Over the years I must have seen hundreds of classrooms, everything from wood and mud buildings that house 80-plus students in rural western Kenya to 100sqm teaching laboratories for classes of 12 in leafy New England. While I’m convinced that the quality of teachers and school leaders has a greater impact on student learning than the spaces they work in, I know that well-designed teaching spaces can help bring about an improvement in outcomes.
With more schools in India and around the world realising the benefits of skill and concept based academic programmes, often referred to as international programmes, over rote learned, content based board examinations, our classrooms, and the opportunities they create, need to be on a school’s list of selling points; they can no longer simply be venues for lessons or the boxes in which teachers and students meet.
What do we need from a pedagogy perspective?
We know from the work of John Hattie (2008) that feedback, classroom discussion, teacher-student relationships and peer tutoring all have a significant effect on student learning. The same research also shows that open v. traditional learning spaces have no effect on learning in isolation. It is, however, clear to me as a practicing teacher and educational leader, that what we build into our classrooms can make some of those impactful teaching and learning strategies far more effective.
We need spaces that inspire students to be present, that facilitate participation and help deliver formative assessment. Classroom discussions are far better in a circle than in rows, feedback on understanding is clearer when there is a way for the class to show their teacher what they are thinking built into the room, peer tutoring can happen when clusters of students can get together in a space and listen to each other without hearing everyone else; all this can be brought forward by good design. We also need spaces that are flexible, that can be quickly configured to suit the tasks that teachers have planned, spaces that seamlessly integrate requirements of ICT for plug and play devices. We need spaces with good acoustic design that help retaining students’ attention and create a sense of calm by cutting out excess noise.
What is the relationship between pedagogy and spatial design?
When 25 classrooms were remodelled in the historic main building of The Doon School over a two year period, the priority was for the rooms to become part of the teacher’s toolkit, places that created more opportunity for them to cause learning. As well as the remodelling of the rooms, we needed to do the equivalent in up-skilling the teachers to make use of the opportunity and to understand how and why student learning would be enhanced through their planning and teaching in the new spaces. Using John Hattie’s (2008) meta-study of what causes learning and the work of Dylan Wiliam (2011) on formative assessment, feedback and questioning as the starting point for professional development, we began to talk, explore and practice the pedagogy that was research based and design classrooms and spaces to improve learning.
Without the investment in time and training there is still some benefit to remodelling classrooms that are out-dated or have become physically, visually or acoustically uncomfortable in the context of 21st century requirements. It’s worth noting that from a hierarchy of needs, personal comfort will improve a student’s capacity to concentrate as well as their engagement and behaviour of a class.
Historic classrooms, while having some charms, are more than just storerooms of out-dated infrastructure; they are the palaces of memories and nostalgia. There is a tendency to hold on to the past as a way of reinforcing identity through material elements, in this case the old teak desks, the enormous teachers’ tables and their comfortable armchairs. While the classrooms hold many memories and could easily remain temples to the education of a bygone day, they are also the spaces where new generations of students continue to learn in different ways; what classrooms looked like and supported even 30 or 40 years ago is not longer fit for purpose.
Defining a vision for the project.
The environment in which we learn, work and live has its effect not only on our learning, but also our readiness to learn. Studies have shown (Ryan, et al. 2014) that natural light and ventilation, as well as access to the natural environment, have an impact on the emotional well being of a human being. A well-designed space will stimulate the mind and encourage engagement; essential conditions for learning. It was challenging to cater to the requirements of 21st century teaching within a 100 year-old building and a plethora of technical issues such as structural design, acoustic treatment, lighting and furniture had to be balanced with the heritage aesthetics of the structure.
The underlying design principle was not to restore the classroom to its early 20th century classical design, but to create an environment that better supported learning in the 21st century without damaging any of the historic fabric. We worked with the principle of adding a new layer, a layer that was reversible, that didn’t take the past away, but reinterpreted it for the future.
Principle 1: Creating the pedagogical environment
The refurbished room had to facilitate the move from a room built around teacher-talk and content-delivery to one that places student learning needs at the heart of the design. It was important for the teacher to have a place to work that was not the fixed focal point of the room; the teacher would be more mobile and students would often be taking the lead. Space for the teacher’s mobility and mechanisms for the collection of frequent and rapid formative feedback, both from and to students, had to be included; a low, wrap-around white board was one solution for the students to share what they understood.
