Over the past decade, Leanlab Education has helped several tech startups gain a foothold in classrooms. They include the social-emotional learning tool Sown to Grow, the gamified learning management system Classcraft and the math tool Levered Learning, among others.
In the process, the Kansas City nonprofit has become synonymous with a research technique known as “co-design,” which says innovation should begin not with outsiders offering solutions, but with those trying to solve problems for themselves.
Leanlab took shape after its founder, a former teacher named Katie Boody Adorno, began studying how education systems work. The child of community organizers with roots in Puerto Rico, Boody Adorno had taught for five years and realized that education could learn from the way her parents’ efforts worked.
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“It was surprising to me how much we excluded community voice in the education sector,” she said, “and how unimaginative we were in that sector. It was still very top-down bureaucratic, and it wasn’t particularly effective.”
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Leanlab began life as a kind of tech incubator, evolving into a quietly influential organization that helps ed tech developers work with educators to evaluate their products in real classrooms.
From there it has moved into several different aspects of research, partnering with University College-London to co-found the Global Edtech Testbed Network, a hub for researchers, policymakers, philanthropists and tech investors to work together. One of its most recent studies found that of 1,640 tech tools in schools, just 11% are evaluated externally.
Last summer, Leanlab also partnered with 20 school districts, charter schools, microschools and afterschool programs to create something called the American Group of Innovative Learning Environments. It works with educators, helping them research their most pressing questions. And it pays teachers $50 per hour for their work implementing the research. The focus, Boody Adorno says, is on solving real-life problems in their classrooms. In the process, teachers are also trained in research techniques.
In an interview with The 74, Boody Adorno stressed the importance of co-design and her belief that technology is changing schools rapidly — so rapidly that large-scale, randomized control trials, which can take years to design and implement, are no longer a good fit for many research questions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The 74: You talk about being the child of community organizers. When you talk about “community voice,” what are you thinking?
Katie Boody Adorno: I was a middle school teacher in both public schools and charter schools. This was during the No Child Left Behind era, 2008 to 2013. It was a very test-driven culture that was very bureaucratic. You had a lot of big administrators from central office or the state department of education telling you what you needed to do. You had scripted curriculum. You had pacing guides that were very assessment-driven. We also were dealing with massive school closures in the city.
All of this felt very “done to” communities. You were literally told what you were going to teach, how you were going to teach it, if your school was going to stay open or not. Teachers didn’t have a say in this. Building leaders didn’t have a say in this. Parents didn’t have a say. Certainly not our students! And then we were shocked when, year over year, we were seeing pretty dismal results — or when the tests came back and said, “Your schools are not performing on par with more affluent or white schools.”
Let’s talk about how Leanlab came about. Were you still teaching at the time? Had you moved out of the classroom?
I taught for five years. I’d moved to an instructional coach role, where I still was teaching one class. I had gone back to graduate school to become an administrator and I was on that career trajectory. I was in a charter school system and I really thought I wanted to be a school leader. But the more I was exposed to the system, the more skeptical I was becoming. I now had the opportunity to slice the data from a higher-level viewpoint and I was just like, “Man, this isn’t working. We’re not seeing transformation for our kids. But it’s not because we don’t have teachers who are working really hard.”
We had a brilliant staff, but it was unsustainable. We were burning teachers out. Our kids were going to school, at that point, six days a week. Even when we were getting strong test results in the state exam, it wasn’t translating into life outcomes for our kids. I became pretty disillusioned, but really committed to the future of our kids.
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At the same time, you were getting to know the startup community in Kansas City?
I got the chance to attend a couple of events and two things struck me: The way they talked about the innovation process was so much more human-centered and actually aligned to community organizing principles. It was really this notion of elevating end-user insights, designing with who you’re serving, which was something that we never really talked about in education.
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The other piece was just the radical innovation. Now it’s kind of a trope and we laugh about it, this idea of disrupting systems. But this was a decade ago, when this language was just coming out. And it struck me as really, really interesting: There’s another way to think about education that we haven’t talked about. I started hosting pop-up events to teach educators how to go through these innovation processes. I was trying to organize at a really grassroots level, bringing together educators, researchers, community leaders to think about what it would mean to begin prototyping new things that could accelerate student outcomes.
When you say “prototyping new things,” you mean products?
In those early days, it really was all over the place. Oftentimes it was technology products. Oftentimes it was new school models, new programs or curricula. But the idea would be: Start first with a problem that your community is identifying. It could be, “Hey, we’re really struggling on basic literacy. We’re really struggling with students feeling safe at school.” Whatever it is, start first by validating that from the community itself that’s experiencing that pain, and then begin prototyping a new solution.
Fast-forward 10 years: When you look at what you’re doing now, what do you see?
