School Design Studio

Scotch Oakburn College's Middle School in Tasmania, Australia opens as excited students and teachers jump right into learning the 21st Century Way

This is a short photo summary of Scotch Oakburn College in Tasmania, Australia we at FNI started working on in 2004. I am so excited to see the fruits of our labors, and those of our local architectural colleagues on this project. The school is organized into learning communities of 150 students with associated space to help them define their identity as a small community within the larger school. Integrated project-based learning is a strong part of the school's philosophy to teaching and learning.
This first space is what we call the DaVinci Studio. DaVinci was a Renaissance Man, someone who integrated the disciplines and did not think of him self as one thing of another. In the same vein, we encourage educators to think of the Studio (fully equipped for both science and art) as a studio for integrated project-based learning. We are proponents of moving full tilt forward with wireless laptop computing across the entire campus including the outdoor spaces surrounding the building. Kids may or may not have access at home. If they do, then they take to the environment right way, if they don't, they now have access they didn't have. This allows for learning outside of the classroom and lots of communication between teacher and students outside of class time. Bean bags are a must in all classrooms and spaces in the school! They create personal space for students when they need it. Think of this happening in a US school - forget it, such stodgy administrators I want to puke! Let kids be kids once in a while. The revolution within classrooms are the Smart Boards that allow teachers and students to access the web from the classroom making every single classroom a potential distance learning lab. Using simple tools like Skype, that now eight million people are using for free when connecting computer to computer, kids can communicate with their peers in Japan, Indonesia, or even the United States (if you get the time zones to work out). Most teachers I've seen control this technology for lecturing, but that is a sad state of affairs! This tool, placed responsibly in the hands of students could unleash an amazing outpouring of exploration and self-directed learning! Outdoor space is a critical must for kids (and adults for that matter). Vitamin D from the sun, fresh air to breath, and outdoor learning opportunities make it a simple no brainer. Of all the ideas we propose, indoor-outdoor connections are one of the most favorite for teachers and students.

Ordrup School in Gentofte Denmark is Designed for Personalized Learning

Check out this wonderful video of the new elementary school at Ordrup school in Gentofte, Denmark that features authentic new paradigm learning environments, privacy niches and "cave space" for personalized learning, as well as, group learning. Going well beyond traditional school design with a teacher’s desk and a black board, Ordrup School in Gentofte, Denmark, has created a variety of rooms with space for differentiated teaching and creative thinking.

The school features true new paradigm learning environments with privacy niches and "cave space", heightened window seating to sit and look outside, green platforms with round, red holes where discussions can buzz and bubble and large upholstered tubes where you can hide with a good book or to spend some time alone.

Furnishings become objects that are interesting, and invite curiosity and imagination about their use.  They are specific, as well as, flexible because they are abstract enough to be used and interpreted in multiple ways (e.g., columns). They subdivide space, and also are child scaled spaces (like the green rings that provide cave space and form a wall).

The design, created by Bosch and Fjord, is based in three concepts, ‘peace & absorption’, ‘discussion & cooperation’ and ’security & presence’, that will separate the individual areas in distinct functions and create new rooms for learning. By separating the activities and creating varied rooms space is created for dissimilarity in both teaching and play where the learning situation will be optimized.

The Laws of Simplicity

John Maeda's site is "devoted to my ongoing thought processes regarding the topic of simplicity. I wrote and designed a book entitled The Laws of Simplicity to let the ideas take root." The book.

Here are John's 10 Laws:

1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. Time: Savings in time feels like simplicity.
4. Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.
9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Learning-Driven Schools: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Principals

When attempting to focus a teaching staff on designing environments for learning, I try to emphasize the need for us as a group to design for LEARNING, rather than for teaching. That emphasis usually goes unnoticed by teachers, and they begin to discuss their needs - the layout of their room, storage, and so on. Usually, I let it go. Its a normal reaction. We are all inclined to think of our own set-up than to think about how to design for our REAL client - learners. True, teachers need the right stuff in the right place to be effective, but if that's all the conversation is about, well, we're missing an opportunity when building new environments to finally focus on the learner and learning.

So, when I read Carol Ann Tomlinson's review of about Barry Beers' new book  Learning-Driven Schools: A Practical Guide for Teachers and Principals I found an educational leader who can help us all refocus our efforts where they need to be. Beers, a school principal with 21 years of service, is interested in constructing bridges between what we know about learning and how teachers teach. It also touches upon that often contentious language barrier between academic researchers and practicing teachers.

Beer's book puts the focus back on the learner and learning, rather than the teacher and teaching.  

As Tomlinson reviews, "Beers first provides a very brief history of what we know about learning. Behaviorism discounts the work of the brain. Individuals learn in a social context. Different students learn differently. In order to really learn, we have to make sense of things, and that sense-making process is highly personal. It takes time. Threats, punishment, and stress deter learning. Challenge, emotional engagement, meaning, and relevance support learning."

"Learner-doing focuses students on deep understandings related to content rather than only on absorption of information or on favored activities. It requires students to reason. Learner plans are also purposeful in attending to student engagement. Further, learning-focused classrooms employ assessment to ensure that the teacher understands the relationship of each student to learning outcomes. Beers explains that assessment only becomes formative assessment when it causes the teacher to adjust instructional plans to ensure that they are working for individual learners. As a teacher continually monitors the academic progress of each learner toward essential knowledge, understanding, and skill, differentiation is simply a logical teacher response to inevitable student differences. Assessment for learning, Beers reminds us, not only involves the teacher in reflection and planning but involves the student as well."

