Steelcase Education Solutions - Student of the Month

Instead we should be asking the question, "Are higher math scores on a standardized test the essential metric in the national conversation about the need to transform learning?"

As someone who works daily with learning institutions, I'm convinced more and more every day that we need to transform how we design the places where learning occurs. Environment and education are intertwined. I compare them to the quantum mechanics principle of entanglement: separate any two entangled electrons and they will always affect each other, no matter how far apart they become. Like those electrons, education and environment are inextricably entangled, continually affecting each other for better or worse.

Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to learning and teaching, expressed this concept beautifully. He said children learn from three teachers: the first is the instructor, the second are students' peers, and the third is their environment. If we're going to prepare children to face an increasingly complex and interconnected world, we need to transform learning and we need to create new learning environments at all levels, from elementary through higher education, to support this systemic transformation. A good place to start studying the "third teacher" is in kindergarten.

Learning from kindergarten

When my daughter Sophie was in kindergarten, I always asked her what she did that day. I heard a lot of interesting things from her, but one thing she never said was, "We studied math" or "We covered some science." She would say, "We looked at a bird's nest with a magnifying glass and it was really BIG! There was even a dead bug in it."

Or she would say, "We counted peas from their pods and Ryan had the most peas, but I think mine were the best because they were greener and rounder than Ryan's."

What she was learning, of course, was from her teacher's lesson plan: observation, storytelling, math and science concepts. But no five-year-old will sit still for something stuffy like "observation," so kindergarten does a number of things to stimulate teaching and learning:

• varied, simultaneous activities for students, on their own and with others
• kids working in big and small groups in various settings, not sitting in neat rows of desks
• students handling real objects at different places (standing at tables, sitting on the floor or in a circle, etc.)
• a background soundtrack created by the teacher ("Can you see what the bird collected to make the nest?") and students ("Look, I found a dead fly!")

The kindergarten classroom is an awesome learning environment. It's experiential, interactive, collaborative, engaging, filled with excited learners, all the things that you hope a learning setting can be. _All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten_ is not only the title of Robert Fulghum's wonderful book, it's also a good way to think about a great learning space.

Why aren't more college classrooms like kindergarten spaces? Why do we take students from the dynamic, interactive space of the K classroom to the sit-them-in-rows-of-fixed-tablet-arm-chairs, didactic and boring classrooms that sap the energy and enthusiasm right out of them?

How can we better engage students with the material? How can we get students collaborating more and learning from and helping each other? In my experience working with teachers and administrators at every level, from elementary through higher education, they're asking those questions. Educators are ready for change and they're looking for ways that space can keep up with changing teaching methods and learning styles.

Many educators are drawing a line in the sand and saying the tweaking and reform of learning spaces is over. It's time for transformation. Time to rethink technology and media, pedagogy, and the physical environment. Time to create a new model that connects people, instead of isolating them from each other, and this great, big, complex, flat world out there that they will soon be living and working in.

A new language

Space and learning are clearly entangled. But consider how we talk about space. Our language influences how we think. Try this sometime: ask people what they visualize when you say the word "classroom." If they're over the age of eight, they will most likely tell you they picture the traditional square, box-like space of fixed desks all facing one way, with a writing board up front along with the teacher. Fluorescent lighting, most likely. Acoustically and aesthetically "vanilla" and uncomfortable. They don't get too excited about it because, let's face it, most classrooms are quite boring.

On the other hand, ask the person what they picture when you say "kindergarten," and you'll get a completely different story. You're smiling already, aren't you? The language we use contains philosophy and understanding, and much history. It makes a difference.

That's why we need a new language and lexicon, and the first word we need to eliminate is "classroom." Instead, let’s talk about learning studios, collaboration hubs, design studios, and diverse, agile spaces. Much like an architectural design studio, they are environments that are active and agile, collaborative, engaging, even exciting.

Why a diversity of spaces rather than one, big, open space? It's an important distinction beyond just the words to describe the spaces. For example, schools have traditionally included a multipurpose room: a generic space with flimsy, vinyl-covered accordion "walls" that divide the large room into smaller ones so several activities can occur at once, at least in theory. But multipurpose rooms lack furnishings that work for different activities, tables that are easy to reconfigure without a small army, and any kind of functional, acoustic or aesthetic properties appropriate for anything except a big meeting. One high school had a multipurpose room that the students jokingly called the "cafegymabandetorium" because it was supposed to work as a cafeteria, band rehearsal and recital hall, all-school meeting space, and a theatre. I'm serious. Unfortunately, it lacked enough tables and chairs for everyone to even meet or eat at once, no stage for the band or drama groups, nor any of the prep and support spaces needed for each of those activities.

