Harvard LEFT 2015: What I Learned

In April 2015, NAC visited Cambridge, Massachusetts for the “Learning Environments for Tomorrow: Next Practices for Educators and Architects” two-day workshop. During the workshop architects and educators from around the world came together to understand key principles of designing innovative K-12 learning environments. The following are ideas and concepts that emerged from the event.

Common themes that arose:

Access. The importance of flexibility of spaces, and providing different kinds of access (moving around a space; access of re-configurability). Access effects the way information flows. Visual and physical access is a cognitive cue. They also talked about the importance of movement and places for introverts as well as extroverts.
School as a home. Classrooms are like family units. Having schools with home comforts can encourage community building and a connected culture.
Personhood + Space. The importance of both students and teachers having the ability to manipulate the space. This idea that one's personhood is invested in a space; when we do things to personalize our spaces this has functional implications as well as emotional. Students thrive when they are able to arrange the environment to suit their needs.
Student Agency. The idea that students are agents of their life and learning. A constructivist view of education.
Campfires, Watering Holes, and Caves. The idea that there are three archetypal learning spaces – the campfire, cave, and watering hole – that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student learning. The campfire is where students gather to learn from the expert; it's storytelling at its best. The cave is a private space for reflection, where students can transform external knowledge into internal belief. Finally, the watering hole is an informal gathering space where everyone functions as a peer.

Thought provoking questions:

What is a school without a classroom?
Why does a classroom exist as a unit of organization within a school plan?
Why do classrooms have boundaries that are aggregated into the form of a school?
Is the classroom just a unit of custody?
Is the classroom in opposition to 21st century learning and student empowerment?
Where is the sweet spot between cautious change and more adventurous change, and how do we accelerate that sweet spot?
How do we start the process of teacher professional development and curriculum design early on in the design and build so that the building can be used as a third teacher (aka when the doors open the curriculum and building are already aligned)?

Thought provoking statements:

Schools are the lynchpins for cities of the future.
A great metaphor for schools is a theater. A stage uses props to change the sense of space, and sometimes at a rapid pace. It's very quickly reconfigurable to adapt to different persona.
High Tech High is credited with being the poster child for project based learning (PBL). Here's what one of the founders said about his school: “PBL is somewhat impoverished in tagging what it is we do and what we want to do – it's more about kids doing transformative work in the community.”
The difference between open floor plan schools of the 70's and today is technology.

When thinking about how to create a design guide for a school, they wanted us to use the following 5 P's:

Learning context/people: demographics, developmental needs, target population
Essential educational program features
Guiding architectural design principles
Key spaces and adjacencies/particulars
Conceptual design diagrams/plans

Three “hazards” to keep in mind when designing:

The tension between high visibility and privacy (and security);
The tension between flexibility and opportunities to personalize;
The tension between flexibility and chaos.

The information that was gleaned from this conference has certainly stimulated our thinking and the work that we do.

Lauren Scranton

KNOWLEDGE & INNOVATION LEADER