An interesting article out of New Orleans about the continuing challenges to fully house all of the returning students coming back to the Recovery District. This section on the use of modular schools in particular caught our eyes:

One 600-student modular campus is under construction. At least 10 more modular schools, designed to house 7,200 additional students, are expected to be open in the fall. Four of them are slated for Planning District 9 in eastern New Orleans. The site of severe flooding after Hurricane Katrina has just one open Recovery District school now.

Construction on another 600-seat modular school began in December.

Two west bank campuses — Rosenwald Elementary, capacity 400, and L.B. Landry High School, capacity 800 — are repaired but unoccupied. “Most of our needs are on the east bank,” Jarvis said.

Jarvis said that as many as 11 other buildings under construction could be ready later this spring and summer. Still more planned restoration projects are under review because of increased construction costs and discovery of additional damage, Jarvis said. That will likely lead the district to ask FEMA for full rebuilding grants for some campuses that originally qualified only for refurbishing, she said.

In the meantime, Jarvis said the Recovery District and the Orleans Parish school district are in the fledgling stages of crafting a long-term master plan for facilities. She said it will be joint plan designed for when the districts are again combined as one Orleans system, as existed before the state took over most of the parish’s public schools because of poor performance.

A couple of interesting stats from the article, as well:

• The Recovery District’s 19 open schools are at 93 percent of their combined capacity, she said, not including a continuing influx of enrollees since the new year.
• The latest tally put the parish’s 17 open charter schools at 97 percent capacity.
• Total enrollment for the Recovery District and charter schools was 16,159.

When the story first hit our attention, it raised eyebrows and seemed to be hard to fully appreciate. But the controversy over the proposed ‘cell phone’ lockers to be placed outside of New York City high schools seems to be still gaining momentum in the news circles:

New York City school officials are taking some heat for a proposed solution to the city’s controversial ban on student cell phones in schools.

The proposal would have students leave their cell phones in special lockers outside their schools, and students likely would pay 25 or 50 cents to use the lockers each day. Critics of the plan say they don’t see how schools will be able to accommodate the lockers–and they balk at the idea of charging students for their use.

From a practical design point of view, do you sense that such a trend could help off-set the reluctance school administrators have in letting cell phones in the school while still appeasing parent expectations? Or is this simply a solution destined to be reversed for its logistical and design weaknesses, as well as the obvious political debate?

Your thoughts?

There are 2 theories for understanding how to design a school for the future. [Note: slightly exaggerated to illustrate a point]

• One, simply be a very talented professional architect and/or planner who focuses on the literal realities of the ‘building envelope’ (et al) and internal systems (et al) and materials/costs (et al) and building schedules (et al), while leaving the learning theory and space-usage to the clients.
• Two, become a rigorous explorer in the land of education, taking note of what is really going on in the ever-changing landscape of what we mean by ‘learning’ and asking yourself what impact that may have on the way we conceive, design, plan, build, and maintain a building called ’school’ so that it best serves the future, not the past.

The first option could easily require a lifetime of professional practice and study and portfolio development. And there are plenty of clients who will be happy with this silo of expertise approach. The second option only matters if you think something is beginning to change on the educational facility landscape due to the evolution of learning, teaching, and what we mean by schooling.

If you are game for the second option, perhaps beginning to explore the key voices that are making up the edu-blogosphere might be worth your time. Let us give you an example:

Will Richardson, one of the most well known and respected bloggers and advocates for the creation of School 2.0 (i.e. learning happens in all directions, is anytime/anywhere, and is 2-way), offers the following ’school design’ provocation in a recent blog post of his:

And so I often wonder how long it will take before our traditional concepts of schooling will be also be significantly challenged by the shifts that a more co-operative rather than competitive Web environment is delivering. One obvious place where the disruption is especially transparent is the explosion of “open content” educational materials that are coming online every day. While the most obvious is the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative, which is providing the materials for over 1,600 courses free online, there are literally millions of pieces of valuable, solid content online that cobbled together could do a great job of replacing much of what we currently teach in schools.

In a presentation last fall, Todd Richmond, a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC, said that because of technologies that allow students to view powerful content online and then remix or reflect on that material by publishing their own reactions back to the world, “the previously strictly hierarchical relationships between teacher and learner are changing.”

