Our Laboratory School
With the establishment of a laboratory school, UL Lafayette will join several other Louisiana universities who currently host students on or near their College of Education campuses. Lab schools are schools working in connection with teacher preparation programs to provide easily accessible field experience in real classrooms.
Our History
Our institution had an operating lab school between 1940 and 1977. The lab school closed during a different climate of teacher preparation, when there were fewer policy requirements for field hours. Currently, BESE is moving towards requiring many more hours of fieldwork and internship for preservice teachers. A laboratory school offers opportunities for teacher candidates to try out strategies learned during coursework.
Our Goal
Our goal is to better prepare future teachers for any classroom. Teacher candidates will teach lessons in the lab school while also studying their own developing practices and how their decisions relate to student learning and engagement. However, teacher candidates will also complete their preparation in community classrooms, supported by university faculty and mentor teachers to bring in new strategies to address unique context needs.
Our Vision
To create and sustain a culture of curiosity, creativity, and courage to use knowledge and skills for innovating a better world.
Why?
Measurability and accountability restrict teacher ability to design high quality learning experiences for the diverse students in their classrooms. Lacking skills and dispositions needed to learn resourcefully, create empathetically, and invent with agency across disciplines and subjects, Darling-Hammond (2010) noted a need to teach our way out of a crisis that will leave 7 million science and technology positions unable to be filled by the products of American schools.
The Learning Lab is a place where outdoor adventure, project-based learning, design thinking, creativity, and curiosity are as essential as literacy and computational thinking. In addition to the learning experience for students, community programs bring enriching, creative experiences to all community children and families.
By empowering and supporting teachers as valued decision-makers, merging best educational practices from across the globe, and expecting continuous cycles of inquiry and action, the Learning Lab changes the course for standardized, one-size-fits-all education. The Learning Lab is a bustling idea factory where teachers and students are relentlessly curious and equipped with processes to externalize passions and ignite agency.
Our Mission
To advance educational equity, innovation, and opportunity for all of Louisiana.
Why?
Students least likely to have access to learning resources at home are also least likely to experience them in school (Darling-Hammond, 2010). The achievement gap can narrow if high quality educational opportunities are offered to all students. As a major producer of teachers for Louisiana, UL Lafayette has a unique responsibility to expand equity consciousness in the next generation of educators and provide a living model for building their ability to deliver the highest quality education to the unique students they serve.
By networking current and future educators, policy-makers, and community, The Learning Lab Collective, is positioned to take a systems thinking approach to widespread educational reform that drives educational equity, innovation, and opportunity outward as every educational discovery is shared and supported locally and beyond. On the following pages, we offer a closer look at how we plan to achieve this mission by expanding on our five core goals.
We want to be a living model of
innovative teaching and learning.
A typical day for a student will look and feel like a bustling idea factory
rich with real-life learning, opportunities to dig into topics of choice, workshop-style content investigations, and creativity as essential as literacy.
Concept
Laboratory schools function in connection with colleges of education to immerse teacher candidates in real classrooms. The Learning Lab at UL Lafayette will create a space for teachers and administrators to try out new and innovative pedagogy, modeling a stance toward continuous and deliberate improvement of one’s own professional practice. The concept invites students, teachers, teacher candidates, researchers, UL faculty, and administrators to never stop learning, improving, and pushing our practice forward for the sake of student growth and fulfillment. With the Learning Lab as a living model of innovative teaching and learning, our outreach efforts are designed to push innovation outward into partner schools for the benefit of ALL children and families in our community.
Program
The programs offered at the UL Lafayette laboratory school are unique in the way we encourage teachers and students to investigate interest areas, learn to work and think collaboratively, practice empathy through communication and looking closely at real issues, and develop resilience and courage to act on issues that matter to them. Our Learning Lab pulls from best practices around the world as we set out on an expedition toward constant innovation. A typical day for a student will look and feel like a bustling idea factory, rich with real-life learning, opportunities to dig into topics of choice, workshop-style content investigations, and creativity as essential as literacy.
Design
Learning extends far beyond classroom walls, so the design of the UL Lafayette laboratory school brings learning opportunities into every corner. Natural light touches each space and outdoor classrooms invite learners outside for relaxed reading and writing, presentations, and adventure. With core spaces designed to maximize learning and creativity, the laboratory school is built for flexibility, personalized learning, teacher and student collaboration, and discovering that learning is everywhere.
Leadership invites educators to participate.
We need you for education reform to be possible.
Leadership
To fulfill and sustain our vision and mission both within our school and beyond, it is imperative to have a strong leadership team of dedicated learners who never stop seeking professional improvement. Learning is modeled through a team leadership model that calls on stakeholders to assist in decision-making. The leadership team will consist of three individuals with varying roles including: Director of Operations, Director of Innovation - UL COE Liaison, and Director of Finance.
Teachers and students will also play roles in decision-making by establishing interest-driven teams to address identified issues or problems of practice. Rather than forced change based on theory, leadership invites educators to participate in inquiry-oriented professional learning communities, or inquiry pods, to make decisions based on situational context and unique student need. Learning that occurs during these inquiry pods is shared with colleagues near and far through the support of the leadership team.
Our mission of outreach
extends far beyond our physical school building.
Learning Lab at UL Lafayette will be an inviting place for learning for all ages in the community.
Outreach
We do our outreach through Co-Lab. With a mission that extends far beyond our physical school building, the UL Lafayette Laboratory School will be an inviting place for learning for everyone in the community. After establishing a strong and cohesive school culture, we will begin to develop working relationships with schools in the community to gain insight into how our school and college of education may help them to meet their own identified problems of practice. We will offer summer institutes for teacher-driven, student-focused learning centered on self-improvement to one’s professional practice.
In addition to collaborations with area schools, the lab school will also offer summer and after-school camps for community children with built-in scholarships for accessibility, access for UL Lafayette faculty research for improving education on a larger scale, and teacher candidate, master’s and doctoral degree candidate immersion in cutting edge educational practices. These efforts extend the reach and impact of UL Lafayette’s College of Education and Human Development to the larger regain and state, as well as potential national and global impact.