2020 Impact Report

A Message from Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab

Dear Friends, Partners, and Supporters,

We planned to release the Teaching Lab Impact Report before the COVID-19 global pandemic profoundly impacted our personal and professional lives. As schools and businesses closed around the world, each of us at Teaching Lab struggled to balance the pursuit of our mission with our equally important personal commitments to our children, families, and loved ones. As we learned that colleagues and loved ones were fighting or losing their battles to the disease, it was difficult to think about why we should release this report. I wondered if what we would say now would be relevant to educators responding to a crisis.

So, we took the time we needed to take care of ourselves, our loved ones, and our school and system partners. We asked teachers and community members: “How are you? What do you need at this time?”

Conversations with educators helped us emerge from the fog with an increased clarity of vision.

Here’s what we learned: During times of crisis, educators understand that relationships matter more than anything. For that reason, we continue to center what we call Heart: the importance of listening to educators, building deep relationships, and recognizing that strong social capital is essential for meeting any and all of our goals. We’ve heard that, when times are hard, we cannot deviate from our pursuit of educational equity. We recognize that, while the context has changed, the need for high-quality instruction for all students remains.

We chose to publish the Teaching Lab Impact Report because we believe that it can be helpful to educators as they ask the following questions: How will we support millions of students when they return to school after being out of school for months? How do we support all of our educators in this new reality so they can equitably serve all of our students?

Specifically, in the Teaching Lab Impact Report, we highlight stories from our partners and programmatic innovations that can help us answer these questions. For instance, we know that the students most impacted by lost learning will be our diverse learners, or our students who are learning English, have disabilities, or have other unfinished learning; in this report, you can read more about the impact of our Diverse Learners Professional Learning Sequence. We also highlight our initial foray into blended learning technology for students as well as our emerging work on student distance learning, both relevant to the problems we’ll need to collectively solve during these difficult times.

Finally, we are proud that we put together a robust learning and research agenda which has allowed us to gather rich data from our partners about how our professional learning is shifting educator knowledge, practice, and mindsets, as well as student learning. Our impact is helping us achieve our mission: to fundamentally shift the paradigm of teacher professional learning for educational equity. Thank you for partnering with us on this journey.

Sarah Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab