SCHOOlS OF THE 21 ST CENTuRY
IMPlEMENTATION
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learns. In a typical school, we create a classroom for one way of instruction, and everyone has to fit that. What is different about the School of One is not just that the instructional modalities are changing, but when you take the teacher out of a direct-instruction environment and make him or her more of a participant in the learning, and put the kids in charge of their own instruction, it fundamentally changes the way spaces get organized.” The drawings show how such a school might appear someday (see previous page). Rooms are smaller than one might find typically, and a variety of furniture types and partitions can be rearranged quickly and easily. The students begin their day at a central gathering space. “That’s like a living room, where the students go in the morning and pick up their new playlist, and see what they will be doing that day.” Although classrooms for largegroup instruction are available, “We envision that they could be rearranged in 12 or 15 different ways,” Weekes says. “But most of the time, students will be in small groups of 10 to 15, or working individually or in groups of two or three.” Students who are doing individualized instruction will be using wireless laptops or PDAs; some computing will be mobile, although computers in other rooms will be hardwired. Smaller learning centers, which are basically extensions of the central area, allow the space that is generally devoted to corridors to be utilized more efficiently. For the pilot program itself, the AAF resource team toured the school looking for a space that would adequately host the 80 students and 10 faculty and staff members. Traditional classrooms available in the school would not have allowed the flexibility that was necessary, and no single classroom could accommodate all the students at the same time. Eventually the staff found ways of temporarily dividing the too-large library, using portable partitions and relocating shelves. Acoustical privacy during the pilot was also not the issue that people expected it might be, which yields a lesson that could apply almost anywhere. “I think students get distracted if they are getting content they are not ready to learn,” says Rose. “They were ready, and that cut down the distractions. In a conventional classroom, kids may look like they are paying attention but sometimes their minds are in another place. That was not the case here.”
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last summer, 80 students, four teachers, and four teacher interns took part in the very first school of one pilot, held at middle school 131, in new york City’s Chinatown. its library was transformed into the very first classroom of this type. the library was chosen because it had the largest open area in the building that also had low ceilings for acoustical control and good lighting. it was not desirable to erect permanent walls for the summer, so makeshift partitions
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Architectural Record 01.10
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were used to divide the space. the aaF charrette held to help plan the space yielded some surprises. school of one founder Joel rose says, “we learned that for different modalities there is often an optimal furniture configuration.” two of the modalities used in the program were self-guided instruction using laptops (1,3) and small-group instruction (2,4). “and we found the number of modality types exceeded the number of spaces and types of furniture we had.”
evAluAtion And the future Does School of One work? The progress of students participating in the program last summer was independently assessed by the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology. It found a significant improvement. In a comparison of pre- and post-program test scores, students had an average increase of 28 percent in the number of test items they answered correctly. The New York City Department of Education is betting on the project and will expand it into three city schools in January, and five more next fall. Apparently, it is a good bet: School of One was named one of Time magazine’s “50 Best Inventions for 2009.” Rose says, “I think that the architecture community is scapegoated because of the experiments with open classrooms 40 years ago. I don’t think the absence of walls was the problem. The problem was the absence of a clear instructional program that delivered on student outcomes.” Rose worries about the open-classroom stigma because he believes open space is one of the keys to personalized learning. He cautions both the architecture and education communities, saying, “It isn’t enough to be focused on the next whiz-bang school. We have to shift our brainpower to the business problem that we have, which is, How do we improve the problem of teaching and learning in our schools? The extent to which we can have a solution requires an integration of all the pieces.” n
p h o t o g r a p h y: © m o r i z a ( t h i s pag e )
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