All schools have values.

Some schools have programs that demonstrate those values.

But few schools enact their values in every classroom every day.

That gap between a school’s values and the students’ everyday experience isn’t a failure of commitment. It’s a design challenge.

Instructional design is how schools bring their values to life.

Values such as curiosity, creativity, equity, and empathy are not things. They’re emergent qualities of interaction: how people, groups, or systems do the things they do. That means we can’t just add programs, because those don’t affect our students’ everyday experiences. We can’t just use ancillary practices, such as mindful moments or check-ins, because those don’t change the fundamental experience of school.

In schools, students spend most of their time in classrooms, interacting with materials, with ideas, and with each other. If we want students to experience the qualities we say are important, we need to structure their most fundamental, everyday interactions so the qualities we value actually emerge. Instructional design is the process of structuring of students’ interactions with materials, with ideas, and with each other to evoke particular outcomes and experiences.

I show teachers how to design instruction so the outcomes and experiences they value are the ones that actually emerge.

what i do

I work with schools, districts, and professional organizations to design instruction that aligns their students’ daily experiences with their values.

This work takes various forms. Sometimes it’s a single session for a PD day, conference, or webinar. Sometimes it’s a series that sustains and deepens the practice of instructional design. It all depends on the community’s needs and values.

teacher whose head is a green apple writing on a whiteboard with a pink marker.jpg

Reflective Sessions:
Understanding Values as Instructional Design Challenges

In these sessions, participants draw on their personal experiences of a particular value—whether that’s engagement, belonging, creativity, equity, or something else—to build a shared understanding of what makes that quality likely to emerge. We then explore what I call instructional micro-elements: tiny features of a learning activity that significantly influence the ways students interact with the content and each other. I show participants how the micro-elements I used in the session itself influenced their interactions. Then, they practice adjusting the micro-elements of a sample learning activity and imagining how student interactions might change. By the end of the session, participants understand how these tiny adjustments can make the outcomes they value more likely, and a set of tools to help them make those adjustments.

Experiential Sessions:
Learning Instructional Protocols by Trying Them Ourselves

A protocol is a sequence of interactions that build on each other toward a particular outcome. In these sessions, participants learn an original protocol that promotes discussion, collaboration, ideation, task selection, or self-assessment. After experiencing the protocol, we debrief how each step builds on the last one, how the sequence makes valued outcomes more likely to emerge, and what the protocol can look like in various subjects and grade levels. Participants might end up using the protocol as written, using certain parts, or modifying the whole—depending on their students, their context, and their values. Ultimately, the goal isn’t fidelity to the protocol but a better understanding of how student interactions build on each other toward a valued outcome.

Generative Sessions:
Using Design Frameworks to Create Prompts

A prompt is a cue to interact with the content in a particular way—to explore, make meaningful connections, or create an original piece of work. During these sessions, participants create prompts they can give to their students to deepen their interactions with their content. We explore an original framework for creating a particular type of prompt, analyze examples from relevant subjects and grade levels, write our own prompts, and receive a tool for evaluating the prompts. Each teacher leaves with prompts they can immediately use in their classrooms, along with a framework they can keep using.

Leadership Consulting:
Building the Infrastructure for Instructional Flexibility

Most professional learning offers teachers an encounter with new practices. But an encounter isn’t enough. To develop what I call instructional flexibility, or the skills and willingness to use practices that actually do what we value, teachers need ongoing opportunities to explore, implement, observe, reflect, and refine. In these consultations, I work with school and district leaders to build the professional learning infrastructure that makes instructional flexibility possible.

how i work with schools

One school approached me because the teachers were committed to belonging—it wasn’t just a trend they were following—and they wanted to evoke a sense of belonging every day in every classroom. We started with a reflective session on student belonging as a design challenge. Then, the lower school had a generative session on designing prompts that help students connect to the content, using my Deictic and Exploratory Prompts frameworks, with examples drawn from across the K-5 curriculum—including Judaic studies, because it was a Jewish school. The middle school had an experiential session, using my Track & Acknowledge discussion protocol that enables every student to participate meaningfully. Teachers at every level left with tools they could use immediately and frameworks they could keep using on their own, building ongoing capacity to serve an ongoing value.