He goes on to quote from District Administration publisher Dan Kinnaman the following impact-on-school-design point in his “School 2.0: It’s Time for Radical Innovations in Schooling” post in the magazine’s blog:

An alarming reality for K12: Despite the radical transformation of data storage and information access, there has been no associated transformation of K12 education. Alarmingly, there may be no sector of society where technology has had less impact.

That’s because K12 education persists in operating on the premise that to have school, you must physically co-locate teachers, students and curriculum materials. Teachers and students are assigned to stand-alone, self-contained school buildings that house paltry collections of mostly outdated curriculum materials. With rare exceptions, digital technologies and interactive communications are still largely peripheral to the primary activities of the typical school day.

The premise that co-location is required is invalid, and we need to stop spending inordinate amounts of time, energy and money to maintain it as our fundamental operational structure.

“Co-location.” Things seem to be getting interesting when you really analyze that from a future of learning perspective, mmm?

What we find intriguing is that more and more educators and technology experts and librarians are having ’school design’ conversations in the edu-blogosphere.

The question remains: are any school designers listening to this realm of your client’s conversation? After all, if you had access to the larger dialogue between enlightened educational leaders, wouldn’t you want to listen, learn and respond?

Our recommendations for exploring a few of the leading voices in the edu-blogosphere are (but not limited to):

• The Pulse (District Administration’s blog) gives you a great inside track to the administrators on a national level
• “The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog” offers some of the same level of insights for higher education in particular
• Will Richardson’s “Weblogg-ed” blog which focuses specifically on using blogging, podcasting and other read/write tools in the classroom, but is one of the best ‘big picture’ blogs for education available
• Edutopia’s “Spiral Notebook” blog which covers a wonderful range of topics impacting the current state of education, technology, media, and school design, too
• David Warlick’s “2 Cents Worth” blog which is one of the most read edu-blogs and truly pushes the conversation forward in terms of what the future of schooling may look like
• Doug Johnson’s “Blue Skunk” blog gives you and entry point into the world of librarians and many Library 2.0 conversations happening around the world. And he’s in-the-know when it comes to library design, too
• “Flux”, a blog recently released by Futurelab out of the UK, not only looks at the intersection of education, schooling, and technology, but hosts a number of school design conferences as well

As we said, this is only a partial list…but it’ll get you going. Contact us anytime at info@designshare.com if you want additional recommendations. And happy edu-blog linking!

Pleased to see long-time DesignShare friend and colleague Jeff Lackney quoted extensively in a recent article entitled: “Do Facilities Play a Key Role in Learning?” (News Sentinel, Ft. Wayne, IN, 1.4.07):

Jeff Lackney, an educational planner and architect for Wisconsin-based Fielding Nair International, studied the link between the quality of education and older buildings. “If I was to generalize, there is usually a 5 percent lower test score in buildings with lower quality ratings.”

Locally, the numbers support his findings. Standardized test scores in FWCS, whose 53 buildings average 52 years old, fall 10 percent below the state average. The average age of school buildings in the United States is 40 years old, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

“It is clear that a clean, orderly, uncrowded, well-maintained environment matters greatly,” Lackney said. “There is much research over the past 30 years that bears out the influence of the school environment on student and teacher morale and satisfaction.”

And as George Jackson, spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers, was quoted at the top of the article:

“When we talk about improving public education, the learning environment is something that needs to be part of the dialogue.”

Thanks to Kristen at ArchNewsNow for pointing us to this Business Week article called “Libraries for the Internet Age” which considers the evolution of public libraries from “centers of wisdom” to something that fuels social interaction:

Many of these libraries have also experienced record attendance. While some people come to take in the often dramatic architecture, much of the increase can be explained by something else: a sense of community. As it happens, a library is about more than books, and forward-thinking architects and designers have emphasized the library’s social role.

And obviously one can’t talk about libraries in this day and age without considering the potential anachronism vs. technology debate:

In these determinedly digital times, the idea of a library almost strikes one as quaint. Imagine: a collection of paper and books stored in one building to, well, gather dust.

If your local municipal library does happen to own a copy of a book you actually need (itself not a given in these underfunded times), it’s only too likely that it will be checked out anyway. Wouldn’t it just be easier to hop online and go to that great library in the sky?

