Education by Design: Reimagining Learning Environments at Punahou School, 1999 – 2019

E D U C AT I O N B Y D E S I G N PUNAHOU SCHOOL

PUNAHOU SCHOOL

Education

by Design REIMAGINING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AT PUNAHOU SCHOOL, 1999 – 2019

REIMAGINING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AT PUNAHOU SCHOOL, 1999 – 2019

Education

by Design

REIMAGINING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AT PUNAHOU SCHOOL, 1999 – 2019

Acknowledgments

Writing: Catherine Black ’94 Design: David Cox Photography: Kathleen Connelly Special thanks to: Punahou School Office of Institutional Advancement for overall project coordination Punahou School Archives for historical imagery and research Alison Kwok ’73 and Ruth Fletcher for their invaluable work on the book, “Case Middle School Stories” (2016), which provided a foundation for, and inspired this project All current and former Punahou faculty, staff and volunteers who participated in interviews and shared their experiences for this project This is a project of Punahou School’s Office of the President © 2018 Punahou School 1601 Punahou Street, Honolulu, HI 96822-3336 www.punahou.edu

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Contents Foreword by Jim Scott ’70. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 Chapter 1: Leading with Program

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Beyond Deferred Maintenance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12 Freedom to Dream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16 Gathering Stakeholders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 Looking Out Looking In

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Looking Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 A Collaborative Design Process

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Taking Risks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 Chapter 2: Form Follows Function: Building a Child-Centered Learning Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 Interdisciplinary, Collaborative and Shared Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34 Flexibility and Adaptability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44 Outdoor Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49 Developmentally Appropriate Design: Following a Clear Sequence K – 8

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Chapter 3: Sustainability and a Sense of Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60 Green Building and Landscape Design

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Sustainability in Educational Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68 Chapter 4: Galvanizing the Community Energizing Volunteers

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Sharing Beyond Punahou Chapter 5: A Look Back and Ahead

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Lessons Learned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84 What’s Still to Come? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85

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Foreword by Jim Scott When I first returned to Punahou as president in 1994, fundraising for renewed facilities was not the top priority for the Trustees. In my opening faculty meeting in 1994 I outlined a vision for the School that included: a coherent and challenging educational program led by an inspiring, dedicated and knowledgeable faculty; a diverse community supported by a strong need-based student financial aid program; and a school environment that cultivates empathy, social responsibility and a global perspective within students. I wanted to be at a school whose vision drives its finances and not the other way around.

As I look back on a quarter-century as Punahou president, it is gratifying for me to see many of these goals actualized. But one of my biggest surprises has been the central role that reimagining learning environments would play during my years as president.

Our first major project was a deferred maintenance challenge. The Wilbur J. MacNeil Hall was in need of renovation. Members of the Academy Science Department were eager for classrooms that enhanced, rather than constrained, their teaching goals. We engaged science teachers in conversations about their aspirations for teaching science, and about the optimal conditions for high-school students to learn the subject.The thoughtful and creative engagement of our educators led to the design of spaces that would support those aspirations and conditions.

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The Dr. Richard T. and Hazel M. Mamiya Science Center was more than a replacement for MacNeil Hall. It was a reminder that actively engaged teachers can be a valuable and insightful resource in the design of an ideal educational experience for students. This first project helped us to understand the power of reimagining learning environments that are student-centered, faculty-inspired and research-based as we seek to fulfill the Aims of a Punahou Education.

Following the construction of Mamiya Science Center, our momentum quickened as we turned our attention to reimagining and rebuilding the entire Junior School. The successful process in designing Mamiya Science Center became our template. Our goals for renewing teaching environments were aligned with the aspirations of transformational donors like Punahou Trustees Steve Case ’76, Pierre Omidyar ’84 and Tom Kosasa ’63. With each subsequent project, we continued to be inspired by the educational vision of teachers and School leaders that renewed and transformed learning. Their compelling ideas helped us to marshal the substantial financial resources required to support new learning environments, while the longevity and continuity of School leadership helped to balance risk and opportunity in making stewardship decisions in the best interest of students.

Over the past 25 years, the thread that connects Mamiya Science Center with the design of the current K – 12 Learning Commons is the vision and voice of teachers. Through their inquiry, research and conversations, they imagined new paradigms for student learning. Those insights led to reimagined learning environments for students. My role as president was to foster the conditions for teachers and School leaders to be supported in this collaborative work, which will positively impact future Punahou students for decades to come.

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Introduction Punahou School is unique in many ways. Founded in 1841, it’s one of the oldest and largest K – 12 independent schools in the United States. Its internationally recognized blend of academic rigor and attention to the whole child is a testament to a world-class faculty. Its impressive alumni community includes former U.S. President Barack Obama ’79, and leaders across all fields.

For nearly two centuries, Punahou has also been distinguished by its breathtaking campus. The School’s name is a reference to the freshwater spring for which these lands were known, long before Protestant missionaries founded a school at the site. Historically linked to Hawaiian royalty and myth, blessed by its gently rolling geography, and cradled by the cool breezes, light showers and frequent rainbows of Ma-noa Valley, Punahou the place exerts a powerful force on those who spend time there – especially the tens of thousands of children who have grown up among its grassy fields, shady arbors and dignified buildings.

The story of those buildings reaches as far back as 1851, when Old School Hall – still standing on the edge of the Academy Quad – was constructed out of coral and limestone. A walk across campus takes one through many periods of architecture and educational design, with valuable historic monuments such as Pauahi Hall (1896), Cooke Hall (1908), Dillingham Hall (1929) and Thurston Memorial Chapel (1966).

When James Kapae‘alii Scott ’70 became the sixteenth president of Punahou School in 1994, a remarkable shift occurred in the design of its facilities and the campus as a whole. In a few words, one might say it was a shift from the functional or aesthetic, to programmatically inspired learning environments.

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What does that mean? Scott says: “I always wanted to tap into the educational thought leadership of our extraordinary faculty to imagine the learning environments that would create the conditions and experiences for children to reach their full potential.” Beginning with Mamiya Science Center, undertaken in his second year as president, Scott made the monumental task of designing student-centered learning environments a collaborative and participatory process that began first and foremost with the people who knew those students best: their teachers.

While many schools undertake ambitious capital projects designed by brand-name architectural firms with multimillion dollar budgets, these are often the exclusive responsibility of a small group of top-level administrators and trustees. And it’s easy to see why – highly collaborative and participatory projects of great complexity are extremely difficult and time-consuming. Bringing multiple, sometimes contradictory perspectives to the table and doing the hard work of prioritizing and consensus-building is often more than busy school administrators want to take on. But when they do, the results can be remarkable.

As dozens of Punahou teachers and thousands of students have experienced over the past 25 years, placing educational program at the center of campus design produces spaces, relationships and experiences that are transformative.

This is not the same as designing a campus that looks beautiful but doesn’t contemplate the needs or aspirations of its primary users. Or one that follows a logic of functionality and efficiency, as many one-size-fits-all industrial model schools were built throughout the 20th century (though research has begun to demonstrate that this is perhaps less efficient at producing a truly educated society than previously thought).

The trend toward program-inspired learning environments has gained momentum in recent years, as advances in the neurology of learning push schools to re-evaluate many of their fundamental assumptions. Like so many traditional pillars of education (standardized tests, separate disciplines and grade levels), the rigid, functional and often monumental educational environments of the past are increasingly challenged to meet the needs of children who must enter a world that demands entirely new skills. The learning environments of the 21st century are looking more and more like the professional environments that define the global century: open and flexible, collaborative and creative (think of high-tech campuses like Google or Apple).

In this context, Punahou has been a leader in its field. Under Scott’s guidance, the campus has undergone a significant transformation while still retaining – and in some cases emphasizing – its essential character and history. From his first year to his last, across a quarter-century of leadership, Punahou’s Academy (high school) and Junior School (kindergarten – grade 8) have acquired 411,243 square feet in new learning environments to the tune of $200 million. But more impressive is the fact that each new environment expresses an ambitious vision for the future of education as articulated by faculty who are passionate about their primary audience: the students of tomorrow.

This book is about the principles and lessons that guided that journey. It documents many of the insights and processes that have now become part of Punahou’s physical landscape, as well as its valuable institutional memory – a memory that takes years, even decades, to accumulate. The hope is that sharing these lessons may serve others that similarly seek to bring their educational mission to life through physical spaces.

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Timeline

Dr. Richard T. and Hazel M. Mamiya Science Center

Case Middle School

Omidyar Kindergarten and First Grade Neighborhood

Sidney and Minnie Kosasa Community for Grades 2 – 5

$16.4 million

$63 million

$26.6 million

$88 million (estimated)

1995 – 1996 planning

1993 – 98 Bishop/Castle

2005 – 2007 planning

2010 – 2014 planning

1997 – 1998 construction

1999 Case gift

2009 Omidyar gift

2013 Kosasa gift

1999 classes begin

1999 – 2001 planning

2009 construction begins

2015 construction begins

2002 – 2004 construction

2010 classes begin

2016 – 2019 classes begin

2004 classes begin

NOTES ON EDITORIAL STYLE » When referring specifically to Punahou, “School” will be capitalized. » Punahou alumni are listed with their graduation year on first mention per chapter. » Individuals will be listed with first and last name on first mention per chapter, followed by last name only. » “Academy” refers to Punahou’s high school (grades 9 – 12) » Junior School refers to kindergarten – grade 8. » The full names of each facility project may be shortened for ease of reading: MacNeil (MacNeil Hall), Mamiya (Mamiya Science Center), Case (Case Middle School), Omidyar or Omidyar Neighborhood (Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood), Kosasa or Kosasa Community (Sidney and Minnie Kosasa Community for Grades 2 – 5) » “Ka Punahou” and the “New Spring” refer to the natural freshwater spring for which Punahou School is named.

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Leading with Program

Looking mauka from the center of the Academy Quad, one of Punahou School’s most iconic views.

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On the morning of August 29, 1994, Jim Scott ’70 gave his first opening address to the Punahou School community as its new president. After the convocation ceremony had wrapped up, he walked over to meet with Academy Science Department Head Gerald Devlin. “OK, Jerry, show me MacNeil,” he said, and followed Devlin over to the long, flat science building fronting Chamberlain Drive. “When we got there, I didn’t need to say anything,” remembered Devlin. “I opened the door and a piece of tile fell down. Then I opened a drawer and he asked me, ‘What’s that?’

And I said, ‘Well, those are cockroach droppings.”

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Beyond Deferred Maintenance

Scott’s decision to tour the building was not coincidental. In his predecessor’s final year, President Roderick McPhee hired a consultant to make recommendations for future campus priorities: Wilbur J. MacNeil Hall was listed as most urgent. Not only was it completed in 1955, just before Sputnik launched the Space Age and revolutionized science in the 20th century, but the facility was outgrown when the School expanded its Academy attendance by several hundred students. By the late 1990s, only 80 percent of Academy science students were taking their classes in MacNeil, with the rest spread out among various other buildings. Encumbered by aging infrastructure, MacNeil could barely meet basic needs for science labs, often falling short of the electrical outlets or computers many teachers needed to fulfill their instructional goals. Temperatures on the second floor were consistently in the 90s. Faculty often had to lug their lab equipment to and from classes in an ever-rotating schedule that tried to accommodate too many classes in too little space.

“In the ’80s, teachers began reporting that the deteriorating condition of MacNeil was inhibiting their effectiveness,” noted Devlin. “By the early ’90s, it became apparent that we had state-of-the-art students studying science in medieval conditions. Faculty were frustrated. Our motto was: ‘Have suitcase, will travel.’

We would stand outside a colleague’s door hoping they would exit earlier so we could get in and set up our class.”

Scott knew that of all the deferred maintenance projects on campus, MacNeil would need to be tackled first and, in September of 1995, after barely a year at the School’s helm, he and Academy Principal Win Healy gathered the Science Department to express “dreams, schemes and fears” and gather creative ideas for the future of science in the Academy. Teachers were asked to consider two questions: “What do you see students doing in a state-of-the-art science learning center?” and “What do you see teachers doing in a state-of-the-art science learning center?” Devlin was assigned to be “faculty shepherd,” with the task of developing a clear, shared vision of their mission as science teachers.

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“Jerry actually went around to each member of the Science Department and asked them to sign off on that mission,” recalls Ruth Fletcher, who became department co-chair at the time and worked closely with Devlin on the project. That mission statement would serve as a North Star during the subsequent two years of planning for a new science center. True to their vocation, the science faculty left no stone unturned in the quest for information that would help them design the ideal learning environment. An extensive canvassing of stakeholders took place, including other Academy departments, science students, parents, alumni and even other schools. The Punahou archives contains hundreds of pages of data organized into neat graphs and tables as each science subdepartment clarified its own mission and vision for teaching science in the 21st century.

“We realized that we needed to craft a mission that was actually bigger than the Science Department alone,” says Fletcher. “So we invited other scientists, teachers and parents to dream and think with us about how we could best educate children. In the early stages of the process, we didn’t want to be talking about the specifics of what went into each classroom – we wanted to design and identify the learning experience that we wanted for science.”

Thanks to the clear focus and extensive rationale voiced by the faculty, Scott was able to make a compelling case to the Board of Trustees for an ambitious new science center. With a $16 million price tag, it would be the most expensive capital project the School had undertaken to date, and it helped to transform the science program in the Academy as well as in the Junior School. There were many elements that led to its success, but first and foremost was a highly functioning, deeply committed group of teachers whose aspirations were effectively translated into a physical learning environment. Their “North Star” proved to be an effective guide for everyone else – colleagues, administrators, trustees, donors and families – who needed to get on board and help sail the project to safe harbor.

A view of MacNeil Hall from Chamberlain Drive in the 1990s.

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The “North Star” This mission statement guided planning for the new science center. It eloquently demonstrates how the project sprang from an instructional program that expressed the Science Department’s highest aspirations for teaching and learning.

The Academy Science teachers are committed to providing learning experiences in which our students can: » Nourish their innate wonder and curiosity about the natural world and learn to use the method of scientific inquiry to explore its interconnectedness and interdependence; » Recognize and develop the skills needed to work both collaboratively and independently; » Attain the discipline of the scientific process to acquire, assimilate, extend, refine and apply scientific knowledge; » Realize their potential to construct meaning from knowledge and so to value the power of rigorous thought; » Cultivate self-confidence, courage, creativity, thoughtfulness, and social responsibility and recognize that these qualities promote lifelong learning and enable those who possess them to contribute positively to human society.

