By Jeff Pett, Fleetwood Group
Last week I had the opportunity to chat with an architect who is serving on a committee of sorts tasked with thinking through school design for the federal government. It seems the government is taking a little heat for not walking the talk of educational standards when it comes to schools for families of our service men and women. As many schools as there are on military bases around the globe, and with many of them being very old and outdated, these architects have been tasked with thinking through how new school buildings should be designed to deliver 21st century learning before the government launches into a slew of rebuilding/renovation projects.
The phrase “21st century schools” is already getting a little overused, and there is a whole cottage industry of consultants who claim to be able to guide schools to this Promised Land. Those of us providing products and services of various kinds to schools are always trying to figure out where trends in delivering education are going so we can help create the best environment to make that happen. For those of us at Fleetwood Group that means furniture and electronic audience response keypads.
One thing that piqued my interest early in this chat was the statement that they are working to keep the learning spaces as flexible as possible. I think that is wise. Our company has been dedicated to making learning spaces flexible since it was established in 1955 building mobile cabinets.
The challenge, though, in school design goes beyond the simple decision to use flexible furniture and casework. It really falls into 4 components:
1. Flexibility in the building (brick & mortar)
2. Flexibility in the furnishings (casework, storage, student tables)
3. Flexibility in the curriculum (books, media, delivery methods)
4. Flexibility in the teaching staff/methodology (teaching solo or on a team, support staff, delivery options)
Will teaching always be delivered, primarily, by one teacher to a relatively small group of students? Or will it be determined to be best if multiple teachers work with larger groups of students in bigger spaces? If the latter is the case, then will schools gravitate to creating buildings with fewer small rooms in favor of larger rooms? The answers to those questions will have huge implications for school design.
Frankly, keeping the furniture flexible might be the easiest component of the four listed above. If you make a decision to build a school with gathering spaces of differing sizes and shapes with NOTHING “built in” — putting every cabinet, teacher’s desk, student table, lab station, book shelf, locker and technology cart on wheels — your school will be the ultimate in physical flexibility and adaptability going forward for decades.
The least flexible component of those four is the brick and mortar. You can keep the design concepts super flexible until the day you start pouring the cement. At that point you have narrowed, to some extent, the flexibility in your school design.
With all of those variables to consider it can start to seem like one of those story problems we all loved back in school. At some point, though, you have to “paint or get off the ladder.” Decisions must be made. I heard one architect describe school design in a way that makes it a little simpler in my mind: he said to think of schools as an assembly of “caves and commons”. That is, smaller spaces and bigger spaces. The mix of spaces will be determined based on what the school is trying to achieve with a particular building, and there is no one-size-fits-all concept.
In the 50s and 60s schools were primarily “caves”, that is they were a line of rooms on either side of a long hall. Add a library and a multipurpose room (gym & cafeteria), the “commons” spaces, and you have your school. In those days architects weren’t needed much, and school boards often launched new school buildings with little outside input.
In the early 1970s we were sold the “open classroom” concept where there were as few walls as possible inside of these new schools. They were designed with mostly “commons” spaces and very few “caves.” I was an education student in college back in those days and I remember well a local school that went that route. It was an exercise in chaos! Within a couple painful years the school board brought the construction people back in to add walls and return to the comfort of “caves”. We do not want to go back there, I would submit.
My recommendation to school boards, school administrators and architects is to provide a mix of caves and commons spaces somewhere between the 1960s version of all caves, and the 1970s all commons, while keeping the furnishings unattached. The big question for individual schools to decide is that mix of types of spaces. I don’t think a one-size-fits-all answer is out there. There is no single “21st Century” school design. We are definitely trending toward less cave-based learning, but there will always be value in being able to work with a smaller group of students behind a closed door. Ideally curriculum and how it is delivered should be the key determinant for how a particular school is laid out, but that is in a state of unprecedented flux right now with schools trying to keep up with the pace of technological change. We might have to accept the added up-front cost of planning school buildings to be at 80% of capacity max so that whatever mix of caves and commons you go with your educators will still have some elbow room to make changes over time.
One thing that can be done today in every new or refurbished school that would help keep a building adaptable for a longer timeframe is to keep the furnishings as mobile as possible, building in as little as possible. That way whatever spaces you have will always be able to be easily repurposed for tomorrow’s as yet unknown needs at minimal expense.
