The Five Es of Entrepreneurship Education

By Gary Schoeniger

The world is changing rapidly. From artificial intelligence, robotics and self-driving cars to the new “gig” economy, the evidence of dramatic change is abundantly clear. And it’s all happening at lightning speed. Suddenly, the rules for survival have changed and the mindset that once enabled us to succeed is rapidly becoming obsolete. We are at the dawn of a new workforce revolution; one that requires everyone to think like an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship has never been more important than it is today. Academic, business, government, and nonprofit leaders around the world have begun to recognize entrepreneurship education as essential for creating the societies of the future. Among the most vocal is the World Economic Forum (WEF). In one report, they cite the need to embed entrepreneurship at all levels of education, emphasizing that “it is not enough to add entrepreneurship on the perimeter – it needs to be at the core of the way education operates.” WEF further states that this will require new teaching methods, new frameworks, and new models.

And yet, while entrepreneurship education initiatives have exploded within colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations worldwide, our understanding of entrepreneurship remains limited and narrowly defined. As a result, much of these efforts have yielded limited results. In fact, a recent report published by the Kauffman Foundation declared that "the traditional methods of encouraging entrepreneurship are not producing desired results and should be replaced with methods that are more likely to gain traction."

Thus far, we have been creating innovators and entrepreneurs by accident rather than by design. Therefore, if we are to infuse entrepreneurship into the core of our systems of education, we need to focus on the five key concepts - the five E’s of entrepreneurship education:

1. Expand the definition. We must begin by re-defining the term “entrepreneurship” in a way that is accessible to all, regardless of their circumstances, interests, or chosen path. Entrepreneurship at its core is a process of discovery - the search for the intersection between our own interests and abilities and the needs of our fellow humans. It does not require, big ideas, venture capital, a unique personality, or an Ivy League MBA. It simply requires discovery skills - skills that anyone can learn to develop, yet skills that our system of education historically undervalued, overlooked, or ignored. 

Too often, entrepreneurship education initiatives are over-influenced by Silicon Valley success stories or reality television shows that encourage students to come up with big ideas, write business plans, and pursue venture capital investment. While these stories may captivate our imagination, they are by far the exception and do not reflect the boots-on-the-ground reality of the mindset and the methods that a typical entrepreneur undertakes. By continuously promoting these narrowly defined models, we may be alienating both students and faculty whose interests lie outside of the traditional business domain.

2. Explore the mindset. In order to truly understand the “how” of entrepreneurship, it is essential to look beneath the surface to examine the “why”. What are the underlying beliefs that drive entrepreneurial behavior? And what are the psychological as  well as the environmental factors that either encourage or inhibit the development of entrepreneurial attitudes, behaviors, and skills?

If we are to infuse entrepreneurial thinking throughout the curriculum, we must recognize  entrepreneurship as a behavioral phenomenon rather than a business discipline. We must recognize that, while not all students have a desire to start a business in the traditional sense, we are all driven by an innate desire to be engaged in work that matters, to pursue opportunities, to have control over our day-to-day lives, and to see a viable path towards a better future. And when given the chance to do so, we are much more likely to become engaged in our work, to recognize the value of education, to persist, and ultimately to thrive.

3. Engage our students. We need to do a better job of connecting learning experiences to our student’s individual hopes and dreams. For some, hope may be seen as a touchy-feely concept that is easy to overlook within an academic context. Yet a growing body of research indicates that hope uniquely predicts objective academic achievement above intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

4. Embrace entrepreneurial learning. Entrepreneurial learning can be transformative, challenging students to re-imagine themselves and the world around them in ways that lead to positive lasting change. If we are to embed entrepreneurship at all levels of education, we must embrace experiential, problem-based learning. We must provide all students with opportunities to develop the skills necessary to identify and solve real-world problems within resource-constrained circumstances where the rules are unknown, no one is in charge, and no one is coming to the rescue. It is only through this process, in these circumstances, that we can truly develop self-reliance and resourcefulness, creativity and critical thinking, effective communication, teamwork, and other entrepreneurial skills. As Google’s Chief Education Evangelist Jaime Casap put it, “Stop asking students what they want to be when they grow up and start asking them what problems they want to solve and what they need to learn in order to solve those problems.”

