Category: Education and Educational Facilities

"Planning and Designing Schools," by C. William Brubaker, 1998
reviews, pricing or purchase
     "To ask the question "What will the school of tomorrow be? is to begin with the false and misleading assumption that our efforts should be and can be directed toward developing a single solution ...every school is unique. ... the people and neighborhoods they serve are distinctive ..."
     "The secret to "reusing" plans is easy to describe: School designs can be reused if the program, floor plans, sizes, sites, grounds design, access, and plans and specifications are reused without making substantial changes. ...but experience reminds us that educational programs usually need special and creative attention and that sites vary in regard to size, slope, and relationship to their neighbors.  Sometimes, however, the sites are similar, and so the archetype idea may make sense."
     Speaking about a prototype school design program in New York: "The teaching cluster is the pivotal piece of the prototype concept.  So that children don't get lost in a crowd, the block is designed for 300 students and is envisioned as a microcosm of the entire school.... With this kit of parts, rather than a single building design, many building configurations can be achieved. The alphabet soup of possible building plans (L-shaped, U-shaped, H-shaped, etc.) contains many options."

"Waiting for a Miracle: Why Schools Can't Solve Our Problems - and How We can" James Comer, 1997, reviews, pricing or purchase

"The Monster Under the Bed : How Business Is Mastering the Opportunity of Knowledge for Profit" by Stan Davis, Jim Botkin
      “…business and its businesslike ways are becoming the dominant educating institution in our society.” reviews, pricing or purchase

"Experience and Education," by John Dewey,
reviews, pricing or purchase

Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds, for Better and Worse, by Jane Healy, PH.D.
“Most children will choose an entertaining visual task over a more taxing linguistic one.” 
       “We’re beginning to pit knowledge institutions such as schools and libraries against broadcast and entertainment institutions.” Robbie McClintock, as quoted by Healy
      “Unless we get the emotional brain involved, higher-level thinking and problem-solving will be short-circuited.” 
      “Newer technologies emphasize rapid processing of visual symbols (e.g. icons, film strips) and de-emphasize traditional verbal learning (e.g., expository writing, text reading) and the linear, analytic thought process that accompanies it.” Sequential argument, reflection and “making pictures in your mind” are diminished in favor of immediate experience. It is easier to convey emotional tone with visual images than with text but more difficult to deal with abstract verbal reasoning, such as analyzing the difference between a republic and a democracy.”
      “True interactivity provides, at the minimum, the capacity to branch to different scenarios, to gather additional information, to take new twists and turns and, when very well done, to explore avenues never anticipated by the creator of the program,” David Thornburg, as quoted by Healy reviews, pricing or purchase

"Education and the Significance of Life," by Jiddu Krishnamurti
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"Ecological Literacy : Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World"  by David W. Orr 
reviews, pricing or purchase

"Power Up Your Library: Creating the New Elementary School Library Program" Sheila Salmon, Elizabeth Goldfarb, Melinda Greenblatt, Anita Strauss
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"School Design," by Henry Sanoff
      "...the expert is the least able to create anew idea, since the problem is often described in the technical terms of the expert's language, which makes it impossible to view the problem in a new way.
     "...the program usually relies on an idealized stereotype of the building's occupants. Institutional clients rely on building committees to advocate the user's point of view.  Such committees are often far removed from the needs of those who actively use the building."
      "... workshops quickly gave us information for which we would have worked for weeks, and some of it we would never have discovered, buried as it was in people's personal feeling."  reviews, pricing or purchase

"Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning,"
by Henry Sanoff,  reviews, pricing or purchase 
       An excellent sourcebook for educational planners. Sanoff describes the Visioning Process, Awareness Walks, Action Planning, Participatory Games, Post Occupancy Evaluations and more, with detailed references, charts and illustrations. While incorporating materials from his 1994 book “School Design,” new case studies command our attention. The planning of Centennial Campus Middle School, a partnership between Wake County and North Carolina State University, designed by Boney Architects, is a good example. Sanoff shows us how the planning principles were arrived at, with a clear progression to diagrams and architectural floor plans.
       In an interview with Design Share last year, Sanoff spoke about the importance of post occupancy follow-up. He noted that teachers who actively participated in a creative planning process often arrange classroom furniture in traditional rows after construction, simply because it is familiar. A solution: meet with teachers early in the school year, and recall the principles from the planning phase; then roll up your sleeves and help them re-arrange the furniture! According to Sanoff, after a few minutes of furniture moving, teachers recall their earlier excitement from the visioning process; the meeting room empties, and each teacher goes to their own classroom to arrange the furniture in an optimal learning environment.

"Inventing Better Schools: An action Plan for Educational Reform."
     "Children, and adults, learn best when they want to achieve some end that is not possible without developing new skills, new understandings, new attitudes, and new habits of mind."
     "... the business of schools is to produce work that engages students, that is so compelling that students persist when they experience difficulties, and that is so challenging that students have a sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction - indeed, of delight - when they successfully accomplish the tasks assigned."
Phillip Schlechty, Inventing Better Schools, 1997, reviews, pricing or purchase

"Blueprint to the Digital Economy" by Don Tapscott
reviews, pricing or purchase
    "What does it mean to be in the educational sector when work and learning become the same activity?"

"Standards For Our Schools: How to set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them" Marc Tucker, Judy Codding, 1998, reviews, pricing or purchase

updated July 11, 2000