How to Rebuild Teaching and Learning

The Corporation’s Saskia Levy Thompson joins other education leaders to discuss reforming learning systems to support innovation and equity for all students

By Carnegie Corporation of New York May 3, 2022

Future of Learning & Work

Principal Alice Hom walks a hallway at Yung Wing School P.S. 124 on April 11, 2022, in New York City. Schools continue to grapple with the instability and unpredictability of navigating a pandemic and its effects. (Photo by Michael Loccisano via Getty Images)

What kinds of schools and learning opportunities may it be possible to create in the coming decades?

Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Saskia Levy Thompson, who directs the Education program’s New Designs to Advance Learning portfolio, joined Grantmakers for Education (GFE) as a speaker at their virtual conversation The Future of Education: Rebuilding the Architecture of Teaching and Learning. The Corporation is a member of the GFE, a forum in education philanthropy with nearly 300 diverse organizations that brings together funders, researchers, educators, students, and advocates to explore possibilities and strategize for innovation and bold thinking across the United States. The panel was part of a learning series of conversations about the implications of the past few years on grantmaking.

“There has been a shift in understanding for those of us that have been doing this work for a very long time,” said Thompson. “We never would have wanted these intersecting crises — the pandemic and our national reckoning with white supremacy and the racial injustices that define our nation. We never would’ve wanted these things to coincide, but the fact is they have served as forcing mechanisms for a different way of thinking about why kids are in school and what it means to learn — and what the core ingredients are for that.”

In addition to Thompson, other featured speakers were Gwynn Hugues, senior program officer at the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California; Jal Mehta, professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Joshua Starr, chief executive officer of Phi Delta Kappa International. The conversation considered what it would look like to exchange current structures of schooling with innovative systems that prioritize human relationships and student engagement.

“We don’t have to hypothesize about what would happen if you removed some of the outmoded structures,” said Thompson. “Many saw and experienced it in real time, whether they were teachers, learners themselves, or parents who were overhearing their kids’ classroom instruction in the living room. We saw that all we were left with were these core ingredients like motivation, curiosity, and determination. It mattered much less whether a kid knew how to do a math problem, and much more whether they wanted to.”

Watch the full panel discussion The Future of Education: Rebuilding the Architecture of Teaching and Learning