5. Examine ourselves. W. Edwards Deming once noted that every system is perfectly designed to create the results it is creating. If we are to fully embrace entrepreneurial education we must also look within to recognize the extent to which our systems of education and our organizational structures discourage the development of entrepreneurial attitudes, behaviors, and skills. We must re-examine our own deeply held, taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions that may no longer be effective. We must embrace new methods, new frameworks, and new models that encourage all students to be innovative and entrepreneurial regardless of their chosen path. In other words, we must also recognize the power of systems to shape behavior.

As the American Theologian Richard Shaull once wrote - “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

The entrepreneurial spirit is the human spirit — it’s not just in some of us, it’s in all of us. If we are to shift entrepreneurship from the perimeter to the core of the way education operates, we must recognize the transformative power of entrepreneurship education as a means to empower ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things, thus enabling them to participate in the much-needed transformation of their world.

Author Bio

Author and Entrepreneur Gary Schoeniger is an internationally-recognized thought leader in the field of entrepreneurial mindset education. As the Founder and CEO of the Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative, Gary led the development of the Ice House Entrepreneurship Program, which has been recognized by the Kauffman Foundation as “redefining entrepreneurship education in classrooms and communities around the world.” Schoeniger, along with Pulitzer nominee Clifton Taulbert, is also the co-author of Who Owns the Ice House? Eight Life Lessons from an Unlikely Entrepreneur, an international bestseller described as “required reading for humanity.”

Gary Schoeniger will present "Creating Entrepreneurial Learning Environments" at EDspaces 2018 on Thursday, November 8, 2018 at 8:00 am at the Tampa Convention Center.

Session Sponsor: 

Understanding the K-12 Landscape: Spotlight on Public and Charter Schools

By Melissa Pelletier and Anne Wujcik

It’s important for stakeholders in the business of space and learning to understand the state of both public and charter K-12 schools. MDR Educational Marketing Solutions recently published The K-12 Education Landscape report, that provides high level information on schools and enrollment figures, among other topics. This article provides an overview of the report’s chapter on public and charter schools.

Public and Charter Schools in Education

There are almost 55,000,000 students in public K-12 schools in the United States, and roughly 60% of all public schools are elementary schools. Sixteen percent are middle schools, 20% are high schools, and 6% are combined K-12 schools. The charter school mix by grade level differs from that of traditional public schools. Only 10% of charter schools are middle schools, compared with 16% of traditional public schools. It is interesting to note the popularity of the K-12 model among charter schools, where K-12 schools make up 17% of all charter schools, compared with only 5% of traditional public schools.[1] The K-12 model is an efficient way to serve small student populations.

Public Schools by Grade

The Charter Schools’ Role

Charter schools garner much more attention than their numbers or student enrollments would normally predict. In the fall of 2017, there were 7,390 charter schools in operation, serving 3,026,038 students, according to MDR’s K-12 Education Market Database. Charters accounted for 6% of all public schools and enrolled roughly 5% of all public-school students. With charter schools’ twin emphasis on accountability and innovation, they have become critical in the school reform movement. Charter schools embody a prime tenet of school reformers—that providing a variety of learning options and allowing parents to choose what is best for their child offers every student the chance to succeed.

Charter schools are publicly funded schools operated by independent entities. They are authorized by state-sanctioned entities such as the state board of education, an institution of higher education, a local school district, or in some cases a specially constituted authorizing body. The authorizing entity has the responsibility of monitoring each charter school it establishes, and is ultimately responsible for the operational and educational integrity of these charters, and for closing any that fail to meet their educational or operational responsibilities. Charter schools are granted more operational control over their budgets, curriculum, and personnel, functioning with greater flexibility than other public schools in exchange for producing specified results.

Charter funding from the district and the state is based on the number of students attending. The amount of funding a charter receives, and the way those funds are distributed differ dramatically within individual states, and even within individual communities within a state. According to the Center for Education Reform, charter schools receive on average, 36% less revenue than their traditional school counterparts do. Charter schools are funded at $7,131 per pupil.

