Back in June we told you that we’d be experimenting with a learning lab, and today marks the opening of the Khan Lab School, which will be composed of a small cohort of around 30 students.
Khan Academy has a history of summer camps and working with classrooms, which have both really helped us better understand opportunities to help teachers and students.
In order to take an even more hands-on and sustained approach, the Khan Lab School will research blended learning and education innovation by creating a working model of Khan Academy’s philosophy of learning in a physical school environment and sharing the learnings garnered with schools and networks around the world.
Our goal is to develop new, personalized practices that center around the student. As this model is developed, we will be sharing and testing the practices in diverse settings to offer new ways of thinking about Khan Academy and the classroom.
The lab school will focus on developing practices that empower students to realize that they can shape the systems and solve problems of the world through their own character, intellect, and passion.
There are already thousands of classrooms across the world that are using Khan Academy. We learn so much from these classrooms and try to share those learnings with other schools and educators. A small-scale lab school helps us further explore how physical environments can be reimagined and blended with online tools to empower teachers and students.
The intent is not just to develop practices, but also to share them in ways most likely to effect broad change. We intend to further share with the world through in-house research fellowships, teacher workshops, videos, publications, and the broader Khan Academy platform.
As this is a research lab school, it is not open for general enrollment at this time. But if you’d like to be on an email list to hear more about the lab school in the coming months, you can sign up here.
– Jason Pittman, Head Teacher, on behalf of the Khan Lab School team