Principle 2: Creating flexible spaces
Flexibility within the classroom that allowed for individual, pair and group work or for formative assessment tasks like gallery walks, debates and peer teaching, was achieved by restoring the spatial volume of the classroom, providing more compact, light-weight furniture and integrating ICT seamlessly into the existing environment. The primary design objective was creating a space that could match the requirements of the task being planned by the teacher, which might require two or three transitions during the lesson. For this it would be important for furniture to be moveable so that it could be configured for and by students to work individually as well as collaboratively and for the chairs to allow fast and quiet movement; the choice to have chairs on castors proved significant for flexibility as well as student behaviour and engagement (you can fidget by adjusting position without resorting to leaning back in a chair on castors).
Principle 3: Creating open and naturally ventilated spaces with abundant natural light
The design of the space and the way it made people feel was integral to it becoming a successful learning environment. One of the underlying principles was to ensure that the classroom space maintained its inherent character. The design encouraged abundant natural light into the rooms through its original spatial configuration. Doors and windows were restored and the connection with the natural environment enhanced. 21st century teaching requires that the classrooms need to be dark for projection so providing motorised blinds added to the hassle-free flexibility of changing light conditions in the classes based on the needs of the lesson plan.
Principle 4: Creating bright and happy spaces that support learning
The one bold transition from the heritage was the addition of colour, the use of soothing shades of blue, green and yellow created the bright environment that was needed to make the space warm. Lighting and integrated tech also served as the resources to lift the energy and hold the engagement of the room together, making it possible to have transitions that draw segments of a well planned lesson together without having to move.
Principle 5: Creating calm environments through acoustic design
The original classrooms at The Doon School were designed in the 1930s and had not be remodelled for many years. They had not been designed with AV equipment in mind, making them unfit for teaching in the 21st century. With concrete floors, plaster walls and high ceilings, the teacher had to raise their voice to be heard clearly and any classroom discussion became drowned out by the reverberation. Rooms need to be acoustically warm and able to respond as both a library and a conference room as well as a classroom. The noise from the old ceiling fans further added to the poor acoustic quality, making the teacher completely inaudible in the rear section of the class on a warm day, which had a direct impact on student learning and behaviour.
While the acoustic design companies were trying to sell us suspended cloud ceilings, our heritage architect was against the application of suspended ceilings. She was of the opinion that while it may have a positive acoustic impact, it would have a detrimental impact on the architectural character of the space.
The design solution that was co-created with the architect ensured that the heritage character of the brick jack arched ceilings was preserved while the practical issue of improving the acoustics was delivered. We decided to treat the walls up to a certain height with traditional wooden panelling and then with a variety of acoustic panelling, again, in keeping with the heritage architecture. The simple physics of creating an air gap to absorb sound was further developed to improve the walls of the classrooms.
There were a lot of questions about using carpets in classrooms, particularly their durability and look as well as their maintenance. The question of having carpet is already answered if you have decided on acoustic treatment for the walls; it’s not about how they look or feel as much as about how they sound and contribute to the acoustic environment. A hard-wearing, but attractive carpet was required and we found a tiled carpet to be the most practical solution.
Lessons learnt
Pedagogy and research informed teaching and learning requires the spaces in which teachers work to create the opportunities for them to do and be their best. Furniture, surfaces, materials and the tech in the room are all part of the toolkit the teacher has at their disposal.
When doing the research into what we wanted in our teaching spaces and what was available on the market, we learned that there is no shortage of people looking to sell you what they have or what’s out there, but the value came from finding those who understood what causes learning and, more often than not, we found that we were teaching vendors what that was.
Lesson 1: Know what you want, what meets your needs
We found that we had to do the work of guiding vendors, articulating our needs, listening to them tell us why what they had was right and then bringing them right back to what would be happening inside the classroom with their products so that they could understand why, actually, that wasn’t what we needed at all.
Lesson 2: For best results a co-creation process is most effective
Designing educational spaces, like a good lesson, is a collaborative effort where the designers need to understand the pedagogy and create an environment that is conducive to learning. It is not simply about how these spaces look, but how they work, how they improve learning and engagement and how they contribute to better classroom management and behaviour that makes a better classroom. Teachers and heads of school do not necessarily know what is available to them in the market and architects and vendors do not necessarily know what pedagogy is required. By inclusively workshopping the project with a school’s stakeholders and establishing an iterative way-of-working with the design team it is possible maximise each other’s contribution to the outcome. We found this relationship at Doon with ATA* and were able to maximise our own learning and the learning for other schools we had a close relationship with over the various iterations and projects that we developed together; classrooms, offices, staff residences, dorms and common rooms, science laboratories and the design for a maker-space.
