Coaches, professional development providers, and other instructional leaders often ask teachers to reflect on past or future instructional decisions. In this way, most designs for teacher learning are backward-looking or forward-looking. They rarely support teachers to reflect and learn within the actual moment of teaching. This raises an important challenge: How can we design teacher learning opportunities that support teachers during the actual process of working with students?
One answer to this question lies in a principle we know works to support student learning: being process-oriented. Teachers, coaches, and parents have all witnessed meaningful learning while watching students work through complex problems—learning that may not be evident in the finished product, where the journey’s twists and turns have already been smoothed out. When educators give students complex tasks, they create supports to scaffold progress through the inevitable challenges that students will face. Encountering challenges and engaging in productive struggle are indicators that a student is pushing beyond the boundaries of what they already know how to do. As teachers, the work we do to scaffold these challenges and help students process struggles can be just as important as evaluating the final product. Yet, while we routinely support productive struggle in student learning, these supports are often absent from designs for teacher learning.
Teachers, like students, engage in the process of productive struggle constantly. They just have to do it alone. They are encountering challenging problems and tasks that require them to reason through multiple options almost every second of the day. For example, teachers may find themselves thinking: “How should I comment on this student’s creative idea?”; “Should I move forward or keep going with this line of questioning?”; or “Should I challenge this idea now or wait?” However, unlike students, teachers rarely have anyone to think through these questions with in real time. In PD and coaching, there tends to be a focus on finished products (plans, student work, a recently observed lesson). In-the-moment decision making, however, remains a private activity—teachers lack opportunities to work through their moment-to-moment challenges together.
When teachers iterate their thinking out loud, they engage in the process of productive struggle with one another.
We think the solution lies in supporting teachers to make their thinking and decision making public during teaching. When teachers iterate their thinking out loud, they engage in the process of productive struggle with one another live. Process-oriented learning experiences welcome multiple voices—allowing teachers to challenge each other, inspire revisions to their thinking, share ideas in progress, and grapple with the challenges of teaching and learning as they occur in real time.
Learning Labs in Action
Below, we offer a concrete example of learning labs—a structure drawn from the work of Elham Kazemi and her colleagues (Kazemi et al., 2018; 2024). Unlike traditional PD that separates planning from practice, learning labs integrate both—allowing teachers to collaborate during actual classroom instruction. Learning labs give teachers appropriate scaffolding as they learn new ways of working with students and offer the opportunity to tap into the knowledge of others in the room to navigate obstacles that arise.
Learning labs are whole or half day PD experiences where a small group of teachers collaborate around a text or task to explore with students (i.e. a reading passage, a math problem, a science phenomenon, etc.). In collaboration with an instructional coach or administrator, the teachers plan a lesson together, enact it in a classroom with students, and, afterward, reflect on students’ learning. Then, the group replans, makes adjustments based on student learning, teaches the lesson again, and reflects on their practice. Teachers embed scaffolds in their lessons, including wait time, question options, and even reminders to ask one another questions about decision making. They make their thinking public throughout the learning lab day—from planning, enactment, and reflection. Learning labs are, in essence, a blend of professional learning components that work together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
During a recent learning lab that our second author, Lauren, facilitated, teachers designed and refined a 6th grade social studies lesson on Cold War espionage using primary source analysis. Over the course of the day, the lesson plan underwent three iterations, each improving how students engaged with the complex texts. When planning together initially, teachers identified potential challenges in the primary sources and created guided supports for student discussion. After the first teaching attempt, they added a graphic organizer to help students analyze authors’ biases. Following the second attempt, they incorporated a timeline to help students place the documents in historical context.
The day led to important discoveries. The teachers realized how various scaffolds could help students tackle complex historical texts. More significantly, they experienced a crucial mindset shift. Many had begun the day believing primary sources were “too hard” for their students. But after spending time collaborating on ways to support productive struggle, teachers were reinvigorated about what their students were capable of.
