Innisfail Middle School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

The concept, planning, and design of this middle school represents a new approach to educational delivery for this school division. The team worked through the following points to plan and achieve this facility:

Design Advancement

This is a unique project that demonstrates four significant design advancements within educational facilities:
• Creates student-focused collaborative learning environments to improve student learning.
• Unifies two disparate schools through an innovative planning.
• Demonstrates a sustainable approach to facility planning through reconsideration of the indoor environment, material selection, accommodation of temporary growth, and future expansion.
• Blurs boundaries between the indoor and outdoor environment by exploring the idea of threshold in both architectural expression and functional programming.

Design Goals

This project was based on three design goals:

• To improve student learning through design.
Evidence suggests the design of educational facilities impact the ability of students to learn and retain information taught to them from within. Daylighting, spatial variability, indoor air quality, and acoustics all impact student performance, and were all considered as part of the development of a sustainable middle school.

• To encourage collaborative educational delivery.
Adopted by many educational jurisdictions as a preferred method of learning, this approach requires a strong commitment to team teaching, complementary programming in core subject areas, and project-based delivery for students.

• To reflect a strong sense of community within the educational facility.
The town is a close-knit, agriculturally based municipality that strives to promote its community spirit. This school, as a reflection of that spirit, needed to be developed to promote a sense of community between all three schools on campus as well as to the community.

Design Solutions

The following solutions highlight innovative responses to the facility requirements:

1. Classroom Pod

The classroom pod developed for this school emphasized the “school within a school” concept while considering the need for collaborative learning, connectivity to the outdoor environment, and flexible project-focused space. The basic premise and functional relationships were the same for each pod, with slight variations reflecting individual requirements of grade levels.

2. Facility location and long-term master plan

Along with maximizing programmatic overlaps between the high school and middle school, the centrally located facility acts as a hub for a future replacement elementary school. Site considerations included classroom orientation for daylighting, improved site access for community use and busing, and minimizing building footprint as part of sustainable design considerations.

3. Sustainable design

Sustainable design solutions included the incorporation of durable finish materials such as masonry throughout the school to reduce life cycle costs of the facility and improve indoor air quality for students. Improved indoor environmental quality was achieved through daylighting, functional efficiencies in shared space between the facilities, and improved acoustics.

4. Connectivity and threshold

To promote connectivity between school campus facilities, a palette of materials reflecting elements of the high school and elementary was used throughout the middle school. Connectivity was also achieved between the indoors and outdoors through the development of enclosed outdoor classrooms.

Educator Narrative

May 13, 2005

To Whom It May Concern:

Our new grade 5-7 middle school in Innisfail is an excellent example of designing to accommodate the way we deliver education to students. The end result is a facility that enables us to adapt our teaching philosophy and maximize student performance.

Our school division believes in collaboration. We envisioned a student-focused school emphasizing the middle school philosophy. With this goal in mind, the architect designed our middle school with three separate classroom pods — one for each grade. These pods create teamwork opportunities for students and teachers within each grade. Included in each pod are breakout rooms, flex areas, gathering spaces, and access to one of two outdoor classrooms. This variety of spaces allows for a broad range of interaction for cross-curricular programming opportunities. The flexible design achieves our goal of teacher and student collaboration, and helps maximize student performance.

The overall site where the middle school is located is actually a campus that encompasses an existing high school and elementary school. Early in the design process, the school division and architect realized learning opportunities existed through the planned sharing of facilities. As the high school suffered from a significantly undersized gymnasium, the design team recognized the chance to integrate the two schools. The middle school design included a larger gymnasium, but no CTS rooms. Instead, the students would have access to the CTS facilities in the existing high school, thereby exposing them to specialized technology and teachers at a high school level — programs that would not have been part of the middle school programming opportunities. There was an opportunity to share other specialized classrooms and spaces, for example the new, appropriately sized band room. With the high school and middle school physically connected there are opportunities to facilitate a more comfortable transition from middle school to high school.

A noteworthy feature of this middle school is way the design blurs the boundaries between the indoor and outdoor environments. An abundance of natural light flowing into the spacious interior, combined with the two outdoor classrooms, creates a natural setting in which our students can learn and grow. The day lighting also brightens and heats the school, while sensors turn lights on when the sunshine doesn’t provide optimal light for student learning.

There is no question that the design of the new middle school enhances opportunities for student learning and gives staff the opportunity to provide education in a student-centered manner.

Yours truly,
Heather Henderson-Hill
Deputy Superintendent