Charter Enrollment is On the Rise

Charter Management Organizations (CMO) are organizations that create and operate networks of schools that embody a shared educational vision and mission. They represent an attempt to bring high performance to scale, replicating educational approaches that show evidence of being effective. CMOs also help address some of the operational challenges faced by stand-alone charter schools. By centralizing administration, CMOs can provide significant ongoing administrative support to schools in their network, freeing principals to serve as instructional leaders. CMOs can also realize some economies of scale, leveraging their greater purchasing power to meet operational needs. MDR has identified 296 CMOs which are part of its National K-12 Education Market Database.

Just under 40% of CMOs operate small networks, managing three or fewer schools. Thirty percent of CMOs manage between 4 and 9 schools, and another third manage 10 or more schools. Among these larger CMOs are:

• Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) operates 209 schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia, serving more than 85,000 students.
• IDEA Public Schools serves more than 35,000 students in 61 schools throughout the Texas Rio Grande Valley, Austin, and San Antonio.
• The Uncommon School Network enrolls more than 13,000 students in 52 schools, located in five northeastern cities—Boston, Newark, New York City, Troy, and Rochester.
• Aspire Public Schools runs 40 schools across California and in Memphis, TN, serving 16,000 students.
• Achievement First operates a network of 34 public charter schools in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island, serving 11,600 students.
• Mastery Schools operates 24 schools in Philadelphia, PA and Camden, NJ serving 13,500 students. 

The Regional Public and Charter Mix 

The region with the largest number of traditional public schools is the South (36%), followed by the Midwest (25%), the West (23%), and the Northeast (17%). Charter schools are distributed differently across the regions: 35% of all charter schools in the nation are located in the West, while only 11% are in the Northeast. Western states have a tradition of being more independent and open to individual initiatives. That tradition seems to have created a welcoming environment for charter schools, with enabling legislation and fewer caps on charter school growth. The charter model is well established in the region, with some of the oldest charters found in the West. California was the second state to pass charter legislation in 1992, followed by Colorado and New Mexico in 1993, and Arizona in 1994.

Overall, traditional public schools are distributed relatively evenly over urban (27%), suburban (34%), and rural (24%) settings. Fifteen percent of public schools are located in towns. Charter schools, on the other hand, are an urban phenomenon. Well over half of all charter schools (58%) are located in urban settings, followed by 27% in suburban locations. Only 7% of charter schools are found in rural areas. Originally, most public charter schools were organized as an alternative to poorly performing public schools, many of which are found in America’s major urban centers. Furthermore, because urban and suburban districts have so many students and schools, it is easier for charter schools to generate the resources needed to launch and attract students. In rural settings, the logistics of organizing a charter school can be much more challenging.

Marketing to Individual Charter Schools Versus CMOs

Not only is the charter school segment quite small, it can be difficult to reach. Nearly three-quarters of charters operate as freestanding, independently administered organizations. These one-off operations use a wide variety of instructional approaches and choose their own instructional materials to support the curriculum. They often have small budgets.

The CMO sector of the charter market—roughly 25% of all charter schools— operates somewhat like traditional school districts. In addition to helping all schools in the network present a consistent educational vision, CMOs can provide significant ongoing administrative support to schools in their network. This may include centralized purchasing of at least some instructional materials, making the various CMO networks more attractive targets than their one-off counterparts. That said, most CMOs manage fewer than 10 schools, and many of the larger CMOs use home-grown curricula and instructional resources.

The smaller size of most charter schools, coupled with their more flexible working environments could make them good partners for piloting new products, and conducting effectiveness research, especially among the CMOs. These organizations have a common philosophy about learning, some degree of standardization in terms of classroom management and instructional approach, and centralized professional development, all of which can help ensure ease of implementation.

Melissa Pelletier is the Education Research Editor for MDR and write this article based on MDR’s State of the Market Report – The K-12 Education Landscape. The report was originally written by Anne Wujcik, a former education analyst for MDR.

The Future of School Design

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 Michael Horn speaks and writes about the future of education and works with a portfolio of education organizations to improve the life of each and every student. He is the co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a non-profit think tank, and he serves as a principal consultant for Entangled Solutions, which offers innovation services to higher education institutions. Horn is the author and coauthor of multiple books, white papers, and articles on education, including the award-winning book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns and the Amazon-bestseller Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools.