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A Map for Future Journeys: the Campus Master Plan After the completion of the Mamiya Science Center, the School engaged the planning firm Belt Collins to update its Campus Master Plan. This update would include basic principles to guide and organize future projects. The preservation of open space, as well as a focus on Junior School facilities that badly needed renovating emerged as upcoming priorities. While the Winne Units (which housed children in grades 1 – 4) were first on the list, a surprise leadership gift from America Online founder, Steve Case ’76, shifted focus to a new middle school.

Rather than throwing the School’s facility planning off course, this shift in sequence was easily incorporated thanks to the prior work on the Campus Master Plan.

Former Belt Collins Principal Gene Yong observes: “By virtue of having a master plan, the School knew in which direction to take that opportunity. That’s part of the value of having a master plan, because you always have a good idea of the work that needs to be done. The most important thing to come out of the Campus Master Plan was its guiding principles. The School could then hand off a project to an architectural design team, who would ultimately be responsible for what was built. We wanted to build sufficient flexibility, guidance and parameters to set a direction so that the Board of Trustees and school leadership could be comfortable knowing that if the design team followed the principles of the Campus Master Plan, then at the end of the day, the project would be consistent with the broader vision they’d signed off on.”

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Freedom to Dream

The success of the Mamiya Science Center, which opened its doors in the spring of 1999, four years after the first faculty “dreaming” session, established a precedent for a series of other projects to unfold over the next two decades. While all of them were unique in scope and outcome, the process that lay at their heart was always the same.

“Punahou is a place that allowed us to ask the same question at the beginning of every project: How do students in this age group learn best?” This sentiment, from former Junior School Principal Mike Walker, summarizes the incredible trust placed in the School’s faculty, and the decision to always anchor conversations about physical space in program and pedagogy. As head of Punahou’s Junior School from 1998 – 2015, Walker played an instrumental role in the three major facility projects that followed, essentially reimagining the Junior School experience from soup to nuts (refer to timeline on page 8).

Giving faculty permission to imagine their ideal educational program and then work backward to design a space that facilitated it became a hallmark of Punahou’s process for creating child-centered learning environments. While there were echoes of this approach in earlier years – for example, some faculty were consulted in the early 1950s on the design of the Mary Persis Winne Units – it was not truly consolidated until Scott’s arrival.

This required significant institutional support, as faculty often did need “shepherding” or organizing. This might take the form of a teacher assigned to facilitate and represent their input, as Devlin was for Mamiya; or by lightening teaching loads so that one or more individuals could research future ideas without the full weight of their daily obligations; or by investing in external consultants to help guide a participatory design process. The common thread was always providing faculty the resources and freedom they needed to do their best thinking. Scott and his academic leadership understood that their teachers’ intellectual capital would be a project’s best resource, thanks to their direct knowledge of the end user: students.

“For almost every Punahou teacher, if you make this a child-centered conversation about what’s best for students, they become key thought partners in developing the best learning environment for those children,” says Scott.

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While conversations about educational program and pedagogy are ideally ongoing at any school, a future facility serves as a powerful catalyst and energizer for faculty participation. When teachers feel that their ideas will have a concrete, long-term impact on the campus and on students, their level of commitment is exponentially greater.

Former Academy Science teacher Mike Gearen remembers: “As anyone who has been a department chair knows, getting teachers to spend their time thinking about those big issues – why are we doing what we’re doing, what are we trying to teach the students – can sometimes elicit groans. Those conversations take place periodically, but many teachers feel like they’re in the trenches: ‘I’ve got all this grading to do tonight and I’m sitting here talking about that stuff again.’ It’s one more thing being tacked on to their day-to-day work. If it’s just a document that’s going to be filed away somewhere, you don’t get as much buy-in. There has to be something concrete they can see is going to result from it.

“I remember Ruth’s face when she was telling us that there was serious consideration of doing a new building for the Science Department,” he continues. “She was glowing – and that was contagious for the rest of us. Because working at MacNeil up until that point, my back literally used to be drenched in sweat every day; it was so hot in there. And as you’re setting up and tearing things down for each class, you’re subconsciously thinking, ‘Well, the administration mustn’t think that much of science and they don’t think much of me as a teacher because they put us in here with the cockroaches.’”

As Devlin says, “The first step in getting quality faculty engagement is for teachers to feel they can actually direct where they’re going. It took a while for everyone in the department to believe that this might happen and then to focus on the bigger questions of what students would be doing in the new facility. But once they did, the results were remarkable.”

Over the course of 25 years, the design process for new learning environments would come to follow certain basic principles: gathering stakeholders, looking out, looking in, looking ahead and a collaborative design process.

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Gathering Stakeholders

Building a thorough and inclusive conversation with the appropriate voices was always the first step in each project. Faculty leadership who could work closely with administrators and architects, and be a conduit to the rest of their colleagues, had to be identified. These teachers typically met on a regular basis – often weekly – for several years. They served as the intellectual brain trust that would flesh out the program rationale that, in turn, guided the design and construction process. Some of them would also sit on a larger project committee that included architects, school administrators from the physical plant, development and business offices, and Scott himself. These committees helped to refine the instructional vision that lay at the heart of each project.

The other valuable lesson for many faculty working on these projects was the ability to collaborate with and learn from other professionals, both inside and outside the School. Fletcher remembers how useful it was to get feedback from development and communications staff when she and other science teachers were asked to make presentations for prospective donors: “We thought we were so on it, with all our graphs and numbers. Then during our practice session, the communications director asks us, ‘Do you have any pictures?’ and we realized we could really use other people’s help in telling the story of how children best learn science. It helped cement the understanding among us that we all had to be working very closely and that it took all of us to move a project like this forward. And it helped to have other thinkers in the room that weren’t so invested in the nitty gritty. They could see the big picture because it wasn’t going to be their classroom.”

As former Physical Plant Director Steve Piper ’68 noted of the Case Middle School planning process: “It was almost two years before pencil hit paper. We didn’t want to create a box and say, ‘Okay, this is what we think the building should look like.’ No – first develop what you want the program to be, how you envision these kids in a space. It could be a building, or out underneath a tree on the playground. It could be anywhere, because learning happens everywhere.”

Looking Out

One of the first tasks for the steering committee was to serve as a conduit of thinking to and from other faculty in their grade or area of the School, though this was not always an simple process.

The steering committees were quick to recognize the importance of learning from other thought leaders and success stories. As a heavyweight in its field, it would be easy for Punahou to sit comfortably within its own echo chamber, but the perspectives gained by looking beyond its borders always proved invaluable.

Walker describes the first steering committee he worked with, on the design of Case Middle School: “What made the middle-school steering committee so exceptional was their amazing credibility with their colleagues. They were excellent at taking what we were talking about in the committee and translating it, and then conversely they would take what they were hearing from their colleagues and bring it back.”

Just as valuable were the relationships that deepened when faculty and administrators got to know each other outside their everyday routines and interactions on campus. Each steering committee spent time studying other spaces and institutions, and from Mamiya onward, the School committed significant resources to its project brain trusts to stretch their thinking and fire their enthusiasm.

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Looking Out: Learning from Other Thought Leaders MAMIYA SCIENCE CENTER » Architect John Hara ’57 and science teacher Roger Pfeffer traveled to Harvard Westlake School, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Hughes Aircraft Company to see how their physical spaces supported science and technology. » A team from Punahou – including the president, Academy principal, several science teachers and the development director – was invited as one of two independent schools nationwide (the other was Phillips Exeter Academy) to participate in the 1996 Project Kaleidoscope Workshop, whose goal was to help 30 colleges and universities plan science education facilities for the 21st century. Project Kaleidoscope was funded by the National Academy of Sciences, the United States Department of Education and a number of private foundations.

CASE MIDDLE SCHOOL » Several years before the middle-school project got underway, a group of faculty visited 11 public and private middle schools around the country to look at alternative models for grouping adolescents. » Punahou invited Anthony Jackson, a national middle-school expert and principal author of an influential 1989 Carnegie Corporation report on educating adolescents, to speak with Punahou faculty, parents and alumni.

KOSASA COMMUNIT Y FOR GRADES 2 – 5 » The middle-school steering committee traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, where hundreds of schools were being built, and participated in a charrette* process that they later brought back to Punahou. » Physical Plant Director Steve Piper and architect John Hara visited the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management to better understand the implications of sustainable building and pursuing a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation.

» Working with the design thinking firm Daylight Design, the steering committee visited a wide range of organizations in California to gather ideas about using space to inspire curiosity and inquiry. These included Hope Lab and the Children’s Creativity Museum, Motion Math (a mobile app company) and the Google campus. » The steering committee visited other schools experimenting with design thinking and interdisciplinary learning spaces, including the Stanford d.school and Stanford School of Education, Harvard University, Head Royce School and Nueva School.

O M IDYAR K – 1 N EIG H BO R H O O D » Faculty traveled to Pomaika‘i Elementary School on Maui to observe arts integration, and to the Nueva and Marin Country Day schools in California to see how sustainability and innovation could be woven into curriculum. » Faculty also visited Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard and the Center for Ecoliteracy in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn about sustainability.

“I think sending your teachers off to different places to see things is really important, not just for what they see, but because people have time to talk and get to know each other in a way that is not the same as at work. The message we got was: Punahou values its teachers.”

“You can’t underestimate the importance of outside thought partners. Bringing that element in really added credibility and dimension to our thinking.”

– Mike Walker

* A charrette is an intensive planning session where clients, designers and others collaborate on a vision for the project. It provides a forum for ideas and provides immediate feedback to the designers. More importantly, it allows everyone who participates to be a mutual author.

– Donna Reid-Hayes ’78, Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood steering committee member

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Looking In

In addition to gathering ideas and inspiration from afar, the steering committees also had a period of intensive instrospection to stimulate their creative thinking about each project’s possibilities.

As mentioned before, the Science Department undertook an impressive survey of stakeholders from the Academy and beyond. Through a facilitated “visualization” exercise (similar to a charrette in concept, though none at the time were familiar with the term) they asked groups across the Punahou community to imagine the characteristics and activities they saw when walking through the doors of the future science center. From Case Middle School onward, design charrettes became an integral part of the planning process, adding trustees, parents and planners to lively, multiday brainstorming sessions, and sometimes producing some of the project’s most innovative ideas.

While for Mamiya this process was essentially led by Punahou faculty, subsequent projects in the Junior School invited outside experts to serve as neutral facilitators for the brainstorming process. Case Middle School’s 18-month program planning culminated in a five-day charrette led by architect and planner Paul Winslow, who had already worked extensively with other schools across the country.

Scott remembers: “We were getting close to the end of the charrette and Paul Winslow said, ‘Well, you’ve come up with a great middle school concept based on teams, which looks like a lot of where the rest of the country’s going.’ And then he added, ‘But you’re Punahou. Where’s the sizzle?’ We thought the next morning was going to be a wrap-up meeting, but after opening things up and welcoming people, I asked that same question: ‘Where’s the sizzle?’ Our discussion led to the creative learning centers, which have been one of the great successes of Case Middle School.”

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To reimagine their learning environments, the Omidyar Neighborhood’s steering committee brought in IDEO, a global design company that has worked with schools and universities around the world. Based on the success of using the design thinking* process introduced by IDEO, the steering committee for the Kosasa Community worked closely with San Francisco-based Daylight Design over the course of their program development.

* Popularized by the Stanford d.school, design thinking is a method for generating creative solutions to design problems. Its success has led to a much broader application to complex social and systemic challenges.

As part of their “looking in” process, steering committees often prototyped ideas before they became concrete design decisions. In the Omidyar Neighborhood, faculty experimented with relocating teachers for art, music and outdoor education closer to the kindergarten before including permanent areas for them in the final design. In Case Middle School and the Kosasa Community, innovative educational furniture was piloted in classrooms to test what worked before ordering large quantities.

“We prototyped well,” remembers Walker. “We weren’t using that language of design thinking at first, but in hindsight that’s exactly what we were doing.”

Faculty engage in a design thinking exercise around the future of Punahou’s libraries as the genesis of the future K – 12 Learning Commons.

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Looking Ahead

One of the biggest challenges that the steering committees faced was anticipating the future needs of those who would come after them. Not only did these projects need to intersect coherently with the Campus Master Plan and ongoing instructional developments across the School, but as learning environments, they had to ensure enough relevance and longevity to justify the enormous investment in building them.

Kindergarten teacher Rebecca Kesler was on the Omidyar Neighborhood steering committee and remembers that, “One of the things Mike said to us was, ‘You are not planning for yourselves. You are planning for teachers and children 50 years from now.’ For me, that was a pretty moving thought and also a huge responsibility.”

Teachers were encouraged to review new educational research and look for important trends on the horizon. It was no coincidence that a campuswide awareness about the neurology of learning flourished in tandem with the facilities projects in the Junior School. Faculty were actively investigating the types of learning environments – including elements like rest and exercise, in addition to physical space – that would best serve children. Many embraced the role of faculty researcher and pursued professional development opportunities supported by the School that encouraged their explorations.

An annual Brain Symposium was inaugurated in 2010, the year the Omidyar Neighborhood opened, bringing national experts in the field such as John Medina, Daniel Pink and Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa to campus to share their knowledge with faculty, parents, and educators from other schools.

Designing with an eye to the future resulted in a growing emphasis on flexibility and simplicity in the spaces themselves, with the capacity to accommodate a continually changing set of tools and experiences. This is a trend reflected in educational spaces around the world, as more emphasis is placed on creative, student-driven learning rather than rigid, subject-based curricula (these principles will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter).

“If we bring a systems lens to it, facility is one of several essential elements in the educational experience,” says Walker. “You can’t ignore the facility.

Unfortunately it’s only one variable in the extensive equation of crafting a learning environment. The best design now is actually frugal and in many ways underdesigned so that it can be readily adapted to meet the next wave of learning needs, and Punahou has pioneered some of the best thinking in educational design.”

It was also inevitable that certain ideas would turn out to be different in their execution. In Case Middle School, two creative learning centers conceived for almost exclusive use by a single grade became resources for the entire middle school and beyond.

“Even though you conceptualize things during a design process, you have to remain open to uses that emerge after the fact,” notes Walker. “A decade after Case Middle School was completed, I still didn’t feel we had fully realized its instructional possibilities. You grow into spaces – that’s always one of the challenges. The vision you articulate is always way ahead of the reality, and different teachers will take advantage of it in different ways.”

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A Collaborative Design Process

During the design of the Mamiya Science Center, it helped enormously that architect John Hara ’57 was a Punahou alumnus with a personal relationship to the School (his father, Ernest Hara 1928, had designed a number of projects for Punahou, including Bishop Hall, which served as the middle school from 1972 – 2004). Hara was highly involved in the planning process for Mamiya, attending steering committee meetings every week for over a year. He also brought many valuable suggestions to the committee, such as traveling to schools and institutions on the continental U.S. to learn from other examples.

