Jill Diniz, CEO and founder of SmartWithIt, is a curriculum innovator, ed-tech entrepreneur, and longtime math educator committed to changing how we think about learning. With a deep background in software engineering, curriculum design, and classroom teaching, Jill brings a rare blend of technical rigor and educational empathy to every product she creates. Her work at Smart With It reflects a passion for joyful, validating educational experiences that are scientifically sound, deeply accessible, and built to last. Learn more about SmartWithIt at https://smartwithit.com/.
Tell us about SmartWithIt and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners and educators.
Human brains are very particular about how we learn. In 6-12 STEM, neither tech nor curriculum-based products have tended to the cognitive science of reliable, joyful learning. But SmartWithIt is solving this problem, starting with its new All the Maths curriculum series.
In a nutshell, research tells us that we can learn joyfully, efficiently, and reliably when we attend to these three cognitive principles:
1. Human teachers, teaching
2. Human storylines, with the support of
3. Reliable spaced recall
First – the power of human teachers. Programs that aim for students to do their core learning from machines – such as Khan Academy and countless others – are missing a fundamental human truth from their offering: learning through face-to-face connections with our teachers and peers has far more potential than learning through screens.
Second, we need engagement through connection to human stories and storylines. In 6-12 mathematics, even the highest regarded curricula still fail to tap into the human instincts that gave rise to mathematics – leaving out the key narratives of human progress. Instead, they present mathematics in a formality-forward manner and attempt to motivate students with contrived contexts, like ‘planning a pizza party’. But students are wise enough to feel the artificiality of these contexts, and the formal approach leaves them yearning for relevance and asking that all-too-common ‘why do I need to learn this?’ question.
AI-based solutions are destined to replicate this poor pedagogy. While AI excels at generating adaptive practice problems and personalized feedback using existing pedagogical approaches – it cannot look at 70 years of failed pedagogy and say, ‘What if the entire approach is wrong? What if we should teach math through the drama of human discovery instead of through formal definitions?’
SmartWithIt’s curriculum products champion authenticity as they bring to the forefront our innate shared instincts to predict, compare, play, and avoid hard work. These are the human propensities that gave rise to mathematics in society. When we use these storylines as the basis of instruction, they generate natural engagement and persistence.
Finally, reliable spaced recall. Strategically timed recall of newly learned material is among the most robust findings in cognitive science, yet most curricula ignore it. SmartWithIt’s messaging app is cleverly designed to use after-school hours to send short, gif-style questions to students that prompt their brains to recall key ideas from their prior lessons. This builds spaced retrieval into the fabric of our materials, ensuring students encounter concepts repeatedly over time in ways that strengthen long-term retention.
The result is a fundamentally different learning experience. Instead of grinding through decontextualized procedures, students engage with mathematics as a human endeavor through teacher facilitation. In this case, they benefit from a structure that respects how human memory actually works — not only during class, but in the hours and days that follow, when consolidation happens.
This approach isn’t just more engaging — it’s more effective. By aligning with how humans naturally learn, SmartWithIt helps students develop genuine mathematical understanding and persistence. We’re not replacing teachers with technology or dressing up old pedagogy. We’re supporting teachers in creating the conditions where authentic mathematical thinking — and authentic human connection — can flourish.
What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
There is great momentum from educators toward using high-quality instructional materials, but our tools for discerning which materials deliver aren’t providing accurate and helpful insights.
For most of the last century, schools applied their own judgment about what “good materials” were. In K-12 mathematics, this was largely an exercise of comparing two almost identical textbooks that varied only in topic arrangement from one chapter to the next.
In 2012, EdReports was established as “the consumer reports of effective instructional materials.” Sadly, their efforts have been an utter failure. It’s as if our “consumer reports” measured dishwashers by looking at 26 features — asking for each to be easily visible by having its own button on the front — but failing to check if it cleaned the dishes, rattled loudly, or was a joy to use. Worse, EdReports championed products shown to be wholly ineffective while rejecting research-backed ones, sadly undermining educators’ ability to choose the most effective instructional materials.
In 2017, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) created an evidence framework encouraging schools to use programs backed by research. Unfortunately, rigorous studies are far too few and scattered to support these decisions. The challenge isn’t that educators lack commitment to evidence-based decisions, it’s that the infrastructure to generate this evidence doesn’t exist. EdReports aimed to fill this gap but instead created confusion by implying its rubric was a viable replacement for research.
The fix requires a coordinated national effort to build research capacity. State education agencies need support to conduct rigorous, multi-year studies evaluating materials under realistic conditions. For example, how does each program perform when used without training? Many teachers change roles year to year, or simply aren’t hired in time to receive product-specific training in every curriculum, so knowing how a product performs with and without training is important. Similarly, many teachers make adaptations to materials. Knowing how the materials perform when teachers are and are not allowed to make their own adaptations can inform school-wide policy on such adaptations.
This isn’t an impossible problem. Medical research faced similar challenges and developed infrastructure for systematic trials and evidence synthesis. Education needs similar investment: dedicated funding for state-led research consortia, standardized protocols for conducting and reporting studies, and centralized repositories making findings accessible.
Without this infrastructure, educators will continue facing an impossible choice: ignore evidence requirements and rely on subjective judgment, or trust flawed reviews that may steer them wrong. Neither serves students well.
What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
Students will continue to come into classrooms with vastly different levels of prior knowledge and skills. However, the widely held belief that educators should address this by grouping students based on their prior achievement undermines student growth for all.
