Imagine a secondary school designed to meet the educational needs of the next 30 years.
A school that includes integrated features that make it a kind of walk-through textbook on environmentally proactive school design.
Large screens throughout the school provide an interactive graphic interface to help inform visitors and students about the status of the sustainable systems being used.
The building itself is a kind of 3-D experiential learning centre linking the science curriculum to the reality of sustainable design.
Systems being monitored in real time include solar water heating, photovoltaic lighting systems, rainwater harvesting for toilet flushing and a weather station.
Did I say a school of the future? Not at all.
The vision of a school as a living textbook that integrates green strategies resulted in the creation of the Northern Guilford Middle School in Greensboro, North Carolina, a school of 850 students from Grades 6 to 8. The school has a design that encourages curricular integration well beyond its STEM courses, which integrate science, technology, engineering and math.
The design for a 2021 school will give students a chance to understand the functional relationships between previously separate areas of knowledge. Even visual and performing arts can benefit from that integration, through physical proximity to shop courses in scene building and design, as well as technology courses that enliven school productions — and large group lessons.
The kind of thinking that went into North Guilford is by no means unique.
Pods of classrooms with adjoining common space are becoming increasingly common in both elementary and secondary school design. These “pods” provide opportunities for teachers and students to work together in large groups, small groups and one on one.
Checking for understanding as a lesson proceeds has always been the key to a successful lesson, but some students are reluctant to ask questions as the lesson flows past them.
The introduction of iClick technology as an integrated part of classroom design addresses that problem.
Each student has a handheld clicker, something like a TV remote. As the lesson progresses, students press a number on the clicker that represents their level of understanding. The results are graphed out on a screen at the front of the room, so the teacher can get a reading on how well the lesson is being received.
Audience-response systems like iClick have been found to have significant positive impacts on classroom participation, allowing students and teachers to monitor progress several times during a lesson.
The use of both offline and online learning technologies such as Moodle, the popular learning-management system, has, up until now, been hampered by lack of access to plug-in power at each desk or learning station. 2021 schools will allow students to charge their devices from virtually any location in the classroom from outlets embedded in furniture and tables.
Another design feature for 2021 schools has been transparency.
Experience has shown that internal transparency is not distracting — no more long hallways with doors with little papered-over windows. Quite the contrary: transparency creates an atmosphere of openness and trust, which reassures students about what the school is for.
The same transparency principle applies to the establishment of a visual relationship between the interior of the school and its exterior environment.
As far back as 1992, a study on the effects of light on children of elementary school age conducted in Alberta by the Policy and Planning Branch of Alberta Education supported the case for daylight in schools.
While the study’s most striking conclusions focused on the positive effects of daylit schools on student health and general behaviour, other studies showed improvements in student performance of between five and 14% for students in daylit schools over non-daylit schools.
Schools for the new century will include areas where students are able to congregate to work, talk, or simply enjoy being at school.
These areas are also provided to encourage the opportunity for more frequent but less formal interaction and conversation between students, and between students and teachers — the kind of thing that usually only happens when teachers coach school sports or produce school plays.
There is a message of trust in all this: “We know you are here to learn.”
That message of trust is, in the view of most contemporary educational thinkers, essential to the development of a sense of student ownership of the school and its purposes — and contemporary thinking about school design can contribute to that.
gfjohnson4@shaw.ca
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
