Millis Road Elementary School

Narratives

Architect Narrative

This school was designed in 1961 to accommodate 560 students. The increasing student population in the district mandated the need for more learning space. Funding was designated to offer five new classrooms including self contained classroom, resource rooms, relocated offices, upgrading of technology, and reconfiguring and adding more parking spaces.

Exemplary Design Ideas Enhancing Learning
A comprehensive collaborative process was envisioned for this project. A major component is a Post Occupancy Evaluation procedure for the exiting building acting as prelude for the development of the Architectural Program. The design team has developed an innovative solution based on extensive research and teachers and students input in the process. Ideas that pertain to healthy environment, safe outdoor learning, parking and students drop-off and pick-up have been explored and developed.

The design solution was developed based on L-shaped classroom concept. It adopts the premise that direct access to outdoor green areas would positively impact learning. Classrooms were aligned on a diagonal hallway with resource rooms at the end. The solution includes a hallway that connects the existing building to the new classrooms and to the student bus loading area. L-Shape classrooms were envisioned as physical settings that allow for flexibility, variety of seating arrangements, and provision of team teaching opportunities. All classrooms faced south since it provides the brightest levels of daylight, and offers direct access to the outdoors, which can foster the development of outdoor learning opportunities. The solution also features a widened hallway that provides additional space in front of the classrooms to display student work. The development of the final design was dependent upon several criteria including outdoor small gathering areas, transition spaces allowing for variety of activities, harmony between the new addition and the existing building, harmony with nature, and teachers’ productivity.

The final design solution sensitively interacts with the surrounding built and natural context. The design product and process both express a set of dialogues. While the product resulted from a coherent process involving a silent dialogue between the built and the natural, the old and the new, the process involves another visible dialogue between all key players in this process. The hierarchical relationships between indoor and outdoor spaces provide a dynamic teaching-learning environment, while the L-shape classrooms enhance multiple teaching methods that include team teaching, emphasize trans-disciplinary learning, and recognize students different cognitive styles and special needs.

Innovations in the Process that Supported the Realization of the Project’s Ideas and Concepts
The process adopted the bottom-up approach toward the realization of the proposed design ideas. In essence, consensus building, decision-making, and awareness raising are tied together in a collaborative coherent design process. The aim was to reach an innovative design solution that enhances teachers’ productivity while fostering students learning capabilities. The project involved a multi-event collaborative planning process that encompassed several procedures. These include literature and projects reviews, existing facility evaluation, workshops, awareness raising walking tours, alternative generation, and refinement of solutions. The process involved students, teachers, parents, and a positive interface between the design team and the client group. The school community was committed to participate in the planning process with the design team.

A three-day series of workshops was planned to emphasize the value of having the school community members participate in the process and how the results from this process could inform and influence the design of the new addition. The intensive nature of this process fostered a high level of energy and interest from the community and allowed students and teachers to interact continuously with the design team.

Workshop Process
The design team gathered at the School on the first day to plan the three-day event. Because the primary expansion consisted of an addition of classrooms, the first teachers’ workshop, attended by fifty participants, focused on the classroom. Teachers were provided with drawings of six different classrooms that were developed from a study of existing examples conducted by the team. They worked in small groups of four-persons to encourage each individual to share their ideas, and learn from each other. The teachers evaluated each classroom arrangement according to eleven criteria.

Discussion groups revealed the need to use outdoor green areas for their teaching activities and for the outdoors to be directly accessible from their classrooms. The teachers discussed whether these classroom alternatives would provide the necessary teacher workspace, enough space for flexible teaching activities, and enough storage for both students and teachers. They wanted classroom’s to provide good visibility and an adequate quantity of daylight. Teachers identified a variety of learning opportunities in the classroom arrangements that they desire to have in their own classroom. After considerable discussion, all groups agreed that the “L-shape” classroom arrangement was the most appropriate scheme for students. This arrangement offers sufficient circulation area to foster flexible seating arrangements; permits a variety of teaching methods; encourages team teaching; offers teachers simple transitions between activities; provides a sense of identity for students; and encourages small-groups to work independently.

Solution Generation
During the second day, the design team prepared alternative design solutions based on results from the survey, the checklist, and the team’s observations about the school building and its surroundings. Two schemes for the classroom addition were developed to be presented and evaluated by the teachers according to criteria that would distinguish between key features of each.

The designers continued to refine the design alternatives during the third day, and they prepared three-dimensional computer models and plan views of the entire site for a workshop that afternoon. Approximately 40 teachers attended this workshop. Again, the teachers were arranged in small groups of four people - - to encourage them to discuss and share their ideas. Design schemes were presented to the teachers with a list of criteria to compare and evaluate each. The criteria were developed from initial survey results where function and appearance were important considerations. The aim was to discover the teachers’ preferences for a particular design by rating design alternatives according to the criteria mentioned above.

Considering the increased student traffic, the designers observed that teachers were quite concerned about the sufficiency of the width of the hallway provided for access from the existing building through the new addition to the bus-loading area. Teachers felt, however, that the proposed location for the bus-loading area, in both designs, would help to relieve the traffic congestion occurring during drop-off and pick-up periods.

Parents Input
Following the three-day teachers’ workshop, the designers shared results of those meetings with, and solicited feedback from approximately 150 parents during a monthly Parent, Teacher, Student, Association (PTSA) meeting. Parents together with teachers then discussed other important issues in addition to the ones revealed in the workshop. Parents recommended finding another location for the administration offices that are presently located at the point of intersection with the new addition in order to provide a wider hallway to accommodate the increased traffic to the new addition. Parents had also a concern for preserving the natural characteristics of the site.

This innovative process revealed numerous factors that helped to inform the design team. Teachers were effective at evaluating and accepting innovative classroom designs, but were less able to creatively plan their own classroom. They willingly accepted new ideas that were beyond their everyday experiences. Most importantly, they commented that this was the first time they were asked to contribute their knowledge and experience in the design process.