Grant-funded “Co-Lab” fosters experimentation and collaboration for teachers 

Sidwell Friends School has received a $35,000 grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation to help support “Co-Lab,” a professional development initiative focused on exploring how AI can support teaching and learning.

The project, led by Middle School Academic Technology and Center for Teaching and Learning Coordinator Nate Green, has already brought together 788 teachers from more than 300 independent schools–and the number continues to grow. Its goal: to empower educators by sharing AI use cases and collaborating to develop best practices.

Green emphasizes that the program isn't about mandating AI use in classrooms—it's about creating informed practitioners who can make thoughtful decisions about if, when, and how to deploy these tools. It’s the exploration and conversation around AI that is often missing in education circles.

What makes the Co-Lab distinctive is its recognition that teachers not only need a voice in shaping AI policies and practices, but also need the time and space to explore AI without the pressure of immediate implementation.

“We started Co-Lab because we need more conversation about the intersection of AI and pedagogy,” Green says. “The way to fix this for teachers is to explore AI and develop AI literacy and to talk about how it should and should not impact our pedagogy."

Green joined a colleague from St. Mark's School in Southborough Massachusetts, Maureen Russo Rodríguez, to launch Co-Lab in August, 2024. They invited friends and colleagues to try the new style of AI professional development on Zoom. What started as nine teachers in August quickly ballooned to 400 by March, when Green sought additional support from Sidwell Friends and the Edward E. Ford Foundation

The monthly sessions take place in the evenings. For each session, a new designer and a facilitator share a topic for exploration and the teachers who participate commit to 45-minutes of  homework followed by an hour-long conversation on Zoom to examine how AI can be used to improve how students learn.

Teachers in Co-Lab experiment with prompts as homework to see how AI responds—ranging from feedback strategies to lesson design and meta-cognition (how students think through problems and come up with their answers and solutions to problems).

For example, September’s session of Co-Lab explored how to use models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to incorporate movement into the classroom.

A summary of a longer prompt would read, “You are an expert teacher who understands the value in adding movement and manipulatives to the classroom. Suggest 3 ideas for movement-based activities and 3 ideas for printable, cut-out manipulatives for my class.”  

Another exercise leveraged research on best practices for providing feedback to students by asking AI for “timely, specific, clear, and actionable feedback on the student’s work.” The homework and subsequent discussion is designed to build a conversation with a student and help them learn to improve their own work rather than have an AI platform provide an answer.

In the classroom, Sidwell Friends 7th and 8th grade History Teacher Stephen Armandt used AI to help students imagine themselves as participants in and witnesses to events during the French Revolution. The tool allowed him to create detailed profiles of 18 individuals, complete with information about what they knew about events and what rumors they might have heard, especially as the violence escalated. AI reduced a task that would have taken Armandt days of work to only a few minutes. 

Armandt was able to use the profiles to generate a simulation in class, where students explored how rumors and differing perspectives can shape understanding and often lead to misunderstanding. 

The simulation helped “students dive that much deeper into the French Revolution,” says Armandt.

The simulation also provided instruction into the importance of media literacy. After all, it was rumors and misinformation that led to much of the violence during the Reign of Terror. That has lessons for today’s political environment, too.

At the end of every month, the teachers who took part in a Co-Lab “Exploration” will meet in small groups of four over Zoom to discuss their own work and then, in larger groups of eight to 12 to discuss the bigger questions about how and why their findings will impact teaching and learning.

The quality of prompts is central to Co-Lab's approach. “The prompts are part of the genius,” says Eve Eaton, who leads academic support at the Lower School. “But sometimes they fail—and that’s useful, too. When AI stumbles, it highlights the value of human judgment. A prompt that doesn’t work for teachers in the Lower School might work for teachers at the Middle and Upper Schools,” Eaton notes.

AI also helps teachers tackle differentiation—the challenge of meeting varied learning speeds. One student might breeze through a 40-minute lesson in five minutes while another student might need extra time. Co-Lab shares prompts–informed by quality pedagogy–to help teachers differentiate classroom activities, organize longer term projects, and make connections for students to improve retention. 

After a decade of witnessing the sometimes insidious effects of social media on the lives of students, Sidwell is paying particular attention to the impact the use of AI in the classroom has had since the first version of ChatGPT was released in late 2023–and will have in the future. Green, who  is helping take the lead in thinking through how schools can avoid the same mistakes they made with social media.

“The rapid development of AI tools is one of the biggest opportunities and challenges that faces education today, not to mention society as a whole,” says Bryan Garman, Sidwell’s head of school. “I applaud these efforts to dive deeply into the ethical and pedagogical questions facing all of us as educators.”

Green believes the best answers to the complicated questions AI presents will emerge from the kind of hands-on learning and pedagogical conversations led by and for teachers.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “our goal with Co-Lab is to help teachers gain enough AI literacy to make the right moves to enhance and improve student skills.”