When I work with a school, I build sessions that honor its identity, serve its values, and support its needs.

Contact me

why to nerd out with me

My expertise comes from experience.

I know what it’s like to be a teacher trying to do meaningful work inside a system that fights it at every turn. Informed by 18 years in the classroom and evidence-based psychological science, I’ve written 7 books about how to design instruction so that school becomes a source of meaning, vitality, and community in students’ lives — and in teachers’ lives, too.

My work is process-based, collaborative, sometimes fun, and always meaningful.

You might draw, play a game, or make a focus sticker in one of my workshops, but you’ll never get tricks, gimmicks, or pointless busywork. You’ll get instructional design principles that work across subjects and grade levels to foster engagement, belonging, a sense of purpose, and a sense of self.

I help schools embed their values into their most fundamental practices. Like, actually.

It’s not hard to say you value equity, empathy, or creativity. It’s not even that hard to organize programs and initiatives to display those values. What’s more of a challenge is to design instruction so your values emerge from the ways students interact with the content and each other. That’s what I help schools do.

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nerdy books

These books explore the same instructional design principles I bring to schools. If you want a preview of my approach, start here.

Learn 10 elements of instructional design that help students connect with the content, their work, and each other — not regardless of who they are, but fully regarding their identities, interests, needs, and values.

Design inclusive, participatory, cohesive, and effective professional learning experiences that leverage in-house interests and expertise. Build a culture of curiosity, creativity, and appreciation among adults in the learning community.

Which understandings, knowledge, and skills we deem “most important” for students to learn is always a question of values, so getting clear on values gives teachers a starting place to design cohesive and meaningful units, courses, and programs.

Discover a process-based, personally relevant, culturally affirming approach to SEL. Learn to implement SEL as its own curriculum, as a pedagogy for academic units of study, or as a set of one-to-one interventions that help students choose how they want to live, in and beyond school.

Learn to integrate student-centered social-emotional learning into every stage of an academic unit. This book contains 30 protocols, rooted in evidence-based psychological science and progressive pedagogy, that teach both academic and social-emotional skills.

EMPOWER stands for exploration, motivation, participation, openness, willingness, empathy, and resilience. This book offers activities that help students learn the habits and skills they need to bring their values to their relationships with themselves, each other, and school itself.

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meet the teacher nerd

I‘m Lauren Porosoff. I help schools design learning environments where community values like equity, empathy, and creativity emerge from the instruction itself. I was a teacher for 18 years, most recently at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York. I‘ve taught the 2nd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grades, mostly in English and history, and I‘ve also served as what was then called a diversity coordinator, a grade dean, and a leader of curricular initiatives.

Now that I no longer have a classroom or a student roster, I don‘t know what to call my job. I usually say “educational consultant,” but that never sounds right for someone introverted and awkward who doesn‘t even own a hairdryer. (That photo over there? That‘s so totally AI enhanced.) But regardless of what I call my job, I see a difference between our JOBS in education and our WORK—and my WORK in education has always been about making school a source of meaning and vitality and community in the lives of students and teachers.

Informed by my classroom experience and evidence-based psychological science, I develop tools and protocols that transform the psychological experience of school for teachers and students. I‘ve developed applications in instructional design, social-emotional learning, professional development, and anti-bias action. I‘ve chosen to focus on instructional design, because meaningful learning is an ideal context for students to figure out how they want to relate to themselves, each other, and the systems in which they participate.

This is starting to make me sound cooler than I am. I am not cool. I‘m a suburban Gen-X mom who likes gardening, cooking, hiking, bingeing high-concept sci-fi shows, and ordering the weirdest thing on the menu. Most of all, I like hanging out with my friend Laurie or my friend Tas or my husband Jonathan and talking about teaching. More specifically, talking about designing instruction so students connect with the content, their work, and each other. That makes me a teacher nerd, and if you’re still here, you might be one too.

let’s nerd out together

Let’s align your school’s instructional practices with your values.