Year
One
Impact

We built Matiq Labs on a different premise: that teachers and school staff are not objects of study. They are the people closest to the problem, and the ones most qualified to design the solution.

The Learning & Design Lab is a year-long, embedded professional development model rooted in Participatory Action Research and Youth Participatory Action Research (PAR/YPAR) methodology. It is not a workshop series. It is not a training. It is an ongoing inquiry practice that lives inside the school year, inside the relationships, inside the real work.

Year 1 was Rialto USD. Five school sites. Eighty-five-plus educators. A full year of designing, questioning, building, and pushing back on the systems that surround them.

What made Year 1 different: by Year 2, Matiq Labs' Learning & Design Lab model was selected as a core component of Rialto Unified's district-wide Healing Plan, a county-commissioned response to a high-profile community incident. Our work was embedded alongside mental health providers, restorative justice facilitators, and family engagement organizations, and formally evaluated by Hanover Research on behalf of the San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools.

That is what practitioner-led design looks like when it lands.

After three sessions, educators left the Lab with concrete questions about what comes next. That is the most important outcome. Not satisfaction. Appetite.

Post-workshop survey responses named five specific areas educators want to continue exploring. This is not a sign the work is incomplete. It is a sign the work created forward motion.

Year 1 proved the Learning & Design Lab works. Eighty-five-plus educators across six schools told us something important: when practitioners are trusted to investigate and design their own solutions, the results follow. Year 2 is about asking what it takes to build on that, deliberately, not just expansively.

Internally, Matiq Labs is investing in the infrastructure that makes growth sustainable. That means deepening our evaluation practice, building a facilitation team that can hold the model with fidelity across multiple sites, and codifying what we learned in Year 1 into frameworks that travel. We are also becoming more intentional about who we partner with. Using CDE data, including SPED designations, corrective action status, disproportionality indicators, and LCAP focal student populations, we are identifying schools where the conditions are right and the need is real, before we ever make contact.

The rural expansion thesis remains. The conditions that make urban schools hard to serve, under-resourced staff, limited access to meaningful PD, high turnover, and communities that have been studied more than they have been listened to, exist in rural schools too. So do the accountability pressures: school improvement plans, LCAP requirements, and focal student populations that demand a systemic response. The Learning & Design Lab was built for those conditions. The framework travels.

Year 2 is where proof becomes infrastructure. For funders aligned with Bay Area and Oakland educator development, or with rural communities that rarely see this level of investment, Matiq Labs offers a well-tested model, third-party validation, and a team that has already demonstrated the ability to build trust inside schools where trust is hard to earn.

A Jaguars graduate. The students our partner educators serve every day.