Planning Schools For A Changing Future
The design of schools should account for advances in technology and consider how those changes will affect the way students learn, according to learning advocates who discuss the future of school design in this article from the BBC.
"Planners have to understand what the education of the future will be like to prevent them designing something that will soon become outdated."
"Education consultant Les Watson says there is a danger that those planning schools for the future create something that 'constricts the learning of the future'."
"Learning consultant Professor Stephen Heppell sees the constant movement from class to class, that characterises today's schools, as a huge waste of time that is preventable."
"'And yet in so many schools we come to the end of the lesson - we ring a bell, we stop them doing what they are doing and then we take them into another box.'"
"Passing a large volume of children through a narrow opening like a corridor or stairwell is bound to create friction and problems, he says."
- Login or register to post comments
- Email this page
- Simulating Mount Rushmore - Nov 07, 2009
- Hearing Acoustics Before The Building Is Built - Oct 27, 2009
- Parcel Map Data Added To Google Maps - Oct 24, 2009
- Citizen-Activated Adaptive Urban Spaces - Oct 11, 2009
- Mapping Climate Change - Oct 01, 2009
Contribute
- Walkscore to Get Bus Points
- Finding A Sustainabe Path for Jakarta
- Isn't This How We Got Into This Mess in the First Place?
- Simulating Mount Rushmore
- Talking 'Bout a RailVolution
- The Solution for Homelessness? Homes.
- The History of the Parking Lot
- The Most Polluted Metro Areas in America
- 'No Credits, Just Prerequisites'
- Center for Developmentally Disabled Doesn't Fit Zoning - Any Zoning
Are you ready to take the AICP exam? Planetizen offers a convenient, self-paced online preparation course to help you successfully prepare for the exam.
Learn more »
D.C. Area Professional Development Courses Offered in Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability– Last Chance to Register!
Planning Academy at Virginia Tech, VT National Capital Region campus in Alexandria, VA
Nov 05, 2009
Step Up Your Site Analysis with Planetizen's Advanced Google Earth Webinar
Planetizen
Nov 04, 2009
Managing Growth With Priority Funding Areas: A Good Idea Whose Time Has Yet to Come
Routledge
Nov 04, 2009
www.flickr.com
|
Open architecture is not a panacea
Before I got interested in planning and its associated topics, I taught social studies for 25 years in a public high school in the Midwest. The school was built specifically to incorporate what was then thought to be the most innovative and education-friendly design, including lots of open space very similar to what's described in this article, and perhaps most importantly, very few walls separating classes, or groups of students and teachers.
Our experience was that, while there are occasional advantages when groups of kids are involved in team-teaching and other large-group learning situations, those advantages are far, far outweighed by the myriad distractions brought on by other kids and teachers visible (and usually, audible) only a few feet away. Using audiovisual materials, for example - and I include everything from the DVD to an old-fashioned slide show, or even a blackboard and chalk - poses tremendous problems for the teacher in the other class whose lesson doesn't involve those instructional techniques on that particular day or at that particular time.
Math students have a hard time concentrating on quadratic equations when the class next door is watching some sort of DVD on (pick your topic) at a volume that allows the kids in that class to hear what's being said in the film. Blackboard and chalk lectures on one topic could not help but intrude on different lessons about different topics in adjacent spaces. This was true even when the adjacent classes were in the same general subject area.
Breaking classes up into small group and individual learning situations merely exacerbated these issues. Focus and concentration were, if not totally absent, nonetheless very difficult to establish and maintain.
Within a very short time - no more than a couple of years - we found ourselves pleading with school and district administrators to erect barriers of some sort so that there was at least some minimal acoustic and visual integrity to a particular classroom space. We started with bookcases as barriers, found them wanting for various reasons, and half a decade later, virtually all the "open classroom" areas had been walled off into individual classrooms, distinguishable from more traditionally-designed rooms only by the fact that some of them were oddly shaped, since they were not originally envisioned as enclosed spaces.
Moreover, since the building's HVAC system was designed specifically for relatively unrestricted open spaces, adding walls did terrible things to ventilation and temperature control. Once the walls were up, some of the new HVAC problems were, in fact, impossible to correct, so we ended up with a few classrooms that were habitually 10 degrees colder, or hotter, than their neighboring spaces because designed airflow had been disrupted by adding those walls. We had the kids' attention in some cases, but in part only because they (and we) were so uncomfortable.
We should be very cautious about jumping on an "open design" bandwagon.