“We trusted John because he was here all the time,” remembers Fletcher. “He came to every meeting and listened deeply. He had a great way of helping us think through ideas. For example, he’d listen until we had come to a decision about a space and then he would say something like, ‘OK, what do you want next to that?’ But he didn’t ask us too soon. He seemed to guide us without us knowing that he was guiding us.”

“John’s ability to be patient, listen and support the needs of teaching and learning enabled the vision of the committees to be realized in brick and mortar that will live on for generations,” adds Piper. “John didn’t just design the facilities for the day of completion – he looked back from where we came to where we wanted to go, to ensure the buildings would stand the test of time with change and flexibility.”

Hara set the tone for the ideal working relationship between the School and the architects of its projects. Although other firms were selected to design the Omidyar Neighborhood and Kosasa Community, each project established a close working relationship from the outset with its architects and contractors.

In a departure from historical precedent, Punahou broadcast an open call to architectural firms for the design of the Kosasa Community. Among its selection criteria was “an educational thought partner” that could work in close collaboration with faculty and administrators.

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“Rather than just coming up with ideas and handing them over to an architectural team for execution, what we wanted to replicate was the extraordinary working relationship between the professionals and the steering committee that we saw from Mamiya onward,” says Scott.

This eventually led to the “design assist” process being the standard approach starting with Case Middle School. The term refers to a relationship in which the architect, engineers and contractors work together during both design and construction, permitting greater flexibility and adaptation to changes when the need arises.

President Russell Young of Albert C. Kobayashi, Inc. – the construction firm that worked on both Mamiya and Case Middle School – says that, “Punahou was one of the first schools to use the design assist process. Afterward, other private schools heard how successful the method was and tried it too. And now even some of the public schools are trying it. A lot of our big jobs are done that way; high-rises, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, don’t bid at all.

They go the design assist method because it’s easier to stay within budget.”

This trust and rapport with the design team allowed for innovations to surface naturally. Architects would meet regularly with the steering committee and present their ideas, get feedback, and iterate. This ongoing dialogue also helped the faculty to understand the practical limitations of space, site, materials, budget, etc., making it easier to explain decisions to their colleagues. The awareness generated on both sides served each project better in the long run.

“When you have multiple constituencies in a design process like this, how you capture and engage people where it really matters and manage everybody’s opinion to a place where there is agreement is probably the most interesting part,” observes Punahou Trustee David Carey, who chaired the Board of Trustees Building and Grounds Committee for 15 years during the construction of Case Middle School, Omidyar Neighborhood and the beginning of the Kosasa Community.

The vibrant outdoor amphitheater in the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood was largely the result of Steering Committee faculty insistence on green space during design conversations.

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More than once, this greater degree of trust and familiarity empowered faculty to champion features that might not have been possible without significant involvement on their part. In the Omidyar Neighborhood, the amphitheater at the main entrance was primarily concrete in the original design plans. But the teachers resisted this idea, as Donna Reid-Hayes relates: “Our argument with the architects was: That’s going to be the first thing kids see when they get dropped off. They’re either going to be drawn up to the Neighborhood because they’re excited by it, or they’re going to see all that concrete and go ‘No, thank you.’ These are little people and you have to welcome them.”

The strength of the faculty’s rationale resulted in the amphitheater’s final design, which features grass terraces and a garden of native plants and trees graced by a colorful mosaic mural. Not only is it a lovely preview of the breathtaking vista at the top of the stairs, but classes often use the setting for outdoor activities and gatherings.

“When we were all finally done with the planning and it was time to build, I remember thinking: If they can translate our ideas into three-dimensional reality, this is going to be an awesome space for kids,” recalls Kesler. “And then once we opened the doors, the kids were so happy. We watched them embody the principles that inspired the spaces and it was a beautiful thing. What I had no way of predicting was the way it was going to move everybody, all the way up to grandparents. Everyone who comes up, looks around and goes ‘Ahhh!’ So many people over the years have said things like ‘I want to come back to kindergarten just so I can be here.’ There is something about this place that’s really special – it’s the beauty, the sense of community that maybe in some ways has been lost, it’s this sense of freedom and the valuing of childhood.

Recently, I was in New York City and a teacher friend and I were discussing the architecture of the public schools there. She commented that they were built in the Federalist style, as a very intentional design choice; they wanted the schools to symbolize authority. And I thought, how incredibly different it is here.”

In the Kosasa Community, the design-assist process was perhaps the longest and most involved, given the complexity of the project: two principal phases over a four-year timeline and the most expensive of all projects to date.

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“I found the teamwork between the School and Design Partners Incorporated to be extraordinary,” says Junior School Principal Paris Priore-Kim ’76, who took over after Walker’s departure in 2015. “As I walk through Kosasa, I am continually struck by how it articulates program because the design speaks to it – the transparencies, the layout, the communication of indoor and outdoor spaces. On the one hand, we had a steering committee composed of teachers, supervisors and leadership that worked hard to articulate that vision.

And on the other we had an architectural team that listened very attentively, put pencil to paper, and came up with this amazing representation of our instructional vision.”

“We’ve always had a really clear sense of the goals for this project because the communication has been strong both ways,” observed DPI Principal Kendall Ellingwood III. “We see this as an example of Punahou’s very forward thinking. A lot of the time we are teaching the client. But in this case, we were learning just as much from the School because we’ve had so much access to the teachers to really understand their thinking.”

In Case Middle School, even the furniture selection process became a collaboration with Herman Miller. The company sent a representative to Punahou to sit in on the design process, and several members of the steering committee visited Herman Miller’s facilities to learn more about their operations and philosophy. While the company had worked for clients in higher education, they had not designed anything for elementary or high school – but they were open to working with Punahou’s faculty in developing pieces that could be flexible and child-friendly, which were tested and voted on by students and teachers.

“It was very inclusive, unlike other projects where ‘what you see is what you get,’” says Piper. “I don’t think that would have been possible without bringing the vendors in and being a part of our process.” The results were so successful that Herman Miller now produces furniture for high schools nationwide.

Taking Risks

While faculty involvement and design collaborations were key to the success of these projects, the role of leadership cannot be underestimated.

When dealing with investments in the tens of millions of dollars, the School’s credibility with its families and its donors was always on the line, requiring a skillful balancing of vision and practicality.

The attitude of School leadership – principals, president and trustees – proved critical at certain junctures when difficult decisions needed to be made.

There were times when budget, precedent or efficiency could have easily overridden a great idea, but courage and the willingness to take risks outweighed these considerations.

In Mamiya, the decision to assign 5,000 square feet to unprogrammed space was quite daring at the time. Scott remembers that it took some convincing to gain trustee approval for this novel idea, but the passion with which faculty made their case eventually resulted in three such spaces: an Open Lab, a Math Science Resource Center and what would eventually become the Gates Family Science Workshop. These quickly became known as Mamiya’s most “innovative features.”

“The thing that was most unique about Mamiya is that it was the first time that we actually built unprogrammed spaces,” says Fletcher. “I remember that Jerry was on vacation and I had to represent him at a board meeting to get approval for the Gates Workshop, the Open Lab and the Math Science Resource Room.

The trustees were asking tons of questions because they needed to understand what the value of all that square footage would be and was it really worth the cost, and I ended up being on the hot seat to answer all their good questions.”

In Case Middle School, the decision to pursue a LEED designation occurred quite late in the project’s development. In this case, the idea was driven by the Board of Trustees. Director of Campus Energy and Major Construction Projects Randy Overton ’80 was working on the project with Albert C. Kobayashi, Inc. at the time, and remembers: “What was interesting about that decision is that

it was made at a point where normally an owner would not consider doing it, because the drawings were already well into the permitting stage. All of a sudden, this was going to be the goal. And it wasn’t just silver, it was, ‘We want gold.’

We generated the additional cost for the board; I want to say it was somewhere between $3 – $4 million to make the changes, and they decided to do it.”

Case Middle School won the first LEED Gold designation in the state of Hawai‘i, and was the first multibuilding project to achieve the award in the world. Because of the significant cost and relative lack of experience in the field of green building, this was a bold decision that took the School out on a limb, but it was in keeping with the Punahou’s pioneering spirit.

“Part of it was being that risk-taker,” says Piper. “We had some members of the board who wondered why we should be the guinea pigs. But if we’re leaders in education, why not be leaders in facilities and educate the community?”

As Piper points out, the Board of Trustees was not always unanimous in its thinking – especially about risks. But the group’s ability to work through differing perspectives, as well as Scott’s talent for helping navigate through tricky decisions, tended to steer the School toward innovation and optimism.

“Punahou’s Board of Trustees is unique because of its longevity, sophistication and legacy,” says Walker. “It made decisions incrementally, always leaving exit ramps in case we needed to get off rather than jeopardize the fiscal health of the School. In 2008 when the recession hit, we were ready to pull the plug on construction of Omidyar, but the board voted to go forward. Maybe because success begets success; they saw how galvanizing Case Middle School was and decided to bridge the economic uncertainty with K – 1, which ended up being another huge success.”

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Another difficult choice was presented with the design of the Kosasa Community: the deconstruction of the beloved Winne Units and, eventually, of historic Castle Hall. The former had reached the end of their service life, but they were designed by celebrated Hawai‘i architect Vladimir Ossipoff in the 1950s as one of his first school projects. The latter had originally been built as a girls dormitory and was therefore physically inadequate for the type of 21st-century instruction that faculty wanted to provide. Its location also poses a physical barrier between the middle school and the rest of campus, and will free up important green space – a priority of the Campus Master Plan’s guiding principles.

Yet both buildings were significant to the School’s history and cherished by generations of alumni, as well as many current and former teachers. Despite significant pressure from the community to retain them for their historic and architectural value, the trustees voted to proceed with the deconstructions that would make way for the future Kosasa Community because, as Scott puts it, “In a school, the educational value must always come first.”

Gene Yong of the planning firm Belt Collins acknowledges the challenges of remaining true to a future vision, even at the expense of current support: “The thing about a Campus Master Plan is that there are very painful steps along the way to achieve an ideal outcome. What’s been impressive about Punahou is the leadership’s commitment to work its way through a lot of those steps.

Deconstructing Winne is not something most schools would even contemplate.

The decision to take down Castle and lose all that square footage to create open space, while simultaneously committing to a capital campaign that rebuilds it, is huge. Eighty to 90 percent of our institutional clients out there would not make that type of commitment.”

There is another, more internal, dimension of risk in these types of projects: Some degree of faculty resistance to change is inevitable and can be difficult to negotiate.

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As Walker notes, “You need to have the program rationale behind a new design but you also have to have the teachers who are going to use it. Moveable walls don’t move themselves; it’s the teachers that move them.”

Walker likes to compare this internal tension to an operetta. “Scene 1 is setting the stage, scene 5 is wailing and crisis, scene 7 is catharsis and by scene 9 no one remembers why they were wailing before. I learned to anticipate that projects that are transformational in scope will inevitably result in some retirements, because certain people will say, ‘This is not what I signed up for.’

Their departures are losses, but it’s the inevitable evolution of schools. When you have the program rationale for a new learning space, you also have to have the teachers who want to use it.”

Sometimes, the cause for anxiety was relatively minor and dissipated quickly after the new facilities opened. “It makes me laugh now, but one of the biggest changes at the time was that we went from chalkboards to white boards,” recalls Fletcher. “And, oh my gosh, people were upset: ‘I want the chalk dust on my fingers,’ and ‘You’re ruining my teaching experience,’ … . We were like, ‘wow.’”

Case Middle School teacher and steering committee member Terry Woody remembers that, “Many teachers were nervous about the big windows in the team spaces – the worry was that it would be easy for kids to make gestures and distract the classes inside. And what would we do without bells? Could we live without bells?”

At other times, the changes demanded a significant adjustment. In the Omidyar Neighborhood, the decision to bring first grade up to the kindergarten area was difficult because, for decades, first-grade teachers had been much closer to grade two in the Winne Units. And for the kindergarten teachers, who had always been alone in their “citadel on the hill,” the challenge was to open up and share their space with a new cadre of colleagues.

But as Walker says, “If you perceive your role as a leader is to preserve people’s comfort, then that has an impact on how an institution will move.” Luckily for tens of thousands of students over the past two decades, Punahou’s leadership has tolerated enough discomfort to make the innovative choices that resulted in transformative learning environments.

Perhaps the ultimate measure of leadership is the ability to see the bigger picture, even when no one else can. “The hardest part of my job is getting people to understand that this is one system, one school,” says Scott. “When I first got here, Dillingham Hall had just been renovated and Wo International Center had just gone up, but they were discrete projects that involved a subsection of the School. Before we could answer key questions about the 2 – 5 project, we had to think about Bishop Hall and the future of music or art. How do you create green and open space that the whole School can share? Thoughtfully planning these projects has been a systems challenge, or maybe I should say a systems opportunity. But I’ve always believed that you’re not just renovating buildings, you’re renewing program. So reimagining learning environments is ultimately about creating the conditions and experiences for children and adults to reach their full promise.”

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Mamiya Science Center hugs the lower perimeter of the Academy Quad. Its diverse and multiuse spaces make the facility a hub of activity from early morning to often the evening hours.

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Form Follows Function:

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BUILDING A CHILD-CENTERED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

How did these new learning environments impact students’ educational experience at Punahou?

While each project was unique, common threads run through them all, reflecting an evolving instructional philosophy that prioritizes children’s developmentally appropriate learning. While a Punahou education has historically valued “the whole child,” many of its facilities, like those of most schools throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, were designed around industrial principles such as efficiency, uniformity and authority.

A view of Case Middle School from the pickup lane fronting its makai perimeter.

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Interdisciplinary, Collaborative and Shared Spaces

Much of the emerging instructional paradigm is influenced by new knowledge from the field of neuroscience, which reinforces the value of “soft” skills such as collaboration or creative problem-solving that often require different spaces in order to be fully realized. When combined with research in the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology, faculty and administrators had new frameworks to guide their design of educational program. One important example of this was the reorganization of grade levels into the communities best suited to a specific stage in a child’s development: Sixth grade was incorporated into the middle school, while first grade was combined with kindergarten as the first step of a Punahou journey, leaving grades 2 – 5 as the new “elementary school” experience.

As Punahou’s facility projects evolved, certain design principles were consolidated across learning environments based on what had worked well in achieving their programmatic goals. Referring to the redesign of the Junior School, Mike Walker observes that, “Kosasa was a culmination of all the learning that had taken place in the previous projects: the moveable walls from sixth grade, the lanai from K – 1, the flexible classroom space from the creative learning centers, the importance of the outdoors and green space, and everything we’d learned about sustainability – it just all came together.”

