The Class:Lab

A two-day professional education program for educators practicing project-based learning at high school or university levels. The course helps you completely redesign your course from the ground up, transform your classroom teaching experience and leave with several months worth of teaching material. In addition, you leave with a community of practitioners, monthly-check-ins, and the necessary commitment from your dean or head of school to make it changes to your scheduled to make "walls-down" teaching possible.

The Class:Lab was created from the ground-up to help educators rethink their classroom experience from scratch in a safe space and introduce design-doing in a meaningful way. The heart of the experience is the wall-size canvas created specifically for educators to be able to see your entire course in one place and physically move about to shape aspects of your classroom experience. It's the first time most educators have even seen their course in its "design view". It is a inter-disciplinary process that puts educators from complementary disciplines in teams to create a shared project-based experience which they then implement in their classrooms independently, while playing off each other's content

It's our response to the limitations of design-thinking which does not play sufficient emphasis on doing. We re-conceived the design-thinking process as a series of jobs rather than a collection of spaces or methods. You can choose to grow up and become a specialist in any of these jobs. The educators responsibility is to choose the jobs which make the most sense, given what you are teaching and decide on the level of expertise your students should be aiming for and what level you can teach it at, along with partners from other disciplines. As one of the professors who implemented it in his classroom commented " You give this to your students and tell them to stick it everywhere including their pillow". We agree !

Because you have rarely designed your course; you usually inherit it or increment it. Because designing your course is meant to be exciting and fun, but here you are doing it all alone behind your computer. And because, if you're putting all this effort into putting to together a fifteen week experience wouldn't it be so much more interesting if you could do it in a way that really engages your learners ?

The heart of the experience is a wall size canvas where you see your entire course at a glance. Latest version of the canvas below. Previous version of the canvas here.

Riverfield Country Day School in Tulsa, Oklahoma has been running on this approach from K-12 for the past four years and happy to give you a tour. Reach out to Jeremy Bates or Jennifer Kesserling if you're interested.  We have also trained over 120 educators across the United States on this process. Here's a billboard :

It does. It takes about three years, before you start seeing results. But it does need the management to be all-in first. Read Prof Arun Aryal's story from Cal State LA, to see how a professor with a 'widow maker' class went to becoming oversubscribed in just a few years. 

Depends on your situation; we aim to keep our operations self-sufficient and charge accordingly. 

We look for schools & colleges where there is willingness to change things at the top and a core group of influential educators who are ready for change on the ground, whether in private or public institutions. Change is hard , the results rewarding and we only work with clients who have an appetite for this. Typically the process of moving over to the Class:Lab process of teaching takes three years with annual ClassLabs, so we look for client who are willing to make a three year commitment to change.