Kailey: Yeah. And the motivation to make these games is—
Shawn: It is really low. If I’m gonna spend a hundred million dollars to make a video game.
Kailey: Then there’s no—
Shawn: I’m probably gonna get a lot faster return on investment in the consumer space than I would in the education space. So there’s an economics problem that would be solved by AI making games. Now, however, we’re not talking about making games. We’re talking about making learning games. There’s a super interesting study. There’s this game from the early 2000s called Spore. Spore is this game. It’s like the Sims or SimCity, but you start as a bacteria and you evolve into a creature which evolves into a society which evolves into a civilization. And that was kind of the game. And all along that journey as a gamer, you are making decisions of how your creature evolves. There’s a super interesting study where they use that to teach kids about evolution, right? Because it’s like bacteria evolving. And so they did that. They intentionally taught about evolution with that. And then when they tested kids about what they had learned, what they realized is that kids had interiorized intelligent design. And that actually there’s this super being controlling evolution because that’s what they had experienced as a player.
Kailey: Oh, clean up on aisle five!
Shawn: Yeah. And I don’t wanna get into the politics of that, but—
Kailey: It’s so interesting that they were learning a lesson we didn’t know we were teaching.
Shawn: Exactly, and there’s implicit learnings happening
Kailey: That’s right.
Shawn: That you need to be really intentful about designing around or teaching back against.
Kailey: Or at least just incorporating that into your Socratic lessons.
Shawn: Yes, exactly.
Kailey: What do you think this means about that? At least just have your finger on the pulse rather than it coming for you the last day of school.
Shawn: So, pedagogically, I’d be really curious to see how these AI self-generating games.
Kailey: Right.
Shawn: What kind of implicit lessons are they teaching kids and how would we even know what those are if the games are self-generating? It’s super interesting when you think about it from a personalization angle or from an engagement angle. When you think about it from a holistic, what are they learning angle, I’m not sure how effective it would be.
Kailey: I think your example of learning fractions, and the game intuiting what question you’re ready for? That you, Shawn, might be ready for question number 512, but I am far more ready for question 650, obviously. But I think that you’re right, when it gets to these bigger, more sophisticated levels of student thought, I don’t know that a game is gonna replace students and a teacher sitting around and talking about ideas. But I also don’t know if games are claiming that they could compete with that.
Shawn: Yeah. I mean, it depends. Games are such an interesting thing. We tend to think about them monolithically. But games are really just another cultural medium. So here’s an example. I use this example all the time. Probably if we log into my Netflix account and we log into your Netflix account, we will see very different things.
Kailey: I’ve played one game!
Shawn: Well, yeah, but I’m just talking about shows and movies, right? So if you go to Netflix, for me, what you’re going to see is probably some Star Trek stuff. You’ll see Studio Ghibli. There you go. If you go to my wife’s Netflix, it’s all Downton Abbey and you know.
Kailey: Girl after my own heart!
Shawn: There you go. We’re both having the same cultural medium, but we’re having very, very different experiences. I hate horror movies. They scare the bejesus out of me.
Kailey: Same.
Shawn: But those are movies in the same way that Star Trek is TV shows, movie, et cetera. So, we have a medium here that has very, very different experiences for very different people. But it’s all the same medium. And games are that, but times 1 million.
Kailey: Yeah, they really are.
Shawn: You can play, we talked about Spore, as an example. You could play Sims. You could play Candy Crush. All those are very, very different.
Kailey: Yeah. And then there’s this whole category of art games that have no competitiveness to them.
Shawn: Exactly.
Kailey: They’re like an artist’s world.
Shawn: That’s it. And you know, if you look at games like What Remains of Edith Finch, that’s a good example.
Kailey: Writing that down.
Shawn: This is a game where you backtrack through memories and it’s all about processing grief. So this is like a social and emotional experience, much different than, you know, playing a zombie survival game. My point is that when you think about games for education, you really need to be careful about the assumptions you make, because you could have a very experience-based type of experience, very narrative driven versus earning points and leveling up, and those are very, very different things.
Kailey: Yeah. I think a lot of teachers, including myself, sometimes approach games like we would approach a slot machine, where we’re like, I don’t want my kids getting cheap rewards and dopamine hits for something that’s not actually real. I think that reminding people that not only is there this whole vast library of games that unless you are a game-er you may not know exists. So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. But also making sure that we keep our eye on the ball of well, what is your goal? What’s your goal with this game? What’s the goal? Is it to teach fractions? That’s a great goal for a game. Is it to learn conflict management? Maybe not, maybe.
