Learning spaces

Some schools in the UK are fortunate enough to receive extra funding to redesign their learning space as part of the Building Schools for the Future programme. However, many do not receive this extra funding and face the prospect of delivering a 21st century curriculum in mid-20th century, or even late 19th century, spaces.

The school calendar

Learning spaces are locked in to a mutual relationship with the activity that goes on in them, each aspect placing demands or restrictions upon the other. In this sense, the limitations imposed by physical space upon the place, time and style of learning need to be re-examined by educators to assess whether or not a priori assumptions of the past still have modern currency. It may be the case that the duration of the school day, the position of examinations or the timing or even notion of extended vacations around harvest or factory down-times should be reviewed, given 21st century lifestyles.

Fabric of the building

Our consideration at Robin Hood School in Birmingham was how to make some initial steps towards redesign, while operating within the confines of a limited budget and older buildings. By removing doorways and knocking down walls, we lost our corridors and repatriated them in to the traditional classroom learning space. Free flow student movement between these new expanded learning spaces empowered pupil choice and supported pedagogical shifts towards learner negotiated outcomes.

The fabric of the building is fundamental to the freedom it provides for learners to explore learning. Attention to the details of seating plans can no longer be limited to the question of whether learners should sit in groups or facing the front of class. Rather seating design should extend to consider the effect that posture has upon learning (we tried sitting all day on our students’ chairs to focus our mind upon the importance of being comfortable). Furthermore, we adjusted our seating plans to provide a range of individual, group or corporate settings for discussion, reflection and learning. This re-design included consideration of the acoustic variety, lighting variation and vertical space within the design of our learning spaces.

Of course, the physical learning space is costly to alter, but taking initial small steps is a valuable start. In fact, building alterations are the easiest place to start redesign as all involved can identify the benefits or pitfalls of various configurations – the fruits of your labour are visible for all to see.  Much more challenging is the design of mental and virtual learning spaces.

Mental learning spaces

Our classroom teachers told us that they knew whether learners were going to have a good or a bad day within moments of their arrival in class. The mental space that we created for our learners was therefore, we decided, crucial to their effective learning. In the UK it is highly unusual for a school to offer counselling services for students, however, we made this a budgetary priority and worked with a local external agency to provide trained children’s counsellors to work with our most troubled youngsters. Developing their resilience and nurturing their emotional development, whether through one-to-one therapy or time spent helping younger children tend a shared allotment, has led to a balanced mental space and had significant impact upon the ability to focus of those students.

Web 2.0 learning spaces

However, 21st century learning provides a further opportunity for the redesign of learning spaces via the internet and this is an area that we have explored with interest at Robin Hood School. Recent years have seen a paradigm shift away from proprietary software and we felt that, on reflection, such suites offer little more to learners than other more traditional methods of recording learning. The advent of Web 2.0 technologies, such as TV webcasting, blogging, social networks or wikis have facilitated ‘always-on’ learning at our school, with 24/7 access to collaborative learning tools, spanning across time zones and cultures. The ability to work at home or school, day or evening, involving students from the same classroom, different year groups, or even different schools and countries, has positioned children to understand better the world in to which they will work and the diverse means in which they will connect and collaborate with their working colleagues. The learning space, it transpires, is much bigger than our ageing building.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Neil Hopkin is Headteacher of Robin Hood School, in Birmingham, England, UK. He is also Chair of National Steering Group Family of Schools, for the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, UK.

 

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