We share what we learn from our R&D work to shape both TFA and the field of education.
We work directly with the org and the field to co-design and co-learn with those most impacted by the education system.
We work in community and reciprocal relationship with innovati leaders and young folks, understanding that innovation thrives in partnership and co-learning.
These are the values that guide how we create, collaborate, and authentically pursue reinvention.
At the Reinvention Lab we know:
So we:
So we:
So we:
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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. 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 evolution — 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 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. Our country’s 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 different, that interrogates and redefines the why, the what, and the how of learning across our country.
But it does mean a radical departure from the status quo.
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