Edtech

Building Bridges: How Collaborative State and Regional Innovation Hubs Can Reshape Education R&D

The traditional landscape of education innovation often feels siloed. Researchers conduct studies, edtech startups build tools, investors inject capital, and educators are left at the tail end, hoping something works for their students. This incoherent marketplace, where solutions often lack substantial evidence of their effectiveness and are built without a deep understanding of the problems, was the central challenge addressed during the session “Uncovering the Hidden Gems: A State and Regional Deep Dive into R&D” at this year’s ISTELive and ASCD Annual Conference with Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF), Leanlab Education, Learner-Centered Collaborative, Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI), and InnovateEDU.

Can Regional Innovation Hubs Create a More Promising Future for K-12 Education?

With uncertainty across the educational landscape—the expiration of ESSER funds and shrinking public school district budgets, cuts to federally funded research initiatives, and opportunities and challenges around AI integration—we need to understand where, when, and how to create systems that support and sustain learner-centered change no matter what comes next.

Humans in the Loop: Insights from Codesigning AI in Real Classrooms

With the explosion of AI in education since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022, the edtech market has seen an influx of tools promising revolutionary changes to teaching and learning. But are these tools meeting real classroom needs? Leanlab Education set out to answer this question by working with five edtech companies, each developing AI-powered solutions, through codesign research involving over 40 teachers and their students across the U.S.

Evidence-Building Partnerships

In an interview with the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, CEO Katie Boody Adorno reflects on Leanlab Education’s evidence-building partnership work with edtech developers and schools in response to the prompt, “Please describe Leanlab Education’s partnership work with edtech developers and schools to support evidence-building practices across the levels of evidence.”