The Impact Lab
Bridges to Belonging
A professional development experience for educators who are ready to go deeper.
The Impact Lab brings together clinical psychology and educational leadership to help educators examine the beliefs they carry into their schools and build something more equitable in their place. Co-created by Dr. Kierra Pickens and Devon LaRosa.
The most persistent barriers to equity in schools are not structural on the surface, they are psychological at the root.
Policies change. Curricula get revised. Programs get funded and defunded. But the beliefs educators carry into their classrooms and leadership offices, the unexamined assumptions about students, about culture, about whose ways of knowing count, tend to stay put.
The Impact Lab exists to change that. Not through another professional development event where knowledge is deposited and forgotten. But through a sustained, structured invitation to do the interior work that changes how educators show up, every day, in real classrooms, with real students.
This is the inside-out model: individual identity and belief work first, then team culture, school climate, and systemic equity. The sequence matters because what we believe shapes what we build.
"The inside work is always for the outside world."
, Inside the Work: Educators Who Lead from the Inside Out
What Is The Impact Lab?
The Impact Lab is a signature professional development experience and community of practice for educators and school leaders. It brings together clinical psychology frameworks and educational leadership expertise to move educators from awareness into action, in their classrooms, their teams, and their schools.
Live Events & Convenings
High-impact professional development events designed for educators at all levels. Structured activities, rich frameworks, honest conversation, and community building, all in a single experience.
The Educator Workbook
Inside the Work: Educators Who Lead from the Inside Out : a self-directed, evidence-based workbook designed to function independently of any workshop, so educators can do the work at their own pace.
School & District Consulting
Long-term partnership with schools, networks, and districts to embed equity-centered belief work into professional culture, not as a one-time event but as sustained, systemic practice.
Inside the Work:
Educators Who Lead from the Inside Out
Something is happening in schools that data alone will never fully capture. Attendance rates fluctuate. Discipline gaps persist. Achievement disparities endure across generations of reform. We measure the outcomes with precision, disaggregate them, convene around them. And still, the needle barely moves.
This workbook goes to the root. It is a structured, evidence-based resource designed to function independently of any live workshop or facilitation. Educators read, reflect, and act at their own pace, building the kind of self-awareness and professional courage that creates lasting change in schools.
Seven Integrated Chapters
Each chapter is grounded in structured reflection, curated frameworks, and applied activities designed to move educators from awareness into action.
- Belief Systems: How they develop and why they matter
- Root Cause Analysis: The 5 Whys Protocol
- Supremacy Culture: Naming and disrupting it in schools
- Liberatory Design Thinking: Reimagining equity-centered practice
- Individualism vs. Collectivism: Understanding cultural values in schools
- Change Management: Leading yourself and others through transformation
- My Promise to Myself: From insight to committed action
Grounded in Research. Built for Practice.
The Impact Lab does not borrow from a single tradition. Its frameworks are drawn from international psychology, clinical practice, organizational change theory, and equity-centered education research, integrated deliberately for the specific context of educator professional development.
International Psychology
A cross-cultural lens examining how individualism and collectivism shape belief formation, decision-making, and institutional norms in schools, with particular attention to whose cultural framework gets treated as the universal default.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
A clinical framework applied to educator belief change through six practices: acceptance, cognitive defusion, present-moment awareness, self-as-context, values clarification, and committed action.
Liberatory Design Thinking
A human-centered design approach that begins with interrogating who has historically been excluded from the design table, then actively redistributes power in the process of building more equitable schools.
Transformative Learning Theory
An adult learning framework that describes how genuine perspective change happens through disorienting dilemmas, critical reflection, honest discourse with others, and intentional action.
Organizational Change Management
A framework for understanding why educators resist equity work, identifying the three types of resistance present in schools, and building the leadership conditions for sustainable transformation.
Equity and Liberation Frameworks
A set of frameworks that name and disrupt supremacy culture in schools, center the cultural wealth students bring, and provide tools for building learning environments grounded in liberation rather than compliance.
Polyvagal Theory and Trauma-Informed Practice
A nervous system framework that explains how the body's threat responses shape educator perception and behavior, paired with trauma-informed principles that create the relational safety belief change requires.
Emotional Intelligence
A framework describing five domains of self-awareness and relational skill, including self-regulation, empathy, and social awareness, that are prerequisites for the reflective work of equity transformation.
Cultural Humility
A lifelong practice of self-critique, power redistribution, and genuine openness to learning from those with different cultural experiences, distinct from cultural competence in that it has no finish line.
Two Worlds.
One Table.
The Impact Lab was born at the intersection of clinical psychology and educational leadership, two fields that rarely get to sit together, and that are both essential for the change schools need. Dr. Kierra Pickens and Devon LaRosa bring different vantage points to the same conviction: that the most persistent barriers to belonging and equity in schools are psychological at the root.
Not perfect educators. Not educators who have resolved every tension or dismantled every bias. But educators who are in honest, ongoing relationship with their own interior landscape, and willing to let that relationship change how they show up.
Insight into Self
A deeper understanding of how personal belief systems developed, how they are shaped by culture and socialization, and how they show up in professional practice, often invisibly.
Tools to Challenge Beliefs
Evidence-based frameworks and structured activities to examine, challenge, and begin evolving beliefs that produce inequitable outcomes, with curiosity rather than shame.
A Promise to Self
A concrete, values-anchored commitment: not a vague intention, but a specific, accountable action plan grounded in the educator's own stated values and professional identity.
Ready to bring The Impact Lab to your school or district?
Whether you are an individual educator, a school leader, or a district administrator, there is a pathway into this work. Reach out to learn about events, consulting partnerships, or the workbook.
