The next generation of schools What if we focused school design on student engagement?
Roel Krabbendam, RA, NCARB, M.Ed
Introduction
Two decades into the 21st century, the promise of 21st century learning has not resulted in heightened student engagement. In fact, our schools are failing to reach too many of our students, just as they are also driving away a significant percentage of young teachers. COVID has only accelerated existing trends.
This paper examines the research on student engagement, and the stakes involved. It then posits an activist role for our school facilities, proposes an alternative approach to learning environments, and discusses how to offer long-term value with current projects.
We are spending over $100B per year in the United States on school building construction.1 Can the money be better spent? Can schools be re-imagined to be more effective and better support students and teachers? Isn’t that $100B annual investment in facilities an incredible opportunity to contribute solutions instead of pretending neutrality? This is the topic at hand.
A. Public education: present tense
A 2006 Conference Board poll2 of corporate executives and human resources professionals rated high school graduates on basic and applied skills, 72.5% rating students as deficient in Leadership skills and 58.2% rating students as deficient in Self-Direction. We might ask, without hyperbole, if we are raising a generation of lemmings (followers, not leaders) and sheep (adrift without a sheepdog).
A 2014 Gallup poll3 of public school students in the United States illustrates additional problems with our current manifestation of school. It examines the three non-cognitive factors most indicative of future success, asking students how they rate themselves for hope, engagement and vitality. These are emotional factors in other words, asking students not how they think, but how they feel. The poll finds 28% of students “not engaged”, and another 19% of students “actively disengaged”. These are children that have their minds elsewhere: we are not reaching them at all. Our schools are failing almost half of our kids.
In 2021, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) states 13 percent of youth aged 8-15 live with mental illness severe enough to cause significant impairment in their day-to-day lives.4 This figure jumps to 21 percent in youth aged 13-18.5 A report from the US Department of Health and Human Services states that the suicide rate for youths 10-24 increased 38% between 2007 and 2018.6
To address the problem, NAMI counsels “A Culture of Engagement”.7 Can schools do more to promote Engagement?
B. Public education: mission
Broadly speaking, the dawn of the new century brought a new and well-branded perspective on K-12 education: “21st Century Learning”. If the 20th Century was focused on standardization and content delivery (communicating knowledge and perspective in standardized classrooms), the 21st Century would focus on flexibility and skill building (project-based learning emphasizing Communication, Critical Thinking, Collaboration and Creativity, with facilities more focused on technology and flexibility). Defined, promoted and monetized by a substantial educational industry feeding a receptive culture eager for children to succeed, the result is a pervasive change in vocabulary, a substantive market for consulting, curriculum and assessments, and nonetheless, the disappointing statistics identified above. School is still failing to reach almost half of the students it is intended to serve.
In this culture’s dedication to prescribed outcomes, a political or institutional focus on the student experience is missing. For this aspect of learning it would seem, teachers are on their own.
How do teachers see their role? According to Megan Power in a 2019 article in Educational Leadership, they are increasingly focused on the learning experience:
“…the role of a teacher today is shifting. No longer is the focus of good teaching mainly on delivering content. Rather a good modern teacher is a designer of experiences”.8
From a more research-based perspective, the work of Dr. Gayle Privette identifies exactly how important it is to focus systematically on the experience of the child. As shown in Figure 1 below, by contrasting emotional experience with performance, Privette showed how a performance focus in the absence of any satisfying emotional experience yielded driven but miserable workers. Peak experience and peak performance together, however, offered a path to self-actualization.9
The implication for school is profound. If school is perceived merely as a mechanism to prepare kids for jobs, then the current model of performance expectation absent institutionalized support for the experience of the child is certainly satisfactory, for half of all students. If however, our cultural expectation is that children develop into emotionally and intellectually and physically powerful individuals, then school must take responsibility along with the student to offer peak experience as it also encourages peak performance.
School is indeed in the experience business, not just the performance business…or it should be.
MPONENT OF PERSONALITY THEORY
What is a learning experience and how do we attend to it? An experience is the product of three components: an action (what we do), and interaction (who or what we do it with), and an environment (where we do it). Student engagement is expected to be most profound when all three aspects of experience are emotionally optimized.