Space has a profound influence on how people interact. Whereas school facilities have historically been organized around self-contained classrooms that build a teacher’s relationship with his or her students in a specific subject area, the spaces that faculty envisioned from Mamiya onward all encouraged interdisciplinary, collaborative learning that also built a greater sense of community.

Unsurprisingly, these reflect the growing emphasis on 21st-century skills over traditional content-based knowledge: things like collaboration, communication, creativity and empathy – all of which are critical in today’s innovation-based economy, and require spaces that enable people to interact and work together across multiple fields.

Examples of the generous light and transparencies that were intentional in Mamiya Science Center’s design.

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The idea of tapping into and cultivating children’s innate curiosity about the world around them was increasingly identified by faculty as more important to authentic learning than a standardized curriculum driven by fixed content. Looking across the continuum of facilities projects, from Mamiya to Kosasa, one sees a growing emphasis on spaces that invite students and teachers to work together to create diverse learning experiences based on authentic, interdisciplinary inquiry.

Even as far back as the planning for Mamiya, there was a strong push toward thinking about science instruction in a more collaborative and humanistic way.

“We wanted to make learning visible and shareable, and that’s why we have those wonderful big windows where everyone could see each other doing science.

There was a predisposition for more collaboration and cooperation and teachers wanted to work together rather than in the silo of their own classroom,” says Mamiya steering committee member Ruth Fletcher.

The Gates Family Science Workshop was Mamiya’s most important interdisciplinary and collaborative space. Not only was it used by students in the Academy and Junior School, but multiple teachers could work together to develop lessons in what was essentially an enormous open space that could accommodate a wide range of small- and large-group activities. It was staffed by two co-directors who worked with K – 12 faculty to develop hands-on, applied science experiences. On a given day one might find fourth-graders learning about traditional Polynesian star navigation on a life-size replica of a voyaging canoe or ninth-grade biology students investigating the life cycle of bees with professional apiculturists or students of multiple ages taking advantage of a pop-up fabrication workshop.

Case Middle School was the first project to truly be designed around interdisciplinary learning and a new, intentional experience of community. After making the decision to incorporate sixth grade into the middle school experience, the steering committee chose to organize its faculty – and their classrooms – by interdisciplinary teams, rather than by subject area. In seventh and eighth grade, the teams are composed of four teachers, one for each subject, who share the

same group of 92 students (language, P.E., music and art classes are taught outside this core team structure). This represented an investment in additional faculty that significantly reduced teaching loads, which had previously been as high as 130 students per teacher. In sixth grade, the basic structure of two main teachers – one for science and math, the other for English and social studies – was not changed. But the facility placed two of these pairs on each floor, encouraging them to share larger activities such as field trips or a morning mindfulness practice with all 92 students and four teachers, essentially preparing them for the seventh- and eighth-grade experience.

In grades 7 and 8, the four team teachers work closely together, along with the teachers for language, PE, music and art, focusing on the 92 students they share over the course of that year. These faculty teams have a cross-disciplinary focus that often leads them to combine their expertise in ways that emphasize project-based learning to help students see the interconnections between subjects, and it is common to hear of major semester-long projects like the fern garden example on page 37 undertaken by an entire team, rather than a single teacher. Each faculty team is also given a barebones schedule that they can choose to structure according to their instructional goals that year, with longer or shorter blocks of time to work on projects separately or as a group.

The facilities are designed to support this program rationale. Case Middle School is a complex of two-story buildings that house one team on each floor for grades 7 and 8, and two teams per floor in grade 6. The four classrooms are arranged along a short hallway where students and teachers will cross paths constantly over the course of their year together. In addition to the teachers’ classrooms, each team has a 1,000 to 3,000-square-foot shared team space where all 92 students and their teachers gather regularly for administrative or curricular activities. If one were to compare a team’s floor to a home, the team space would be the shared living room.

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An activity in Mamiya Science Center’s Gates Family Science Workshop, in which a large world map was placed on the floor for children to explore during Ho-ku-le‘a’s Worldwide Voyage curriculum.

PRINCIPLE IN ACTION: INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION

On a breezy spring morning in Case Middle School, the 92 seventh-graders and four faculty in Team 7Z gather to learn about a project they will be undertaking in the months ahead. Kay Lynch, the state’s foremost expert in endemic Hawaiian ferns, is present to share her story as a horticulturist and researcher of numerous fern species that exist nowhere else in the world. The students’ task as a team is to cultivate a fern garden adjacent to Kuaihelani, the creative learning center dedicated to Hawaiian Studies. “You will be the first people to observe how these species adapt to conditions outside their natural upland habitat,” says Lynch.

“If you think about it, you’re making history!”

The students will study the ferns through multiple lenses as different teachers develop activities specific to their expertise: In English class, they will research the ferns and develop journalistic stories on the project’s progress; in math and science classes, they will conduct regular observations and measurements of the fern garden, testing hypotheses about the impact of light, moisture and heat on the plants over time; and in social studies, they will learn about the uses and value of ferns and plants in traditional Hawaiian culture. In the coming months, the students will also gain a deeper understanding of botany, ecology, and the social and cultural forces that have placed many of these plants on Hawai‘i’s endangered species list. As a team, they will be taking collective responsibility for the fern garden, which every student will spend time in over the course of the semester. The project is interdisciplinary, collaborative and focused on a real-world issue with an authentic audience – a recognized expert in her field. This is the kind of learning that takes place on a regular basis in Case Middle School, thanks to the reimagining of its educational program around interdisciplinary teams and the spaces that were designed to facilitate that.

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Students gather informally during a break in one of the Case Middle School team spaces.

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“When a child is admitted to kindergarten, they’re joining the School but also a neighborhood,” he continues. “But by second grade, children are ready for more expansiveness, so their neighborhood becomes larger. The same thing happens with Case Middle School; they have a team and a house that they belong to, but they still go out for P.E., art, music, foreign language. So they have that safety of the nest, but also access to the world.”

The team organization was hugely successful and transformed the middle-school experience, making it the ideal bridge between the intimacy and safety of grades 2 – 5 to the expansive independence of the Academy. Mike Walker remembers, “There was a generation of parents who had children in both Bishop Hall and Case Middle School and they would say things like, ‘Now the school knows my kids so much better; I now know who my child’s advisor is, who their teachers are. We can have team meetings. The school feels much more child-centered.’”

Case Middle School inspired subsequent projects to achieve the same sense of community and interdisciplinary collaboration in ways appropriate to their age group.

This sense of community and intimacy was top of mind for Jim Scott ’70, who had previously served as head of Catlin Gabel School in Oregon, with a K – 12 population of 760.

“When I first got to Punahou in 1994, the question I asked myself was, ‘How do you make a large school feel small? How do you make the largest independent school in America feel more intimate, more responsive, more flexible?’” he remembers. “By going to a team concept in the middle school, not only were we in line with where the theory of middle-school education was going, but we were able to help solve that riddle. An eighth-grader today belongs to a school with 3,750 students, a middle school of 1,000 students, a grade of 375 students, and a team of 92. That team has four teachers who are committed to it. The students start each day with their team, each of which has its own unique community.

In the Omidyar Neighborhood, one of the first important programmatic decisions was to provide Punahou’s youngest learners with a highly attentive community experience during their first two years of school. This was accomplished by moving first grade away from second through fifth, and combining it with kindergarten, as 6-year-olds are developmentally more similar to 5-year-olds than to 7-year-olds.

The Omidyar Neighborhood’s design places one kindergarten and one first-grade classroom in a single “house” with a shared atelier between them. At year’s end, each kindergarten class moves next door to the space occupied by its former first-grade neighbors. This strengthens their relationships with the same four teachers over two years, which in turn builds trust, security and a sense of family before they travel down to the lower campus for second grade and beyond.

Left: A mindfulness activity at the beginning of the day in a Case Middle School team space.

Right: The luminous entrance to the sixth-grade houses in Case Middle School.

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The setup also encourages teachers of both grades to collaborate on shared curricular themes, inquiry projects and field trips. One example of this is the annually rotating focus on mauka (mountains/uplands) and makai (ocean/ shoreline), which every teacher in the Neighborhood uses as the starting point for an interdisciplinary curriculum with a strong focus on sustainability and place.

In the Omidyar Neighborhood, faculty also chose to bring the arts and outdoor education closer to the center of the student experience – a decision supported by research demonstrating the importance of creativity and play in early childhood education. The previous model had clearly differentiated between classroom teachers who taught “core” competencies like literacy and math, and the teachers responsible for “special” subjects like art, music or P.E. Whereas these “specials” teachers previously rotated among classrooms in different areas of campus, the Omidyar steering committee chose to integrate them more fully into the Neighborhood so they could focus exclusively on kindergartners and first-graders.

To accomplish this, dedicated spaces for the “specials” teachers were built into the new facilities: Fully equipped art and music workshops were incorporated into a renovated Wilcox Hall, and a new P.E. pavilion was constructed at the tip of the Neighborhood’s playground. As a result of this proximity and the greater amount of shared time together, the “specials” and classroom teachers began to work much more closely on coordinating curriculum and activities.

“Previously, it was kind of like the old junior high model where the kids would go off to music class and then come back, and then they’d go off to have their art class and come back to us. And that’s actually not very integrated at all if you think about it from the kid’s point of view,” says kindergarten teacher and Omidyar steering committee member Rebecca Kesler. “We wanted to put the specialists more at the center of the community.”

The proximity of these “specials” classes also made it possible to divide the class in half, so that 13 students at a time go to music, art or P.E. once per six-day cycle. This leaves the other 13 students with more personalized attention from the classroom teachers, who can plan activities for smaller groups.

The renovation of Wilcox Hall allowed for the creation of new art and music classrooms, making the creative arts central to the experience of kindergartners and first-graders in the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood.

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As the next step in a child’s Punahou journey after “graduating” from the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, the Kosasa Community is organized around two sister neighborhoods. Each of them houses two grades so that the larger environment is broken into smaller settings that share many recognizable features. As Grades 2 – 5 Dean and steering committee member John Nagel ’91 notes, “We want the kids to feel at home, like they have a familiar space where they’re welcome and known. Because in order for kids at this age to learn best, they need to feel safe.

So when the second- and third-graders move up to the fourth- and fifth-grade neighborhood, it’s not that far away and has the same basic organization.”

The two Kosasa neighborhoods are arranged around a variety of shared spaces for students and teachers to interact and learn together – most notably, two playgrounds with their own set of unique outdoor education features, and the Junior School Learning Commons. The classroom studios are also grouped in “houses” connected by walkways and stairs, so that a sense of continuity and community dominates the built environment. Like Mamiya, Case and Omidyar, the studios are open, airy and bright, thanks to abundant glass windows and sliding doors that make the learning inside them visible.

For Junior School Principal Paris Priore-Kim ’76, “Kosasa is a place where communication, collaboration and connection are actualized, because of the transparencies between the buildings, the transparencies between the classrooms, the ability for faculty to view teaching beyond their classroom and the exchange between indoor and outdoor spaces.”

The educational program developed by grades 2 – 5 faculty during the planning for the Kosasa Community is focused on personalization and inquiry. Personalized learning recognizes the diverse personalities and needs of each child, as opposed to forcing them into predetermined curricular and assessment standards. Inquiry is the tool that transforms each child’s curiosity into selfdriven learning, with the teacher as mentor to guide students’ authentic questions about the world around them. This program demands an environment that can accommodate the broadest range of learning experiences a teacher or student can imagine. These experiences are naturally interdisciplinary, and the characteristics of flexibility and adaptability that make them possible are discussed next.

Continuity in visual planes and pathways keeps the buildings of the Kosasa Community highly connected.

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Flexibility and Adaptability

When Gates Family Science Workshop in Mamiya was conceived, it was a daring experiment, since teachers had little experience with unprogrammed spaces.

But as faculty realized how quickly education was changing, flexibility and adaptability in their learning environments became increasingly important.

It proved so valuable that what was originally a concept in building design expanded to include furniture, scheduling and how diverse users might interact – such as students of different ages, or students and teachers.

Over time, unprogrammed and flexible spaces like the Gates Family Science Workshop or the Middle School’s creative learning centers could adapt to meet changing needs, while rigidly structured spaces – like a classroom designed for 25 students to sit at desks arranged in rows facing the front of the room – could not. Of the three creative learning centers, only one – Kuaihelani – is still being used as originally planned; a testament to their adaptability. In 2018, the Gates Workshop was reconfigured to incorporate a stronger emphasis on fabrication, technology and design, but it remains an interdisciplinary and multi-age workshop staffed to support students and faculty from kindergarten through grade 12.

The steering committees understood that they were ideally planning for decades to come. “One of the things about these rooms is that they’re actually really basic, if you strip out the furniture and everything else,” says Kesler of the classroom houses in Omidyar. “We told the architects: ‘We know that we’re going to need light, because human beings need a lot of light. We know that we’re going to need electricity. And we know teachers are going to always need storage. Other than that, just make the classrooms really simple and we’ll fill them with whatever is appropriate in education at the time.”

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In Case Middle School, the two core teachers for each sixth-grade team share a moveable wall that they can retract for team activities, and Walker believes that this was one of the project’s most successful features: “In hindsight, I would have done that in seventh and eighth grade too. Just seeing how well they were used showed everybody what’s possible when you have that kind of flexible reconfiguring of space. Up in K – 1, blending two classrooms built on the notion of the moveable wall, and of course in Kosasa all the classroom studios have one.”

In the Kosasa Community, all the spaces have been designed for optimal flexibility.

Even the current organization of grade levels on separate floors would be easy to change in the future, should faculty decide to pair two classes of different ages next to one another. This is the latest expression of an instructional philosophy that has been slowly but surely moving toward personalization and attentiveness to each child’s unique learning journey.

“We know that all children learn differently, and the flexibility of our spaces is critical to creating learning that is authentic and enduring,” says Priore-Kim. “Rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach, which is the model of education many of us grew up with, these facilities allow our teachers to configure space, furniture, classes and even grade levels in new and innovative ways.”

“The steering committee started with the idea of personalized education: Everyone has different needs, no one learns in exactly the same way,” says Nagel. “So how do we provide a space that accommodates all the different needs of all our different learners? By understanding that in order to really personalize, we need to be flexible. So we started talking about the flexibility of not only our curriculum and our teachers, but our space, our furniture, even our schedule.”

With a moveable wall between each pair of classroom studios, it’s possible to have large-group activities with all 50 students, or divide into smaller groups using the shared breakout room or the lanai.