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.

Plenary Session Sponsor: 

Designing Educational Spaces That Support Executive Function

By Dr. Nancy Sulla

Imagine you enter your home, fling open the door, and the door knob punches a hole in your wall. You decide to fix it yourself. All you have to do is “Google” it. You locate a how-to sheet with step-by-step directions for spackling a wall; you find a video of someone demonstrating the process. Easy, right? Not so fast. Suppose you did not possess the skills of focus, following multiple steps, shifting focus from one event to another, catching and correcting errors, attending to an activity, and persisting in a task? Even the best how-to sheet or video would not yield success. Those are just some of the skills of executive function, managed by a part of your brain just behind your forehead.

It turns out that living in situations of chronic stress, such as poverty, domestic violence, abuse, protracted divorce, and even having parents that put constant pressure on you to succeed, can slow the development of this part of the brain. In his book, How Children Succeed, Paul Tough (2013) draws the correlation between poverty and poor academic achievement due to lack of executive function. Is it possible, then, that the rush to purchase better instructional materials and provide professional development to teachers to offer better lessons might not provide the answer to student achievement as much as would building executive function? Consider that most content you need to master today is easily found on the Internet. What is not found there is the ability to think critically, reason, see unintended consequences -- the skills of executive function. The good news is that the part of the brain that handles executive function has the ability to develop further; we can improve students’ executive function.

The history of classroom design has been to focus on teaching, with students being able to face the front of the room for lessons; but what if, instead, we design classrooms that focus learning, with an emphasis on ensuring growth in executive function that will lead to student achievement? In Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classrooms (Sulla, 2011), students engage in solving real-world problems. Drawing from myriad related learning activities identified and designed by the teacher, students schedule how they will use their class time to learn the content needed to solve the problem. While there are times when the teacher addresses the whole class, these are short 10-15 minute presentations to introduce concepts and raise students’ awareness of what they need to learn. So rather than designing the room to accommodate those few moments over the course of a day or week, the classroom is designed to allow for various opportunities to engage with and grapple with content.

Executive function skills are not strengthened through lessons as much as they are through classroom structures and continued use. In my book, Building Executive Function: The Missing Link to Student Achievement (2018), I take a different approach to executive function skills. Rather than starting with the skills themselves, I recommend focusing on the greater life skills that executive function skills support, namely conscious control, engagement, collaboration, empowerment, efficacy, and leadership. Following are ideas for building educational spaces that support these skills.

Consider the following physical spaces in a classroom to promote greater executive function while advancing academic achievement:

Discourse Center

An area of soft seating with couches and chairs provides a comfortable place for students to discuss their work and texts they are reading. If you can, physically design the space to be tucked into an indented area and have a “nook” feel to it.  Here students build conscious control and engagement, practicing the executive function skills of focus, attending to a person or activity, concentrating, maintaining social appropriateness, and more. Offer students discussion protocols, or “norms of engagement,” so that they see what is expected of them in this area. These may include summarizing what others have said, making a connection to or transition from the last person who spoke, ensuring that all students participate in the conversation, etc.

Observation Deck

Creativity is an executive function skill: it is not a personality trait that only some possess; it can be developed in all. Highly creative people observe (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015).  Design an area where students can observe. It should have a window to the outside; however, it could also have a counter on which to place various objects, plants, and animals for observation. Here, students build conscious control and engagement. As students build the ability to observe and record observations, they can advance to anticipating and making predictions.

Conference Area

A conference table offers students a place to discuss their readings and research when they need to have perhaps texts, paper, and/or computers with them. Design seating for a group of no more than four at the elementary grades and up to eight at the secondary level. Students sign up to use the conference area for their small-group discussions. Offer students discussion protocols to follow. Here, given the appropriate tasks, students build conscious control, engagement, empowerment, efficacy, and leadership.