2. STUDENT ENGA the grim statistics of
FIGURE 2 Given the each of these components school facilities engagement appears long overdue.
. ENGAGEMENT AND LEARNING EXPERIENCE
statistics of public education of components should these student long
school facilities, an examination of how these facilities might better attend to student appears overdue.
GEMENT LEARNING education, the suggestion that the culture focus on optimizing not sound out of place. Given the annual investment in of better As a culture, we should be all hands on deck.
Public facilities focused student
facilities student engagement the athletic
C. Public education: facilities focused on student engagement
Think about the rich and varied athletic experiences offered the American student. Suburban high school tennis court soccer fields, lacrosse fields, stick hockey fields, swimming pools, and running tracks.
high schools offer gyms, weight rooms, wrestling mats, basketball courts, volleyball courts, courts, handball courts, racquetball courts, baseball fields, softball fields, football fields, soccer fields, and
Think about the and varied athletic experiences the American Suburban offer gyms, weight rooms, mats, basketball s, handball racquetball courts, fields, softball fields, fields, soccer lacrosse fields, hockey fields, swimming pools, tracks.
GEMENT AND EXPERIENCE the suggestion that the culture focus on optimizing not out of place. Given the annual investment in examination how might to a culture, should all hands on offer rooms, wrestling mats, courts, volleyball s, courts, courts, fields, . In the outdoors, a ecosystem of , the suggestion that sound of place. Given annual investment examination of how facilities attend to student As culture, we should be all deck.
Elementary also hopscotch four square and tetherball and playgrounds and . the outdoors, rich ecosystem of optimizing sound facilities better we on deck. student. basketball volleyball courts, fields, running the the culture focus on gyms, wrestling racquetball
Elementary schools also offer hopscotch and four square and tetherball play structures intended to engage the imagination athletic activities and environments is taken for granted.
Elementary hopscotch square structures engage and is for
Think rich offered the student. weight courts, courts, s, baseball fields, football stick hockey fields, swimming offer intended the imagination activities
Public experiences gyms, wrestling racquetball football fields, fields, running offer four structures environments taken , culture optimizing sound we on deck. engagement basketball volleyball courts, fields, lacrosse running tracks. schools and and tetherball imagination. In the outdoors, a rich ecosystem of environments granted.
FIGURE 3. THE ATHLETIC ECOSYSTEM
Indoors, these same schools offer just two academic experiences: the classroom and the lab. The classroom focuses students on the teaching wall, all eyes to the front, and the lab focuses students on the project, all eyes to the table. The width of the room, the flooring, the ceilings, the walls, the lighting, the technology, the cabinets, the windows, the doors, and the teacher’s desk are often exactly the same.
FIGURE 4. THE ACADEMIC ECOSYSTEM?
The contrast between athletic and academic environments is...startling. Why is it that the academic experience is so barren of diverse, engaging environments? Is it any wonder that students tune out, despite the teacher’s efforts? Can we not begin to invest the academic ecosystem with the same attention to the human spirit as the athletic environment? Is this not exactly where the school typology taken for granted for over a century needs reconsideration?
Consider, for example, an alternative conception of school. In this school, students are assembled in grades or teams or departments or communities of practice, each of which contain a hub dedicated to teacher workspace, refreshment, student help-bar, a shrine rich in inspirational material, a resource area with books and academic materials, an electronic array of curated videos, and an open classroom with relaxed seating. Around this hub is a rich and varied palette of venues, each offering a different kind of learning experience.
A community of practice focused on words might value historical research, storytelling, composition, and foreign languages. This community might feature a speaker’s corner where students address their peers on topics of interest to them. It might feature a round table or Harkness table for discussions. A sandbox type space devoted to freeform collaboration could facilitate teamwork and projects. A 50 seat arena might facilitate debates and theatrics. A campfire space might facilitate storytelling, and a classic classroom might present information.
A community of practice devoted to seeing and describing the world through patterns and formulas and classifications might be served by a digital domain in which students physically interact with information projected on the floor, true embodied learning. A situation room would allow them to collaborate using multiple streams of dynamic data. Laboratories would remain vital to the enterprise, as would workshops devoted to engineering and architecture. A garden might offer respite, outdoor classrooms and botanical exploration. Tents might offer a classroom setting deeply connected to the outdoors and a classic classroom might efficiently serve information.