Shawn: It depends. I mean this is how teachers should be designing lessons anyways. What’s your pedagogical intention?
Kailey: Mm-hmm. How will you know when they retrieved it?
Shawn: And is this tool, this medium, this game, the right way to do that? Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends.
Kailey: Okay, Shawn, let’s look at one more prediction, and this one’s incredibly important. Jack Lynch, our CEO, said that teachers are demanding that new EdTech tools come with safeguards consistent with their power. Obviously, AI is incredibly powerful. And also we need to have some guardrails around how we use it, how we tell children to use it, and et cetera. And Jack predicts that we’ll see a renewed call for ethical use guidelines and policies at various levels of leadership in response to those demands. Can you talk a little bit about your predictions for how the EdTech industry will rise to that challenge?
Shawn: Yeah, it’s super interesting because AI in general is creating a lot of conversation around that, even outside of education. There’s a ton of conversation around deep fakes and using AI to scam people, et cetera. I think that societally we’re actually living that right now. And there is a larger call for better understanding of how data is used and how your own data could be used against you. And so I think that we’re seeing that as the zeitgeist and that is just existing even more within the educational space. An educator’s job is to prepare kids for the future and society. And that means making them aware of these types of situations. I think the other piece is that whenever you see ESSER funds are running out now, so we’re probably gonna be seeing some constriction on budgets.
Whenever that happens, you start seeing districts say, okay, here are all the things we have. Which of these work? Which of these don’t work? Which of these do we really need? Which don’t we need? If I need to cut somewhere, where am I gonna cut? There’s natural pressure to start saying, well, which of these tools really does work?
One of the things I’m really excited about with NWEA joining HMH and MAP Growth being part of a lot of our offerings as we move forward is that we’ll be able to directly put our money where our mouth is. So if we say, “Hey, Into Reading is super efficacious.” Well, we actually happen to have the data to show that growth with the most valid psychometric test that exists, that has the most national norming against it. And you can make up your own mind as an educator. We’re going to be open about how our solution is leading to growth and obviously help you see that data.
We believe that our programs work. But we believe it so much that we’re willing to stand that up against real data. I think that responsible EdTech companies are going to do more and more of that because it’s a super interesting thing where education has this very powerful alignment, especially if you’re in the pedagogy space, where the business outcomes really align super well with what the customer needs and wants.
Kailey: Mm-hmm.
Shawn: So, if students succeed and we can demonstrate that students succeed, that is really good for HMH. But that’s actually what educators want also. They want to use our stuff, see students succeed, and they want to know that they’re succeeding. And so actually, those two things are perfectly aligned, and that’s why HMH is a double bottom line company because part of it obviously it’s a company and has financial reasons for doing things. But, actually, those align super well with increased rigor, increased standards, increased guidelines around how we leverage and use these tools and, ultimately, demonstrating student outcomes.
Kailey: Wow. So following what you’re saying, you’re saying that maybe this scalpel that might be arriving to trim unnecessary programs will actually really motivate us to choose what is proven to be working, and that’s good, regardless of how it’s happening, is to stick with the things that are proven to be really moving and shaking outcomes for student growth.
Shawn: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s our responsibility to be able to demonstrate that efficacy.
Kailey: Agreed. Well, thank you so much for all of those education predictions and all of those opinions. I think that we all agree we would love to chat with you for another hour. And we have so many other education predictions for you to watch in 2025 on our blog. Get the link in our show notes and thanks for joining us today listeners, and thank you so much for joining us today, Shawn.
Shawn: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jenn Corujo: If you or some you know, would like to be a guest on the Teachers in America podcast, please email us at shaped@hmhco.com. Be the first to hear new episodes of Teachers in America by subscribing on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed today’s show, please rate, review, and share it with your network. You can find the transcript of this episode on our Shaped blog by visiting hmhco.com/shaped. The link is in the show notes.
The Teachers in America podcast is a production of HMH. Thank you to the production team of Christine Condon, Tim Lee, Jennifer Corujo, Mio Frye, Thomas Velazquez. and Matt Howell. Thanks again for listening.
***
Hear new episodes of Teachers in America on Shaped, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hear more of Teachers in America on Shaped
