Findings For The Field

Accelerate Teacher Learning = Accelerate Student Learning

What is Findings For The Field?

Teaching Lab started releasing Findings For The Field (formerly known as our annual Impact Report) in 2020 as a way to share our findings on the impact we’ve had on educator mindsets, knowledge, practices, and student learning each year. Our extensive research agenda includes surveys, observations, and student work sample reviews taken at multiple points during the school year.

We also rely on many focus groups and interviews with educators to help us learn about our impact, and most importantly, get a pulse check on their current instructional needs to continually improve our programming. Once a year, we bring all of our analyses together and share with our partners, funders, researchers, and the broader community and add to the literature on the impact of teacher professional learning.

If you are an educator, we want to share with you how taking teacher learning seriously through intensive and ongoing professional learning makes a real, positive, and lasting impact on student educational experiences and learning.

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A Message from Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab

Dear Readers,

This last year was rough — from a global pandemic that continues to persist to civil unrest due to repeated acts of racial injustice and police violence. We applaud you for continuing to move forward and keeping hope alive.

We especially commend the many educators we serve who kept teaching in unsafe environments; kept teaching in new and confusing virtual modalities; and kept teaching, not just to improve academic learning, but to ensure that the whole child is looked after by addressing student trauma and centering culturally responsive instruction.

Before the pandemic we said, “teaching is rocket science.” And this past year, teaching was more like “building the rocket while we fly it.”

In the following report — Findings For The Field — we show that despite this difficult year, teachers adapted, persevered, and improved their mindsets, knowledge, and practice. As an educator, I’m not surprised. Teachers will always bring it for their students even in the most challenging circumstances — it’s our calling.

After all, when we take teacher learning seriously, we take student learning seriously.

“Teachers will always bring it for their students even in the most challenging circumstances — it’s our calling.”

As you know, our vision is to reimagine education and truly pursue educational equity by accelerating student learning — but our vision will not be realized without teachers. Our Head, Heart, Habits, & Equity model is about taking care of the whole teacher on behalf of the whole student.

When you treat teachers like professionals, teach them the evidence behind instructional practices, and give them time and space to learn and grow in their communities, they improve student learning experiences — and most of all, they experience joy while doing it.

We hope that Findings For The Field will encourage you to truly advance educational equity — for our nation’s students and for our amazing educators.

Thank you for shifting the paradigm with us.

Sincerely,

Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab

Teaching Lab’s Measure of Influence

This year, Teaching Lab shifted our model from delivering professional learning 100% in person to delivering 100% of professional learning virtually. Educators who participate in Teaching Lab professional learning highly rate their experiences and improve their:

1) equitable mindsets and beliefs,

2) content and pedagogical content knowledge, and

3) equitable teaching practices.