Quite. Except that—like paper itself—the library has not been vanquished by the Internet yet. According to Library Journal, the number of public library projects (160) completed in the U.S. between July 1, 2005 and June 30, 2006 was low, but still robust. Libraries haven’t become anachronisms after all.

In fact, many new and renovated libraries are remarkably high-tech, and we aren’t just talking WiFi. The William F Ekstron Library in Louisville, Ky., boasts a so-called Robotic Retrieval System, a roaming crane that will find your book among the 1.2 million volumes in the stacks and deliver it to the circulation desk within minutes.

Note: We wrote about the robotic library a few weeks ago. Here’s the link.

In a potentially telling story out of the re-building of New Orleans, one school has aggressively been adding SmartBoard technologies to its classrooms as they develop an exciting strategy for the future of learning:

Workers are installing the first phase of a high-tech multimedia program at St. John the Baptist Parish’s two west bank schools that’s aimed at improving academic performance and introducing new job skills to students at the small, mostly rural schools.

The St. John School Board voted to spend up to $1 million on the project, which was proposed by a grass-roots committee of educators and community leaders.

This is occurring in 3 stages.

Stage 1:

Computer consultant Terri Lawrence of Detel said work began over the Christmas holiday with the installation of 11 “interactive white boards,” or SmartBoards, at each of the schools. The installation is scheduled to be completed by the end of January.

The 22 white boards are accompanied by a laptop computer for each teacher and an ELMO brand digital document camera. Teachers can use the boards in a variety of ways, Lawrence said.

The large white screens can be used as a class-size monitor for a computer, a touch-sensitive electronic blackboard or to display projected images from a digital document camera, such as pages of books, microscopic images and images of actual objects.

Stage 2:

In the second phase of the project, each school will get a mobile computer lab equipped with 30 laptop computers for the high school, and 24 laptop computers for the elementary school. Each mobile lab will provide wireless access to the Internet to the class using it.

The labs, called “computers on wheels,” or “cows,” allow teachers to lead a lesson on the Internet in the classroom. Every student can have a laptop to use.

Each school also will get a complete video conferencing cart, Lawrence said. The mobile setup includes a camera and microphone for two-way real-time communication via the Internet between students and a distant source.

Stage 3:

The third phase of the project will be the creation of media labs where students will learn video production and editing and newspaper publishing.

Whether existing computer labs will be used or a new lab created in each school for the program hasn’t been decided, but every teacher will be trained in how to use the media production software.

What impact do you think such an investment in future technologies will have on the rebuilding of New Orleans’ schools? Is it possible that what would have been an ‘extra’ in the past will be seen as mission critical as the city’s educational culture rebuilds?

Occasionally one runs into a story where students are invited to consider the refurbishment of a historic school they currently use. But an entire academic program geared towards historic preservation?

In Brooklyn, where the mystique of the 123-year-old Brooklyn Bridge looms, high school students learn about caring for the bridge and other historic landmarks in their own backyard.

Brooklyn High School of the Arts’ students are immersed in the country’s first and only preservation arts curriculum, which teaches the art and science of maintaining and restoring historic landmarks. Their education ranges from reading about preservation to hands-on work at historic sites in Brooklyn and New Orleans, where students recently helped stabilize a house foundation built in 1896.

While we missed the “Dome, Sweet Dome” story back in May, 2006 when District Administration first published it, but it definitely caught our attention nonetheless.

When a school design project attracts teachers or administrators, something good must be going on. Clearly echoes what many say in terms of retention, as well.

What caught our attention about one school in particular was that it was a dome — not an athletic structure, either — that attracted a Superintendent to apply for a new position:

Joseph Brown Sr. applied for the superintendent’s position at Grand Meadow (Minn.) School District #495 because the one-campus school building boasts a monolithic dome structure.

As a high school principal 30 miles to the west, he had heard his predecessor talk extensively about this new construction. When Brown read about the opening in the newspaper, he called the sitting superintendent on the spot to apply, and landed the position five days later. “Honestly, I never would have considered coming here had it not been for the dome school,” Brown says today. “I am a social studies guy and I was intrigued with the idea of circles. A lot of anthropology studies are about the importance of the fire pit and people working together in a community.”

