Just wondering about Learning Spaces and more.

At Academia Cotopaxi we have started working on a master facility plan to improve the school’s learning spaces. Several companies came to visit the school and they will make some proposals based on their expertise and on what we would like our school to become.

This visit, coupled with a question about “blue sky thinking” that we have used in some interviews, made me really wonder: if I had a magic wand, what kinds of changes would I like to see in schools? What kind of learning spaces would we need for our students, families and school community as a whole?

It is becoming quite cliché nowadays to say that students should be at the center of the learning experience. However, it would be an interesting step for schools to reflect this in their structures and their physical layouts. So here are a few ideas that really get me excited. First of all the constraints that schedules put on learning seem antiquated. It is embarrassing to say to a student that they can’t take an elective since it clashes with another class. So if schedules get in the way, could we get rid of them? I am imagining that students should be grouped by level and interest, rather than by age, and they could design their own timetables for the day or for the week. Depending on their levels of independence students would design their daily or weekly timetables with a mentor and possibly with a member of the learning support team and an ELL teacher. Timetables would be designed to address the pre-agreed, personalized learning objectives in a given time frame.

Furthermore, instead of going to traditional classrooms, students would go to learning areas or pods. There would be a science pod, a language pod etc. And those areas could be flexible and be designed around different learning outcomes for different projects. So teachers would not necessarily have classes per say but they would support students to achieve their personalized learning objectives in particular fields. Having said that, teachers would probably need to address certain aspects of their course to larger groups of students from time to time. They could offer specific sessions several times to allow all students who need to attend this class to schedule this in their timetables. But that kind of traditional class would become the exception since typically students would follow their personalized schedules.

Clearly this approach would not really fit in with exams and the conventional way of assessing students’ progress but it would probably drive educators to not only assess students against very specific learning outcomes, but also to assess them in a more holistic way. Numbers and grades could even be abandoned in the benefit of meaningful and regular comment-based evaluation.

This picture sounds quite idealistic and the implementation of those transformations definitely sounds challenging. Where do we start with such drastic changes? However, there are schools around the world that are experimenting with some of those ideas. While I can see that this is not for tomorrow for most schools out there and that this approach requires a lot of flexibility I would offer that we have a duty to seriously reflect upon and act on what the new school needs to look like and how it should operate. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have students arriving at school in the morning and asking themselves: “what do I really want to learn today/this week?” rather than us telling them what they have to learn?

For what it’s worth…