School Design Studio

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.

Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning

What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing. Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk has a giant vision: to create a free global online education system that puts the power of creation and collaboration in the hands of teachers worldwide. He's realizing that vision with Connexions, a website that allows teachers to quickly "create, rip, mix and burn" coursework -- without fear of copyright violations. Think of it as Napster for education. Connexions' open-source system cuts out the textbook, allowing teachers to share course materials, modify existing work and disseminate it to their students -- all for free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing. Baraniuk envisions Connexions as a repository where the most up-to-date material can be shared and reviewed (it's far more efficient than waiting for a textbook to be printed); it could become a powerful force in leveling the education playing field. Currently encompassing hundreds of online courses and used by a million people worldwide, Baraniuk's virtual educational system is revolutionizing the way people teach and learn.

Learning Spaces for the Creative Age

In this workshop session, Randy Fielding continues about the Creative Age with the stakeholders in the Regina, Saskatchewan School District. He discusses spatial representations of the four primordial learning modalities of Campfire, Cave, Watering Hole and Life first articulated by Dr. Thornburg. Here he works interactively with the participants to determine what the best learning spaces will be for the new school designs in Regina.

New Designs for Personalized Learning

CNN's Lisa Porterfield reports in her article, Designs For Learning:  "In class, you likely spent most of your time sitting at your desk, listening to lectures and memorizing facts. And the only places you probably could meet with other students were at your locker or in the cafeteria.

While these types of traditional schools have served their purpose for decades, new models of teaching and learning have come on the scene. To prepare students for an evolving information-based society, architects are designing innovative schools to support these changes.

"Several major educational trends are shaping the planning and design of 21st-century schools," said Jeffery Lackney, an architect and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Personalized learning

Some educators say they recognize different learning styles require unique learning environments.

"Instruction and schools are now being designed around the needs of kids," said Leigh Colburn, principal of Marietta High School in Marietta, Georgia.

"We've grown up in a consumer-oriented, choice-oriented society," Colburn said. "And this millennial generation that's coming up -- they're used to choices, they're used to being able to make decisions, and we have to give them more freedom in a structured way."

In such an environment, students can set their own agendas with teachers who act as advisers. Some teachers focus on collaborative projects that link to the real world, such as building a community garden.

In response to these trends, designers are replacing traditional classrooms with "studios" that contain storage areas for long-term projects and spaces for individual, small-group and large-group work.

At the Avalon School in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the school's 120 students develop their individual educational programs, you won't find corridors or traditional classrooms. Instead, at the center of the building is a common area, surrounded by rooms that house a science lab, seminar spaces and studios with open-office student workstations.

Changing classrooms

"It's not like a factory anymore," Lackney said. "One-size-fits-all schools don't work. ... Schools are being built with a variety of spaces that meet the needs of individual learners."

There is a push to build smaller schools, with smaller class sizes. When redesigning large school buildings, architects reconfigure schools into "neighborhood groupings" and remove corridors to make more spaces for learning.

Dr. Kenneth Tanner, an architect and professor at the School Design and Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia, said natural light is shown to improve behavior and test scores. Designers also consider factors such as energy-efficient spaces that maximize the use of sunlight and have good indoor air quality.

Finding ways to integrate learning is another growing trend in school design. For example, "if a school has solar panels, they can be used as an exciting new way to teach math and science," Lackney said.

Getting away from centers of technology like the audiovisual storage closet from decades past, results in improvements right at the teacher's fingertips, such as classrooms with ceiling-mounted LCD projectors.

"Schools are completely moving away from the computer lab and infusing technology throughout the entire building," Lackney said.

As portable electronics enable students carrying handheld PDAs and wireless laptops to learn anywhere, at anytime, the question arises as to whether the school building itself could become obsolete. According to Lackney, "school planners are experimenting with the concept of virtual schools."

Can There be a Creative Tension Between the Realities of Teaching and Reform Ideals?

Whenever we as outside professionals and so-called experts are called upon to provide assistance in changing educational environments, an interesting dance occurs between us as the outsiders to the school culture and the insiders to that culture, teachers. "We've seen reforms come and we'll see them go. We'll outlast them including this one," or, "you're expecting us to change again?", or "we do these things already." In most instances, we all know that the truth is somewhere in the middle, and that is where the conversation needs to start. For the educational planning process to be effective and successful holding the Creative Tension between current reality and future possibility is key. Not only do educational planners/reformers need to listen to the stories of classroom realities, but teachers need to consider possibilities for change. Somewhere in the middle is the best fit solution for both students AND teachers.

