“We make experiments happen.”

For many years, this seemingly simple statement has sat directly underneath our K12 Lab logo. But what does it mean? What sorts of experiments are designers doing? What is the impact of this work? 

The K12 Lab’s mission is to obliterate opportunity gaps in elementary, middle, and high schools. We do this through offering learning experiences that build the creative confidence of students, teachers, administrators, and funders. We also do this through launching our own explorations and design investigations–or experiments–aimed at addressing some of the stickiest challenges and  opportunities in education. Behind this is a simple core belief: We need new ideas, methods, and practices in the K-12 sector that spark change in students’ and educators’ lives.

Here are a few of the experiments we activated to address some of the key challenges facing K12 education today:

Over the past twenty years, our education system has focused heavily on assessment. With standardized testing becoming the norm, it’s important to question whether these forms of assessment are good ways to measure students’ abilities, and how these tests help students learn and grow.

The K12 Lab has developed an unconventional model to radically rethink ways of assessing hard-to-measure skills, such as collaboration and communication.  By harnessing the international craze of escape rooms, we’ve designed a creative and engaging toolkit to help asses the skills that students, educators, families, and employers say matter most.

The body of research on the science of learning offers windows into how the brain works, how learning happens throughout our lives, and the ways culture impacts learning. While much of this research is academic, it builds on the experiences of students and classroom teachers—but does it benefit them?

Most educators do not have time to read hundreds of pages of research. The more schools become spaces for conversations about how learning happens and how culture impacts our brains, the more opportunity there is for students to understand themselves and be understood as learners. Learning can not and does not happen absent of culture.  Approaching education through the lens of our shared and varied cultures is not a ‘nice to have,’ it is the foundation–it is how all of our brains process new information. 

We set out to explore how design could make developments in learning science highly accessible for elementary, middle, and high school educators. Through iterative workshops with teachers, desk research, and conversations with researchers, we have developed new offerings for classroom educators, including a Learning to Learn Bootcamp and a series of videos and GIFs created in collaboration with Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. 

The fear of school shootings dominates public discourse about school safety. This presents communities with an increasingly difficult challenge: how to keep students physically safe without inadvertently traumatizing them through activities like “active shooter drills” and physical features such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras. More importantly, challenges to students’ safety are much more complex than the horrific but rare school shootings. 200 times more students die by suicide. On average, 160,000 students miss school everyday due to a fear of bullying.

Reimagining how the K-12 sector approaches school safety is essential to prioritizing the overall wellbeing of the school community—enhancing learning while keeping students safe. To explore how design might help spark this reimagination, we met with students; conducted desk research; connected with thought partners in child psychology, architecture, behavioral science, and education; designed and taught a course; and engaged our educator community in design sessions. We took these insights and questions and created a series of resources to help students, educators, school leaders, architects, and communities ask and answer questions related to school safety.