Learning can and should be joyful, right? Here are three school redesign projects that highlight creating buildings and classrooms from a learner-centric view. The results are not only promising, but inspiring.
Welcome to part two of our series on school building designs which drive learning, support the teacher and are not only technology rich, but sustainable.
Discovery Elementary School, Arlington, Virginia: A Place of Joy
The Discovery Elementary “net-zero” public school in Arlington, Virginia was envisioned to be a hundred percent sustainable campus that was a place of joy for kids to learn. It opened in September of 2015, after breaking ground in March of 2013. It is 98,000 square feet and designed to serve 630 pre-K through 5th grade students.
Robert Moje, who was the project leader, said of Discovery, that the spaces are proof that kids can learn in an environment that is inviting and encourages joy in engagement. “If we can get the children to be happy and joyful, just to be there while they are learning, then 95% of the effort of getting them engaged will be taken care of.”
Part of the feedback that exemplified how the school spaces are achieving their goal was when a young student demanded of his mother that he be taken back to school, after a dentist appointment, for the last 30 minutes. “Johnnie got picked up by his mother to go to the Orthodontist at 2:00. He came back at 2:45. School ends at 3:15,” said an administrator over attendance. He insisted to his mother that he had to get back to school because he wanted to be there at the end of the day and for whatever little activity was left.
Moje, a senior architect who has been redesigning schools for the past 40 years, recommends that schools consider how they would create a place of joy from a child’s point of view. “Everything about the building and grounds at Discovery Elementary were themed,” said Moje. “The pre-school is the back yard, the middle school starts with fields and forests, then you have the ocean and eventually the atmosphere, the galaxy and the universe beyond. Interestingly, during our initial research, John Glenn, from Ohio – on of the U.S. Astronauts – had lived right across the street from this site and had trained for Friendship 7, the first man in space, by running around the site. So that’s where the name Discovery comes from. His last flight was on the Space Shuttle ‘Discovery’, so ‘Discovering the Joy of Learning’ is the long name of that school.”
Buckingham County Primary and Elementary Schools: Revived from Total Lost Cause
Buckingham County Primary and Elementary Schools is another example of a campus which was redesigned from the ground up to change the paradigm of how teaching and learning happens. Buckingham County was in fact considered a lost cause. Their leadership was told they were going to be consolidated into another larger district. They would lose all identity. They had five elementary schools and they were all old and worn out. Doing anything but closing some of their schools and bringing others into another system seemed the only solution as every other option was too expensive. 
A new Superintendent came in and decided he was going to do something different. He started with what had been an old African American K-8 school/High School side-by-side that they had abandoned, mostly because of perception and their history. He pulled his engineers and architects in and asked them what they could do. The buildings were not great but they were empty and work could start, so that kept certain costs low.
The design team created a total learning environment in order to support learning both inside and outside the traditional classroom. It was a ground-up change. It didn’t have to be expensive, but it had to change so that the families nearby could believe the school had new potential.
Now at Buckingham, each grade level enjoys age-appropriate outdoor gardens and play terraces, which encourage children to re-connect and spend time in their natural surroundings. Inside the schools, in addition to core classrooms, each grade level has small group learning spaces that transform circulation pathways into child-centric “learning streets.” These spaces are intimately scaled with soft seating and fun colors that communicate both collaborative and shared learning experiences.
“When Buckingham was reopened in September of 2012, the community poured in and parents and students were there and you heard kids looking up at their parents and saying, ‘Can we stay here, can I live here, can I sleep here every night?’” said Moje.
Further Exploration
Tens of thousands of schools out across the world still have their existing buildings and infrastructure from thirty years ago, some even from a hundred years ago. It will be difficult but some schools are making it happen “in place.”
Take for example, Alexandria Country Day School (ACDS) in Virginia. Constructed in 1943 and originally a Catholic girls school, ACDS’s schoolhouse has been improved and modernized in a way that retains the spirit and warmth of the old, yet has inserted into it a very modern, flexible and responsive approach to teaching and learning. Central to the classroom re-design are mobile adjustable standing desks from Ergotron, called “LearnFit” desks, which allow for both student personalizati
on and teacher flexibility.
ACDS consulted with Dr. Ellen Fisher of the New York School of Interior Design, to transform the classrooms while maintaining the original classic look of the buildings. She stated, “Our goal was to achieve less-specific and more multi-use learning spaces that are purposeful today and flexible for the ever-evolving pedagogy of tomorrow.”
Bob Hill, Ergotron’s Education Manager, concurs, “The physical classroom itself plays a significant role in realizing the promise of 1:1 devices and personalized learning tools, and classroom furniture must keep pace with technology and students’ varied learning styles. Student desks need to promote better metabolic learnstyles, greater student engagement and natural collaboration.” A growing body of research shows that there are metabolic health benefits to introducing standing into the classroom, which are exhibited in the form of greater student engagement and on-task behavior, which has a positive impact on academic performance.
Some tips for any “remodeler”:
Here are a list of design concepts to consider when designing or redesigning your school or classroom spaces:
- Good acoustics, baffles or movable walls.
- Mobile indestructible and bright furnishings.
- Casual and center-stage type interaction and isolation spaces.
- Different sized places for different groups to interact.
- Places for storage and material, for continuing art projects or robotics or maker-space activities. (Space allocated so that materials can be left out for long periods of time.)
- Nooks and relatively private corners to read.
- Lots of light.
- Spaces to experience nature.
“Just think if we flipped those statistics of 60-70% of kids who are absolutely bored out of their minds,” said Moje. “What if we had those kids absolutely engaged and creatively using everything we have available for them because we accomplished this transformation of education?”