"Teaching for learning necessitates providing an environment in which students search for meaning. Teachers in such settings check for students’ prior knowledge as a unit of study begins—likely discovering learning gaps for some students and early mastery for others. Teaching for learning requires student action; growing student awareness of him or herself as a learner; processing of ideas and reflection on those ideas; motivation via removal of threat, use of novelty, and positive feedback; monitoring and enlisting student emotions in learning; and teaching for memory and meaning. Teaching for learning also calls on teachers to use strategies that enhance learning—for example, effective cooperative strategies, identifying similarities and differences, interactive writing, hypothesis-testing, organizers, and non-linguistic representations of ideas."

If Five Year Olds can get Engaged by Project-based Learning....

At Auburn Early Education Center students, nearly 500 five-year olds, are doing thematically-based projects and getting into it! If five year olds can excel with PBL why doubt this instructional method with older students?

Read the Edutopia article, "Beginning the Journey: Five-Year-Olds Drive Their Own PBL Projects" by Ken Ellis and view a video of kids moving through various projects at the Center to see how engaged they can become!

As Ellis reports: "At this award-winning kindergarten learning center, shared with a special-education preschool, the students decide what projects they want to tackle, and teachers guide them to resources, on the Internet and in books, that help them create something from what they learn. Whether they're building an airplane or a cruise ship, or conducting a funeral for the class praying mantis, AEEC students are learning more than basic facts and skills. They are acquiring a taste for the process of lifelong learning.

"These kids have a very authentic, real purpose for learning," says AEEC principal Lilli Land. "When you want to find something out, what do you do? You go to the computer, you get on the Internet, you get a book. You don't go to an adult and just have them feed you all the information. You have to learn to be a problem solver; you have to learn to be resourceful. So we teach them to be lifelong learners, and you have to keep them excited about the process of learning."

I would suspect that if my son had gone to THIS school when he was five, he wouldn't have told his dad after one day of kindergarten, "I'm  b o r e d !"

Out-of-Classroom Experiences and Social and Emotional Learning

Architect Sean O’Donnell, architect with Ehrenkrantz Ecktut & Kuhn Architects just published a great article entitled "Place-Making: How the out-of-classroom experience can foster social and emotional learningon the link between out-of-classroom experiences on social and emotional learning" in the latest issue of Learning By Design. As Sean writes, "The formal process of education is often focused on classrooms and labs, but learning is not confined to the classroom alone. It occurs throughout a school or campus, throughout the day. While out-of-classroom learning may concentrate on topics discussed in class, informal out-of-classroom interaction is also an opportunity to encourage social and emotional learning—one of the keys to children’s lifelong success."

Sean quotes Daniel Goleman (Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships) in support of his argument: “The social universe of the school is at the center of the teenagers’ lives. That fact presents a danger … but also a promise: for school also offers every teenager a living laboratory for learning how to connect positively with other people.”

Later in the article, Sean states, "While educators have put considerable emphasis on integrating SEL across the curriculum, public nonprogram spaces in schools, where students control the discussion, are often designed solely to facilitate circulation between classes. Considering that corridors can represent 10 to 20 percent of a building, this is a lost opportunity to extend SEL beyond the classroom and throughout the campus."

I agree with you Sean AND I'd suggest we stop designing corridors all together! I'll discuss this more in future posts, but for now, take a good look at Scotch Oakburn College in Tasmania, a project I planned and designed while consulting with FNI that blows away corridors and creates the transparency, social connectedness and subtle security that Sean writes about in his article....

Are Schools Killing Creativity?

In February of 2006, Sir Ken Robinson made an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. Robinson is author of "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative", and a leading expert on innovation and human resources.

Textbook on Educational Facility Planning

Ken Tanner and I have co-authored the definitive textbook entitled Educational Facilities Planning: Leadership, Architecture and Management. Our essential goal in writing this book on educational architecture is to establish a common language, a Lingua Franca, for better more constructive communication among the various groups and interests involved in planning, designing, constructing, and using educational facilities. We have found that the communication divide between architecture and education, and in general between researchers and practitioners in both fields are as wide as they have ever been, despite sincere, thoughtful and tireless efforts of individuals in both disciplines – many voices of whom we have endeavored to capture in this book. Flowing from our fundamental goal of improved cross-disciplinary communication, are several purposes for writing this book. First, we aim to introduce ideas that encourage people who plan and design physical learning environments to become more responsive to students’ needs and community cultures. Second, we anticipate this book will provide a scholarly reference work for practicing educational leaders and architects that picks up where most guideline books leave off. Finally, we intend for this book to be the primary textbook for students of education architecture and planning who plan to either become school administrators, professional designers or educational researchers.

33 Principles for Educational Design

I have enjoyed reading your "33 Principles of Educational Design". It struck a chord with me because too many times I see designers jumping in and rushing for an 'architectural' result. There are some amazing opportunities out there at the moment, and dare I say it, 'most' are being completely wasted with a lack of proper pre-planning, consultation, and vision. It is very easy to read and understand, and this clarity is obviously intended for its value to educators. I wish that something like this could be distributed to all schools by their respective Departments, just to show what is possible, and what they should expect from their architects.

"Sam Aukland, Principal, Aukland Architecture"