Lesson 3: Plan for the future, create spaces that are robust and easy to maintain
An important feature of the design was that it was to be robust and low maintenance, many of the design decisions were taken with the view that they would be lasting for at least 25 years. Mistakes can become time consuming, expensive to fix or something that you have to live with and it can take several iterations of a design to get it right.
As well as the quality of the products chosen, the quality of the installation and civil work under the surface has a knock-on effect that will present itself over months and years after the work is done. Without a tight project management team, or project lead, there is always the opportunity for slippage and with school owners and boards being rightly conscious of where their money is being spent, it’s too easy for the lowest quotes or the next cheapest similar alternative to be considered the right one. Costs need to be considered over the expected lifetime of the room and looking back at the last time any investment was made… in some cases, as at Doon, this might be decades ago.
Outcomes
Following the refurbishment of the classrooms and the professional development for the faculty there was a demonstrable improvement in several aspects of teaching and learning that were observed by the faculty themselves, by heads of department and me on our classroom walkthroughs and, most importantly, by the students.
First and foremost was the classroom management; teacher mobility being key to this, as was having quiet furniture and movement that allowed for fidgeting to rightly go unnoticed. Next was the collaborative and group work that was facilitated by the rooms, with some departments actively changing their schemes of work to make full use of the flexibility and turning what were very didactic units into something more experimental and problem solving.
Teacher-talk** reduced and students found their voice because they could be heard. Progress was being made based on more frequent feedback facilitated through group questioning and from visible thinking and answers collected on the whiteboards; more learning was happening in the classrooms with fewer students being left behind or able to hide in the corners.
Teachers who had been teaching in the rooms for over 15 years reported that they were trying new things and that they felt closer to their students as a result of the double horse-shoe arrangement that became the default arrangement compared to the historical three row (triple barrier) default.
Students reported being more engaged in class, also as a result of the new default arrangement, and that they were also more likely to contribute because they could hear what was being asked and what other students were saying; this is a key result for improving classroom discussion, one of the things that has a large impact on learning.
Students reported feeling less sleepy in classes with the new lighting and, although they had a preference for one colour over another, they found that the colour lifted the environment. They also reported that their teachers were asking more of them in terms of tasks and working together. This was an important outcome not only because it demonstrated greater planning on the part of the teachers, but also because life is all about working together and the more we are preparing our students for this, the better we are serving them.
It is difficult to identify a causal link between what we did to the classrooms and something like the exam results of the students. I am convinced that the way-of-working that both the teachers and students were able to adopt and grow into as a result of the classroom refurbishment will have a positive effect on the way they work in their universities, for their internships and on the teams they are part of or lead in the future.
It was particularly exciting for the school and ATA to share in the recognition from UNESCO of an Honourable Mention in the 2016 UNESCO Heritage Award Winners for work that, “exhibits notable technical accomplishment in preserving the character of a renowned historic institution, while incorporating modern educational technologies in an unobtrusive manner.” “The practical skills training in construction techniques and traditional building methods conducted as part of the project was found to be in keeping with the pedagogical mission of the school.”
Any school, head or board that would like to share in our learning, process or understanding of classroom design and the professional development for teachers to get the most out of their classrooms, is welcome to contact us at MR Ed. Partners or ATA.
* ATA; Aishwarya Tipnis Architects email: studio.ata.delhi@gmail.com
** Teacher-talk; the percentage of the lesson that a teacher dominates with their own voice. If a teacher is talking for 90% of the lesson then the maximum amount of time that you know the students are thinking about what you want to them to be thinking about is only 10%. Learning happens when students are caused to think, so teachers need to reduce their talk and increase the tasks and questions that cause thinking.
Hattie, John 2008. Visible Learning. Routledge ISBN-13: 978-0415476188
Ryan, et al. 2014. Archnet-IJAR, Volume 8 – Issue 2 – July 2014 – (62-76)
Wiliam, Dylan 2011. Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press ISBN-13: 978-1-935249-33-7
