Lessons from School design in the UK



Does architecture matter for learning?
Evelyn Grace Academy by Zaha Hadid



This past week I was in London for the Annual CAE conference.  Every few years the AIA’s Committee on Architecture for Education has a conference outside the United States, and this year it was in conjunction with the BCEF - British Council for Educational Facilities.  We saw some interesting schools and also some that made me question why they were on the tour.  Presentations covered sustainability and a little bit about pedagogy and the built environment, but the conference seemed to be under the cloud created by the drastic reduction in the Building Schools for the Future building program in the UK.  This £55 Billion program was the creation of the last liberal government but has been drastically reduced by the current conservative government.  In general, the British architects and builders who were at the conference still seemed to be getting their heads around the fact that the ambitious building program was essentially over.

This made it all the more interesting that one of the key note speakers was Graham Stuart an MP, Conservative Party member, and Chair of the Education Select Committee for the new government. Considering he was addressing a group of architects and builders who focus on building schools, his pronouncement that school environments are inconsequential compared to the quality of teaching was stunning.  He said the last government had wasted a lot of money on some schools thereby depriving other needy areas from getting any help.   He said he knew of no credible research that demonstrated that the school environment affected learning.  He was vehement in these beliefs and went unchallenged except for Alan Dunlop, a Scotsman and recent Visiting Chair in Architecture at Kansas State University, who suggested that although teaching is most important, the environment is also an important component in learning.  The MP would not grant this point in the sense that he said the focus must be on teaching.

This is an argument I have heard before in the United States in various guises.  I believe that teaching is the most important thing but not the only thing.  Environment matters.  A good environment attracts teachers and students, allows them to do their jobs more efficiently, and tells them they are valued.  This is no different for teaching and learning than it is for any other kind of endeavor.  Human activities benefit from purpose built environments designed to house them.

These benefits might be considered “higher order” benefits but research has shown (see Earthman’s work at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sw56439#page-1) that even improving bad environments improves student performance.  The significance of this is that even with bad teaching students will do better in a good environment. 

Times are very difficult right now and educational providers are being forced to cut back severely.   Prioritization is necessary in times like these but denial of evidence to justify priorities is bad policy.  Solving the problems we face will require cooperation and new thinking.  Einstein said:

 “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

We need new thinking about how to deliver, pay for, and accomplish the mission of educating our children if we want to solve our current problems.

Lunch at 9:30?

This morning on MSNBC there was an interesting story on a school in Florida that is serving lunch at 9:30 AM.  Hamburgers, tater tots and corn dogs were on the menu. The announcers were aghast at this and wondered why it was happening.  They focused on a 9^th grade academy and interviewed a few students and a nutritionist about it.  The nutritionist explained that school started classes at 7:00 AM and students might get up as early as 5:00 AM, and so may not eat breakfast, thus a meal at 9:30 is warranted.  The talking heads were still appalled and vowed to look into this further.

There are so many things wrong with this picture it’s hard for me to know where to start.  First I am glad that MSNBC carried the story, but so far they haven’t at all explored the reasons behind the phenomenon.  Let’s examine some facts about child development.  Children especially teenagers need more sleep than adults.  Studies have shown that teenagers’ internal clocks are naturally set to require more sleep and a later start time for best academic success.  Some have suggested that teens should not start class before 9:00 or 10:00.  Also, it’s no fable that breakfast is important.  After sleep your body, and especially your brain, needs nourishment and hydration.  Students who are hungry are distracted and do not learn as well.  So, starting at 7:00 Am is a terrible idea but feeding kids something is a good idea.

Next, let’s turn to what is likely happening to create this condition.  The fact that the school they focused on is a 9^th grade academy is the first clue.  9^th grade academies are a bad idea.  Every time a student transitions from one school to another, learning suffers.  Also 9^th grade is a tough year in the best of circumstances.  When there are no upper classman around to model behavior, behavior suffers.  The reasons many districts go to a 9^th grade academy model are not pedagogical but rather economical.  Their high schools are full or crowded so they break off the 9^th graders to create room.  In this story, the 9^th grade academy is also likely to be overcrowded driving the need for multiple lunches and hence early lunches.  It is also likely they are starting early to economize on their transportation costs.  We see a lot of districts scheduling buses for maximum efficiency thereby requiring some students – usually teenagers – to catch the bus at 6:00 AM or earlier.  Overall, I am willing to bet that the back story is that cost cutting and perhaps foundational underfunding is behind this story.

How the story could be different.

It doesn’t have to be this way, but change would require the school district to really alter its operations.  First of all it is healthier to graze rather than eat at prescribed times. It lowers obesity and keeps you fueled.  If food is available when you are hungry you don’t overeat as frequently.  Second, why do kids have to eat in a mass feeding in a cafeteria?  If the school was broken into smaller units and food service was distributed you may not have to eat at 9:30.  For this to happen though it would be necessary to rethink how you organize the school.  Rather than departments have smaller mixed learning units.  Create teacher and student teams and a feeling of community.  Have all of the conveniences for your small learning community easily at hand so that food isn’t a disruption, but rather a chance to build community.

