About the Lab
For too long, professional learning for educators has omitted the imagination, ingenuity, passion, and real experience that teachers bring to their work. The Lab for New Teaching invites educators into communities where we stop being audiences and start being authors of our own learning—where problems are posed, solutions invented, and methods reimagined.
We prioritize collaboration, participation, belonging, agency, emergence, and relationships of nurture.
The Lab approaches teacher learning by prioritizing collaboration, participation, belonging, agency, emergence, and relationships of nurture that are uniquely available in learning communities. While our courses are require rigorous participation, we resist standardization, seeking instead learning experiences that are personal, professionally meaningful, and transformative.
All learning today is necessarily hybrid, and so we look for opportunities to integrate learners’ digital lives into their digitally-enhanced or fully online learning experiences. But we always maintain that humans, and not technology, drive education, and so we bring people together with people around the challenges and promises of teaching and learning.
All learning today is necessarily hybrid, and so we look for opportunities to integrate learners’ digital lives into their digitally-enhanced or fully online learning experiences. But we always maintain that humans, and not technology, drive education, and so we bring people together with people around the challenges and promises of teaching and learning.
Our Design Approach
Design should support the fundamental right of all human beings to control their own minds and thoughts. At the Lab, we make you the subject of the learning process. To do this, we design in opportunities to mark your own understanding. Our weekly activities, office hours, and community-driven discussions give you ample opportunities to reflect on your own learning, to personalize your learning path, and engage in professionally meaningful and relevant education.
Learning objectives are incredibly useful as guideposts, but too often they are used as the line to cross at the end of the race. We use them instead as mile markers, to designate progress on a learning journey that's aimed at discovery.
We also rely on essential questions as points of inquiry that will drive the production of new knowledge. We ask questions to help you navigate open learning, and in order to cultivate new, emergent outcomes.
We also rely on essential questions as points of inquiry that will drive the production of new knowledge. We ask questions to help you navigate open learning, and in order to cultivate new, emergent outcomes.
We make course content into open water by providing a library resources you can explore according to your interests and inclinations. We believe in learners leading learning, and offer you the opportunity to explore the world of any given subject matter as best fits your needs.
Our goal in providing a library of resources for you to use in completing your work is to encourage inquiry and investigation as much as investment and engagement in your learning process.
Our goal in providing a library of resources for you to use in completing your work is to encourage inquiry and investigation as much as investment and engagement in your learning process.
Our methods come out of a combined half-century of experience, exploration, discovery, and success. You can feel confident that our design supports the most rigorous and emergent learning, even if it doesn't look like the standard fare of teacher professional development.
Our greatest evidence are the thousands of educators we have supported over the past two decades, the positive changes they've made to their practices, the renewed investment they have in their work, and the restless hopefulness that becomes a part of their professional lives.
Our greatest evidence are the thousands of educators we have supported over the past two decades, the positive changes they've made to their practices, the renewed investment they have in their work, and the restless hopefulness that becomes a part of their professional lives.
As a learner entering a lab, we trust you to lead your own learning. We provide a pathway, expert facilitation, an evolving library of resources, a community of educators, and respected, diverse voices in the field—all the fuel you need to learn.
But we ask—and trust—that you will bring the fire.
But we ask—and trust—that you will bring the fire.
"It is urgent we have teachers, it is urgent we employ them, pay them, support them with adequate resources; but it is also urgency which defines the project of teaching. In a political climate increasingly defined by its obstinacy, lack of criticality, and deflection of fact and care; in a society still divided across lines of race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, income, ability, and privilege; in a digital culture shaped by algorithms that neither know nor accurately portray truth, teaching has an important (urgent) role to play."
~ From the Introduction to An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy
~ From the Introduction to An Urgency of Teachers: the Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy
Sean Michael Morris
Founder & Executive Director
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