For understanding more about the current realities of teachers in their workplace, the classroom, a new book review by Joan Y. Pedro of Mary Kennedy's new book Inside Teaching: How Classroom Life Undermines Reform in the April 26, 2007 edition of Teachers College Record helps those of us on the outside to understand more about what is going on inside classrooms that makes reform difficult if not impossible.

As Pedro states, "Mary Kennedy has produced a very interesting and thought-provoking book which captures the heart of teaching and the many drawbacks that teachers encounter in the classroom. The main aim of this book is to portray the way teaching “really” looks and to learn why reform efforts are not generally successful. Kennedy puts forth the notion that teachers are aware of reform efforts but that they are so burdened with the everyday orchestration of teaching and learning that reform is not always at the forefront of their thinking or practice. Kennedy carefully and in a very powerful way has produced research on teaching that is valuable in this age of reform, and which represents the constant struggle faced by educators as they seek to balance high-quality instructional practices with external calls for accountability that often come from corporate and public leaders."

Pedro concludes: "Teachers can gain many thoughtful insights into teaching, and reformers can gain a better understanding of how teachers operate and move away from their narrow lenses of how teaching should be performed. School reform needs good teaching and can be improved when we consider the complexities of teaching."

 

What if the 'Studio' replaced the 'Classroom'?

Leonardo da Vinci's work space would incorporate the hands-on elements of an artist's studio, a science lab, and a model-building shop. Thats just what we are proposing with the idea of the Studio replacing the Traditional Classroom as the primary place for learning.

In our article, "The Master Classroom" in Edutopia, my colleagues and I argue that, "The industrial era had a long run, both gritty and great, but it's over. The problem is, someone forgot to tell the education establishment. In schools across America, the factory model is still alive, and nowhere is it more readily apparent than in the classroom.

In these little factories, every day we can find teachers encouraged (and often compelled) to mass produce learning and marginalize the differences in aptitudes, interests, and abilities. The industrial-age classroom was not all bad in its time; after all, America did all right in its heyday. But this model is no place to prepare students for the fast-changing global society they will inherit."

Instead we "challenge communities and clients to explain why a regimental row of desks facing a chalkboard needs to remain as a school's primary building block. We ask them to review the eighteen modes of learning that educators accept as essential for success in today's world, so they can see how a traditional classroom can accommodate only two or three of them.

But if not the old-style classroom, then what? How should the model evolve? In exploring this question with educators around the world, we've come up with at least three distinct "studios." To help us, we called on illustrious thinkers who shaped the ideas of their times: Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and a modern master named Jamie Oliver. Destroying the traditional learning environment and creating something entirely new was a major challenge for our three maestros, but here's what they came up with.

To learn more about the idea of studios, read on.....

 

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.

Virtual Worlds, Learning and Games

Constance Steinkuehle, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison known for her work on cognition, learning and literacy in massively multiplayer online games recently published an interesting article entitled "Virtual Worlds, Learning, & the New Pop Cosmopolitanism" in Teachers College Record getting a lot of press.

She states: "American schools largely remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, are forward leaning, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are aligned with many of today’s “new capitalist” workplaces."

Game theory folks has been around for a while...its role in learning is well established.

Dr. Steinkuehle is specifically interested in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) as a way of young people to learn and create "self-sustaining online communities of learning and practice". She suggests, obviously, for any adult parent with a child, that "there is a great generational divide on the matter of video games"; meaning to those of us over 35 video games are a waste of time, and even a way of "introducing our youth to violent, misogynistic themes".

She suggests however; "For those younger, they are a (if not the) leading form of entertainment, a resource for creativity and innovation, and a new campfire around which to socialize.

Apparently more than eight out of 10 kids have video games at home! What a surprise. There is a "huge cultural transformation of “our society’s massive shift toward electronic media”. And you know the whole argument....passive participation...shorter attention spans...etc. Well, Dr. Steinkuehle finds that gamers are engaged in some rather powerful learning that she says "rivals the contemporary classroom"...and I'd bet are probably much much more interesting than school too.

FUN FACT: Did you know that (only) three game titles that she researched had a total population of 9.5 million gamers! We can't ignore this trend!

What does this mean for education? Read Dr. Steinkuehle article...

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"