By Michael B. Horn
The steady march of disruptive innovation is
growing louder in K–12 schools across America.
It is introducing new learning designs — powered by
blended-learning models, which mix brick-and-mortar schools with online
learning where each student has some control over the time, place, path, and
pace of their learning — to upend the traditional classroom.
The most disruptive of these models invite us to
rethink the use of time and space in learning along several dimensions,
including personalization, access and equity, and productivity.
Ultimately these new models could allow all
students to build their passion and fulfill their unique human
potential—something today’s schools do not do. But for this to happen, we will
need to rethink the physical design of schools themselves.
Legacy schools
Today’s schools were built based on a factory model
of schooling in which students proceed in lockstep through school based on
their age regardless of their distinct learning needs. It was built to optimize
efficiency for universal schooling in an era where that had never been done
before. It was not built to optimize learning.
Because the disruption of blended learning is emerging
to a large extent within the physical architecture of these existing
“egg-crate” model schools, this architecture could allow the traditional
classroom to harness online learning as a sustaining innovation to preserve
itself and co-opt the disruption for a long time to come.
This is the challenge before school designers over
the next several years: to create new designs that harness the power of new
learning models for years to come, even as those new models are still in their
infancy, and to avoid doubling down on the traditional school design that would
harden the factory model of schooling.
New school designs
For many, particularly those who are seeking to
bring sustaining improvements to the traditional classroom model, the basic
layout of egg-crate classrooms may be perfectly adequate. Many blended
programs, however, are choosing to rearrange their furniture and physical space
to align with the principles of student agency, flexibility, and choice that
are at the core of their new models.
For example, the Khan Lab School, an
independent school founded by the renowned Sal Khan in California, has
converted the bottom floor of an office park into a learning studio. There are
no interior walls in the studio; it feels more like a one-room schoolhouse, in
keeping with Khan’s book The One-World Schoolhouse, than like
a standard school building. The open space gives students the flexibility they
need to complete collaborative term projects, such as starting a greeting card
business or building a computer from scratch, while providing distinct spaces
for individual work online or small-group instruction.
In Chicago, Intrinsic Schools, a public charter
school, operates in a building that Larry Kearns, an architect at Wheeler Kearns Architects, designed. When designing
it, he
said it was key to turn off the
autopilot switch and focus on the activities that fuel learning. Because
“learning is monopolized by large-group direct instruction, all you need are
cellular classrooms, with rows of desks focused on a single instructor” in a
traditional school, he told me. But because blended-learning models use
multiple modes of learning, they need spaces designed to support different
modalities.
When designing the building for
Intrinsic, Kearns first spent a year prototyping ideas with the schools in
multiple pilots in temporary spaces. Without the feedback from those pilots, he
said, the ultimate learning space would have looked totally different and been
based on assumptions that proved false.
In Kearns’ words, the school looks
like the following:
Each grade at Intrinsic,
which includes eight instructors and up to 180 students, is accommodated in a
pair of interconnected “pods,” each with its own acoustically isolated room.
Each pod is an open studio with spaces dedicated to individual, collaborative,
and small-group learning. One pod focuses on a humanities curriculum and the
other on a STEM curriculum. In each pod, a “coastline” of workspaces provides
for personalized online learning, “exchange tables” host peer-to-peer learning,
and “pop-up classes” provide areas for teachers to work with 12 students at a
time. These spaces are skillfully interlocked with one another to minimize
disturbance between activities. First time visitors to Intrinsic are always
surprised by the corridors. You won’t find hallway lockers or the ubiquitous
double-loaded school corridor anywhere. Instead, you will find hallways lined with
windows and views. Since Intrinsic students use Chromebooks, they don’t have to
rely on lockers to store books as they move from room to room.
The resulting building has far more
space dedicated to learning than a traditional building where so much square
footage is wasted on large hallways—55 percent compared to 25 percent at most
new district high schools in Chicago. As a result, it is a much more cost-effective
building. Intrinsic, which was built with union labor, enjoyed cost savings
that were at least twice that of schools of a comparable size.
Challenges to moving in this direction
There is a lot of inertia in school
building design, so moving in this direction will not be easy. There are two
obvious challenges.
First, in the 1970s a wave of
builders tried to move to an open
classroom design, which ultimately failed
as educators spent the 1980s and 1990s erecting walls. There is a difference now,
however. In the 1970s, there was an assumption that any learning activity could
occur anywhere. In other words, you wouldn’t need to design specific spaces for
specific modalities of learning. In trying to be all things to all modalities, however,
the spaces were suboptimal for any activity. On top of that, in the absence of
any technological advances, the dominant model of instruction was still a
teacher talking to her class, which produces noise that could disturb a
neighboring class or silent learning activity. Blended learning changes this
dynamic because of the introduction of online learning, but it’s still
important to bear in mind that spaces in new buildings must be purpose-built
and not try to be universal in nature.
Second, a significant number of
building codes have emerged in districts and cities over the years that are at
odds with what designers and educators may want to do with new building
designs. With Intrinsic Schools, for example, Kearns said they had to apply
“for every kind of code relief possible. Since the codes only referenced the
egg-crate school, no one knew how to apply the rules. So the major trap to
avoid is the impulse to design schools literally by the books that exist now.”
Other opportunities with new designs
There are two other clear
opportunities with new school design. First, there is the opportunity to create
spaces that feature far more interaction for teachers with their fellow peers.
Research has shown this professional interaction is a big positive, and new
designs can greatly increase the number of interactions beyond anything we are accustomed
to, as teachers can co-teach and students will benefit from exposure to a much
larger social group and multiple instructors with different strengths and
styles.
Second, it’s likely that with technology handling
basic instruction, maker spaces will become far more common in schools. These
spaces will allow students to work on 3D-printers, laser cutters, and more to explore
and test ideas in the humanities, math, science, and engineering.
The
future
As Kearns said, “If blended learning is a more effective way to educate, it is similarly a
more efficient way to build schools.” Although the best many educators can do at
the moment is hack their current space with simple
workarounds, the real example of a missed opportunity is when leaders get the
chance to build a new building or renovate an old, and they choose to
perpetuate the integrated factory-type blueprint. After all, who wants to be
the designer that builds the last twentieth-century school building?
Michael B. Horn is the EDspaces 2018 Keynote Speaker at the Opening Plenary on Wednesday, November 7, 2018 at 9:30 am at the Tampa Convention Center.
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