President Harry Truman once famously said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Brother Adam Geller (North Carolina – Chapel Hill, 2005) has taken those words to heart as his business continues to evolve and he continues to help educators improve their own performance. And, as he continues to evolve, Adam’s company, Edthena, and its AI Coach platform, was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025.
Adam joined AEPi’s Omega chapter shortly after its refounding. “I was at summer orientation and at a Hillel barbeque with another freshman – Colin Sutker (North Carolina – Chapel Hill, 2005) – and we met some of the brothers from the chapter and it just felt like the right place for me.” After graduation, Adam worked for AEPi as the first executive fellow.
He then moved on to a teaching role at Teach for America in the St. Louis Public Schools. With three years of teaching experience under his belt, he began working for Teach for America nationally and began looking at ways to utilize technology to improve teaching skills.
“During my first year as a science teacher I wanted to be a great teacher and have a great impact, but no one else had a science teaching background. The right person to be observing me was the local science teacher at the science museum. He was willing to help me and that’s when I began to realize the power of being observed.”
“When I moved on to that national role, I began to focus on that problem: getting teachers feedback on their actual teaching. It is still really hard to have the right person in the right place at the right time to get that feedback. We (Edthena) are building the technology infrastructure for that process to occur.”
In 2011, Adam was named a Kauffman Foundation Education Ventures Fellow and took the leap to start Edthena. At its outset, Edthena was the product. It offered a mechanism to provide remote teaching feedback in a simple and non-confrontational manner. Edthena is still going strong, but that video coaching is now just one set of tools in a suite of technological products from the company designed to help teachers improve their skills and better themselves professionally.
“The second tool we built is called AI Coach. It allows for teachers to self-reflect on their practice by working with a virtual chatbot style coach.” Released in February 2022 (before ChatGPT!), the AI Coach technology was awarded a U.S. Patent for a “conversational assistant control of a graphical user interface.”
“Using this new technology helps us solve some of the constraints that are present. Schools may not have the extra staff to support teachers’ professional learning. This creates a different and supportive experience.”
Now, to further advance its impact on teachers, Edthena is participating in an ongoing Gates Foundation-funded research project in partnership with the University of Virginia and the University at Albany to test a new system that watches and listens to classroom videos. As part of this, teachers across the country will receive actionable feedback and coaching specific to math instruction.
TIME recently wrote about AI Coach and this work in its Best Inventions of 2025 article:
“Classroom teachers need to learn, too, but often don’t get adequate instructional coaching. Edtech company Edthena created AI Coach, the latest version of which debuted with elementary school math teachers in September. They can record and upload their lessons, and then the platform—validated by researchers at the University of Virginia—analyzes audio and video and offers time-stamped feedback detailing opportunities for improvement. The goal, says Edthena CEO Adam Geller, is to “give teachers clarity on how to grow, the confidence to try new strategies, and the support to keep improving.”
“Teaching is still a distinctly human endeavor. It’s more than just conveying facts. It involves probing, thinking, and supporting productive collaboration. We’ve built a new experience for teachers. They’re getting ideas from the process and learning from them.”
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