Collaborative Area

Collaboration requires the executive function skills of seeing multiple sides of a situation, being open to others’ points of views, maintaining social appropriateness, and overcoming temptation. Students also build skills related to problem-solving, advancing efficacy. The keys to designing collaborative spaces are having 1) a table size that allows students to talk and engage with collaborative materials easily; 2) an unbroken surface area, as opposed to desks pushed together; 3) a round table so that no one is at the head of the table. I recommend 42” table diameters or, in the case of a clover table, 48” (the indentation offers a 42” diameter while the protruded area offers a 48” diameter.) Collaboration is not a process of divide-and-conquer; it requires students to “come to the table” with individual mastery and synthesize to develop a better end product. Provide students with consensus-building tools to guide their interaction. 

Individual Work Area

At times, students need to work independently to build content mastery. Design a section of the room with individual desks apart from the noisier collaborative areas. As students consider their goals and schedule how they will use time, they build important executive function skills related to empowerment, such as monitoring performance, managing time, and reflecting on goals. As they tackle real-world problems, both individually and collaboratively, they build the executive function skills for efficacy -- being able to identify a goal and create a plan to achieve it.

Quiet Work Zone

For students who struggle with focus, concentration, attending to a person or activity, persisting in a task, and overcoming temptation, a quiet work zone will support their growth. Consider study carrels designed to minimize distractions.

Small-Group, Mini-Lesson Area

Students build academic skills through learning activities, teacher facilitation, and small-group lessons offered by the teacher on targeted skills or concepts. It is important to put a table (rectangular or kidney shaped) in an area of the room with a white board and, if possible, projection capability. Students sign up to attend small-group, mini-lessons, building greater executive function skills toward empowerment. Teachers can also require certain students to attend specific lessons.

Daydream Center

Creative people daydream! (Kaufman & Gregoire, 2015) How wonderful to build a space in a room where students can spend a ten-minute period just daydreaming. Fill it with stimulating images and colors.

Game Area

Games, particularly games of strategy, are powerful tools for building the executive function skills for engagement and efficacy, including making mental images, identifying cause-and-effect relationships, and considering future consequences in light of current action. Set up some tables and fill the shelves with board games. Computer games are welcome as well!

Maker Space / STEM Area

Many teachers these days are designing areas to fill with materials that allow students to make objects and/or use a design process to solve a STEM problem. Fill shelves with see-through bins of materials and let students creativity flow! A good design process will move students between divergent and convergent thinking, exercising myriad executive function skills.

Next time you consider designing educational spaces, whether a classroom or entire school, consider how the physical space can promote greater executive function toward increased student achievement.

 References

Kaufman, S.B., Gregoire, C. (2015). Wired to create: Unraveling the mysteries of the creative

mind. New York: Penguin.

Sulla, N. (2011). Students taking charge: Inside the learner-active, technology-infused

classroom. New York: Routledge.

Sulla, N. (2018). Building executive function: The missing link to student achievement. New York: Routledge.

Tough, P. (2013) How children succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character. New York: Mariner Books.

 About the Author

Dr. Nancy Sulla is the President, IDE Corp. — Innovative Designs in Education and an author and the creator of the Learner-Active, Technology-Infused Classroom. You can follow Nancy’s blog and find out more about her at www.nancysulla.com and her company at www.idecorp.com.

All the Things you Cannot See

by Shona O’Dea, Well AP, LEED AP BD+C, DLR Group Building Performance Analyst

Within the physical school environment, there is an entire world of things we cannot see that influences the human experience of a space and a student’s ability to perform. Pulling back the curtain on those elements equips everyone to better understand – and embrace – a more holistic approach to district planning.

A recent report from the World Green Building Council concludes that indoor environmental quality (IEQ) can have a profound impact on students’ cognitive function and performance, but optimizing the environmental quality of schools involves much more than air sensors. A holistic master planning process enables clients to think beyond a bare-bones conditions assessment approach by expanding into a comprehensive plan for optimal building performance, and one school district in Illinois agrees.

Barrington School District 220 in Barrington, Illinois, partnered with DLR Group to lead a district-wide facilities master plan to assess and improve learning environments for its students and staff. DLR Group’s team began the process by documenting 12 schools and an administrative building within the district to qualify and quantify holistic building performance. We translated our findings into a report card that measured energy performance, thermal comfort, indoor air quality, visual comfort, and acoustical satisfaction, a deliverable that is guiding future decisions related to facilities and capital investments throughout the district.