While domes have a significant history in architecture, there are few examples of rigorous dome designs for academic settings. Because the cost of dome technology has dropped, a few US-based firms continue to seek school communities that see the potential:

In ancient days, they were the premier construction option and “dome and cheap were never in the same sentence,” South notes. The technology took a huge leap forward in the 1970s when engineers puzzled out how to inflate a fabric balloon within a circular foundation, then spray a layer of urethane foam to the interior and place reinforcing steel rods via a special hangar system. Finally, the outside is coated in a thin-shell concrete. That process has stood for three decades.

“It’s pretty hard to improve on an egg,” says South. “So we’re learning to make them look nicer.” Today’s monolithic domes usually sport planters around the base, with concrete shelves that jut out to make an inviting entry into the facility. In the education market, where bottom-line budgets rule, most school districts save the esthetic investments for the interiors.

Talk about inspiring a community to go the distance:

The idea so captured the imagination of the 1,000 people living in Grand Meadow, they passed a bond issue to build the entire K-12 campus as a series of five connected domes to house its 360 students and 34 full-time teachers.

But a trend of larger proportions?

By that same token, Hall can’t declare monolithic domes a trend in the education world. “It’s an option for solving a certain set of problems in a certain environment, but to me a trend is something that everyone gets involved in because it is applicable everywhere,” he notes.

To learn more about school dome construction, consider visiting the Monolithic Dome Institute out of Texas.

What does a school look like and offer if they claim “to have one of the most technologically advanced classrooms in [England]”?

Student voice:

Year six pupil Jacob Buswell said he feels like one of the “luckiest children in Europe. I just love working here,” he said.

Teacher voice:

Mr Hicks said: “The envelope of learning is being pushed hard once again here at Broadclyst Community Primary School with what we believe is the most technologically advanced classroom in the country.”

Worth a look at that National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities: “Educational Trends Shaping School Planning and Design: 2007″, a collection written by Kenneth Stevenson, Dept. of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of South Carolina.

The 12 trends:

• Trend One: “School Choice” and “Equity” Redirect Facilities Planning”
• Trend Two: Small May Trump Large
• Trend Three: Reduced Class Sizes? Maybe.
• Trend Four: Technology Goes Big Time
• Trend Five: The Mission May Change
• Trend Six: Classrooms are Being Reconfigured
• Trend Seven: Schools Go 24/7
• Trend Eight: Paper is Disappearing
• Trend Nine: Grade Spans are Changing
• Trend Ten: Special Education Has Gone Mainstream
• Trend Eleven: Early Childhood Programs? Plan on Them
• Trend Twelve: School is Where the Hearth Is

As Stevenson says at the end of his piece, “These twelve trends have the potential for making schooling in America unrecognizable within a few decades, so it behooves educators and planners to ask continually”:

• What is emerging in educational practice that affects the ways we think about schools?
• How is the demographic composition of our community changing the way education should be delivered?
• What will future taxpayers be willing to support?
• Can education be delivered in a more efficient, effective manner?

Your thoughts on these specific trends? The essential questions that Stevenson closes his piece with?

Thanks to a tip from DK at UK-based MediaSnackers, we were given a chance to peruse a dynamite collection of presentations called “Spaces, Places and Future Learning” geared toward the future of school design sponsored by Futurelab. These took place in the beginning of November, 2006.

Here are a few things that caught our eye:

Steve Thompson offers ideas on using innovative technology and practice to re-imagine learning spaces in “Extending the Learning Community”:

“I’m going to talk about digital villages. It’s a term I’ve heard and it could apply to many different things but I use the term to refer to a learning space that is the entire community. So what is a digital village?” Read the full transcript or download the PPt.

Ian Pearhouse considers how mobile technology will inform and challenge our perceptions of learning spaces in “Mobile Technologies and Learning Spaces - Where Next?”:

“…have a look at some of the more defined learning spaces that we already know about, school, colleges and university. So, we’ve got the classrooms and the labs, but already we’re looking at learning spaces that go outside of that, the playground, the sports field, the social areas, the cafes and dining rooms. Of course, we’ve got this huge opportunity with BSF to actually incorporate technology into the building that will aid learning in those spaces, be they formal or informal spaces. We’ve got learning in the home. There’s learning in the bedroom and the study, learning in the lounge, we’re learning in the kitchen. We can learn in the garden and in the street. Whatever hobbies we’re doing, talking to the neighbours or whatever, we’re learning all the time. In the wider community, parks, places of religious worship, in cafes and bars. So, out into the community, either in part or in whole.” Read the full transcript or download the PPt.