After spending time collaborating on ways to support productive struggle, teachers were reinvigorated about what their students were capable of.
This kind of collaborative learning was made possible through two key strategies: teacher time-outs and huddles. We will explore both of these features in more depth next, and you can also find more information, videos, and other professional development tools at Teacher Education by Design. TEDD is an open-source library of tools for teacher learning that our first author, Sarah, developed with colleagues at the University of Washington.
Teacher Time-Outs
Just like coaches use time-outs to address a challenge or change strategy, teacher time-outs serve the same purpose in classrooms where two or more teachers teach a lesson together. These time-outs can happen in the context of a whole team of teachers teaching together in a learning lab, but they can also happen in more routine moments of teaching between coteachers or between a teacher and instructional coach. Teacher time-outs occur when one teacher wants to publicly pose a question, talk through a problem of practice, or discuss an idea they have during teaching (Gibbons et al., 2017). They call a “time-out,” and the educators in the room openly talk about their questions, such as: “What question should we ask next?”; “Would a turn-and-talk help at this point in the discussion?”; “What should we do with this student’s interesting idea?” This move creates space for teachers to reason through productive struggle in real time. It also models for students that teachers use metacognition to problem solve, too—we are continuously adapting to students’ ideas and actions.
During the 6th grade social studies learning lab, a time-out emerged when the teachers noticed students had different understandings of the chronology in their primary sources. The teachers called a quick time-out, and together with students, discussed how to clarify the timeline of events. The 30-second collaboration led to a solution: Students would create their own timeline through close reading of the texts. This real-time problem-solving helped teachers recognize when to adapt their instruction. Time-outs often lead teachers to adjust their original plans—providing more support or taking a different approach than initially planned. Learning labs help teachers become comfortable with letting go, being flexible, and rethinking their lessons.
Teacher Huddling
Not all teaching decisions should be discussed publicly, and sometimes interrupting class flow isn’t ideal. In these kinds of moments, teachers can still deliberate together by taking a moment to huddle. Huddling is when a teaching pair or team quietly decides what to do next outside of the earshot of students. Huddles work well as students are finishing a group task and teachers need to decide how to review students’ progress and move forward in the lesson. Just like teacher time-outs, huddles provide a safe and supportive moment for teachers to think through critical decisions about how to steer students’ thinking while the lesson is still happening—rather than waiting to assess student work once students have left the classroom.
Learning labs help teachers navigate the dynamic nature of classrooms with immediately applicable strategies.
A recent huddle during a 1st grade literacy discussion we observed demonstrated another way these collaborative moments support teacher decision making. When students offered an unexpected interpretation of a fable, the teacher quietly huddled with colleagues to discuss whether to intervene and clarify what seemed like a possible misconception. In the huddle, they decided to let students continue their discussion. The students soon worked through their confusion independently, supporting their ideas with textual evidence and respectfully challenging each other’s thinking. This deeper thinking would not have occurred if the teacher had inserted themselves too soon. In contrast with the previous 6th grade learning lab experience where teachers provided more support and scaffolds for students, this collaborative moment served as an important reminder that sometimes the best teacher move is to do less.
Real-Time Growth
Learning labs help teachers navigate the dynamic nature of classrooms with immediately applicable strategies. Through time-outs and huddles, teachers collaborate during the moments that matter most—when they are in the classroom with students. These structures create spaces where teachers can embrace productive struggle and work through challenges together rather than in isolation. Like the scaffolds we create for students, they give teachers the support to take risks, question their practice, and learn from each other in real time. Perhaps most powerfully, students see that their ideas matter enough for a community of adults to come together, listen deeply, and learn alongside them.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ How could you create more opportunities for real-time collaboration with colleagues during instruction in your school? What barriers would need to be addressed?
➛ Think about a recent instructional challenge you faced. How might having a colleague to problem-solve with in the moment have changed your approach?
➛ In what ways could making teacher thinking more public benefit both teachers and students in your school?