Some would say “impossible!  It would be a mess, we can’t serve that way, this is progressive nonsense.”  But here, let me draw on my own experience.  I went to a Catholic K-8 school.  We had no lunch room only classrooms. We went to Mass every morning and for a time you needed to fast prior to receiving communion.  To accommodate this we ate breakfasts at our desks and of course later also ate lunch at our desks.  Our room was not a mess, and I can guarantee that in my class of 50 students there were the usual group of wilder kids.

The school should also be different.

When you think about how the story could be different it easy to see that the school should be different as well.  Rather than just rows of classrooms organized in departments with a big separate cafeteria space, organize the school into smaller units and distribute that cafeteria space to each unit.   Rather than departments, mix subjects in each of the smaller learning units so that kids aren’t wasting as much time traveling between classes.  Rather than a big central cafeteria space that “nobody owns” create smaller multiuse spaces owned by the small learning communities. 

Rethinking how we deliver education might just keep us from eating corndogs for breakfast.

Any Time, Any Place

The realization that learning can and should occur at any time and in any place is beginning to find some traction.  School districts are increasingly offering online as well as seat time courses and we are seeing this at the college level as well.  Nay sayers are concerned that online or other out of classroom courses do not have the rigor of a face to face course.  There is also the prospect of cheating with Johnny or Suzy paying there smart unscrupulous friend to take tests for them. Also, some statistics show that the drop out rate for online courses is very high.  While anytime, anyplace learning can have big advantages in terms of allowing students to control the pace of their learning and use learning modalities that work best for them, it is becoming clearer that adolescents still need a proverbial "kick in the pants" to stay on task.  Even motivated students can be easily distracted.  Multitasking is all well and good, but attention and concentration are also 21st Century skills.

To address some of these concerns the concept of digital badges is being developed through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.  Digital badges are sort of a "Merit Badge" you receive if you can demonstrate competence in a field of study you pursue outside of school.  The trick is to test this knowledge so that users can demonstrate proficiency in a way that is accepted by schools, businesses and other entities. 

The enclosed article http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/10/11/digital-badges-could-help-measure-21st-century-skills/ tells more about digital badges, but I am interested in them because they are yet one more piece of evidence about how learning is changing outside of mainstream schooling.  Will schools change to offer a menu of digital badges for prospective students to choose from?  What would a school (if you could still call it a school) look like that specialized in offering digital badges?

The Teen Brain and its Implications for School Design

The October 2011 issue of National Geographic magazine features a great story on brain development in teenagers.   The article describes the prevailing thinking that the teen brain is still developing and hence teens exhibit erratic behavior, but goes on to discuss new thinking that teen behavior is an evolutionary response that causes teens to seek novelty.  The basic idea is that back on the savannah as children matured they needed to spread out and leave home to find new opportunities and hence pass their genes more effectively.  Those that sought novelty in their experiences did move out and were most successful in the reproductive sweepstakes, so that tendency has stayed with teenagers ever since.  The article concludes that it’s not that teenagers don’t recognize the risk in their behavior; it’s that they value the reward from their behavior more highly than the risk it entails. 

When you think about this finding relative to how we educate students it makes sense that students are bored by the mundane and stimulated by the novel.  Students need to be engaged and be encouraged to take risks with their learning.  Memorizing facts is not engaging and not terribly risky other than the risk of not remembering them correctly for the multiple choice test.  But it is risky to ask tough questions and confront your own lack of understanding.  It is risky to apply concepts to situations you have not encountered before.  And it is risky to conduct experiments or build projects that test your understanding of the way things work.

I think the environments for learning we create can facilitate measured risk taking.  We can create flexible lab-like spaces that allow experimentation.  We can create places to discuss and debate issues that require that students risk that others will disagree with them.  We can create rooms that are so agile that that they can be rearranged for each class and challenge students to try to develop the best lay out for the current task at hand.  We can create spaces that are transparent and make learning visible thus exposing students to the risk of observation as they learn.

What do you think?

Good Ideas and Unintended Consequences

I support the American Jobs Act and the $25B it allocates to school construction, but when I hear about what it’s intended to accomplish I do see a negative consequence.  This consequence is the perpetuation of obsolete schools. 

Sure, students need a safe, dry, and warm place to learn, but investing in school infrastructure should also enable schools to be better places for learning.  Research has shown that learning does improve in schools with better environments.  If a school is cold, drafty, poorly lit, has leaks in the roof and mold problems improvements simply have to be made.  When they are, students in these sorts of schools will have a marked improvement in achievement.  But what about students in schools that are already in better condition?  If the warm-safe-dry conditions are met, money is likely to go to energy improvement and deferred maintenance, items that do not have as great an impact.

If the school being renovated is arranged as an egg crate double loaded corridor, if teachers work in isolation, and the skills being taught are for the 19^th century not the 21^st, aren’t we just perpetuating obsolescence by renovating such a school?  The goal of the Jobs Act is to create jobs quickly.  These will mainly be construction and manufacturing jobs.  The rush to create them means that using the money quickly will be more important than using the money wisely. 

A better approach might be to fund innovation.  Funding school projects that are trying new things and are changing the status quo rather than perpetuating it would be a better tactic, but would not create the jobs at the rate the country needs.

Making an obsolete school last longer doesn’t mean it is less obsolete.