Module 5: VIII.) Facilities and Space pt. 2

There are some really interesting dimensions to be thinking about as we think about new space in schools. And the first is the idea of bigger, more flexible classrooms inside leaner and greener schools.

Second one is that if you're stuck in an existing space that you have somewhat of an inability to modify, you can actually hack or actually put in a workaround to actually modify that space.

And lastly, don't forget the power of furniture and how just furniture alone can change your space so much.

Now what we're finding is that as schools start to answer these sorts of questions, they're realizing that in many cases they're going to want a much bigger space, more wide open, that really goes beyond a traditional classroom.

Michael I almost think it's like my vision of the new normal is like a library of a college campus meets a Starbucks, where there's still academic learning and purpose, but maybe ability to have more informal or different kinds of spaces, and maybe even a place for a student to sit and have a beverage while they take a break from their learning.

To create larger spaces that are more flexible. We see a lot of people taking a lot of different tacks. So new classrooms, which emerged from New York City's school of one, works with school districts to actually come in and tear down the walls between groups of classrooms to create far more wide open learning spaces that can enable a greater variety of activities and many more teachers in the environment with students than would otherwise be.

And rocket ship education that we've been talking about used to use the lab rotational model, where students left the classroom and went to the lab, and they just are not as happy about the classroom talking to the lab and the lab talking in the classroom. So they're actually trying to pull the lab back in. And they've been experimenting with taking three classrooms and knocking out those two middle walls to say, what would it look like to make a large space that could fit up to 100 students, but maybe would have lots of different stations within the room for small group instruction, for independent computer work, for time with the teacher. And whether it's flexible walls or floating bookcases, or ways to create that demarcation of space, but still have a really vibrant, exciting learning space that was flexible for their needs.

And you remember Carpe Diem, the blended learning school with locations in Arizona, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. What's interesting is that in their Arizona school, when they initially started, they had a large central learning lab where students worked at their individual offices online, and then they had those breakout rooms around the perimeter that were glassed off and where students do collaborative projects. But what they noticed was that when students were in the collaborative areas, working with other students and teachers, that they would get so energized from that collaborative activity that when it was time to rotate back into the learning lab, that energy would just pour out of the breakout environments into the central learning lab, and it would disrupt the learning often times. So what they did when they moved to the Indianapolis facility and opened that school there is that they actually put it on two different floors. So on the second floor was your learning lab, and on the first floor was your breakout rooms. And the reason they did that was so there would be a cultural distinction about the first floor being the place for that noisy collaborative activity. And by the time you moved up the stairs to the second floor, it was time to be quiet and ready to focus on your individual work.

So Summit, Rocketship, and Carpe Diem all have one more thing in common, which is, as they move beyond this old, like, egg crate model of architecture for schools, they're actually building schools with a smaller footprint, using less square footage, probably bringing down their cost to build the buildings and creating, frankly, a more environmentally friendly building because it's occupying less land.

Yeah. And so if you look at Carpe Diem in Arizona, actually, the traditional school building in that space would cost two and a half times as much to build and would require twice as many classrooms.

And you think about repurposing existing space. When Summit was trying to create this big, more flexible learning environment, they actually decided to start with an old converted office building and create a really neat, flexible space out of an office park. This all has serious implications for the way we build schools into the future. If you're still out there raising school bond money to have a $40 million new school constructed in your community, my guess is you might be missing some potential opportunities.

And I know for one, I wouldn't want to be the school district that builds the last 20th century school building as we're moving into this world. Which raises actually a really important point, which is that we think that as you're building new school buildings in your community, get involved. Don't just be on the sidelines. We think that educators need to be in these conversations about how to design these environments optimally. And don't just leave those details to the operations or facilities people.

Now, we realize most of you are not going to be designing a brand new $40 million building. That's okay. You can still do a lot of these same ideas in whatever setting you're thinking about. Blended learning.

So we've seen some of these new workarounds already. For example, new classrooms, helping districts tear down walls between classrooms to get larger spaces. But if you can't tear down a wall, just think about the larger spaces you already have in your school. Multipurpose rooms, cafeterias, even folding walls that adjoin between different classrooms. There are a lot of opportunities, and.

Even just within a classroom, creating little nooks or thinking about how kipp la use some hall room space to create another learning environment for their students. This spirit of creativity and hacking your space can lead to some really simple but creative uses of space and furniture for very different outcomes in schools.

We've also seen some examples in Milpitas, which is a school district in California. What they've done is that they looked around and said, where do we already have large learning spaces? And it turned out that they had them in their kindergarten classrooms. So what they did was relocated the kindergarten classrooms to smaller rooms and used those spaces for big learning labs for their lab rotation model that they implemented.

And also they got furniture right there and created different levels of heights and different kind of cool settings that really worked for those students.

