To drive meaningful improvements in education, we must build an R&D infrastructure that supports both long-term research and nimble, practice-focused innovation. This infrastructure should support R&D that is accelerated, agile and actionable — meeting the urgency of teaching and learning while delivering real-time results.
ACCELERATED: BUILDING SOLUTIONS AT THE SPEED OF NEED
At Mineola Public Schools in New York, Superintendent Mike Nagler exemplifies this approach by collaborating with the coding platform OYOClass on co-research and design. The company's founder Melora Loffreto said, “We modeled teaching, and we observed teachers, and we sat down next to his students to watch them approach the editors and lessons. We got to see firsthand what struggles were happening and designed methods to overcome those.” The result, Nagler said, was a better experience for students and a stronger product for districts.
Rapid-cycle models of R&D can offer opportunities for principals, teachers and learners to participate in continuous feedback loops. When R&D truly centers teachers and students in the process, it counters the “guinea pig” narrative — the concern that teachers and students will be treated as test subjects. The solutions are wholly driven by their needs. To shift the narrative, researchers and ed-tech companies must design accelerated R&D approaches with schools, teachers, parents and students to realize the value of a rapid, transparent methodology informed by those who are directly benefiting.
AGILE: CREATING RESILIENT, ADAPTABLE SOLUTIONS-TO-FIT
While acceleration focuses on the pace of education R&D implementation, agility focuses on the fit of R&D to the learning context. As students continue to disengage from school for myriad reasons, including instructional models that feel disconnected or irrelevant, educators need solutions tailored to their realities.
For this reason, Jason Green, co-founder and president of the education software company Yourway Learning, said ed-tech leaders should not "just dump technology into classrooms."
“We need to do intentional research to understand teacher growth over time," he said.
Agile R&D depends on continuous collaboration among educators, developers and researchers. Teachers provide feedback, developers implement changes in real time, students benefit from the improvements, and researchers study the impact — all in a loop that strengthens outcomes and relevance.
ACTIONABLE: REALIZING THE PROMISE OF RESEARCH-TO-PRACTICE
For R&D to matter at the district level, it must drive improvement and impact — not just produce insights that remain buried in academic journals or one-off pilots. Actionable R&D connects the dots between innovation and student success.
It also ensures that impact is measured, understood and realized. This means asking a critical question early and often: What’s working, for whom, and under what conditions?
Answering this helps shift policies and practices by putting R&D in the hands of districts and communities — not just researchers. Educators hold unique insights into what motivates and supports student learning, but too often they lack tools to turn those insights into actionable strategies. That’s where effective use of AI comes in.
Green spoke to why AI needs to inform R&D.
“AI needs to be more than solving for efficiency. It can’t just be a time saver. It needs to be focused on an opportunity to increase efficacy and coherence to increase outcomes,” he said.
Used wisely, AI can help translate R&D into practices educators can use immediately.
THE POWER OF ACCELERATED, AGILE AND ACTIONABLE R&D
Imagine if this kind of infrastructure was already in place in states, districts and communities across the country prior to the pandemic. Would schools have adapted more quickly to virtual learning? Could we have shortened the learning curve and reduced the long-term impact?
Accelerated, agile and actionable R&D empowers district leaders, principals and teachers to co-design solutions with students and communities that make a real difference. Mario Andrade, superintendent of Nashua School District in New Hampshire, said R&D is an essential part of action research, or research that tries to understand and solve a problem at the same time.
“You have to go in with a mindset that we are going to do R&D and action research," he said. "You can’t say that R&D is separate. It needs to be baked into the way we do things and into how to achieve outcomes, create efficiencies and save money. We still need the academies to do longitudinal work, but we also need boots-on-the-ground approaches."
Kimberly A. Smith is the chief inclusive innovation officer at the nonprofit Digital Promise.