Baseline for Measurement

DLR Group used a two-pronged approach to gather qualitative and quantitative information related to IEQ at each building. To gather qualitative data, DLR Group issued a district-wide IEQ satisfaction survey to all employees (including teachers, administration, support, and maintenance), and collected 566 responses. These responses were categorized into four key comfort factors: acoustic, air, thermal, and visual to give the team a holistic understanding of the district’s capital assets.

For our quantitative efforts, the team placed IEQ equipment in representative classrooms from each building, allowing us to observe “point-in-time” spot measurements via monitors tracking temperature, relative humidity, CO2, PM2.5, and TVOC over a data collection period of 72 hours per room. Additional qualitative observations were recorded in workbooks, including:

• Do walls reach all the way up to the roof deck?
• What is the fraction of windows on the external walls?
• Are there any window dressings?
• Is the flooring material hard surface or soft surface?

DLR Group also engaged teachers and students by utilizing on-site data logging equipment throughout the process to create a personalized learning opportunity for Barrington students. We partnered with students at each facility to move data loggers between focus classrooms, following a defined schedule. Spot measurements also recorded light levels, VOCs, and background decibel levels in each focus classroom.

Once the survey, workbooks, spot measurements, and logging were complete, DLR Group compiled all data into a master grading tool or report card, along with the basic site measurements and resource consumption results. The grading tool algorithms, written for industry standard requirements, generated IEQ grades for acoustical satisfaction, indoor air quality, thermal comfort, and visual comfort.

Key Findings of the Four Core Components

Acoustics

The IEQ survey results identified a number of factors impacting acoustics, including fans, air conditioning equipment, and furniture. During our classroom observations at the high school, we noted teachers were limiting movement to avoid disruption in adjacent spaces. Students also indicated that teachers were not conducting classes as they desired due to concern that moving furniture would disrupt nearby classes. Further testing revealed that furniture was extremely heavy, and moving it caused the noise criteria inside that classroom and adjacent classrooms to almost triple. From these results, the district was able to demonstrate a need for new furniture that facilitates flexible teaching and learning spaces in the high school.

Air Quality

Carbon dioxide concentration often acts as a proxy for ventilation adequacy. The concentration of carbon dioxide in outside air is approximately 400 PPM, and industry standard internal thresholds recommend a maximum of 1200 PPM. Beyond these levels, the brain begins to go into sleep mode, which can have a profound impact on cognitive function.

The necessary mechanical systems were in place to ventilate classrooms adequately, and the air quality in this district received better-than-average results. Most occupants did not record strong satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their air quality, however stuffiness was the most popular complaint, especially in summer months. All buildings tested for volatile organic compounds were at negligible levels throughout. One building received an initially high reading but, on further analysis, we determined the readings were conducted during an art fair where the art supplies produced VOCs from off-gassing.

Our assessment uncovered three buildings at approximately 3000 PPM, which exceeds ASHRAE 62.1 Ventilation for Acceptable Indoor Air Quality Standards and specifies 800 PPM plus ambient. The district immediately instituted a no-cost solution by revising damper positions to ensure a CO2 level of no more than 1200 PPM at all buildings.

Daylighting

According to the report by the World Green Building Council, 27 percent of U.S. schools have inadequate lighting. Light levels at Barrington facilities were determined satisfactory, however some spaces generated higher light levels than required due to replacement of fluorescents with efficient LED bulbs.

Of the 80 percent of respondents who have access to daylight, 80 percent are satisfied with their visual environment. Areas with too much light are scheduled for de-lamping, which will involve removing some of the LED bulbs from light fixtures to return light levels to the illumination necessary for the task conducted in the space. This solution also will result in energy savings for Barrington.

Thermal

ASHRAE Standard 55 Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy recommends operative temperatures range between 60- 80°F depending on factors such as occupants’ activity and clothing levels. Barrington levels fell within industry standards, with an average setting at 68°F, however surveys results showed on average, 65 percent of occupants were dissatisfied with their thermal environments, with more complaints in winter months due to drafts and uneven temperatures.

