New Designs for School
Breakthrough Schools D.C. Round 3 Grantees
16 schools reimagining for more personalized and deeper learning ...
New Designs for School
InnovateEDU Inc.
New Designs for School
New Designs for School
We’ve all had the experience of truly purposeful, authentic learning and know how valuable it is. Educators are taking the best of what we know about learning, student support, effective instruction, and interpersonal skill-building to completely reimagine schools so that students experience that kind of purposeful learning all day, every day.
School: Brooklyn Laboratory Schools (LAB)
Grades Served: 6-12
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Operator: InnovateEDU Inc
Operator Type: Charter
Setting: Urban
Students at Opening: 132
Students at Capacity: 1068
Blended Model Type: Station, Lab, Individual Rotation and A La Carte
Key Features: Project-Based and Experiential Learning, Next Generation Staffing Model, Community Partnerships, Social-Emotional Development
The Operator:
Opening its first school in 2014, Brooklyn Laboratory Schools (LAB) is slated to become a network of open-enrollment, college-preparatory, 6-12th grade public charter schools operating in Brooklyn, NY. LAB’s mission is to prep are students, including English language learners (ELLs) and students with disabilities, with the academic foundation, digital literacy, and leadership skills necessary to succeed in college and professional life as they grow as ethical leaders. LAB is designed to educate high-need urban students, particularly those who are least well served by traditional public schools.
The Academic Model:
- LAB employs game-based adaptive learning and assessment courseware, enabling teachers and tutors to tailor instruction to be truly student centered and meet the diverse needs of each student.
- The school fosters a culture of entrepreneurial learning through courses and activities in the 360Lab; robotics, coding, and game design are examples of hands-on activities that also help build mindfulness, persistence, and grit.
- LAB leverages blended instruction to focus human capital and extend the school day, week, and year. We make extended days feasible utilizing high-dosage tutoring and blended instruction: students spend two hours daily with tutors and at least an hour in 360Lab enrichment courses.
- Rigorous college prep learning progressions and a focus on college-level reading and writing—a typical day includes 195 minutes of literacy-focused instruction—round out the academic model.
The Organizational Model:
- Time: LAB utilizes an extended school day, week, and year and high-dosage, personalized tutoring and remediation
- Staffing: Master teachers are supported by a Corps of full-time tutors in each classroom who work with students in small groups or 1:1
- Partnership: LAB co-locates with an ed-tech accelerator operated by InnovateEDU. Entrepreneurs and designers work with LAB students and teachers on K-12 digital tools to serve, inform, and enhance teaching and learning. The goal is to create disruptive, scalable learning tools and models to transform the future of learning and extend the scale of the LAB model well beyond its Brooklyn campuses
- Scale: The LAB network’s first cluster of schools will include four middle and two high schools, all located in the same Brooklyn district.
In 2016, LAB was selected as one of 10 XQ Super Schools and awarded $10 million to support the launch of the high school model.
Application Deck