LessonLab Research Institute

WHAT IT IS

LessonLab has developed new environments for professional learning. Enabled by LessonLab's VisibilityTM technology platform, these environments allow teachers to study and improve their practices in the classroom settings where they must ultimately be applied. LessonLab's goal is to make the technology transparent when educators are participating in its programs.

Video and other artifacts of practice, accessed using Visibility's tools and interfaces, enable teachers and other professionals to study their own, and others', practice in context, slowed down. The Visibility tools also facilitate collaborative discussions of practice, both in live groups and virtually, over the Internet. The results of these activities are stored in scalable multimedia databases, which provide means of accumulating and sharing professional knowledge over time.

Professional development programs situated in these new environments serve both to generate and distribute professional knowledge about teaching. The Visibility technology platform consists of three primary components:

•	Digital libraries of teaching practices
•	Software tools which support teachers as they learn from, and contribute to, the contents of the digital libraries
•	A comprehensive database for research of program effectiveness

Underlying all of LessonLab's environments for professional development and learning is an unparalleled research base. Research about how teachers learn best was used to build the Visibility application tools, and that same research base continues to grow as new data about how the tools are used, and what teachers learn, is continuously collected, aggregated and analyzed.

LessonLab Research Institute is the independent research arm of Achievement Solutions at Pearson. Our mission is to improve teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms.

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