Learning Labs as Systems Work Reflections with Dr. Kai Mathews

When I think about the first year of the Learning & Design Labs in Rialto, I don’t think about agendas or slide decks. I think about questions—specifically, the kinds of questions that begin to change how people see their role inside a system.

Dr. Kai Mathews, who co-designed and facilitated the Labs with us, names it simply: “The quality of your life is based on the quality of your questions.” That line stayed with me, because it captures what this work really is. Not professional development in the traditional sense, but a living inquiry into how schools function, where they break down, and what becomes possible when adults are willing to look honestly at the systems they’re part of.

From Kai’s perspective, Learning & Design Labs are not a series of sessions to be completed. They are diagnostic and design spaces—open enough for the real conditions of a school to surface. What’s unresolved. What’s unnamed. What’s already in motion beneath the surface. Each Lab builds on what emerged in the previous one, making the work feel less like a checklist and more like a thought partnership. Not an “agenda meeting,” but a co-thinking space where deeper patterns and tensions come into view.

That distinction mattered deeply in Rialto, in part because of how the work began. Unlike much of Kai’s district experience, which is often proactive, these Labs were fundamentally reactive. They were launched in the aftermath of a violent, racially motivated incident involving a student. And yet, as the work unfolded, it became clear that the system had never fully named what had happened—or reckoned with its ripple effects.

There was no shared acknowledgment of the student’s experience. Little space to examine how other students made sense of the violence, or how fear, confusion, and grief settled into the school community. Families were left filling in gaps with rumor and assumption. Staff—both those who were present and those who inherited the aftermath—were expected to “move forward” without a shared understanding of what they were carrying.

As Kai named it, we were talking about healing and restorative practices in the abstract, while avoiding direct communication about a very real act of violence. That disconnect revealed a core tension: the desire to address an issue without fully acknowledging the harm, the racial dynamics, or the systemic failures that allowed it to occur. It also revealed how often school systems treat crises as public-relations problems, rather than human and structural ones.

Still, Kai never framed this as failure. She framed it as data. Every site has a different starting line. What matters is what people are willing to name—and what they’re willing to work on once it’s named.

One of the ways Kai knows the work is beginning to land is by listening closely to how teachers’ questions change. Early on, questions often orbit frustration and blame—about students, families, or the community. Over time, something shifts. Teachers begin asking a different kind of question: What is actually within my power to change?

That moment matters. It’s when educators start seeing the classroom as a small but powerful ecosystem—defined by what it feels like, sounds like, and invites. It’s when they begin asking, How am I creating or triggering the conditions my students are responding to? The work moves away from labeling students as the problem and toward examining environment, practice, and relationships as levers within reach. This shift doesn’t erase poverty, racism, or trauma—but it does reclaim agency in the spaces educators shape every day.

Kai is also clear that this work cannot stop at the classroom door. The same reflection we ask of teachers, she argues, districts must be willing to do for educators. You can’t talk about systems change and only intervene at the individual level.

That means moving beyond self-care toward system care—embedding wellness, learning, and adaptation into the structures of the district itself. It means reimagining departments like HR not as compliance hubs, but as designers of human-centered learning systems. And it means acknowledging that in under-resourced, understaffed environments, changes in policy and practice may need to come first—creating new habits that eventually reshape beliefs.

In Rialto, as in many districts, the choice to manage trauma primarily as liability and risk has consequences. It affects trust. It affects learning. And it limits how far healing work can actually go.

When Kai talks about conditions for real change, she returns to three ideas that feel deceptively simple, but are rarely present together. First, shared clarity about the problem. When leaders and staff can name the problem in the same way, buy-in isn’t manufactured—it emerges. Second, cross-pollination. Teachers need to see how others teach, beyond content silos and individual classrooms. Vertical alignment across feeder patterns builds shared responsibility for student experience over time. And third, proximity. Facilitators and partners must go to school sites, observe classrooms, and, whenever possible, talk to students. There is no substitute for seeing the work up close.

Together, these conditions begin to shift practice. And over time, practice has the power to reshape mental models.

When I asked Kai what she would say to future partners and funders, her answer was direct: you have to be willing to be changed, too. District leaders and funders cannot stay at arm’s length. They have to see themselves as participants, not purchasers. They have to be open to stories and data that move them, not just reports that reassure them. And they have to recognize that teaching doesn’t just shape classrooms—it shapes livelihoods, health, mobility, and possibility for entire communities.

As Kai put it, teaching is one of the most fundamentally important professions we have. When our K–12 systems fail, no one is left untouched.

That, to me, is the clearest argument for Learning & Design Labs. They are not simply professional learning spaces. They are infrastructure—for reflection, for redesign, and for building education systems that are more honest, more human, and more just.