Tag: learning spaces

3 Ideas to Improve Educational Architecture

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This piece is from the 120th edition of the Dialogic Learning Weekly, an email newsletter I create and send out every Friday.

This week I am sharing some ideas about the design and development of learning spaces. These are all ideas I am actively pursuing or applying in my day to day consulting with facilities teams, schools and architects.

Increase the opportunity for users and stakeholders to share their experiences.

Importantly this is not just sitting with teachers and asking “What do you want?” That is the weakest level of consultation. I imagine a time when it is normal to have a broad user group to talk to and time to have an in-depth dialogue about their experience. After all who are we attempting to help the most?

A design team may never teach a class of thirty children, but they can increase their understanding of the core teaching and learning principles involved. They can observe teachers and students using the existing spaces and spend time discussing the experience.

This type of consultation is best put to use when it is gathered early on in the process. It also has the effect of establishing a collaborative tone for the project. We have to develop a user experience baseline which can guide design decisions and ultimately help articulate the value add.

Invest in pre- and post-occupancy evaluation frameworks.

The Soft Landings Framework from the UK is a great resource that explores the way a new building is handed over, helping the occupiers have a “soft landing”. It is rare for me to experience significant frameworks in school projects, even in some of the most recent brand new schools here in Australia.

You might have experienced a brand new facility or building at your school. What sort of assessment of impact have you experienced? How did the evaluation take into account the shift of time?

It is all about improving our measures of impact, linked to establishing a starting point, a baseline set of data. Often this is merely the condition of the building, not the state of the user behaviour.

One of the ways we can assure quality investment in school facilities is an evaluation framework that incorporates surveys and assessments during handover, one month into post-occupancy, again six months in and a year after completion. Nothing changes unless mindset changes.

Learning environment awards that emphasise long term impact on teaching and learning behaviour.

You will notice the throughline of evaluation and assessment amongst these ideas. The rationale for design awards is not something I can directly impact and is an unusual aspect from a teaching and learning perspective. I understand the role awards can play in the competitive world of architecture.

Reflecting on the way awards are currently conducted for teaching and learning environments I think we have a few things amiss. At the very least they should involve a site visit to experience the spaces in real time and see the core users. The maxim goes: “we measure what we value, and we value what we measure”.

Perhaps if we need awards, they focus on the impact on behaviour. They are time-shifted to allow months if not years to pass, for the key stakeholders to fully realise the potential of their new spaces and have grappled with a change in their behaviour. Only then can we attempt to evaluate the impact.

Let me know if you have experienced anything related to these ideas – I would be grateful to hear your thoughts.

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You can find out more about my work with learning spaces and educational architecture on the Dialogic Learning site.

Everyone Round the Camp Fire – Learning Comes First in New School Design

Education ArchitecturePublished onUpdated on5 Comments on Everyone Round the Camp Fire – Learning Comes First in New School Design

6366760143 6fcbe45c05 zOver the last couple of years I have begun to take a deeper interest in the spaces that we call school and those we don’t but which are still considered spaces for learning.

Much of this focus has to do with our ongoing work at NoTosh with architectural firms and in support of schools seeking support and advice in making the most of new and old physical designs.

So I was drawn to this piece about a new school just outside Stockholm – partly due to the blog title – “Learning environments based on learning.” Here is a short extract in which Ante Runnquist explains some of the spaces or learning environments they have designed for the Vittra Telefonplan.

  • Campfire situations are characterised by communication flowing from one to many, requiring a space that can accommodate a certain number of people in a group situation, where everybody can focus on the person talking or presenting.
  • The watering hole is a place where people come and go, and a learning environment where you can gather in groups of different sizes. A watering hole is a place of exchanging communication, flowing back and forth. The watering hole areas are typically placed where you naturally would go, and where you maybe bump into somebody or something.
  • Show-off situations are situations where one person communicates towards the rest of the world, showing what he or she can do or has done, thus requiring a physical space for display and exhibition.
  • In the cave, communication flows within oneself, requiring a physical frame that furthers seclusion and contemplation.
  • Lastly, the laboratories are places where the students can acquire hands-on experiences, working physically and practically with projects in a societal and experimental context. The laboratories inspire students and teachers alike, enlarging the learning experience and inspiring teachers to use different tactile approaches.

In practical terms the learning that is going to take place dictates what space would be best. And Ante Runnquist, a Vittra researcher and the author of the post, supports what we believe at NoTosh about how the pedagogy surely is the forerunner for any school design.

Even though pedagogy has changed greatly over the last 100 years or so, the physical blueprint for schools, dating back to medieval monasteries remain: it is one based on time-space-topic. Behind this lies a basic assumption that the students need to be regulated , if a school doesn’t verify that the students are in the right place at the right time and doing the right things, they simply wouldn’t do it.

During our trip to Sydney in November of 2011 Ewan and I found an old book of school designs from decades ago and were amazed to see how traditional the furniture was in the diagrams. Despite the interesting spaces being crafted and planned, you could still see the regimented learning that would take place from the rows of desks. Some things never change.

In our experience new school design does not automatically mean a school is thinking about learning in new ways – much of our design thinking work helps school do just that and if we are fortunate this precedes any physical planning. In fact it should inform the design.

It is exciting to see that the plans at Vittra Telefonplan have this as a simliar focus.

First, I think we have to rethink pedagogy: what are the dynamics of an education with focus on on 21st century skills? Second, as a consequence: we need to rethink the learning environment. When we do this, things start to happen.

Picture: Detritus of “meaningless language” to describe learning cast aside by students at MLC (Sydney, Australia) by Ewan McIntosh