In a session today at EdTech Week in New York City, Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab, and Abbas Manjee, co-founder and chief academic officer of Kiddom, challenged the notion that innovation in education technology begins and ends with student-facing software. Instead, they argued that real progress occurs when ed-tech leaders create learning tools that mirror the dynamic nature of any given classroom — working alongside teachers, integrating AI systems into curriculum and linking instruction to student outcomes. They said Teaching Lab and Kiddom have partnered in an effort to make this vision a reality.
“What we’re trying to do as we envision the future is design for a classroom where every single student, 100 percent of students, are learning at the highest levels, and 100 percent of teachers are excited to wake up and come to work every single day,” Johnson said. “I think for the first time ever, technology can help us with this.”
But Johnson, who spent the earlier portion of her career teaching middle school science, described the current state of teaching as unsustainable. The main problem, she explained, is that the classroom model itself has not evolved much in recent decades.
“I want us to envision a completely new operating system for classrooms and for schools — an operating system where teachers don’t just get data reflected back to them, but where teachers actually get an analysis of what they should do the next day with students,” she said.
Both Johnson and Manjee, who also spent a handful of years in the classroom, said this vision is at the heart of Teaching Lab’s work with Kiddom.
The main mission of the partnership, they said, is to tackle what Johnson referred to as “the 5 percent problem.” Originally from an article written by Laurence Holt, the problem illustrates the reality that even the most effective tools rarely reach enough students to make a measurable impact.
“There are products that have an impact, but it’s only 5 percent of students that access them at the dosage required to get that impact,” Johnson said. “That, to me, means we are designing tools that teachers do not want to use, which is a giant problem.”
Johnson added that solving this problem requires ed-tech companies to stop “selling products that don’t work and partner with teachers and students to actually improve them over time,” emphasizing that meaningful progress depends on collaboration and research.
According to Manjee, in order to provide educators with the most impactful technology, companies need to stop thinking of curriculum, pedagogy and technology as three separate silos, but rather as one cohesive flow. He likened AI’s potential role in the classroom to the human nervous system, handling computation and analysis so teachers can focus on creativity and human connection.
“More technology is not necessarily the answer. More content isn’t necessarily the answer,” he said. “We need to invest in connecting curriculum, pedagogy and technology, so that the teacher can continue to do what they do best, which is connect with and inspire students.”
Both speakers emphasized that the goal isn’t simply to lighten teacher workload but to fundamentally improve how instruction is delivered. Manjee, for example, described AI as finally making personalized learning achievable, but only when it’s mediated through the teacher.
“Any form of AI should honor the very special relationships that teachers form with their students, and it should work through them, not around them, and certainly not to replace them,” he said. “So what is personalized learning mean for a student? Well, I think it means serving up the right content to the teacher to then determine how is that going to best serve the student.”
The speakers agreed that progress requires patience and a commitment to measuring impact.
“Play the long game,” Johnson said. “You can sell to district leaders, you can sell licenses, you can scale within a school system, and you’re not really incentivized to go on the ground and see if the teachers are actually using the tool in a way that benefits them or the students ... I think you have to care about impact.”
Ultimately, Johnson urged the audience not to lose sight of why this work matters.
“There is not a single teacher in the nation who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You know what I want? I want a disengaged class, and I don’t want any of my students to learn,’” she said. “If you give teachers the support to learn new things, and then they can see the benefit of learning those new things ... then they are going to come along, because you are actually supporting them to do what they want to wake up to do and succeed at every single day.”
As AI reshapes education, both leaders called for an approach that prioritizes coherence, collaboration and care.
“If you believe that learning is a social process, we should also enable the teacher to see behind the technology, to help the novice teacher learn,” Manjee said.