Schools might define communities of practice around images, incorporating art and graphic design and photography, or around objects, incorporating sculpture and construction and mechanics and electronics and robots. They might define a community of practice around music. The advantage of communities of practice is that it blurs the line between traditional subjects, inviting collaboration through the dominant method of communication.
A school might also organize around grades or teams or departments. An elementary school might organize hubs around grades, with four or five classes (100-150 students) served by each hub. If Dunbar’s number11 holds then this is about as large an effective community can be. A middle school might organize around teams, each team encompassing all of the major subjects. The premise is the same in each case: to congregate 5 or 6 teachers in a hub that facilitates collaboration, mentoring, cultural expression and inspiration, and to diversify the learning environments to engage students and teachers alike, indoors and out. The book school (Ludovicus, Boston, 2018) offers a more expansive lexicon of new classroom typologies, along with the research and issues that birthed each typology:
D. Public Education: future tense
Public school has an attention deficit, an engagement problem. Rather than thinking of school facilities along traditional typological lines: classroom, hallway, cafeteria, library, auditorium, multi-purpose room, office, and thereby perpetuating the status quo, the $100B of school construction projects in the United States every year offer an opportunity to contribute a solution. By thinking in terms of enrichment and diversity instead of conformity and reproducibility, the next generation of schools can and must support teachers in delivering powerful, engaging learning experiences. Not all projects of course invite starting from scratch and rethinking school from the ground up. Nevertheless, every project even slightly concerned with delivering long-term value should consider these questions:
What can be done here to expand the diversity of learning environments on this campus? What can be done here to support teachers as, more and more, they are called to deliver engaging learning experiences? What can be done here to connect students to the outdoors? What can be done here to enrich experience instead of strip it for management or maintenance simplicity? Finally, what can be done here to capture the attention and devotion of that 47% of students who have checked out even though they occupy the seats. Whether we care about individual student self-actualization or neuro-diversity or international competitiveness, the mission of nurturing strong, independent, and creative activists instead of inert passivists, participants instead of mere recipients, should defy political and economic boundaries.
It’s all hands on deck.
References:
1. “New education construction put in place in the U.S. in 2018, with forecasts from 2019 to 2023”, Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/962009/projected-value-of-total-useducation-construction/
2. Casner-Lotto, Jill and Benner, Mary Wright, “Are They Really Ready to Work?”, The Conference Board Inc, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and the Society for Human Resource Management (2006) https://conference-board.org/pdfdownload.cfm?masterProductID=224 (paywall)
3. Gallup Student Poll, US Overall Report (Gallup, Fall 2014) https://www.gallup.com/services/180029/gallup-student-poll-2014-overall-report.aspx
4. Merikangas, K.R., He, J., Brody, D., Fisher, P.W., Bourdon, K., & Koretz, D.S. (2010). Prevalence and treatment of mental disorders among U.S. children in the 2001–2004 NHANES. Pediatrics, 125, 75-81.
5. Merikangas K.R., He J., Burstein M., Swanson S.A., Avenevoli S., Cui L., Benjet C., Georgiades K., & Swendsen J. (2010). Lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in U.S. adolescents: Results from the national comorbidity study. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(10), 980-989.
6. Curtin, Sally C., M.A., “State Suicide Rates Among Adolescents and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2000–2018”, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 69, No. 11 September 11, 2020
7. https://www.nami.org/Support-Education/Publications-Reports/Public-PolicyReports/Engagement-A-New-Standard-for-Mental-Health-Care
8. Power, Megan, “Teamwork by Design”, Educational Leadership Online July 2019 | Volume 76 http://www.ascd.org/publications/educationalleadership/jul19/vol76/num09/Teamwork-by-Design.aspx
9. Privette, Gayle, “Experience as a Component of Personality Theory”, Psychological Reports (1985, 56) pp263-266
10. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). "Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates". Journal of Human Evolution. 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J
11. Krabbendam, Roel, school (Ludovicus, Boston, 2018) 280p
The Author
Mr. Krabbendam is a K12 studio leader for ACMartin in Los Angeles, CA. His book school (Ludovicus, Boston, 2018) presents a lexicon of learning experiences and environments for the next generation of schools.