Inside the EnvisionEdPlus Design Lab: How Educators Become Designers of Learning

In its recent coverage of emerging classroom trends, Education Week highlighted a massive shift facing primary and secondary schools: the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the necessity of workforce-aligned career pathways, and an unprecedented “skills crunch” in the modern economy. Schools can no longer rely on 20th-century instructional blueprints to prepare students for a 21st-century landscape.

But how do we ask teachers to reinvent their classrooms when professional development remains stagnant, linear, and bureaucratic?

You cannot build an innovative classroom through non-innovative professional development. To bridge this gap, EnvisionEdPlus created the Design Lab model. This revolutionary professional development framework treats educators not as passive recipients of information, but as active designers, engineers, and problem-solvers.

What is an EnvisionEdPlus Design Lab?

The Design Lab framework is an experiential professional learning environment. It brings together a powerful triad: educators, employers, and youth experts. Together, these stakeholders utilize human-centered design thinking methodologies to unpack, prototype, and build operational solutions to a school’s most complex challenges.

Instead of sitting and listening, educators in a Design Lab are:

• Empathizing: Deeply investigating the lived experiences of their students and the shifting needs of local industry.
• Defining: Pinpointing the exact structural bottlenecks limiting student engagement or equity.
• Ideating: Brainstorming cross-curricular, real-world learning strategies without the constraints of traditional silos.
• Prototyping: Developing tangible tools, units, and models.
• Testing: Implementing mini-lessons in real-time and gathering continuous feedback.

Design Labs in Action: Real-World Impact

This isn’t theoretical; it’s a proven vehicle for school transformation. Take our partnership with Riverside Local Schools. Riverside’s journey with EnvisionEdPlus began in 2019 within our Operation Graduation Design Lab.

Through that collaborative design environment, school leaders and teachers partnered with us to completely reimagine the high school experience. The results speak for themselves: the collaboration has flourished across multiple major grant projects, securing $4.1 million in funding to support college and career readiness.

Today, Riverside features a state-of-the-art CTX (Career Technical Experience) wing housing Advanced Manufacturing, Healthcare, Construction, and Welding programs. Because teachers were empowered as designers, they unlocked one of Ohio’s most underutilized flexibility options: simultaneous credit. Students building physical structures in the construction program are simultaneously earning core math credits, because EnvisionEdPlus Design Labs empowered leadership and teachers to think creatively about what school could be.

Fostering Adaptive Leadership

Education Week notes that the defining characteristic of successful educational leadership today is adaptive leadership—agility, resilience, and proactive problem-solving. The EnvisionEdPlus Design Lab model embeds adaptive leadership into the very fabric of a district’s culture. It proves that when teachers are given the space, resources, and design frameworks to innovate, they don’t just stay in the profession—they transform it.