One of the most fruitful opportunities in all of the work I do with schools (see a glimpse of these offerings here) is within the Learning Lab model. I have written about learning labs before and shared how they get to the heart of inquiry, allowing teachers to co-plan, co-teach, and reflect together across the span of a single day. There are a number of specific resources that I use to help colleagues I have the good fortune to co-teach with and I to make the most of our partnership. There are a few Learning Labs models schools and I discuss to help maximize impact for staff and spread the learning as much as we can. We care about student learning and teacher learning. We care about creating capacity and impact. We care about getting the absolute most out of our investment of time, budget, and effort.

In many circumstances the Learning Labs are recorded. With student / family / teacher consent, the planning, lessons, and reflections are captured to help create assets for future use. Some schools edit these recordings into short documentaries of learning that can be viewed by staff in the coming weeks and months, helping spread the learning and impact more teacher practices. These assets tend to be 15 to 25 minutes long, include narration and text features, and help viewers see the lesson sequence, the key strategies employed by the teachers, and the thinking underneath the moves. I adore this sort of artifact. They are incredibly useful!

Recently one of my partner schools, the International School of Manila, created a helpful Lens into Learning Labs video. In the video, critical friends Sarah Tudge and Jeff Phillips describe why this sort of collaborative inquiry has been so impactful at ISM and in doing so, help us all the rich opportunity in Learning Labs. Have a watch!

My deep thanks to my co-teaching colleagues at ISM for your willingness to share your practice with us all as well as to Sarah and Jeff for your steadfast leadership towards more student and teacher agency.