There is no fixed front or back to the studios, and even the furniture can be moved easily by children. What’s more, there are different types of furniture to suit different types of personalities: Some chairs roll on wheels, others pivot around a central axis for more fidgety students, while still others are fixed. Tables come in multiple shapes that can fit together like puzzle pieces to build a staggering number of configurations.

The flexibility is not only meant to support different student needs, but also different teaching styles, notes Grades 2 – 5 Dean and steering committee member Julie Crane-Cory: “Every student is different and that’s why we need a group of teachers working together collaboratively. Each teacher has different strengths so we need to find ways to take advantage of that diversity instead of saying all teachers must teach all their students in exactly the same way.” Faculty are encouraged to apply their creativity to developing learning environments, lesson plans and experiences that are appropriate to a particular individual or group at that moment. The next day, week, or month, the learning environment might look completely different.

“It exponentially changes how children can be organized for targeted learning,” adds Priore-Kim. “The personnel in grades 2 – 5 can adjust as well, because we now have three teachers (one for each individual classroom and an assistant teacher that works closely to support both those teachers) for each space that may adjust to student interest or program as they see fit.”

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PRINCIPLE IN ACTION: FLEXIBILITY AND ADAPTABILITY

On any given day in the Kosasa Community, one might walk past a half-dozen classroom studios that all look completely different from one another. Some are double the size of others, owing to the fact that the moveable wall they share has been pushed open to gather all 50 students for a guest speaker. One has a large open space in its center where students are doing a relaxation dance to shake out extra kinetic energy accumulated throughout the morning – the lightweight furniture has been quickly rolled to the perimeter by the students themselves. Another class has its tables and chairs arranged in concentric semicircles around the teacher, who is explaining the day’s lesson on an interactive digital screen that she has rolled out of the corner where it sits when not being used. In yet another, half the students are working on iPad video projects in pods of three to four, while the other half is reading in a makeshift library area on beanbags and padded benches.

This diversity is intentional and made possible by physical space and furniture that is so highly flexible, adaptable and moveable, it can be reconfigured by students themselves on a daily or even hourly basis.

“What’s exciting about this is that there are no defined spaces, as opposed to the traditional classroom where you have your reading area, your art area, your technology area,” says second-grade teacher and Kosasa steering committee member Natalie Hayashi. “The joy is in letting the children decide what space works for them.

They get to take ownership of their own learning.”

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Outdoor Environments

Punahou is blessed with an exceptionally large and beautiful campus, in a geographical location where the outdoors can enrich learning all year long.

While Punahou’s learning environments were not historically designed to celebrate the outdoors, they were naturally enhanced by them, as generations of students who splashed in the Lily Pond or climbed Rocky Hill can attest.

As the campus has evolved, the use and preservation of green space has become increasingly intentional. A growing body of evidence demonstrates how exercise, play and a connection to nature influence children’s physical and cognitive development. Punahou’s spectacular setting also presents an opportunity to create thoughtful outdoor spaces that go beyond playing fields and decorative landscaping to enrich children’s learning.

“We’ve recognized that learning takes place outside as much as inside, and what kids learn depends on the environment you put them in,” says Nagel. “On a flat, grassy space where you play ball or tag, the kinds of skills that develop are more hierarchical. Whereas if you have a wild space, you’re fostering creative leadership where children will interact and socialize in a different way.”

While there is considerable outdoor space in Case Middle School, most of it is paved. This was later recognized as one of the facility’s shortcomings, but helped ensure that future projects incorporated the outdoors much more intentionally.

Planning for Omidyar included the difficult decision to relocate two heavily used tennis courts behind Wilcox Hall that were originally going to be incorporated into the new facility. Yet the more the steering committee and architectural team looked for workarounds, the more they realized that this valuable open space could truly transfigure the new learning environment. Scott and Walker made a strong case to the trustees that respecting the educational mission of the School meant making this space available to the project. The solution was costly, but the tennis courts were relocated to a new site farther up on Rocky Hill and the playground that opened up in their place would become the true community heart of the K – 1 Neighborhood.

Top: Barwick Playground was reimagined in the outdoor landscaping of the Kosasa Community.

Bottom:The central playground of the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood.

Facing page: The native forest environment in the Kosasa Community playground.

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“We knew after Case the importance of green space for kids,” remembers Walker. “I think that’s why the Board of Trustees made the incredible decision, at the cost of $2 million, to move those tennis courts to give kids that central playground.

Initially we were going to design around it, but we would have been repeating the mistake of not having adequate green space. It was a huge decision, but it was the right one.”

In addition to the shared playground that forms the heart of the Omidyar Neighborhood, vegetable gardens, bioswales, and easy access to Rocky Hill’s “wild” spaces are other examples of how the outdoors were designed to support a curriculum that emphasizes place, sustainability, exploration and movement.

“Even when it’s dry, the bioswale at Omidyar is teaching us about water. Children are in there picking up rocks, turning things over, and it’s a very tactile experience. They’re learning things, they’re discovering the life under rocks – it’s a very interactive, relational quality that these outdoor spaces provide for these students,” says Priore-Kim. Accessible outdoor environments would help teachers incorporate these learning experiences into their curriculum, opening up many more opportunities for children to learn from the natural world.

“It used to be that you had to go up the stairs, around the bend, down the side, along the fence to get to your garden,” remembers kindergarten teacher and Omidyar steering committee member Donna Reid-Hayes ’78. “My garden is right here now and from the children’s point of view it gives them more independence.”

The bioswales in the Kosasa Community and Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood are both a teaching tool about sustainability and a space for playful exploration.

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PRINCIPLE IN ACTION: OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENTS

On a bright fall morning in the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, a group of kindergartners set out on a winding adventure from their central playground to a lookout on the slopes of Pu‘u o Ma-noa, or Rocky Hill.

Led by outdoor education and P.E. faculty, they are following the “kukui nut trail,” moving from one tree to another as they learn about the candlenut tree that provided light and oil in ancient Hawai‘i.

Along the way, they harvest leaves and nuts while practicing skills like observation, counting and comparison.

By the time each class regroups at a rainwater catchment barrel in the Neighborhood, the students have learned how to identify the trees and recognize the process of decomposition of their leaves and seeds on the ground. They take turns putting their collected nuts to a flotation test to see which ones contain meat – and sink – as opposed to those that have dried out, and therefore float. In one class, students learn how to crack the nuts and pry out the meat, refining their motor skills and coordination by learning to crack the hard shells on a concave lava rock with just the right pressure and focus in order to avoid crushing the soft, inner seed.

When learning transcends the classroom, the interdisciplinary nature of the world outside becomes more evident. While this challenges an educational approach built on standardized curriculum, it offers new ways to explore and integrate traditional disciplines – not to mention intersecting with many of the School’s values, such as sustainability, Hawaiian culture and instructional innovation.

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“A kid might just get up during snack time and go out to the yard and pretty soon there’s five or six of them in the garden looking at something,” adds P.E. teacher and Omidyar steering committee member Peter Balding ’77. “That could have never happened before because they had to plan the event of going to the garden. This was one of the things that was inherently good about the Winne Units that we applied up here, where it didn’t exist before.”

“I love to see people’s reaction at the sheer beauty of the place when they come up the stairs,” says Kesler.

“And for me, the fact that I can look up toward the mountains and Rocky Hill and I see the sky every day, I never stop appreciating it. The kids may not understand what a gift they’ve been given, but they feel it.”

By the time faculty were designing outdoor spaces for the Kosasa Community, they realized that in order to meet a range of instructional goals and learning profiles, the outdoor spaces would need to be as flexible and diverse as the indoor ones. Third-grade, Hawaiian Studies and Outdoor Education faculty were heavily involved in the planning of outdoor teaching environments in Kosasa. In the neighborhood closest to the Lily Pond, an open-air pavilion and imu overlook a series of terraces fed by water from the New Spring and containing Hawaiian canoe plants such as taro and sweet potato, which are also used in the annual Third-Grade Lu-‘au. There is a large community garden in addition to the smaller plots outside each ground-floor classroom.

In the “mauka” neighborhood, a forest environment is planted with native trees such as koa, ‘ohi‘a and kukui, with large, climbable boulders and trails winding through it. The bioswale occupies a central place in the playground, and is referred to as an ‘auwai (a Hawaiian irrigation ditch), echoing the concept of the Hawaiian ahupua‘a or watershed. During Outdoor Education classes, new second-grade students are sent on scavenger hunts to identify plants and other features of their open-air environment, such as the gabion wall that filters rainwater runoff before it flows into the bioswale.

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The iconic third-grade Hawaiian Studies curriculum was a driving force in imagining Kosasa’s sense of place. While this yearlong focus on Hawaiian culture evolved in the Winne Units, where outdoor spaces were modified to suit it over time, the Kosasa Community presented an opportunity to imagine the ideal setting for this curriculum from scratch.

“Whether it’s making kapa from a wauke plant or digging up a pia root to make haupia for the Third-Grade Lu-‘au – when students can see and touch these things, instead of just seeing them in a book or a movie, it makes their learning real,” says third-grade teacher and Kosasa steering committee member Haunani Dalton ’70 Abdul.

Celebrating its physical proximity to the New Spring by weaving the element of water throughout both its neighborhoods, the Kosasa Community intentionally builds upon Punahou’s deep sense of place perhaps more than any project in the School’s history. As a design element and metaphor for the Community, the ahupua‘a echoes Hawaiian values of stewardship, community and a deep connection to the Islands.

“The existing landscape differentiates this project from others,” observes landscape architect and principal of PBR Hawai‘i, Stan Duncan ’73. “It presents a wonderful opportunity to make a more direct connection between Ka Punahou and the campus in a way that hasn’t been done before, by really celebrating it rather than turning our back on it.”

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Developmentally Appropriate Design: Following a Clear Sequence K – 8

The Campus Master Plan provided the School with a vision to guide multiple projects across a single section of its campus. Between 2004 and 2019, the entire Junior School was redesigned from top to bottom. While the sequence was determined in part by the urgency of aging infrastructure and in part by philanthropy (see Chapter 4), all three major projects were initiated by the same leadership team – Jim Scott and Mike Walker – with notable continuity of instructional philosophy, experience and trustee support. The end result is a kindergarten through grade 8 student experience that is connected and developmentally coherent.

OMIDYAR NEIGHBORHOOD: WONDER AND EXPLORATION The priority for K – 1 was to create a safe and nurturing environment that stimulates young children’s innate sense of wonder and desire to explore the world around them. Built to the scale of small children and located in its own “neighborhood” far from the rest of campus (Chapel, lunch and Convocation are conducted separately here), Omidyar is filled with light, laughter and the playful rhythms of nature. It is an ideal environment for the School’s youngest learners as imagined by the adults who know them best. By eliminating the abrupt transition from kindergarten to first grade, it is also more developmentally appropriate, based on what neuroscience tells us about children of this age range. Each student benefits from four attentive adults over the course of their two years. Sharing the same classroom “house” during that time, kindergartners and first-graders get to know each other, establishing early friendships across grades. The Neighborhood’s small size and self-enclosed design make it easy for children to feel recognized and supported by its 12 teachers and 12 assistant teachers.

In the redesign of the K – 1 Neighborhood, the three programmatic themes or principles inspiring the new learning environment were attentiveness, collaboration and flexibility. Collaboration and flexibility have been discussed previously.

Greater attentiveness was achieved by reorganizing staffing in several ways: Teaching assistants, who had previously worked in more of a clerical support role to the teachers, became assistant teachers – professionals with credentials and the pedagogical experience to team-teach a class. This important programmatic shift ensured that each student would receive the attention and recognition so important at this age. It was piloted long before construction began, and ultimately allowed for many more configurations of class and curriculum.

“Omidyar is such a developmentally appropriate environment for young children,” says Walker. “The blending of indoors and the outdoors, the gentleness and sheer beauty of the place – it all allows teachers to attend in a truly loving and nurturing way to children.”

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Or, as Kesler summarizes her experience: “I loved imagining what the buildings would be like, going from the architects’ drawings to the real thing, but it wasn’t until they cleared everything out and we walked up here for the first time that I thought, ‘It’s really a neighborhood!’ That’s when I truly understood what the architects intended by putting us all around this central playground. We say it’s like the neighborhoods of the 1950s, where moms just sent their kids out to play because everyone knew it would be safe. We can let kids out knowing there are all these other adults who see them as their children too, because we really are a community.”

KOSASA COMMUNITY: CURIOSITY AND INQUIRY Children in the Kosasa Community experience their sense of wonder maturing into self-driven curiosity and inquiry. As they become more independent, they are able to absorb a broader range of experiences and interact with students of other age groups. The horizons of their daily environment are wider, but still nestled within the familiarity of their neighborhood; they are much closer to, and more aware of, the rest of campus.

Personalized and inquiry-based learning are the programmatic principles behind spaces that can facilitate a variety of experiences to stimulate students’ questions and curiosity about the world around them. Classroom “studios” are interconnected and flexible, maximizing teachers’ ability to build diverse activities around real-world inquiries. The outdoor environments are also stunningly diverse, with open fields for running free to intimate nooks and “forest” trails that invite exploration, reflection and discovery. This range of environments is designed to reflect children’s unique learning profiles, so that every student feels comfortable helping to shape his or her own educational journey.

“The idea of inquiry leads our curriculum, and Kosasa really provides the opportunity for kids to take the curiosity that’s fostered in our K – 1 Neighborhood and turn that into something that they can become passionate about in grades 2 – 5,” says Nagel. “The environments are based on the concept that learning takes place in all different areas, both indoors and outdoors. They’re built to

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support every kind of learner, based on this notion that kids learn at different rates and they have different interests. It’s through inquiry that we can meet these different needs and keep them interested and excited about what they’re learning.”

“Second- through fifth-graders are quite diverse,” says Crane-Cory. “They come in as young learners, very much attached to their teachers, who are just getting to know their own identity and their relationship with other students. As second graders, they come in here very curious. What we want the space to provide for them is to maintain that curiosity, because it will drive their learning. That is something our faculty is very mindful of as we see their journey going from needing more support to becoming more independent, complex thinkers before they move on to becoming middle-schoolers.”

CASE MIDDLE SCHOOL: COMMUNITY AND SELF-DISCOVERY After the safety and intimacy of Omidyar and Kosasa, where each student belongs first and foremost to their classroom and second to the broader perimeter of their neighborhood, children are ready to enter Case Middle School. Here, being part of a larger community and having a greater degree of independence drives their learning. The team spaces are the foundation of this experience, and for the first time, students are part of a group that is larger than their class, but smaller than their entire grade. While their curriculum is more defined by subject areas as they prepare to enter the Academy, it is intentionally interdisciplinary, with many teams choosing real-world inquiry themes and projects to pursue throughout the semester or year.

