We build new offerings for TFA that reinvent education.
We share what we learn from our R&D work to shape both TFA and the field of education.
We work directly with young people on our team to co-design and co-learn with those most impacted by the education system.
We work in community and reciprocal relationship with equity and innovation leaders, understanding that innovation thrives in partnership and co-learning.
As Teach For America's early stage R&D Laboratory, our work is constantly changing.
However, this academic year, we are focused on building prototypes, pilots and programs towards two broad "field facing challenges":
We’re at the start of a technological and economic revolution.
Past tech revolutions have transformed our politics, economy, & society. But they haven’t really improved education, especially for the most marginal learners.
Non-dominant groups get left holding the bag in these moments: greater inequity, less room to shape emerging tech, and disproportionately impacted by algorithmic bias.
Getting involved early allows us to direct the use of AI equitably toward the reinvention of learning.
It also enables us to help educators make meaning of rapid advances & a deluge of new tools – so they can empower better teaching & learning.
High school students struggle to figure out what to do after they graduate.
Schools are largely not designed to support them in that. Often we find counselors in schools overwhelmed and overworked, managing as much as a 1:400 student-to-counselor ratio: and still finding heroic ways to help students navigate their futures.
Over the last year, research in other areas converged on this topic as one of urgent need: young people in high school and post-high school, as well as educators, administrators, parents, and others spoke to the needs of young folks to explore their futures and the lack of support currently available for that transition point.
Our R&D in this area focused on reinvented ways to ensure young people have more agency, power, and knowledge to shape their future.
These are the values that guide how we create, collaborate, and authentically pursue reinvention.
So we aspire to:
So we aspire to:
So we aspire to:
So we aspire to:
So we aspire to:
In 2019, the Reinvention Lab team was sitting with young people from across the United States on a shaded, warm February day. We were in India together, learning with Teach For India and its Kids Education Revolution program about adult-youth partnership. Zail, a then-high school student, started waxing philosophical - and he used the metaphor of bubbles.
"When communities come together, it's not as much a melting pot as it is bubbles forming larger bubbles. The bubbles don't fold into each other, they don't lose their shapes or identities - they just come together, and form something larger than any one community on its own. It's beautiful."
From that metaphor, and with help from Firebelly Design, we designed the Reinvention Lab logo. Organic shapes that come together to form a greater whole. It also reminds us of our motto. Grace Lee Boggs said, "Transform yourself to transform the world." We say, "Transforming ourselves to radically transform learning." This logo reminds us of those layers of transformation: starting with self, and radiating out to our organization and larger systems.
Teach For America seeks to ensure all children have access to an excellent education. But the definition of excellent is not fixed— instead, it is constantly evolving to meet the needs of young people and the rapidly changing world.
If we are to remain a powerful and relevant force in the education discussion, we must also evolve. We must be in deep partnership with those forging a new future, constantly interrogating the implications for our work. We must acknowledge both the brilliance and harm of our history, zeroing in on the unique assets we have to bring to this moment. We must be willing to imagine and test bold ideas and commit to ways of being that enable us to be nimble.
The Reinvention Lab aims to be an exploratory space in which TFA can lean into this next frontier— to look ahead to where the education sector must go and identify tactics, insights, and modes of operating that can catalyze this future.
The majority of students today are going to schools that were designed for yesterday. That system - built for the assembly-line era - prioritizes rote memorization, affirms a narrow set of identities, and assumes a one-size-fits-all solution.
And yet the world is changing beneath our feet. An automation economy demands new skills and births new industries. Movements for environmental sustainability and racial justice call us to merge activism with critical innovation. Our country’s democratic institutions are under threat from misinformation and division. We must ask: will our current education system prepare the next generation to thrive in and transform these realities?
Our answer is a clear no. We must co-create something radically different, that interrogates and redefines the why, the what, and the how of learning across our country.
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