The high school recorded a large range of variation in temperatures, initially attributed to a number of additions to this building, and ranging ages of HVAC systems. On further analysis, the HVAC systems were able to meet an optimal set point, however that occurred at the end of the school day as students were heading home for the evening. The district simply adjusted HVAC systems to warm up earlier in the morning to improve comfort level at the high school.

In other schools with a high number of thermal comfort complaints, temperature readings hit the recommended set points. However, numerous elements also affect thermal comfort, including humidity, air speed, and mean radiant temperature of surfaces. Thermal imaging identified areas of missing or damaged insulation causing temperature asymmetry; cold spots where moisture may have penetrated a wall; thermal bridging issues at doorframes; or insufficient seals causing air drafts. Long-term solutions for temperature asymmetry are being incorporated into the District’s future capital planning.

Towards Transparency

This comprehensive process helped Barrington officials make data-driven decisions on how to best use its maintenance budgets, and plan for future capital investments. Ultimately, while data, analysis, and recommendations play an important role in any holistic master plan, the greater value may be found in the deeper conversations that occur between agency and individual users. This level of transparency and communication contributes to a positive relationship between a school district and the local community it serves, and ultimately improves the educational experience for all learners of all ages.

About the Author:

Shona’s focus on efficiency and indoor environmental quality is an important component of DLR Group’s Performance Design team, supporting the firm's pursuit of sustainable design and operation. Born and raised in Ireland, Shona earned an honors degree in Building Services Engineering from the Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland's leading sustainable building engineering program, and moved to the Midwest as part of the Atlantis dual master’s program in Sustainability, Technology and Innovation at Purdue University. She currently serves as Young Engineers in ASHRAE Region VI Coordinator, President of the Chicago Chapter of IBPSA.

Architects Prioritize Design as a School Security Solution

Northwood Elementary School on Mercer Island, Washington, winner of a 2017 Education Facility Design Award. Designed by Mahlum, photo by Benjamin Benschneider

by Katherine Flynn

How well can anyone plan for the chaos and violence of a school shooting? 

In American public schools, it’s now considered a best practice to have a written protocol in place for how to proceed if a shooter opens fire on school grounds or inside school walls; nearly 90 percent of schools have them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition, 70 percent of schools run active-shooter drills with their students.  

But for architects who design schools, the planning starts much earlier, before the first brick is laid. Strategic thinking about how to keep students safe is now baked into the design process of every school and learning institution— with the added mandate of preventing a school from looking or feeling too similar to a prison. 

According to a Northeastern University study, school shootings are not statistically more common now than in the past. Four times the number of children were killed by guns in schools in the early 1990s than today. Nevertheless, in the wake of the shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018, in which 17 people were fatally shot and 17 more injured, as well as a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas in May, the conversation around preventing equally high-profile violent incidents in the future has reached a crescendo. Architects are preparing themselves to see this reflected in the participatory design process moving forward. 

“For communities that don’t yet have that emotional distress in relation to a shooting scenario, it probably doesn’t come up as often,” says Jenine Kotob, Assoc. AIA, who designs schools at Quinn Evans Architects in Washington, D.C., and is an active member of AIA’s Committee on Architecture for Education (CAE). “So it [has] kind of been up to [the architects] to work with the client at the highest level to talk about it and figure it out. But I definitely think, moving forward, that’s going to be completely different.” 

Striking a balance

When schools put stronger security measures in place with the intended outcome of keeping students safe, they can have unintentional adverse effects. 

“In a daily experience, it really impacts the students and how they feel about themselves, and it kind of perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline issue,” Kotob says. That pipeline in turn perpetuates prejudices as well as harmful paranoia and anxiety.  

And that’s why architects make it their job to pursue solutions that are all but invisible. “In a daily experience, it really impacts the students and how they feel about themselves, and it kind of perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline issue,” Kotob says. That pipeline in turn perpetuates prejudices as well as harmful paranoia and anxiety.  

And that’s why architects make it their job to pursue solutions that are all but invisible. 

