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Many educational researchers seek to actively promote positive change in schools. A Change Laboratory is a distinctive way of doing so. A Change Laboratory is a formative intervention in which researchers foster participants’ agency in a process of collaboratively re-designing activity. This paper analyses 66 Change Laboratories involving schools from a historical and developmental perspective. It identifies changes in spatial spread, theoretical references, methodological features, foci of intervention and wider issues addressed. These changes constitute developments, based on evidence that Change Laboratories have moved through a zone of proximal development to qualitatively new forms, that contradictions have driven this process, and that ascent from the abstract to the concrete can be observed. Change Laboratories have developed from an archetype to a set of diverse concrete forms. A proposal is made for a universal essence of Change Laboratories, and possible frontiers for future development are outlined.