Research suggests that most instruction – certainly conceptually-focused instruction – is best conducted in heterogenous, not homogenous, groups of students’ prior achievement.
If you are a parent of a student who is well-prepared, you may believe being in a class of less well-prepared students to be a detriment – something that slows the class down, perhaps. But when instruction asks students to learn content at a conceptual level – asking themselves, ‘how do I know what I think I know?’ – it is actually far better not only to slow down, but to abandon the unspoken norms that students assume when they are grouped by ability level.
When students are placed in classes based on their ability, the more advanced students can
inadvertently feel pressure to appear ‘smart’ at all times, not questioning how or why something is true. On the other side, students placed in lower achieving groups might see themselves as having little expected of them.
What makes heterogeneous classes more effective is that every student is faced with the challenge of trying to make an argument that is universally clear to all. In classrooms where every student is seen to be equally ‘prepared,’ students are far less willing to say, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense to me.” They are also less likely to think there is a need for more clear and compelling explanations. Therefore, you inadvertently under-develop all learners in the classroom, even the most ‘prepared,’ when you group students into classes based on their prior test scores.
You might then ask, “But how much of education is ‘conceptual’?” Not all – procedural skills matter too – but the vast majority of 6-12 core instruction should be. As Dan Willingham says in his book, Why Don’t Students Like School, “Abstraction is the point of education.” Abstract
thinking is what enables us to transfer school learning to a future career where we’ll face challenges unknown to us today.
To support the development of abstract thinking in students is to use materials that are appropriately designed to focus on that very goal – recognizing underlying structure and similarity, making and challenging generalizations, transferring what we observed in one specific instance to see how it applies in wider or varied instances.
Human teachers teaching in the context of human stories and focused on the abstraction of the big ideas will have all students engaged. With the right materials, the differences in procedural fluency don’t interfere with conceptual progress – they actually provide ready motivation for students to improve their procedural skills.
What are the areas of education or training and workforce development that are being overlooked?
If there’s one subject we can’t afford to teach poorly, it’s economics — yet we do it anyway. On the one hand, progress is being made – eight states test their high school economics standards and another sixteen states require a stand-alone economics course to graduate. On the other hand, economics content, like so much high school content, is not being taught with relevance and human stories at the center. Our current standards treat economics as pre-instruction in college coursework rather than as essential knowledge for navigating the economy students already live in.
For example, if students don’t know how the financial crisis of 2008 came about to the extent that they understand what type of regular monitoring of economic data could have led an ordinary person to anticipate it and protect themselves, potentially even profit from it, then students aren’t prepared to push for economic policy that is in their community’s best interest. Instead, our current economics instruction focuses on skills like plotting out supply and demand curves to find the market equilibrium price and quantity. Such skills remain far too abstract and disconnected from the economic realities students will face or the policy debates they’ll need to navigate as citizens.
When campaign strategist James Carville used the slogan, “The economy, stupid,” back in the 1992 presidential election, he certainly wasn’t awakening some shared obsession with supply and demand curves, he was tapping into the deeply human desire to have an economy that works for us. There is so much good content to delve into here and a truly motivated base of high school students ready for meaningful, relevant learning. It’s time we stop focusing on the pre-teaching of college content and instead prepare all students with the know-how for recognizing things like weakening regulations, market manipulations, “irrational exuberance,” and other indicators that suggest their own financial interests are at stake.
This shift requires more than new textbooks. It requires changing our conception of what high school economics should be. We need standards written for citizens making sense of economic policies and practices, not for aspiring economics majors. The curriculum innovations will follow once we get the purpose right.
What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
In 3-5 years, all the investors who have poured money into AI products will want to see a return on their investment. They’ll be doubling down — spending exorbitantly on marketing and lobbying dollars to exert influence on what schools, districts, and states spend their money on.
The margins associated with technology solutions have always been attractive to anyone looking to invest in the education space. AI has added even more shine to these already-glittering edtech objects. The hype around AI is so pervasive, and the current state of educational outcomes so dire, that district leaders will feel a mounting pressure to adopt AI-powered “personalized learning” tools promising to solve teacher shortages, achievement gaps, and differentiation challenges simultaneously.
All vendors will claim their products are different — backed by learning science, adaptive to individual needs, and proven effective. With biased study designs, vendors can manufacture ‘evidence’ of effectiveness. But I expect these products will ultimately fail students for the same reason previous tech waves failed: they’ll replicate decades of poor pedagogy, just more adaptively and at greater scale.
What AI can’t do for us is question whether students should be working through isolated problem sets at all, or whether mathematics should be taught through human stories of discovery rather than formal definitions. The technology will make existing approaches more pervasive without making them more effective.
The real challenge won’t be AI capability — it will be maintaining focus on what actually drives learning. Research consistently shows learning happens through human connection: face-to-face interaction with teachers and peers, engagement with authentic narratives, and instruction designed around how memory actually functions. Yet AI vendors will promise gains by replacing or minimizing these exact elements — students working independently through algorithmically-generated content rather than collaborating with classmates and teachers.
This pressure will intensify because the economic incentives are overwhelming. Large, investor-backed companies will outspend everyone else on marketing, lobbying, and partnerships, making it nearly impossible for evidence-based alternatives to compete for attention — even when they’re more effective.
Schools that resist this pressure and instead use technology strategically — to enhance rather than replace human connection — will see dramatically better outcomes. But it will require leadership willing to resist slick presentations and do the critical work of seeking out curricula grounded in cognitive science rather than artificial intelligence. The winners and losers among communities over the next 3-5 years will be determined by whose leaders can resist the siren call of technological quick fixes.