Teaching Lab Wins $100,000 in Ed Tech Competition
Written by Teaching Lab Staff
Photo by Jill Wellington from Pexels
Teaching Lab is the winner of the Futures Forum on Learning: Tools Competition, a global competition aimed at developing new technologies to address student learning following the coronavirus pandemic.
Our organization will receive $100,000 to further develop Teaching Lab Plus, the virtual version of our professional learning model, which seeks to accelerate K-12 ELA and math learning of Black and Latinx students and students experiencing poverty through transformational virtual teacher learning experiences.
In our online environment, teachers learn to equitably instruct and engage students in any context, including in online and hybrid contexts. By 2023-2024, Teaching Lab will reach over 15,000 teachers and serve 1.1 million students. We will engage in rapid experimentation, create linked datasets and open them up to researchers to answer questions like: What leads to the greatest improvements in teacher and student learning in an online environment?
Accelerate Pandemic-Related Learning Recovery
The competition was convened and sponsored by Schmidt Futures and Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin to accelerate pandemic-related learning recovery and advance the field of learning engineering. The 18 winning teams, made up of entrepreneurs, learning scientists, and researchers from around the world, are eligible to share a total of more than $1.5 million in awards to fund tools, technologies, platforms, and research projects ranging from interactive learning apps to on-demand tutoring.
“The Tools Competition Award allows us to reimagine teacher learning in service of reimagining student learning. When you think about it, nothing in education improves without teachers. If we actually care about educational equity, we will provide teachers with the support they deserve -- anytime, anywhere, including online — so they have the skills, knowledge, and capacity to continuously improve to advance educational equity with students and families. We believe this can happen virtually because we’ve been doing it since the onset of the pandemic and teachers prefer the flexibility and access to communities outside of their immediate school. With this award, we’ll also collaborate with researchers and learning engineers to build a stronger evidence base around what works to improve teacher learning in online spaces. The findings from this research can be used by anyone to improve the way they support teachers to engage in continuous learning.”
—Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab
To Serve One Million Students by the End of 2021
Launched in July 2020 at the Futures Forum on Learning, the Tools Competition generated nearly 900 proposals from 55 countries, showcasing innovative ways to accelerate learning recovery and mitigate the educational impact of COVID-19 on K-12 students. The educational tools developed by the winning teams have the potential to serve one million students by the end of 2021 and close to 20 million students within the next three years, according to estimates calculated by each team.
“The pandemic has underscored the importance of investing in long-term innovative solutions that improve student outcomes,” said Ken Griffin, Citadel Founder and CEO. “Every student should have access to the tools and resources they need to succeed, and I applaud the winners of our Tools Competition for their commitment to improving education for students globally.”
“The Tools Competition is built on three big ideas,” said Kumar Garg, Managing Director and Head of Partnerships at Schmidt Futures. “We must address the global learning loss from the pandemic now, or risk the consequences lasting for years. We must develop new solutions. And we can’t just chase after silver bullets—we have to actually invest in tools that use the best learning science and have the infrastructure for continuous improvement. That’s the value of learning engineering, and that’s what all of these winners exemplify.
The 18 winning teams come from institutions and organizations across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In addition to receiving financial prizes, the winning teams will share insights from their work with external researchers to facilitate experimentation to improve student outcomes and better understand student learning.
Tools Competition Background
Administered by the Learning Agency with support from Teachers College, Columbia University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the competition consisted of three rounds of proposal evaluations and pitches before a panel of judges that included philanthropists, education technologists, teachers and researchers. In order to be considered for an award, each proposal had to address a pressing learning goal connected to COVID-19 learning loss and work with external researchers to build a culture of continuous improvement.
Winners have now received the first installment of their awards and will be provided with the opportunity to connect with leaders in the field and present their ideas to a panel of educators for further refinement, review, and funding.
The field of learning engineering, and Schmidt Futures’ Learning Engineering program, aims to leverage the rapid advances in computational methods, data, and talent to both improve and utilize our growing understanding of how people learn. The Tools Competition embodies that approach by seeding the development of new tools and approaches that contribute to research infrastructure for rapid testing and improvement by a new generation of computational talent.
