When asked to imagine classroom learning, some people envision a teacher at the front of the room, guiding their students’ learning through a series of questions without much connection to the students’ interests or experiences. Many teachers envision the same model when they think about their own professional learning. But, as University of Delaware Associate Professor Lynsey Gibbons has shown, student and teacher learning doesn’t have to follow this format. 

In a new book titled Learning Together: Organizing Schools for Teacher and Student Learning, Gibbons and her colleagues show school leaders how to foster equitable learning and student engagement by structuring the school environment around teacher learning and collaboration. Supported by a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, Gibbons and her research team have also put these principles into practice through professional learning partnerships with three Delaware schools. Since 2021, Gibbons and her team have worked with elementary teachers in collaborative Learning Labs on facilitating student-led discussions. Participants shared that these experiences transformed their teaching practices and led to more equitable learning in their classrooms. 

“In my 26 years of experience in education, this professional development has by far been the most beneficial,” said Jennifer Michalcewiz, a first-grade teacher at Forwood Elementary School in Wilmington, Del. “Most of the time you go to professional development and you go back to your classroom and you don’t really have the time or support to implement what you learned. But, through this experience, I am a different teacher.”

Learning Together 

Drawing from their experiences in research-practice partnerships in six U.S. elementary schools, Gibbons and her Learning Together co-authors show that deliberate school reorganization is the first step in meaningfully shifting practices from teacher-centered, procedure-based learning to student-centered, discussion-intensive learning that develops student agency. Job-embedded professional learning opportunities are key, as well as opportunities for collaboration and sustained practice. 

Among many practical takeaways, they also offer readers a set of guiding principles for designing teachers’ professional learning. For example, they suggest that student ideas and experiences should be central to teacher learning, and that learning to teach is a continual process of knowledge, skill and identity development.

Learning Labs with Delaware Teachers

With the support of school leaders from Delaware’s Forwood, Wilmington Manor and Pleasantville Elementary Schools, Gibbons and her team facilitated this type of learning experience through Learning Labs focused on promoting equitable, student-led classroom discussions in English, mathematics and science. In the Learning Lab model, teachers engage with UD-facilitated content, collaboratively prepare an instructional routine with grade-level colleagues, enact this routine in one of the teacher’s classrooms in real-time and then reflect on the experience. 

“I have a couple of students who have a hard time participating in class because they feel that they are behind their classroom peers,” said Kayla Debord-Golder, a third-grade special education teacher at Wilmington Manor Elementary School. “But, through the Learning Labs, I've been able to alleviate some of the pressures in our environment. Now, we do a ‘hands down’ discussion where all of their hands are down and they'll lean into the conversation when they want to share. We also have a chart that gives the students steps and sentence frames for participating. And now, the students who I would have described as shy or uncomfortable have just blown away my expectations.”

In line with Learning Together—which emphasizes that teaching involves becoming a student of your students—the Learning Labs also focus on understanding how teachers themselves make sense of these discussions. 

“Last year, we found that teachers moved away from the more common practice of initiating a response from a student and then evaluating that response to facilitating a student-led conversation that got more of the kids’ ideas out there,” said Gibbons, who specializes in mathematics education and teacher learning in UD’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). “But, they weren’t sure how to facilitate connections among those ideas, either by connecting the kids’ ideas to each other or by connecting them to the bigger disciplinary concept in math, English or science. So, in our next phase of the Learning Labs, we worked on that.” 

Fostering Equitable Learning 

In fostering more student-led, open-ended discussions, the Learning Labs helped teachers create more equitable learning opportunities for their students. 

“During the discussions, I started to see and keep track of who was participating and who wasn’t,” said Greg Napoleon, a fifth-grade teacher at Wilmington Manor. “And then I could design the questions in such a way that it would pertain to all backgrounds of students and all levels of students, changing the language or the presentation so some of the barriers were not there anymore. I also worked on giving up some of the control of the classroom to my students during the discussions.”

Data from Gibbons’ project also helped teachers consider how to enrich and support the development of children from marginalized communities so they develop voice and agency in the classroom. 

“In our work with teachers, we’ve used tools that can help us understand which students are contributing to a classroom discussion,” Gibbons said. “The tool allows us to track who is talking or teaching in real-time, graphically illustrating patterns of participation and types of contributions made by each student. Teachers can then reflect on student participation with consideration to different social markers like race and gender. We shared this data with the teachers, and we’re helping them start to question who gets to participate in the discussion and whose voice was privileged during that discussion.”

Transformative Teacher Learning 

Participating in the Learning Labs was challenging and even uncomfortable at times as teachers practiced new skills in front of their students and colleagues. But teachers across all schools, grade-levels and content areas shared that these Learning Labs profoundly changed their teaching practice. 

“I never thought you could have a conversation—like adults do—with a bunch of six-year-olds that wasn’t teacher-led,” Michalcewiz said. “But now, one child says something, somebody feeds off of what they said, and they really think about it.”

“The Learning Labs have been such a great experience,” Napoleon said.“I would do this every year if I could because it really helps and it shows that our kids can do so much more than we think they can.”

To date, Gibbons and her team have facilitated more than 50 Learning Labs with more than 30 educators across grades K-5 in Delaware.

To learn more about CEHD research in teacher preparation and professional development, visit its research page.