Anthony Bravo gives an educator’s view of starting a school and the accompanying design/planning implications in “World Class Buildings for World Class Education”:

“Basically, what I’m going to try and share with you is the experiences I’ve been through in regards to building Crossways Academy, and to give you what I wish I’d had three years ago when I started the process. This is an idiot’s guide to making sure you get a world-class building and institution.” Read the full transcript or download the PPt.

Alastair Clark considers e-learning’s impact on the way learning will unfold in the future in “Hang Out Your Learning”:

“…take lessons from the way that e-learning’s been adopted in adult and community learning environments, where learners often only attend class for less than 4% of their waking week.” Read the full transcript or download the PPt.

We also noticed the past DesignShare contributor Bruce Jilk also participated in the 2-day event. Great to see that!

Note: this barely scratches the surface of the presentations offered by Futurelab here. Well worth exploring them in their entirety.

If anyone from Futurelab wants to share some insights as to their work, we’d welcome that! Contact us at info@designshare.com

Consider John Pederson’s recent blog post graph of the “Rate of Change” disparity between schools and the real world.

While this is not a specific issue to school architecture, it does offer our community a chance to consider how the campus designs we support and construct help to foster such a disconnect. And ultimately, we are challenged to ask ourselves whether school designers should help ‘lead’ their educational clients/partners in the direction of new ways of thinking, or merely support what they are asking for from day one? And ultimately how wide a net we should cast to make an argument for what we really mean by a ’21st century school’?

What do you think?

Looking into the near and distant future, do you see school design creating more ‘citadels of learning’ or ‘museums of learning’? David Warlick might have an idea or two for you.

In the rising tide of education-bloggers and podcasters, David Warlick quickly races to the front of anyone’s list of recommendations. And more and more schools are bringing David in to help them wrestle with how to take advantage of the amazing array of technology and web 2.0 tools that can truly transform classrooms into dynamic learning environments.

He’s been writing recently about what he sees as an emerging renaissance of ‘learning’ taking place in schools. This is a list of key change-agent components he sees beginning to take shape:

I’d like to spend a little more of your time exploring just a few ideas of what an education renaissance might look like.

• Students actively pursue learning — Our children’s intrinsic curiosity does not go away by middle school. Instead it is refined, because we come to understand that curiosity is a potent source of energy to be harnessed for education. Further more, we empower learners with access to content and tools to work the content in order to satisfy their curiosity and the other needs of growing children and young adults.
• Teachers become learning consultants - managers and modelers of learning — Regardless of what that introduction implies, teachers stop looking like managers and start to become partners in their classrooms. They are consultants who help their students learn to teach themselves (It’s the best thing they can learn to do today). Teachers can do this, because they too become empowered with access to content and the tools to work the content, and are connected to dynamic networks of professional collaboration. Teachers explore, experiment, and discover along with their students, even if they already know the material. They always learn something new and celebrate it with their students.
• Classrooms become learning engines — We stop relying on laws of physics — mass & momentum — to drive learning, and instead, cultivate our classrooms into learning engines. I believe that we are going to learn a lot about this as we start to pay attention to video games. We will learn what it is about highly interactive games that make children (and adults) want to learn, and begin to infect our classrooms with these same elements of need.
• Schools become museums of learning — School will cease to be citadels of learning. Instead, they will turn themselves inside-out and become an integral part of their communities. They will come to mirror their communities as the communities come to mirror them. People will see not only the raw data of the traditional assessments of their children’s most basic information skills, but also the relics that result from the real learning that happens afterward, the learning that happens as students begin to lay the tracks to their future.

Given David’s observations, what do you see as the potential impact in the world of school design? And how are you and your clients beginning to wrestle with this underlying platonic shifts in the way you imagine the layout of your school/campus?

Your thoughts?