The Future of School Facilities: Getting Ahead of the Curve
May 2002
Michael DeArmond, Sara Taggart, Paul Hill
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Forward-thinking educators usually accept the idea that tomorrow’s classrooms will look different than today’s. Instead of large schools, 52-minute class periods, and rambling curricula, they foresee classrooms and schools that are personalized and focused; they look for teachers that will emphasize mastery over breadth. Whether these aspirations are realized now or years down the road, they are unconstrained by the current routines found in America’s schools. Innovative educators realize that industrial-age assumptions about learning – that everyone learns the same way; that there are “smart” kids and “dumb” kids – are obsolete. Tomorrow’s classrooms will be based on something different.
But all too often, these same people see school facilities as a fixed frame of reference. “We’ll transform teaching and learning,” they might say. “But it’ll happen here, in this building.” The reasons for this limitation are complex. Some people take the word “school” to mean “building.” They fear that changes in buildings will mean that their neighborhood will lose its school. Others simply assume that it would take too much money and political effort to change existing buildings. As understandable as these attitudes are, they in effect allow a given stock of buildings to limit how we think about teaching and learning.
This does not have to be the case. Instead of assuming that the future of learning has to take place in buildings we happen to have now, districts can let innovations in instruction and learning drive how they provide, design, and use school buildings. With this goal in mind, this paper looks at five trends in education and what they imply about the kinds of buildings and spaces districts will need for tomorrow’s schools.
These five trends go beyond isolated changes in pedagogy or assessment (e.g. project-based learning, or exhibitions). They take a step back and point to broad forces that will affect how schools are organized. As such, they are perhaps a little harder to grasp than any single approach to teaching; and yet, in the long run, they are also more likely to affect every school in a given district.
The five trends are:
- Pressure on schools to perform for all students, not just those who learn best in traditional settings
- Demands for the personalization of learning, so that every child has a chance to learn and families have choices
- New technologies that will change how teachers teach and students learn
- Periodic shortages of teachers (and school leaders) linked to swings in the economy
- Shifts in student population and residency patterns that will affect not only the demand for schools, but also the demands on schools
Each of these, if taken to its fullest, promises interesting new realities for public schools. They suggest that the “schools” of the future may encompass the local library, a science lab shared between local high schools and a community college, a classroom located on site at a software developer’s corporate headquarters, or a new elementary school built with movable walls and computer wiring – and these are only a few of the possibilities.
Regardless of how these trends express themselves, however, school districts will have to respond to them in some way or another in the years to come. If they are constrained by a set of buildings whose location and structure were designed long ago, their response will be less than effective. If they think broadly about the future of learning and what it implies for facilities, they can instead anticipate and plan for school spaces that expand, rather than restrict, the educational opportunities they offer their children.
Part I of this report outlines the five trends and what they might mean for schools; part II offers six criteria, based on the trends, that can be used to guide district decisions about facilities; and part III, in an effort to further clarify these points, describes two districts that are using innovative approaches to get ahead of the curve when it comes to school facilities.
