year ago, a group of education leaders made a purposeful choice to step outside their individual efforts and pursue a shared question together. Their bet was that the deepest insights about the future of education would only surface when people learned together across borders, engaging with the biggest challenges facing us.
Across the global education ecosystem, actors are constantly improving and innovating, but largely in isolation. Educators, policymakers, and organizations advance their own strategies, generate their own insights, but less often step back to learn across contexts. The result is a landscape of fragmentation where knowledge exists but it doesn’t connect, and the field struggles to move in a coherent direction.
The Reshaping Education Steering Group (RESG) emerged organically to counter this, creating space for people to step outside their own pursuits and engage in collective inquiry around a shared learning agenda.
Sparked at the Better Future Forum in 2025, this collective inquiry has spanned more than 20 convenings across 10+ countries, engaging over 2,500 participants across sectors and geographies from Kenya to India, Malaysia to the United States. Each inquiry centered on one shared question: What will it take to equip students to shape a better future?
When people step out of their own work and into shared inquiry, something shifts:
- Greater coherence begins to form: Across convenings, a consistent pattern emerges: a shift away from defining success purely through academic achievement toward a broader vision of human flourishing. In Mumbai, participants emphasized that what students know is only part of what matters. Also important is “who they are becoming, their purpose, mindset, and sense of possibility”.
- Collective sense–making surfaces deeper “truths”: In an online global convening, participants challenged the long–held assumption that students are “future leaders.” Students are already leading today, but some of those who lead are held back by outdated systems that have historically excluded them or devalued their inputs. This kind of insight requires bringing people together to interrogate a shared question and move past what we often just accept as the challenges of doing this work.
- Collaboration shifts from coordination to shared ownership: In Davos, one idea cut through: teachers are not implementation risks, they are system architects. And in New York, on the margins of the UN General Assembly last September, participants pointed to the need to move from control to trust, redistributing power in classrooms so students can take ownership of their learning.
- A sense of collective responsibility starts to take hold: In Malaysia, at the Malaysia Teacher Prize ceremony, educators described the need for a “village” approach where education is not the responsibility of individual actors, but a shared commitment across communities, systems, and sectors.
These insights are not new in isolation. Versions of them have existed in different places for years. What is new is the connection between them. By stepping outside their own work and engaging in shared inquiry, participants were able to see patterns across contexts and challenge assumptions they might not question alone. They were able to build a more coherent understanding of what it will actually take to reshape education.
This is the core function of RESG and more broadly of the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future, an initiative from Teach For All. Not to produce answers in isolation, but to enable the global education ecosystem to make sense of the problem together, and translate that shared understanding into collective leadership and action.
If the past year has made anything clear it is this: our tendency to stay within our own lanes is the biggest barrier to progress. We innovate real solutions, but often do bring not them outside our lane. We need for collective inquiry to bring insights together. Without shared sense–making, coherence does not emerge. Without coherence, collaboration remains shallow. Systems change and transformation become harder and less sustainable. At this year's Better Future Forum next month in Singapore the RESG will again reconvene to consider what direction to take their shared learning next.
Stepping outside our own work is a prerequisite for progress. Most fields don’t fail because of a lack of solutions. They fail because they never learn how to learn together. Let’s ensure education is not one of them.
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Stepping outside work to learn together about education’s purpose
Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova via Unsplash+.
May 13, 2026
The education sector does not lack for innovations or solutions, but those are often fragmented. When education leaders step outside their regular roles, they can both share solutions and recognize new patterns that help inform future work, writes Anna Molero
A
year ago, a group of education leaders made a purposeful choice to step outside their individual efforts and pursue a shared question together. Their bet was that the deepest insights about the future of education would only surface when people learned together across borders, engaging with the biggest challenges facing us.
Across the global education ecosystem, actors are constantly improving and innovating, but largely in isolation. Educators, policymakers, and organizations advance their own strategies, generate their own insights, but less often step back to learn across contexts. The result is a landscape of fragmentation where knowledge exists but it doesn’t connect, and the field struggles to move in a coherent direction.
The Reshaping Education Steering Group (RESG) emerged organically to counter this, creating space for people to step outside their own pursuits and engage in collective inquiry around a shared learning agenda.
Sparked at the Better Future Forum in 2025, this collective inquiry has spanned more than 20 convenings across 10+ countries, engaging over 2,500 participants across sectors and geographies from Kenya to India, Malaysia to the United States. Each inquiry centered on one shared question: What will it take to equip students to shape a better future?
When people step out of their own work and into shared inquiry, something shifts:
- Greater coherence begins to form: Across convenings, a consistent pattern emerges: a shift away from defining success purely through academic achievement toward a broader vision of human flourishing. In Mumbai, participants emphasized that what students know is only part of what matters. Also important is “who they are becoming, their purpose, mindset, and sense of possibility”.
- Collective sense–making surfaces deeper “truths”: In an online global convening, participants challenged the long–held assumption that students are “future leaders.” Students are already leading today, but some of those who lead are held back by outdated systems that have historically excluded them or devalued their inputs. This kind of insight requires bringing people together to interrogate a shared question and move past what we often just accept as the challenges of doing this work.
- Collaboration shifts from coordination to shared ownership: In Davos, one idea cut through: teachers are not implementation risks, they are system architects. And in New York, on the margins of the UN General Assembly last September, participants pointed to the need to move from control to trust, redistributing power in classrooms so students can take ownership of their learning.
- A sense of collective responsibility starts to take hold: In Malaysia, at the Malaysia Teacher Prize ceremony, educators described the need for a “village” approach where education is not the responsibility of individual actors, but a shared commitment across communities, systems, and sectors.
These insights are not new in isolation. Versions of them have existed in different places for years. What is new is the connection between them. By stepping outside their own work and engaging in shared inquiry, participants were able to see patterns across contexts and challenge assumptions they might not question alone. They were able to build a more coherent understanding of what it will actually take to reshape education.
This is the core function of RESG and more broadly of the Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future, an initiative from Teach For All. Not to produce answers in isolation, but to enable the global education ecosystem to make sense of the problem together, and translate that shared understanding into collective leadership and action.
If the past year has made anything clear it is this: our tendency to stay within our own lanes is the biggest barrier to progress. We innovate real solutions, but often do bring not them outside our lane. We need for collective inquiry to bring insights together. Without shared sense–making, coherence does not emerge. Without coherence, collaboration remains shallow. Systems change and transformation become harder and less sustainable. At this year's Better Future Forum next month in Singapore the RESG will again reconvene to consider what direction to take their shared learning next.
Stepping outside our own work is a prerequisite for progress. Most fields don’t fail because of a lack of solutions. They fail because they never learn how to learn together. Let’s ensure education is not one of them.
