Learning Design, Not School Design

It’s always been perplexing to me why traditional educators have always equated learning space with places called schools. It’s like the traditionalists can’t recognize that learning is happening anytime and anywhere – not just 8 AM to 4 PM, August thru May.

Earlier this month, I read with interest an interview published by Education Reimagined. Education Reimagined interviewed an architect by the name of Jay Litman. Here is what Litman had to say,

“I’ve been in the [architecture] field for 45 years, a licensed architect for 40 years. I’ve always found that you gain happiness from understanding the values you want to hold in your life and trying to achieve those values in all that you do. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rockstar, a painter, a doctor, or an architect. And, for me, I wanted to make a difference in something. I really loved the whole institutional end of architecture – libraries, schools, colleges – because those things tend to last a long time and make an indelible mark on a community.”

“What focused my attention on education was the fact that one of my sons was born with a moderate/severe hearing impairment. As a parent, you immediately start to understand where your kids are getting their information and how they learn. Today, he works as an illustrator and my other son works as an engineer. Working so closely with the school system to advocate for my son’s education helped me to understand that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we run education in this country.”

“The problem is that the programming DNA we use to design schools is out of date. The conventional programming DNA of schools goes all the way back to the 1840’s with Horace Mann and his revolution of getting out of the one-room schoolhouse and sorting kids into similar age-range classrooms. This continued throughout the later 1800’s when educators here and in Europe picked up a lot of lessons from the Prussian military academies. This is how the instructional concept of ‘the sage on the stage’ was institutionalized. It was more efficient to have everyone in the classroom roughly the same age and with similar educational backgrounds This practice evolved into the grade level system and an institutionalized education system that values efficiency over effectiveness. Nine generations later, this novel and conventional approach by Horace Mann has become the ‘traditional’ system still in use today.”

“Sadly, too many practices in our public schools are governed by this misplaced reliance on efficiency. For instance, assigned seats have to do with taking attendance – it has nothing to do with your ability to pay attention or to be grouped with kids that maybe have similar learning styles. It’s all about whether you’re there or not. And then, everything else falls by the wayside.”

“If you look at any traditional school building in the country – it doesn’t matter how many metal panels it has, how many big open atriums it has – you still find kids in a nine-hundred square-foot box with a teacher’s desk in the corner and a door leading out to a corridor. Why do we even need corridors at all? We need intimate learning spaces. The open classrooms of the 1970s were a failure. If you think about college lecture halls, they’re a great place to fall asleep – it’s a non-engaging space. That’s the epitome of ‘sage on the stage.’ There’s no way for a student to have any agency of their education in a situation like that.”

“Think about how much the world around us has changed since 2000, let alone since the 1950s. Yet, the old programming of our schools persists all the way back to the 1840s of Horace Mann.”

“Technology alone has been a major change. It has altered the world around us, how we communicate, how we access information, and how we create new things. It has certainly transformed the way we engage with physical spaces. This shift has changed the way we work, play, socialize, and learn. Everything has changed, except how we design school building.”

“Recently, the City of East Providence, RI built a brand new $190 million high school. It looks new and modern, but the core programming DNA of its design is still based on the traditional Cells and Bells programming language. The new school is big, it’s a beautiful work of architecture. However, with all these bells and whistles, all the teachers are still expected to teach in autonomous classroom settings. The narrow corridors have been replaced with spacious shopping mall-sized galleries, not to enhance education but to glorify circulation, and maybe for a bit of architectural pizzazz. Why do communities continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a brand new ‘state of the art’ school that is more relevant to the world of the 1970s? The kids and their teachers of today’s world need to be in a school environment that is designed to foster and support the technical and social/emotional skillsets that will prepare our children and grandchildren for the mid-2030s and beyond.”

“Architecture should reflect the values of the space and the community. Many architects start with a design concept, such as a shape or a feature. I believe we must start the process of place-making with the child! What is the ideal learning environment for the best student experience? What do we want the students to see and do throughout their day? How do we build a school campus that holds up those goals and values?”

“There’s still a need to have a space for educators and learners to gather, so we create learning studios instead of classrooms. At our schools, we have smaller spaces for one-on-one or small-group instruction, as well as larger areas for full-group assemblies. We redesigned everything to be agile and multi-functional around the learning commons. Many of the spaces have windows or balconies to the outside, and we even designed several outdoor meeting spaces, which are covered and have access to technology.”

Many years ago I served on a committee advising the U.S. Department of Defense on how to build their next generation of schools around the world. During the first day, groups like Google, Facebook, and Apple carried the conversation. Everyone was excited about the possibility of taking money and applying it to learning spaces not defined by brick and mortar, classrooms, and cafeterias. But the second day was dominated by the traditional government contractors, those groups who made their money by pouring concrete, setting metal beams, and laying brick for beautiful new schools. In the end, our government sided with the traditional contractors because that is what all of the adult decision-makers felt comfortable with moving forward.

There wasn’t one young learner in the room.

We now have the technology and the ability to make our community, our city, our region, our world our classroom. But, in order to make this happen, we must stop thinking that learning must occur within a place called school, 8 AM to 4 PM, August to May.

Til tomorrow. SVB