How Can We Rethink Classroom Design?
More and more classroom designs are moving away from traditional, teacher-focused classrooms (with desks lined up neatly in a row) toward open, flexible layouts with furniture designs that support technology-enhanced learning and student-led group projects. If you’ve kept up with the latest changes in modern office design, you’ll see many similarities to the way that new workspaces have moved away from regimented office cubicles toward more open, collaborative environments. Let’s take a look at how these new classroom interior design ideas work in practice.
This classroom studies chemicals on phenolic worksurfaces and raises the hydraulic-equipped tables to standing height to keep the students engaged.
Classroom Design is Undergoing Major Change to Get the Most Benefit From New Education Technology
If you could build a new school from scratch, would you follow a traditional classroom design layout or would you opt for something completely new?
The rural school district in Eminence, Kentucky faced a choice. Their school district was failing and the small town was declining along with it. Superintendent Buddy Berry, a 4th generation alum of the school, sought to make a radical change: he led the effort to engage his students in building a brand new facility that would focus on personalized learning and help students prepare for college.
The new 30,000 sq ft school, dubbed the EDhub, wraps around a central core, where students ages K through 12 grade assemble for different classroom activities. Unlike traditional school designs, the EDhub space is incredibly open, providing a feeling of community which is further enhanced by the large expanses of glass window walls. Hallways wrapping around the core incorporate impromptu meeting spaces, just like the latest office designs.
The small, lower-income community elected to raise its own property taxes to fund the $6 million dollars needed for the new school. But their investment in the future is already paying dividends. Rather than shrinking, enrollment in the school has doubled. Whereas only 20% of Eminence students went on to college before the new facility was built, now 99.5% of the students enrolled in the college prep studies are on track to graduate from university.
What is Blended Learning and How is it Changing Classroom Design?
There’s a lot to unpack in the Eminence EDUhub video above.
For example, while many leading schools or libraries are thrilled to have one Makerspace at their facility, the Eminence school has eight separate Makerspace labs, including a robotics lab, a bio lab, a design thinking lab, TV production studio lab, and a tool shop lab.
Makerspaces promote hands-on learning by allowing students to learn about current technology by creating projects that reinforce STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) skills that they are learning in school. These projects, which can range from building Internet of Things-powered robots to more traditional woodshop and sewing projects, are often organized by the students themselves.
Formaspace created these flexible, custom modular desks for the makerspace at the Arizona Science Center. Makerspaces have become a key element of modern classroom design.
This brings us to the classroom design layouts at Eminence. What’s different there?
Like many new schools, their classrooms are designed for maximum flexibility. Not only can the furniture be moved around easily, so can the wall divider units, making it easy to create layouts for specific functions, such as student group projects or classroom presentations. Compared to traditional classrooms with all the desks lined in a row facing the teacher, it looks more like the interior of the latest Silicon Valley startup rather than a primary or secondary school classroom.
What’s the reason for the shift in classroom design after all these years?
The answer is there is a revolution going on in education right now.
It’s driven by a desire to take advantage of new technology to help the students learn on their own or by working in groups.
In this new philosophy, students learn by working together with other students on group projects, as well as spend time outside the classroom learning new material. Teachers no longer spend all their time giving lectures to students; instead, they use their time in the classroom to facilitate student projects, answer questions, and assess each student’s progress, often by receiving individual and group presentations from students.
This new approach goes by a lot of different names:
- Personalized Learning
- Integrative/Integrated Learning
- Blended Learning
- Flex
- Flipped Classrooms
In this article, we’ll use the term blended learning to describe this new educational approach.
Now a little history. Where did blended learning come from?
The term itself dates back to at least 2006 when C.J. Bonk and CR. Graham published their book The handbook of blended learning environments: Global perspectives, local designs. Nancy Van Note Chism at Indiana University has also written extensively on the topic, including her work in The Importance of Physical Space in Creating Supportive Learning Environments, co-edited with D.J. Bickford.
There is also the wonderful, self-deprecating story told by grass-roots education innovator Esther Wojcicki, a pioneering English and Journalism teach at Palo Alto High School in Silicon Valley. Wojcicki wrote a grant in 1984 to acquire eight of the first-generation Macintosh computers for her classroom. In the TEDx video below she explains how she was able to change her teaching approach to allow students to learn journalism by doing it themselves — by making newspapers, magazines, and video programs of their own creation.
Today the Palo Alto High School journalism has 500 students and publishes ten award-winning, student-produced publications. As the program has grown, there are now five journalism teachers, but Wojcicki often has as many as 80 students in her classroom at one time. This has only been possible by changing (or “flipping”) the classroom around where students work in self-directed groups, coming to Wojcicki for assistance and guidance.
What Do Modern Blended Learning Classroom Designs Look Like?
If you’re familiar with the latest trend in office design, with their open spaces, comfortable seating, easily reconfigurable furniture, spaces for impromptu meetings, and places to collaborate together on projects, the newest classroom designs will seem very familiar to you.
