On May 14 2025 Dr. Kay Brocato enjoyed a day of visits at the SABEL technical college. Dr. Brocato is involved in a multi-year study of positive learning places. Her Positive Learning Places project takes her to all manners of teaching and learning environments to observe practices and principles at work for optimizing growth. She has worked longitudinally—continually over decades—cataloguing practices that bring about reciprocal growth between and among all entities in a learning environment. She looks for any and all moments which invite engagement. In 2022, the Sabel school foundation caught her eye and she began conversations with Sabel headmasters, discussing the dynamic ways Sabel students engaged in and with the local community. Since then, Dr. Brocato has shared the good news of Sabel practices in every professional development session she leads or attends.
This past Wednesday, Dr. Brocato enjoyed a full day inside the Sabel technical college. She was able to meet with Ulrike Emschermann, Bettina Schynowski and Tobias Pirron, the administrative team, discuss the unique qualities of the technical college at the start of the day. Thereafter, she visited the English Language Arts Classrooms of Bettina Schynowski and Tobias Pirron, the Math class with Manos Votsos, the Chemistry class with Andreas Timper, and the Economics class with Antonia Stegemann. Regina Wohllebe and Astrid Bonenberger gathered at noon to share an overview of the German and English Language Arts program and describe what makes a school like the Sabel technical college a state approved school. The day concluded with a visit to an internship site where Ms. Stegemann and Dr. Brocato were able to hear from a local business about how the Sabel interns are provided with authentic work as complete professionals in a fully functioning workplace.
In a single day at Sabel, learners and leaders showed a sense of community with positive, engaged, purposeful learning. Of particular note was the warm, kind demands by teachers encouraging students to engage in challenging academic work. In classrooms, teachers used humor, story-telling, compliments, smiles, one-on-one chats, varied learning tasks, signage, furniture, temperature, lighting, classroom and hallway spaces, direct eye contact, audio-visual and print materials of many kinds in highly intentional ways to welcome learners into demanding academic content. One student said, “But I wanted to earn a top score,” upon hearing she had not received a perfect score on a recent high stakes assessment. The teacher duo each quickly responded with compliments about the specific strengths in the work submitted by the student. Such explicitly articulated, high expectations is foundational to a positive learning place. At the Sabel technical college, there is evidence of shared aims for excellent academic performance as a primary intention. Short term evidence, within one day at Sabel technical school, made clear that students and teachers share a gift of high and ever-higher expectations for academic success with one another. In short, the teachers at the college care about the academic stuff of school and the real human individuals behind that academic stuff. The college shows significant evidence of a school climate and culture which benefits the entire local learning community with a positive learning place.
The day at the college was truly rewarding. Dr. Brocato plans to continue working with the college in suitable ways in the future. She plans to find more examples of positive learning places in Munich’s local libraries; home, public, and parochial schools; athletic fields; public parks; trains and buses plus the accompanying stations; street festivals; local small businesses and larger industries; community gardens; exercise and dance studios, and even the local groceries and markets. She seeks to document the elements of learning environments which engage all the living things and all the objects of a space to become the best each can be or the best each wants to be. The sort of invitational way the college engages learners and teachers will keep Dr. Brocato enamored of and coming back to the Sabel technical college and the surrounding city of Munich.”
(by Kay Brocato, Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction, and Educational Leadership)