Now, we've labeled this last section don't forget the Furniture. But we're not just talking about the furniture. We're talking about all the things that you decide to do that impact the learning environment that you create. So that ranges from the furniture to also how you decorate the walls and all those little touches in design that you put in.

And, you know, it's easy to say, why are you talking about paint color? Right. We get it. But the thing is, if you visit schools that don't get this right, and they think it's just about the tables or the kids on the computers, it can lack that heart, that emotional connection. We actually visited a school recently together, which looked beautiful. It was an historic building, but it was really dark. And they sort of went for history and gravitas rather than energy. And then they asked the students to work independently for a large portion of the day. And you could just feel it in the vibe of the students. There was something missing. It was. It didn't have that pop. It didn't tell students with every decision, go for it, keep working. It's up to you. Don't give up.

So don't think that your furniture has to be one size fits all, if you will. Not every desk has to be the same size or shape. Not every chair has to be arranged the exact same way. Be creative in the choices that you make to construct that ideal learning environment.

The Milpitas district here in California is actually a great example of that sort of creativity. And we mentioned how they put in some stadium seating with just wood cubes, and they created a cafe in one part of the room and beanbags in the other. And the superintendent was telling us how the students actually run to the classroom to get their favorite kind of seating. And it just shows you that the elements of choice and a little bit of an excited learning environment can really help support your blended learning program.

The furniture that we're using in the learning centers, it's a lot of furniture on wheels. As much as we can, we want our furnitures that are flexible and movable. The primary tool that we're looking at in the labs is tables, small tables where you can group four of them, because I think a group of four is optimal. Chairs that are easy to move. I saw something this morning where there's different heights. And what's nice about that is, from a supervision standpoint, you really can see what's going on. You've got kids closer that are at desk level, and it's almost like the perimeter is a whole nother. It's like an amphitheater feel.

I also love how Summit has evolved in this regard, Brian. If you went back last year when they were debuting this flex blended learning model in their San Jose school, what you saw is that the environment took place in what we call portable classrooms, basically temporary spaces that are sort of adjacent to the brick and mortar school building and are actually pretty popular in California.

And.

And what they realized was that they could remove some walls in these spaces that weren't load bearing, which allowed them to create much more open learning environments, but they were still a little boring and staid. And they evolved over the course of the year. And then, of course, this year, you've seen in the footage how much more colorful and what sorts of design choices they've made to make that learning environment really come to life.

And this is that iterative idea that we've been talking about before. Right. If you had seen Summit last year, you would have thought this might be the ugliest learning environment in California. And then you came back a few weeks later, and it went from rows of tables to chairs to, let's stagger where the rows are. And then they said, let's put in some higher seating, let's put in some color, let's put in a monitor on the wall. And over the course of literally one year, it went from being a room that you might have run from to being a place that you could really see being an effective learning environment. And they did that through feedback from their students, asking them what works for you? And being bold and thinking about space very differently.

So student ownership matters?

Yep.

Space matters a lot in this work. And we knew that from the beginning, but we didn't know exactly how and we didn't know what was going to make a difference. And so when we first set out to do this, we actually thought if we tear down the walls and let kids sort of be in an open space and move, that would make a big difference. And so we did that. But then we didn't have enough resources or thought into the actual furniture. And so we ended up leasing this furniture that were these big long tables that were really hard to move. And essentially they became these giant rows that were dark and dingy in color. And it made the space feel very cavernous. And it actually set us back because the feeling in there was not consistent with our principles and our values of learning. And so we quickly had to iterate on that. And so we worked on how do we think about space? And we asked the kids that. And what we realized is we wanted space that was much more sort of collaborative in nature, much more comfortable, much more mobile, much more. And so what we ended up bringing in were a bunch of different trial pieces where we have a little cluster of chairs and a whiteboard here and more flexible.

So we know that this isn't a comprehensive look into how to redesign your school space for blended learning. But like everything in this course, the big message that Brian and I are trying to convey is throw away your existing assumptions about how this has to look, about how we have to have traditional classrooms and so forth, and instead really let the learning environment you're trying to create drive your design decisions. Don't compromise on that before you've actually asked that question and figure out how much freedom you really have to shape this environment.

This is where we want to hear from you. The discussion board, with all 13,000 of your brains, is going to be much better than what we can come up with. So you're about to see a pop up link that's going to take you right into the discussion forum. We want your ideas about what would make for great learning environments. And even better, we'd love for you to go out on the web and find some pictures or if you're in schools or you know of schools that are doing this well, put a link to a video that you have or upload a photo we can only imagine if we had 100, 200, 300 good examples, what the conversation could look like. So it's in your hands. Give us some good learning environments, whether you have them now or whether you go out and do a little web research and find something good to share.