Traditional classrooms and most classroom buildings share the same problem: they are big, repetitive boxes that don't have spaces that support the way pedagogies have evolved. You want to do more project-based learning, more inquiry-based learning, more research-based learning, and those take very different spaces than the ones made available over the last fifty years. The solution is a diversity of agile learning spaces.

Diversity and agility

For a K-5 STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) school in Champaign, Illinois, the Booker T. Washington STEM Academy, we designed a project-based learning environment with a cluster of three studios that flow out onto a communal gathering and project workspace. With this flow concept, we were able to delete words like the "science lab" from the program. In this STEM environment, the learning of science is not contained to a destination but it is pervasive throughout the academy. The core of the building is the STEM lab, where students connect with professionals and discover concepts and create projects that express their understanding of STEM. Flanking this central lab are offices for academic coaches and STEM coordinators. Bookending the building’s core are a Learning Resource Center, a student commons area where student artwork, models, and graphics are displayed, and an agile space dedicated to the physical health of the children.

The strategy is to provide a variety of spaces, each with inherent flexibility through furniture and tools, and in thoughtful relationship to each other so they can support different learning activities. At the BTW STEM Academy it's easy for everyone – teachers, students, administrators, visiting experts – to flow between the different spaces.

Another example is the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Chicago, a grad school whose vision is to redefine the profession of psychology by aligning with Alfred Adler’s attention to the mental health of a community, not only the individual. We were given the mandate to celebrate this alignment through the design of their new learning environment. "We are not two communities, one for teaching and one for learning, but one community of learners dedicated to using our skills to serve our communities," said the collective voice of the Adler community. To reinforce this desire for an environment that nurtures human interaction, we designed dedicated and agile community nodes like the quad of a college campus. The major community nodes became two-level atriums that physically and visually connect the school’s two floors. These communal nodes also reinforce the community’s conviction that learning, teaching and collaboration happen everywhere.

Studios and seminar rooms at Adler are located along the perimeter to give everyone access to natural light and skyline views. Mobile tables and chairs let students and teachers quickly shift from group work to lecture mode to a U-shaped layout for discussion, or whatever setup they need. Technology such as wi-fi, interactive white boards, and media:scape is used to support information sharing, content building, and collaboration. There's a diversity of spaces and each one offers agility and flexibility through its design, furniture, and technology, and thus supports different pedagogies.

The Design Studio

Another interesting thing about these two schools is that they work for different ends of the "arts and sciences" spectrum in much the same way. There's this idea that arts and sciences are somehow opposites (the whole left-brain, right-brain discussion). But art and science have much in common. My definition of design is the collision of the art, science and technology.

Leonardo da Vinci is the model. He created amazing art and an equally amazing amount of scientific work. He didn't do one or the other, he did both. And this is not an approach limited to geniuses like da Vinci. In fact, it's not uncommon for doctors to be artists or painters, for scientists to be writers and photographers, for poets to be carpenters. Any scientist will tell you that there's a great need for creativity and right-brain thinking that's essential to the scientific process. The process can seem very linear, but in fact it's anything but. It has twists and turns, and there are always places that require learning from mistakes, trial and failure, and intuitive leaps to achieve scientific progress. Same with artistic progress. Maybe we should call these spaces Design Studios. What do you think?

So there you have them, my initial recommendations for using space to help transform teaching and learning:

• change the language and lexicon; eliminate "classroom" from your vocabulary and talk about learning activities and settings
• plan a diversity of agile spaces for learning; no one space can truly be "multipurpose"
• accept that creativity isn't just for the arts, and process isn't just for the sciences—find the collisions
• put the users, the teachers and the students in control of their space, furniture, technology and digital tools
• create spaces at every level that look more like kindergarten: experiential, interactive, collaborative, active, exciting

After all, much of what we needed to know about education spaces we did indeed learn in kindergarten. 

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