“The construction of Case Middle School, both the overall program and the new buildings, allows for a gradual transition for our students from the protective, nurturing elementary school to a more independent Academy,” noted eighth-grade science teacher and Middle School steering committee member Dan Tuttle ’73.

“This middle school has allowed us to look more closely at the ways to best support the learning of 11- to 15-year-olds: teaming, an advisory program, the alignment and/or integration of subject matter, service learning, etc. Although the facilities are fabulous, it’s the program that really makes Case Middle School successful. We were allowed to create new programs and recreate existing programs before any plans were drawn up for new facilities. It just makes a lot of sense to progress in that sequence.”

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The central playground is the heart of the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, providing a recreational and curricular space that knits the kindergarten and first-grade community together.

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Sustainability and a Sense of Place

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The Aims of a Punahou Education include a commitment to educating for a sustainable future, and this shared value has blossomed across the School during Jim Scott’s ’70 leadership. It brings with it a greater appreciation for the role that Hawai‘i’s unique history and culture play in Punahou’s identity and in the experience of its students. While this sense of place echoes across centuries of Punahou students’ memories as one of the School’s defining characteristics, it has only more recently become an intentional priority in campus planning.

Students play on the outdoor rock landscaping in the Kosasa Community.

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Punahou’s faculty and leadership have worked closely with architects to ensure that the campus reflects the School’s values and culture. “Unlike a cold climate where kids spend the majority of their days in indoor settings, children in Hawai‘i grow up barefoot, running on grass. It’s very sensory,” says Gene Yong of Belt Collins. “What’s been happening in the world of education is the extension of learning beyond the classrooms, but in Hawai‘i, it’s been happening for generations. It’s only now becoming more codified as part of 21st-century learning.”

The Growth in Sustainable Design Features Over Time MAMIYA SCIENCE CENTER » Temperature management based on humidity and light sensors » Sensor-operated lighting that shuts off 10 minutes after a room is vacated » Windows that can be opened for natural ventilation when appropriate » Low VOC (volatile organic compounds) flooring

Cultivating a sense of belonging and stewardship for one’s home have emerged as hallmarks of Scott’s tenure, and reimagining Punahou’s learning environments has played a key role in raising awareness about how and why this is so.

“Every year, I tell the fifth-graders that, between the sixth and ninth grades, their class size is going to more than double,” says Jim Scott. “So those students who have been here from kindergarten through fifth grade have a deeper understanding and perspective about this place that they’re going to be teaching the new ones. If you studied at the New Spring, you’re called to a different type of leadership and learning, and it has to do with the duality of the School’s two founding gifts – one Western and one Hawaiian. That’s why the understanding of this place is so important to me. It becomes a base for all our students, but the K – 5 community can actually teach the rest of our students about Punahou.”

» Low-flush automatic toilets (the first on campus) Recognition: Hawaiian Electric Company 1999 Energy Efficiency Awards Project of the Year

CASE MIDDLE SCHOOL » Natural ventilation and lighting to minimize need for artificial lighting and air conditioning » An ice-based cooling system that also cools Bishop Hall, reducing electricity usage for air conditioning » Use of recycled materials and materials that require less resources for cleaning and maintenance » Waterless urinals (the first sizeable commercial installation in the state) » Bathroom faucets that automatically turn off

“We realized that we really needed to make open space a central part of the Campus Master Plan,” Yong adds. “Usually it’s an uphill battle with schools, because fundraising campaigns are built around buildings. Architects have reputations associated with buildings. There’s no name for the designer of the Academy quad, but it’s one of the most incredible places on campus.

Open spaces and outdoor learning environments can be very intimate or very expansive – from a lanai to Rice Field – but they are not to be taken for granted. Finding balance between the buildings and the landscape is something that you have to be vigilant about, because you can easily lose it.”

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» A water catchment system fed by KaPunahou, the New Spring, collected in underground storage tanks and used to irrigate landscaping instead of using municipal drinking water » Relocation of major trees » Recapturing of storm water for irrigation » Photovoltaics power 100 percent of Gates Creative Learning Center Recognition: LEED Gold; Hawaiian Electric Company 2006 Energy Efficiency Awards Project of The Year and Innovation in Design

This balance became an important consideration for the Kosasa Community, with its ambitious vision for outdoor learning. As Grades 2 – 5 Dean and steering committee member John Nagel ’91 explains: “It became clear to us that, because we valued outdoor space as much as we valued indoor space, we needed to make some well-thought-out decisions so that we could preserve the outdoor experience for students as much as possible.” This ultimately meant building two-story facilities, which nearly doubled the amount of green space available to students for play or curricular use.

OMIDYAR K – 1 NEIGHBORHOOD » Photovoltaics installed above all covered areas, resulting in on-site harvesting of 85 percent of the Neighborhood’s energy needs » Maximizing indoor use of natural daylight to reduce the need for artificial lighting » Energy-efficient lighting and air conditioning with occupancy and daylight sensors

Green Building and Landscape Design

» An online building dashboard that allows students to track the Neighborhood’s energy usage and impact of savings

In recent years, a number of School initiatives have promoted sustainable behavior and a deeper grounding in Punahou’s island context – from educational programs to retrofitting much of the electricity and water infrastructure on campus. But an important and lasting example of this shift has been how each facility project under Scott’s tenure raised the bar for green building standards, even though this often required significantly more time, energy and resources.

» Outdoor creative learning center with Hawaiian educational gardens and native plantings

The outcomes have positioned the School as a thought leader among its peers. Punahou has been recognized as one of the nation’s leaders in sustainable school design, and was the first facility in Hawai‘i to receive a LEED Gold designation (Case Middle School, 2006), serving as a model for other educational institutions. It followed this with LEED Gold (operations) and Platinum (facility) designations for the Omidyar Neighborhood; the Kosasa Community is currently being built to the highest green standards the School has pursued to date. Also in 2006, Punahou established campuswide sustainability goals around water, waste, energy and transportation, and was named the Greenest School in America by the Green Guide. This in turn influenced subsequent facilities, which lifted their sights from merely incorporating green design features to making that design a part of the School’s sustainability curriculum itself.

» Garden plots and agriculture plantings of banana, papaya, kalo, etc.

» Recycling center » Bioswale to manage water runoff and provide discovery learning for students

» Cisterns that reduce water usage by 30 to 40 percent in conjunction with water-saving fixtures in kitchens and bathrooms » Healthy food choices and waste management protocols for the dining room Recognition: LEED Gold (operations) and Platinum (facility)

KOSASA COMMUNITY

Designing to LEED standards became a norm after the success of Case Middle School, and even a prerequisite for the selection of the design team for the Omidyar and Kosasa projects.

The Kosasa Community will be the first project in the School’s history planned to generate 100 percent of its own energy use on site through renewable sources (Omidyar reached 85 percent), pioneering Punahou’s ambitious goal of becoming a net-zero campus within the next decade. But these accomplishments resulted from years of accumulated experience as the School’s educational philosophy moved simultaneously in this direction.

» Digital dashboards that provide comparative information about energy and water usage in real time across multiple buildings » Ventilation systems that prioritize natural cooling as much as possible, including energy-efficient fans and clerestory windows that maximize trade winds

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» Water-meter displays in restrooms and refillable water bottle stations that quantify the number of plastic water bottles saved » Temperature-sensitive display ports to alert students when natural ventilation is preferable to air conditioning » Daylight- and motion-sensor lighting systems that automatically adjust brightness for exterior light and shut off when the room is empty to reduce energy consumption » Exposed structural elements and cutouts of interior walls and lanai floors to make elements like insulation, plumbing and electricity visible and teachable » Photovoltaic panels that support the buildings’ net-zero energy consumption » Vegetative “green screens” and light-colored roofs to absorb and reflect solar heat, and reduce the need to cool buildings » A 25,000-square-foot native Hawaiian forest environment with trails and boulders supports an outdoor classroom » Numerous plants support Hawaiian Studies curriculum, including kalo, palapalai, pili grass, noni, lonomea, koa, kukui and ‘ulu » Backyard garden plots for each set of ground-floor classrooms, and a 4,000square-foot garden to be shared by the entire community » Cisterns for each building to capture rainwater for gardening » Permeable pavers, a gabion filtering wall and bioswale to absorb excess water runoff – the bioswale also helps to illustrate the interconnected water systems of an ahupua‘a or watershed » A student-designed treehouse » Agricultural terraces for Hawaiian canoe plants fed by spring water from Ka Punahou » An open-air classroom, navigational compass and imu pit for Hawaiian Studies curriculum » Preservation of the centenary banyan tree that has been a beloved natural climbing and play structure for generations of Punahou students Recognition: National Association of Industrial and Office Properties (NAIOP) Hawai‘i Chapter Kukulu Hale Sustainability Development Award; American Society of Landscape Architects Hawai‘i Chapter 2018 Award of Excellence in General Design; LEED Platinum (pending); Hawaii-CHPS (pending)

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The first facility on campus intentionally built with sustainability features in mind was Hemmeter Fieldhouse and Gym. Completed in 1981 and overseen by John Hara ’57, the 1,800-person gym was oriented to make use of natural light. Its rooftop solar panels for heating the pool and locker rooms were among the first to be installed in the state.

In Mamiya Science Center, a number of green features were incorporated thanks to Hara’s natural instincts for resource efficiency, even though sustainability had not yet become a major priority for facilities design. As former Physical Plant Director Steve Piper ’68 notes, “We bought the first 134A chillers in the state of Hawai‘i when we did Mamiya. We built an 85,000square-foot completely air-conditioned facility that consumed less energy than the old MacNeil Hall, which only had two air conditioned spaces: the auditorium and an upstairs classroom.”

Case Middle School incorporated and expanded on many of the features that had worked in Mamiya: sensor-operating Lutron lights that turned off when classrooms were vacated in Mamiya, dimmed automatically according to the amount of daylight in Case. Low-flush, automatic toilets in Mamiya became waterless urinals in Case.

Many of these features were part of the original plans for the Middle School – which would have been a strong contender for a LEED designation even before the design team chose to actively pursue it. But it wasn’t until then-Trustee Mary Moragne ’54 Cooke made a strong argument for setting the project’s sights on a LEED Gold designation that the entire steering committee received a thorough education in what green building could be.

Cooke suggested that Hara visit the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California, Santa Barbara, which at the time was one of the national leaders in green building and design. “Sustainability was new at that time, so we were the first kids on the block to try it,” recalled Hara.

Top left: Photovoltaic panels were used liberally in the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, covering walkways and the pickup/dropoff pavilions to maximize sustainable energy use.

Top right: Skylights line the classroom houses at Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, allowing for generous natural light to fill the Community Room below.

Bottom left: Water cisterns collect rainwater for later use in garden plots at the Kosasa Community.

Bottom right: Clerestory windows, natural daylighting, and low-energy fans help to regulate temperatures in Kosasa Community classrooms.

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The changes needed for LEED Gold would add another $3 million to the project’s already record-breaking budget, but as Piper notes: “The research supported it.”

Students were in airtight classrooms in Bishop Hall with artificial lighting and very little communication with the outdoors.The physiological arguments for environments with natural light and fresh air were just as compelling as those for preserving natural resources, and when the design team applied its creativity to the challenge, several unique ideas emerged.

One was the choice to save a significant amount of the overflow water from the New Spring – much of which was simply going into a municipal storm drain. Two 1,000-gallon holding tanks were installed below ground next to the Middle School, and the water collected in them is used for landscape irrigation.

Another innovation was an ice plant used to cool the facility in place of conventional air conditioning, also reducing energy use during peak daytime hours. An ice plant freezes water in large tanks at night, which is melted during the day to produce water that chills the Middle School buildings. The ice plant also provides the cooling for nearby Bishop Hall.

Other unconventional choices included relocating several large centenary monkeypod trees, which would have been cut down and simply replaced in most construction sites. But because of the trees’ historic value to the campus, an additional $10,000 was spent to preserve and replant each of them. “They have a lot of stories to tell – kids sat under them for generations. Do you cut down a tree just because you could replace it with something cheaper? Or do you want to be able to tell the story?” asks Piper.

The impacts of sustainable design on human behavior became much clearer with Case Middle School. Not only did teachers report feeling more alive and energetic at the end of the day – attributing this to the new classrooms they occupied – but the facility prompted a renewal of many of the School’s custodial practices.

Classrooms in Case Middle School allow for ample light and natural ventilation, creating a healthier learning environment for students and teachers.

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For example, a new rubber-based flooring was selected to replace the standard vinyl tile that had been in classrooms before. At the time, this Terranova product was the largest single installation anywhere in the country (138,000 square feet, all told), and it practically eliminated the expensive stripping and waxing that had to take place at the end of each year. After seeing how practical it was, other schools – including many in the Hawai‘i Department of Education – began to use Terranova.

Another big shift was the move to green cleaning products and replacing individual packaging with refillable dispensers. This began in Case and quickly became a campuswide practice. “It really did change the chemicals we use and how we clean on campus, which, in itself, has created much healthier environments for the kids,” says Director of Campus Energy and Major Construction Projects Randy Overton ’80.

Case also provided an ideal reason to begin experimenting with photovoltaics.

Although the cost of the technology at the time was too high to apply to the entire project, one of the nine buildings was designed to be entirely solar powered. Fittingly, this was the eighth-grade creative learning center focused on innovation and technology, which would eventually become home to the School’s robotics and engineering program. Scott remembers how an earthquake on Hawai‘i Island shut down the power in Honolulu one evening: “It was late on a Sunday without power, and we were trying to decide whether we call off school the next day or not. We had our meeting down in the Middle School – the whole campus was dark except for the eighth-grade creative learning center.”

Soon after Case and Omidyar, a significant amount of photovoltaics were installed on many of Punahou’s buildings and in less than 15 years, the School was producing about 1.2 megawatt hours annually in solar energy. Since 2007, electricity use has declined by 1 percent across campus, despite the heavier use of facilities for both School and community activities, and the addition of tens of thousands of square feet in new buildings. Punahou currently derives 15 percent of its campus power from solar energy. When the Kosasa Community is finished, that number will be closer to 25 percent, placing Punahou in the top 2 to 3 percent of schools in the country, according to Vice President and Treasurer John Field ’72. With Overton’s guidance, the School is currently in the process of redesigning its entire infrastructure in pursuit of an ambitious net-zero goal in the years to come.