In working on a redesign of the Marie H. Reed Center, an elementary school and community hub in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., Kotob says that Quinn Evans took a layered approach: planning for the worst-case scenario of a violent mass shooting incident but also accounting for the more commonplace security concerns that students and teachers were likely to encounter, such as bullying and sexual harassment. Kotob and her colleagues didn’t want to provide too many dark, out-of-the-way spaces, but they did want to include hiding spaces and escape routes in case of an emergency. 

Karina Ruiz, AIA, the 2019 CAE chair, has over two decades of experience in public school design in the Portland, Oregon, area, says that an essential part of the design process is thinking strategically about where to place doors, windows, and wheelchair ramps in proximity to one another. “As we’re dealing with active-shooter planning and prevention of mass tragedies, part of that has to do with just time for first responders to arrive,” she says. “You’re building these layers at the front entry where you’re slowing people down and putting obstacles in their paths.” 

Unencumbered visibility for administrators who work near the front entrance is another key tool in buying time. Kotob and her team employed bullet-resistant glazing in the main lobby space, near the school’s front entrance, and equipped the glass throughout the rest of the building with breakage sensors. At the classroom level, glazing around entryways is kept to a minimum. 

“That was strategic, so we would allow for the entire class to tuck away in a blind spot in the room,” Kotob says. “So if an active shooter is walking down the hall, they peek through a window and they see,  ‘Oh, there’s nobody inside so let me keep going into the next room.’” 

Following the shooting at Santa Fe High School, where 10 people were killed, Texas’ lieutenant governor was ridiculed for suggesting that the attack might have been avoided if students had only one available entrance and exit. While it’s a strategy that many school designers already utilize, Kotob says, it’s incorrect to cast it as an infallible solution. 

“We can’t make those kinds of generalized statements. There is no, ‘Well, we can just wipe away the issue if this one thing was resolved,’” Kotob says. “While we do try to design for the most secure solution—which, in this case, at Marie Reed, is one door that the public can enter through, especially families and students—we still don’t know if teachers on the inside are going to be propping doors open to let kids in and out.” Using one entrance and exit also creates a bottleneck effect, making students particularly vulnerable targets during crowded arrival and dismissal times. 

In the process of working on security strategies for schools, architects also recognize the importance of prioritizing space for school support and mental health services. 

“Simple things like moving a counseling wing and putting those where students are located—near commons, near libraries—and then making them transparent,” says Ruiz. “Design can be an engager in prophecies that allow us to build softer schools—places where kids don’t feel disenfranchised and lost in the first place.” 

Architects stress that design isn’t going to singlehandedly solve the problem of students encountering danger at school—or perpetrating it. Pamela Moran, superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia, says it’s important for K–12 schools to put an emphasis on addressing social-emotional learning, and for staff to be trained in looking out for warning signs of declining mental health in students.  

“I think you have to take a multifaceted approach,” Moran says. “How do kids develop that personal social-emotional competency? We want to make sure we have kids with as many skills as possible to cope with the things that might turn into anger towards themselves or others.”

Kotob also emphasizes that design can only be one piece of a larger whole. “There is a pie, and the pie is comprised of legislation, policy, education, awareness, and technology—and then architecture is one small piece of it,” she says.

Students first

Successful school design ultimately hinges on centering the needs of those whom the school is intended to serve. 

“Working with students specifically so that they can be co-designers with us, rather than recipients of a design that is imposed on them, is really important,” Ruiz says. 

For parents of public school students, sending their children to school comes with a sense of acceptance that there’s only so much that they — or anyone — can do when it comes to keeping their students safe. 

“If someone really wants to cause harm, they’re going to find a way no matter what you do, unfortunately,” says Albemarle County Public Schools Director of Learning Technologies Jamie Foreman, who has four children ranging from preschool through fifth grade in the school system. “That’s how I think about it as a parent.” 

As architects continue to innovate new ways to design for effective security measures, Ruiz emphasizes that conversations around designing safer schools should always recognize the vital role that public schools play in their communities. 

“We, as designers, are uniquely situated — through our training and through our work experience — to bring a myriad of people together from different backgrounds, with different perspectives, to solve complicated problems in beautiful and elegant ways,” she says.

Katherine Flynn is a writer/editor at AIA focusing on industry trends and emerging ideas.