We got pretty good at building commercially viable ventures — a lot of these companies were going on and scaling and making money. But we weren’t solving the problem of knowing if they were actually moving the needle for students across the board. And when we looked at the sector about five years ago, we realized very few tech solutions had any evidence that they were accelerating learning outcomes for kids or even demonstrating any evidence that they were beneficial to students.
So that’s when we underwent another pivot, just before the pandemic, where we said, “We have great relationships with these local schools. We have emerging respect from this entrepreneur community. What does the world look like where we actually bring in researchers more seriously, deepen our relationships with schools so that we can run more in-depth trials?”
The end goal here is that we actually want to see outsized impact. We want technology to actually live up to its promise of accelerating student outcomes beyond what we’ve seen. At that point, we brought in an internal research team. We flipped our business model. So we charge for-profit ed tech companies. We grant money — we believe in unrestricted grants — to schools, and offer market rate stipends. We typically pay teachers $50 an hour.
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Let’s talk about co-design. I’d like to hear a little bit about that process.
Co-design is really interesting because it’s become buzzy. People are throwing it around a lot and there’s not a lot of understanding of exactly what it means. When you design solutions or technologies in a silo with a technologist developer and a company that doesn’t have access to the realities of a school environment, it cannot be very beneficial. And unfortunately, this has happened a lot in the ed tech sector because typically these technologies are selling to administrators but delivering to students. So oftentimes they don’t think about the design for students or teachers because the customer is not the user. Co-design has come to be used as colloquial lingo around what it means to elevate the user’s perspective and give feedback to the product or solution when it’s being developed, so that it actually benefits them.
Let’s talk about these problems that actual educators identify. What have been some of the hits?
There’s no clear winner, but I would say across the board, folks are still very concerned about learning loss, primarily post-pandemic, primarily in literacy and math. We’re thinking about solutions that target upper elementary literacy and math, particularly in literacy, where a lot of schools have now gotten LETRS training for the Science of Reading, but our older kids might have been left out. So those kids are still struggling with basic concepts.
Social-emotional learning or well-being — whatever geography allows you to say — is still a huge priority. That’s also now become educator well-being. Teaching with technology is a big one, particularly with AI, “What is safe? What is reasonable? How do we prepare the workforce to do that?” And then college and career readiness and preparation for an ever-changing workforce. People call that different things: real world learning and experiential learning, portrait of a graduate, college readiness. But it’s this idea of, “How are they getting prepared for the future?”
Are there products, for lack of a better term, that people would recognize that have come out of all this work? Or is it too early to talk about that?
No, it’s not. We’ve done 80 studies. And prior to that, in our five years of doing research and development, we worked with small startups that are just getting off the ground. Folks that are federally funded. We’ve done a lot of research for a tool called Sown to Grow, based out of the Bay Area. They’ve gone on to do really great evidence-based work around cultivating a culture of increased belonging and well-being and social-emotional learning. And we work with big incumbents on new products, like Logitech, McGraw-Hill and others.
So do you become their research arm? What can you do for McGraw-Hill that they don’t already have in-house?
What we functionally do is match them with schools and we have a third party R&D team that will help them figure out if their product is working. And we align all of our evaluation to the federal criteria for evidence. So if they really want third-party evidence, we can be the one that does that. What’s unique about us is that we’re really nimble. We’re one of the only research firms that’s connected to a school network. So we’ll say, “Hey, let’s put this in front of a diverse student or school audience. Let’s get feedback.”
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So you’ve kind of gone from being an incubator to being an American Institutes for Research?
We’re an R&D firm that’s much more nimble and focused exclusively on co-design and technologies. We’re uniquely positioned where we’re different than AIR or WestEd. We’re not really doing randomized controlled trials (RCTs). We’re not doing what we believe is maybe an outdated mode of research. We’re really trying to elevate school community insights and take an iterative approach.
I’ve been writing about education research for 25 years, and when people complain about it, most often the complaint is, “You’re not doing an RCT. That’s the gold standard.” To hear somebody like you say, “Hold on a second, that’s not the best format” is striking.
RCTs are a pain in the ass to do for actual educators. Any educator, ask them if they think it’s equitable to randomly implement a solution that you think is going to be really effective for their kids, but assign it randomly, withhold it randomly and try to implement a cohesive curricular framework around that. That’s just really hard to do and raises some interesting ethical questions. The other piece is that we’re just in an age of technology vastly outpacing our traditional R&D systems. If you do a traditional RCT, it might take you a year and a half to recruit the number of participants you need to engage in that study. The intervention has completely changed by that point — and it’s going to change again by the time you get the findings back. So how helpful is that for the field?
Disclosure: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Leanlab and The 74.