Photovoltaic panels provide shade over a walkway connecting Wilcox Hall to the rest of the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood.

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Sustainability in Educational Program

“Environments that teach” became an increasingly important concept as facility design evolved. What began as sustainable building features, such as water-saving bathrooms or daylight-sensitive dimming, grew into tools to teach sustainable behavior for students. In Omidyar, kindergartners and first-graders can see the net savings of electricity in their neighborhood in real time through an interactive digital dashboard that classes check on a regular basis. The students can also study principles like resource conservation by observing features of their built environment, such as rainwater catchment systems, green recycling bins and the photovoltaic panels that cover their dropoff pavilions.

In part, the move toward seeing the buildings as educational tools was a natural result of the faculty and staff’s own learning. The facility projects were slowly helping to shift cultural awareness about sustainability, as Piper notes: “Not only were we educating ourselves, but in the process we were also educating the other members of the team who would then become stewards of the

facility and help us. We could do what we wanted but if the maintenance guys didn’t understand it, if the teachers didn’t understand, if the students or administration didn’t understand … then it was a lost cause.”

Seventh-grade students working on their “Project Green” social studies curriculum occasionally take a tour of their middle-school environment with Physical Plant staff. Overton relates how even something as simple as showing them the ice plant used to chill the air in Case and Bishop Hall can be a teachable moment: “When we tell them we’re taking them to the ice plant, they think it’s going to be like walking into this ice cave. It’s always kind of funny because they rush to touch the tanks thinking they’re going to be freezing. They touch the side of these ice tanks, which are basically oversized Matson containers that have been very well insulated, and they say, ‘What’s wrong? It’s not working.’ And I say, ‘Well, I want you to think about that.’ Because if it were ice cold then you would know that the tanks aren’t very well insulated and they weren’t doing their job.”

“We became more intentional with K – 1 about how to incorporate sustainability into our curriculum,” says Scott. “By the time we did Omidyar, it wasn’t just photovoltaics. It was water, it was wind. We knew that we could provide two-thirds of the Neighborhood’s energy through renewable sources, and the kids realized that if they changed their behavior, we could increase that. So they measure energy use by classroom. They realize if they can convince their teachers to turn off the AC and open up the window with those breezes coming down from Ma-noa Valley, we use less electricity. They look at a cistern catching rain every day and see that it’s going to water the plants in the garden. Mike Walker used to tell a great story of this kindergarten student halfway through his first year. One weekend he’s at home with his family and it’s pouring rain. This little boy goes and puts all these buckets outside. His father asks, ‘What’s that for?’ And he replies, ‘This is so we can catch the rainwater so we don’t have to use the other water for the plants.’ Making sustainable behavior visible helps kids to think about their interdependence with natural systems.”

During the planning for the Omidyar Neighborhood, all kindergarten and first-grade faculty were invited to submit proposals for professional development grants to help them incorporate sustainability into the curriculum. A number visited

An interactive digital dashboard in the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood enables students to track energy usage and even make decisions based on it, such as using natural ventilation over air-conditioning.

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organizations pioneering sustainable education in the San Francisco Bay Area, as mentioned in Chapter 1. As a result, classes spend regular time in the garden, learning about the cycle of planting, cultivating and harvesting that produces food; and it is common for teachers to develop their own sustainability-inspired projects for students. In Gaylynn Nakamatsu’s class, for example, kindergartners script, shoot and edit their own iPad videos on topics such as recycling waste or water, or how solar energy works, using the Neighborhood’s physical characteristics as content.

“On the last day of school, they have a little chapel program up in the K – 1 Neighborhood, where they say goodbye to the first-graders, and it’s the kindergartners now who are going to step up and become the buddies for the next year’s kindergartners,” recounts Scott. “I don’t know how a photovoltaic cell works, but watching a 6-year-old explain it to a 5-year-old is pretty darling.”

In Kosasa this notion of using the physical environment to teach sustainable behavior is taken to a whole new level with features that are intentionally made for students to observe or manipulate. Digital monitors in each classroom indicate when air conditioning can be turned off in favor of natural ventilation.

Transparent cutouts in the floors and walls make the buildings’ insulation, energy and waste systems visible to students, stimulating their curiosity and helping them to understand how complex systems function.

“As students walk by one of the plexiglass cutouts, they might see a water pipe or air conditioning duct or insulation, and all of those pieces are meant to invite kids to ask questions about the world around them. Instead of just, ‘OK, we have this green building that is sustainable,’ we want them to wonder how the building is actually made, how it enhances the overall environment,” says Nagel.

Similarly, faculty ensure that every student in the Kosasa Community understands how the bioswale and gabion wall work to filter rainwater runoff so that it disperses gently back into the ground, or the names of different native plants, and why protecting Hawai‘i’s unique species is important.

“There are all sorts of sustainable features built into the buildings to give students a heightened awareness of our dependence on natural resources. This builds on the awareness that’s already started to take root when children are in the K – 1 Neighborhood, of where these natural resources come from and how we need to steward them,” says Junior School Principal Paris Priore-Kim ’76. “We’re lucky that we have the opportunity to learn about ourselves and our responsibility to this place, to understand our interdependence on one another and the interdependence between human beings and nature. The outdoor spaces in the Kosasa Community call on us to do just that. They provide opportunities to cultivate stewardship, to be patient as we watch things grow, to be responsible for living things, to be careful about our resources, to understand the preciousness of water. The outdoor spaces teach lessons not only about nature, but about how to operate in humane ways in nature.”

First-graders study the sweet potato plants they cultivate in their Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood garden plot.

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The Kosasa Community’s facilities and outdoor environments seamlessly combine opportunities for children to see sustainable principles in action.

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Galvanizing the Community

Grade 3 faculty Luanna Meyer ’81 Yee leads donors and supporters on a tour of the newly opened Kosasa Community in 2016.

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An important dimension to these projects was how they successfully mobilized the broader School community around new educational ideas.

Rather than being managed behind closed doors by administrators and architects – which would probably have been easier – Punahou’s academic and administrative leadership went through the lengthy process of making faculty, families and alumni active participants in the evolving story of each facility. This nurtured a shared investment in each project that supported its success in multiple ways, from the design process to the educational program to the philanthropy that would make it possible. This community engagement also established a precedent for sharing Punahou’s learning with broader audiences, helping to inspire other educators and institutions in Hawai‘i and beyond.

Students and faculty celebrate the groundbreaking of Mamiya Science Center in 1997.

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Energizing Volunteers

“One of the hallmarks of these campaigns under Jim Scott’s leadership has been the strategic use of volunteers from the Punahou community to rally diverse constituent groups behind the School’s vision,” observes Vice President for Institutional Advancement Kathryn Nelson. “None of these projects would have been possible without countless people who believed so deeply in the vision that they were willing to give significantly of their time and their financial resources.” An early and productive partnership with the Office of Institutional Advancement in all four projects facilitated the participation and enthusiasm of other stakeholders beyond campus – particularly school families, alumni and donors.

At $63 million, Case Middle School eclipsed all previous projects in scope and required a significant mobilization of the School community in order to be built.

A full-scale capital campaign was organized and Claire Olsen ’58 Johnson, trustee from 1974 – 2015, and her husband, Larry, were tapped to co-chair it.

The two created a comprehensive volunteer structure with other couples in charge of communicating the campaign’s case for support to different audiences (Junior School parents, Academy parents, corporate donors, alumni, etc.)

“We decided to do it all by parent couples,” recalls Johnson. “After all, we were a couple who met and grew up here at Punahou. The great thing about that was that both husband and wife could get in the car after a meeting and talk about it, and in this way the whole family could get behind the project.” This approach created a highly energized volunteer team directed by couples of different ages – including Dan ’42 and Carol Case themselves, for whom the Middle School would be named – who either were or had been parents of Punahou students and who all became close friends throughout the course of the campaign.

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“We had such fun times,” says Johnson. “We’d sit around the Sullivan Boardroom table strategizing and then go out into the hallway to make phone calls together – it truly was a team effort.” The volunteers organized playful activities to raise awareness and energy around the project, including old-fashioned pep rallies on Chamberlain Field – complete with pleated skirts and lettered sweaters – and collections where parent volunteers held out scoop nets for donations in the morning drop-off traffic.

“People are so amazing if you make personal contact with them, but you have to believe in the project and really understand how it serves the School’s educational mission,” adds Johnson. “Once the faculty came up with this innovative vision for the Middle School, it was easy to talk about. And the minute you can explain to other parents how this will be really good for children of that age group, then asking for their support becomes a conversation about what’s best for children and not about their wallet.”

One of the couples that the Johnsons invited to be on the volunteer steering committee for the Case campaign was Greg ’80 and Shirley Yim, who had three children in the Junior School at the time. Now a Punahou trustee, Greg says that the Johnsons opened their eyes to how fulfilling being a philanthropic volunteer on behalf of the School could be: “Claire and Larry were amazing mentors and they introduced us to that idea of supporting the School by taking on a leadership role in rallying parents around Case Middle School. For me, the biggest a-ha was realizing that it was our time to give back. Maybe because our kids were young at the time or because I was still in the middle of my career, I had never really imagined myself in that role, but they helped me to understand that it’s actually important to start when you’re a little younger.”

Despite their sense of being young and inexperienced as philanthropists, the Yims were instrumental in securing a significant gift for the project. Perhaps more importantly, their enthusiasm and talent for rallying parents around educational program was infectious. As a pediatric neurologist, Greg could translate the Middle School design (and those of subsequent projects) into the language of child development that was fascinating for other parents and faculty. He became a regular speaker on the neurology of learning even after the Case campaign had successfully wrapped up.

To preserve the momentum of parent involvement in the School’s strategic initiatives, Johnson founded a volunteer parent giving group, the Parent Advancement Council (PAC). Composed of a diverse group of parents from different grade levels, the council meets regularly to learn directly from School leadership about Punahou’s top priorities and brainstorm ways to support them philanthropically. Members engage in peer-to-peer education with other parents through a variety of methods, whether it’s hosting speakers and events on relevant topics or sign-waving to support giving during the morning dropoff.

When Johnson became chair of the Board of Trustees, the Yims took over leadership of PAC and helped to further nurture the culture of philanthropy among School families.

“PAC’s membership is really diverse, but the common theme is they are all excellent parents,” says Greg Yim. “They all love the School but, more importantly, they are parents that want the best for their children. We had a mission and our mantra was participation. We just wanted other parents to get more involved with the School.” Because of PAC’s philanthropic orientation, members would inevitably become more aware of the strategic priorities driving Punahou’s major giving campaigns. The relationships that flourished within the group, as well as the commitment of parents once they better understood the story behind each campaign, only served to strengthen the connection between these families and the School.

Punahou Trustee Greg Yim ’80 speaks to new parents at a reception hosted by the Parent Advancement Council.

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“The more you get involved, the more you start to do with the people that you meet, and the more your engagement with the School ultimately supports your children too,” says Yim. “I’m one of those pediatricians who believe that school is ideally a family event; the parents and the student are learning together and the more the parents get involved, the more they understand what’s happening at the school and why, the better they become as parents because they’re truly involved in and educated about their child’s experience.”

As an illustration of PAC’s success, when the group was founded, parent giving was dismal in comparison to other schools of Punahou’s caliber: less than 20 percent. Today, parent participation in giving has doubled to an average of 40 percent and some grades considerably higher than that.

Volunteer engagement as a vehicle for connecting constituents to the School’s vision was also true for Reunion giving, which has traditionally been strong due to Punahou’s robust Alumni Reunion program. Capital campaigns often motivated Reunion classes to leave their mark on the campus, and Advancement staff worked closely with Class gift committees on how to communicate the case for support in each campaign.

During the Case Middle School campaign, for example, all Reunion committee meetings were held on the third floor of Bishop Hall, overlooking the construction site – the ideal vantage point from which Mike Walker and other faculty could describe the project’s vision. Tours of the Kosasa Community’s completed first phase were an integral part of Alumni Week activities while Reunion volunteers worked to raise support for the second phase, still under construction.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the vital voice of faculty was the foundation upon which these projects were built. While administrative leadership and trustees were crucial to decision-making and gathering resources, it was teachers who breathed life and instructional wisdom into each new learning environment.

Dan ’42, Carol and Steve Case ’76 celebrate the groundbreaking of Case Middle School in 2003.

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Trusting teachers as communicators of the vision speaks volumes about the autonomy and respect given to faculty when it comes to defining the School’s educational vision. Faculty were often invited to serve as spokespeople for a project, and Barb Young ’67 Morgan, who was vice president for Advancement during the Mamiya and Case Middle School projects, says that a highlight of those campaigns was, “the ability, enthusiasm and willingness of the faculty and administrators to dedicate their time to being a communicator about the program.

It made our work so much more credible.”

“I loved the fundraising,” remembers Mike Walker, who played an important role in garnering support for all three Junior School projects. “I loved when you could see someone’s eyes light up with the power of a possibility. When you could describe those possibilities with such conviction that someone could actually feel them, you would see this breakthrough in the room where everyone is animated and excited. It also puts you in touch with people like Steve Case and Pierre Omidyar who can see the power of possibility. Some people think of giving as something transactional, like if I’m happy with the School, I’ll give. But when they realize that they can transform generations of students, giving is about much more than just the money.”

Punahou under Jim Scott’s leadership has made a point of not taking on long-term debt or using tuition dollars to fund any of its facility projects, which places a significant burden on philanthropy. Over time, this required the Office of Advancement to function much more like that of a small college, with an investment in the professionalization and sophistication of its departments (Development, Alumni Relations, Communications and Operations). This in turn has helped to strengthen the School’s culture of philanthropy, as evidenced in the launch of its first comprehensive campaign in 2013 with a $175 million goal – $88 million of which was earmarked for the Kosasa Community and Junior School Learning Commons.

Punahou’s Board of Trustees, which has an extraordinary level of continuity and dedication among its members, played an important role in pursuing these ambitious educational projects while managing resources and community relations effectively. “I think it was a healthy tension and it’s really described Punahou over the last 20 years,” says Scott. “We should be leading, but we have a responsibility to our donors and to our community to be good fiscal stewards of their resources.”

Another dimension of philanthropy was the way transformational gifts could set a sequence of events in motion. In the case of the middle school, a leadership gift

by Steve Case ’76 launched the redesign of the Junior School. Although prior plans placed the Winne Units first in line for an upgrade, the Campus Master Plan also identified the middle school as a priority for reorganization based on the work of faculty groups to identify a more developmentally appropriate experience for the middle-school age group. This was what caught Case’s attention, resulting in an impromptu meeting with Scott over Carnival weekend in 1999. “I thought he was going to offer a gift in support of the Science Center,” recalls Scott, “but instead he said, ‘If you’re willing to make the middle school the next building priority, I’d like to name it after my mother and father.’”

