Learning to Leapfrog: Innovative Pedagogies to Transform Education

This report follows up on the book “Leapfrogging Inequality: Remaking Education to Help Young People Thrive,” published in 2018 by the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution. The book argued the importance of education leapfrogging–creating transformative shifts rather than incremental evolution by harnessing the power of innovation to advance a breadth of skills. The book put forth a framework for leapfrogging that outlined two core elements (teaching and learning, and recognition of learning) and two support elements (people and places, and technology and data).
This report focuses on the teaching and learning element of the leapfrog framework, especially on pedagogical approaches and the role of teachers, but draws on the others as relevant. It does not attempt to be exhaustive and does not pretend to address neither all education policy variables, nor critical system factors such as political will and adequate funding, nor demand-side factors such as student and parent support for innovative approaches.