In the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, the strong commitment of Pierre ’84 and Pam Omidyar to sustainability not only ensured that the Neighborhood’s design would aspire to LEED Platinum, but prompted faculty to take the concept of sustainability a step further and incorporate it more intentionally into their curriculum.

Early gifts such as these also reinforced Punahou’s commitment to sustainability in important ways, such as the School’s current work to develop a strategy to reach net-zero energy consumption for the entire campus, which was inspired in part by a leadership gift to the Kosasa Community.

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Sharing Beyond Punahou Through a variety of initiatives, Scott has helped Punahou to reposition itself as a “private school with a public purpose,” which in turn emphasizes the School’s responsibility to be a partner and resource to other educators in Hawai‘i and beyond. This mindset reverses a historic stereotype of Punahou as an elite ivory tower and makes it an active part of the community, and the approach to campus design is no exception.

When it comes to sustainable campus design, Punahou has been a leader in Hawai‘i, with a number of other schools following its example in the years after Case Middle School received the LEED Gold designation. Visitors from other schools around the world – particularly throughout Asia – began to request tours of the award-winning facility, wanting to see concrete examples of green building design.

“We were beginning to receive national attention,” remembers Scott of the early 2000s. “Steve Case was our alumnus, but he was also becoming one of the more famous entrepreneurs in America. And I think that’s where Punahou first started to understand that its thought leadership had meaning, that people were looking to us to see how we were going to do things. What was also happening around that time is that Hawai‘i was committing itself to a future around renewable energy policy.

Again, we might have just been riding the crest of a wave that placed us on the leading edge. LEED was taking off nationally, but Hawai‘i was starting to become more focused on how to plan for a sustainable future, so that brought us local as well as national attention.”

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As schools and other educational organizations experience the major disruptions prompted by technology, neuroscience and a radically different global economy, many are conducting a thorough reevaluation of their teaching and learning environments only to discover that the rigid and siloed spaces that dominated most of the past two centuries are not only irrelevant, but even a liability when it comes to learning. Identifying ways in which institutions – especially large ones like Punahou – can reimagine their learning environments by harnessing their faculty’s best thinking is increasingly important if these institutions want to remain relevant in the 21st century.

As Walker observes, “Punahou’s contribution to the field with these projects is how compelling program informs design and impacts the experience of children, which then impacts society. Punahou has the resources and the will to do that well.”

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A Look Back and Ahead

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While the pace of construction can seem dizzying at times, the evolution of a school’s culture and community is much more subtle and slow. Change is often most visible when assessed in hindsight, and yet its continual unfolding can make precise evaluations elusive. Nevertheless, it is worth posing some questions: After nearly 25 years of nearly constantly renewing Punahou’s learning environments, what has changed at the school? How have new instructional programs and the spaces designed for them transformed the experiences of students and teachers?

Following are a few examples of how these experiences are different today:

Ka Punahou and Thurston Memorial Chapel – the iconic physical, historical and spiritual center of campus.

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» Interdisciplinary, student-driven, inquiry-based learning has flourished, thanks to design decisions that increase proximity and communication among teachers of different grades and disciplines.

This offers a more diverse array of teaching experiences to students so they can create their own unique learning journeys. To facilitate this, flexible unprogrammed space has become a norm in campus facilities, whereas not long ago all learning environments were defined by a specific use and/or discipline. These physical changes indicate the movement toward interdisciplinary and student-driven learning, which are hallmarks of 21st-century education. » The notion of mixing age groups has begun to take hold, particularly in the flexible and shared spaces connected to the K – 12 Learning Commons, as well as the ability of the Omidyar and Kosasa facilities to accommodate different grade-level configurations in the future. This signals an openness to new instructional models that meet children where they are developmentally, recognizing each student’s individual learning profile rather than organizing and assessing only by age. » The outdoor landscape has become intentionally woven into curriculum, with Omidyar and Kosasa providing models of the value placed on open space in the School’s Campus Master Plan. This has made it easier to offer a rich variety of creative outdoor education experiences without having to leave campus – from gardening and learning walks, to the study of Punahou’s natural resources such as Rocky Hill or the New Spring itself. » Hawaiian culture has become more present in learning environments, reflecting its growing importance in the School’s curriculum. In Case Middle School this can be seen in Kuaihelani Learning Center, which also houses the K – 12 Hawaiian Studies Program. In the Omidyar Neighborhood, the building names as well as the gardening program reflect Hawaiian protocol. In Kosasa, the outdoor environments were designed to support the third-grade Hawaiian Studies curriculum. » Teachers share their practice and collaborate outside their individual classrooms, grades or disciplines, supported by greater transparency and communal, collaborative spaces in their environments. Case Middle School’s team spaces and creative learning centers, Omidyar’s paired classrooms, Kosasa’s shared classrooms and the K – 12 Learning Commons are examples of this. » The Junior School experience was completely redesigned. With an overall student population larger than that of the Academy, the Junior School was broken into three distinct environments that provide a smaller, more intimate community for the children in each of them. These grade-level groupings were adjusted to create a more developmentally appropriate sequence of experiences for the children in Omidyar, Kosasa and Case Middle School. The process of redesigning the K – 8 journey also resulted in a complete renewal of the Junior School’s educational program, as faculty were given the freedom to reimagine it from the ground up.

Students and faculty in the D. Kenneth Richardson ’48 Learning Lab, a high-tech space dedicated to design and fabrication within Mamiya Science Center that also forms an integral part of the K – 12 Learning Commons.

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Lessons Learned

As with any undertaking, there were lessons learned along the way. The creative process that allowed faculty to imagine new programs and spaces was often a leap of faith into unknown territory, which included guessing at future needs that did not always turn out as anticipated. Below are some examples: In Mamiya, faculty advocated for two important unprogrammed spaces: Gates Family Science Workshop (which now houses the D. Kenneth Richardson ’48 Learning Lab) and the Open Lab. Of the two, Gates was far more successful in transforming student learning, primarily because it was staffed by faculty dedicated to developing programs for the space. “We initially thought that the Open Lab would be where teachers would go for long-term student projects, but in practice they were able to do the science lab projects in their new classrooms because they were so much better equipped than the previous ones,” notes Mamiya Science Center steering committee member Ruth Fletcher. Without staff responsible for actively developing research projects for students to engage in, the Open Lab became a space for peer tutoring, student-teacher conferences, study sessions or meetings rather than the experimental laboratory originally envisioned.

Another oversight in Mamiya was the design process for Cornuelle Lecture Hall.

Because MacNeil’s auditorium had been used for so many (nonscience) activities, a 36-person campuswide committee was convened to make decisions on a new auditorium. Science faculty wanted something small and cozy that lent itself to lectures, while dance and theater faculty wanted a performance space that could supplement Dillingham Hall. “So we all got together and tried to figure out how Cornuelle could solve everyone’s problems,” remembers Fletcher.

In the end, the design served neither one purpose nor the other perfectly. The stage had a rollup door to expand it for performances, but it would rattle so noisily when the wind blew during science lectures that the door eventually had to be walled in. A sink to assist scientific demonstrations was installed on the stage but hardly ever used for that purpose. The lecturer’s podium was located behind a post and therefore never used. “The lesson in hindsight is to have a clear idea for the functionality of a space without multipurposing it to death,” concludes Fletcher.

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Like Mamiya, Case Middle School built a considerable amount of fixed technology into its classroom infrastructure – before laptops and wireless internet became the norm. Hundreds of Ethernet connections in both facilities were only used for a short period of time. In another example of technology’s tendency toward increasing mobility and versatility, the impressive but largely static Promethean display boards that were installed in Case Middle School and the Omidyar Neighborhood were replaced by mobile digital displays that could be rolled around to any position in the classroom in the Kosasa Community.

As mentioned before, there were no grassy lawns or fields where students could play directly within Case Middle School, although there were several large open spaces a short distance away. “The lesson was that kids tend to stay in visual proximity to their classroom space,” says former Junior School Principal Mike Walker.

In the Omidyar Neighborhood, certain features of the outdoor landscape were conceived of by faculty before confirming the practicality of their use or maintenance. For example, a windmill was meant to power a pump that would direct captured rainwater through the bioswale. But because the windmill doesn’t work properly, the water that comes out of the pump at its base is actually drawn from the municipal source. This learning experience helped to ensure that Physical Plant and the landscape architects were in close communication during planning for the Kosasa Community.

While mistakes were inevitable, the continuity in leadership from one project to the next developed an institutional memory that also ensured that lessons learned carried over to the next project.

What’s Still to Come?

The K – 12 Learning Commons are learning environments that straddle the realms of physical space and instructional vision. They will include two central facilities – one in the Academy and one in the Junior School, the latter of which is part of the Kosasa Community and scheduled to open in the fall of 2019. The Academy Learning Commons will involve a comprehensive renovation of Cooke Library and is anticipated to open in several more years.

Perhaps more than any other facility to date, the K – 12 Learning Commons facilities will most closely reflect Punahou’s vision for the future of education. They break free from the traditional teaching model of self-contained, age-delineated classrooms altogether and exemplify the 21st-century learning environment that offers students the tools they need to apply their learning to relevant questions or problems in the world at large.

As Academy Principal Emily McCarren notes, “The Learning Commons are about creating relevance and congruence between real work that people do outside of schools and what students experience in schools. We want to make sure our spaces acknowledge that learning happens in lots of different ways for lots of different people, and that we’re giving students awareness of how they can best learn. These are spaces where kids can work on things together in ways they don’t traditionally in classrooms or libraries; spaces that draw you to doing group work as opposed to telling you that you need to sit by yourself; spaces that urge you to consult other disciplines. We have to create environments where students can see connection between subjects, where they can get their hands dirty in real-world challenges, where their wonder can drive what they learn as opposed to somebody else’s questions, and where we can leverage our remarkable strength as a large and diverse community.”

The Learning Commons will be hubs of creativity, collaboration and community that intentionally connect the entire school from kindergarten through grade 12.

They will function as an extension of every classroom and the heart of a vibrant network of instructional programs that includes Wo International Center, Luke

Center for Public Service, Kuaihelani Learning Center, the Chapel program and others. As physical spaces, they will be the ultimate expression of the evolution in facilities design that has taken place over the past 25 years, with a number of features that first appeared in prior projects: » Flexible, open and unprogrammed space: Classrooms are the exception in the Learning Commons, while makerspaces, performance spaces, gathering spaces and collaborative spaces that can be tailored to multiple purposes are the rule. » A breadth of technological, creative and human resources to allow students to experiment, build, create, discover and fabricate at a level of sophistication that cannot occur in classrooms; from design and fabrication workshops to art and music studios, multimedia and technology spaces – in addition to areas for research and reading like those of a traditional library – the Learning Commons will offer the range of tools and teaching staff that students need to freely apply their curiosity and imagination to addressing real-world questions and audiences. » Use of technology to connect the campus internally and also to the outside world: The Learning Commons will have the technological infrastructure to broadcast and communicate learning far beyond its physical space alone. » Fluidity in scale and accessibility that encourages interactions between children of different ages, as well as between students and faculty.

Speaking about the Junior School Learning Commons, Grades 2 – 5 Dean and Kosasa steering committee member John Nagel ’91 notes: “The classrooms provide a space for students to find inspiration, to start asking questions and to have a community of people around them who are thinking and talking about the same things. The Learning Commons magnify their learning by making it possible for them to devise answers and solutions to their questions for audiences beyond just their teacher. We want students to represent their understanding of the world in whatever way is meaningful for them – it might be through writing, or through the creation of a video or other use of technology, or through art or music, or through some type of scientific experiment. What we’ve tried to do is put all of those elements in one place and then give students the resources they need to express their learning in authentic ways.”

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In the Junior School, the Learning Commons will be a focal point for the entire K – 8 community. Its central location in the Kosasa Community, between Case Middle School and the Omidyar K – 1 Neighborhood, will make it a natural gathering place for students and faculty. Also housing administrative offices and a variety of community spaces, it will be the “front door” to the Junior School.

“The Learning Commons is the place where what students do in their classrooms is made visible to everyone else,” says Junior School Principal Paris PrioreKim ’76. “In the Learning Commons, children are producing answers in response to large questions around energy, around the environment, around social action, around relationships with other human beings. They are seeing the power that they can have as problem-solvers.”

As a place that intentionally draws in students from the entire School, the Learning Commons will be intensely collaborative community spaces. This enhances the potential for mixed-age experiences that support social, emotional and ethical learning. “We want to see those natural kinds of collisions occur,” says Grades 2 – 5 Dean and Kosasa steering committee member Julie Crane-Cory. “It might take a little time for the children of different ages to interact but if we can nudge them a little, I think we can have a completely different kind of campus where we’re all learning with and from each other.”

Because schools have traditionally separated “big kids” from “little kids,” the decision to create spaces for such a broad age range was controversial at first, but it is supported by the notion that these diverse interactions are positive for children’s development.

An illustration of the future Quilter Lab for Creative Arts – a facility dedicated to the visual and performing arts within the Junior School Learning Commons complex.

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“A huge part of social, emotional and ethical learning stems from self-awareness and, especially when we’re little, we come to a better understanding of ourselves vis-a-vis others,” says Priore-Kim. “Relating to others gives children the opportunity to be cared for and learn to care for one another. How wonderful is it if we can cultivate an eighth-grader that knows exactly what to do when they’re in the presence of a second-grader? And if that second-grader sees in that eighth-grader a guide, a friend, someone to look up to? To me, the beauty of multi-age environments is about giving children as many opportunities as possible to cultivate their abilities to be relational human beings.”

As the Learning Commons demonstrate, facility and educational program at Punahou have become so intertwined that one cannot be explained or experienced without the other. Reflecting dramatic changes in education, learning environments have undergone a radical transformation in recent years. If self-contained classrooms defined school for most of the 20th century, it appears that collaborative and interdisciplinary spaces signal its evolution in the 21st. While campus planning is a complex and costly process, it is also a concrete and impactful way to make new educational paradigms manifest. As Punahou’s story illustrates, reimagining learning environments begins with a compelling vision, is carried forward by an inspired and generous community, and is brought to life through the thousands of students and teachers whose educational experience is made richer and more relevant as a result.

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E D U C AT I O N B Y D E S I G N PUNAHOU SCHOOL

PUNAHOU SCHOOL

Education

by Design REIMAGINING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AT PUNAHOU SCHOOL, 1999 – 2019

REIMAGINING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS AT PUNAHOU SCHOOL, 1999 – 2019