School Design Principles for the 21st Century

A well-designed school should:

  1. Support Teaching And Learning Weave virtual and physical learning spaces to meet students’ diverse learning needs. Provide spaces of different shapes and colors for a variety of learning activities involving different size groups. Enable activities ranging from large, hands-on, team projects to quiet personal reflection. Provide quiet, private study areas that are well-separated from noisy areas. Give teachers practical and stimulating teaching spaces, as well as good personal work spaces. Offer strong spaces to display and celebrate student work. Offer outdoor environments for educational activities and experiences that can’t be done indoors. Function as a “three-dimensional textbook.” Encourage strong, active school leadership by decentralizing administrative spaces. Provide spaces that enable mentoring, externships and distance learning.

  2. Be Safe And Healthy Build safety and security into the design, avoiding intrusive, prison-like measures. Establish clear boundaries between public use and school use, Buffer and protect walking paths outside the school from traffic and service areas. Provide clear sight lines and design inside traffic patterns carefully to maximize safety and supervision. Provide excellent air quality, localized heating and cooling controls, windows that open, and natural/task-appropriate lighting – all of which research has shown to improve learning.

  3. Be ‘Smart’, Clean And Green Site schools to promote “smart growth” in their communities. Coordinate site selection and planning with the surrounding community and its development planning. Use designs, mechanical systems and lighting systems that conserve water and energy. Use renewable energy where possible. Use non-toxic building and teaching materials.

  4. Be A Center Of Community Design schools to serve both as symbols and centers of their communities. Build schools that draw the community in with a sense of welcome. Scale the design to the surrounding neighborhood. In a school’s public spaces, inside and outside, provide icons that invite pride in the school’s and the community’s shared traditions and sense of purpose. Make schools easily accessible by walking, car or mass transit. Enable schools to become centers of civic participation and recreation. Where desired, integrate shared uses such as neighborhood health clinics, libraries, or recreation centers. Where practical, renovate older schools that play an important role in the history and fabric of their neighborhoods. Incorporate the neighborhood and its assets (social, cultural, natural) into the students’ learning environment. Conversely, make sure the school provides spaces for its community partners in learning and for lifelong learning activities.

  5. Be Based On A Public Process Involve the public, in all its multiple perspectives, meaningfully in envisioning and designing schools. Go beyond the obvious stakeholders – parents, teachers, students – to include community groups, the business community, senior citizens, local colleges, taxpayer groups and other government officials. Listen to and value public input, respecting diversity in age, culture and gender. Provide honest and transparent information about cost and financing. Use an open and inclusive process of design and construction to build trust between schools and community.

  6. Be Practical, Cost Effective And Flexible Use designs and materials that are easy to use and maintain without sacrificing aesthetics. Design and build to optimize public investment. Use all available resources, including up-to-date technology and community resources that can provide alternatives to traditional classroom spaces, cultural diversity and technology. Use a “life-cycle cost approach” that reduces the total costs of ownership. Ensure the flexibility/adaptability of places, because part of being cost effective is planning on changes in curriculum, technology, programs or community needs.

Building on the Past

Since 1998, a number of organizations at the national and local level have done excellent work to craft principles for good school design. Each effort sought in its own way to reflect the latest research on learning, teaching, organizations, materials and design.

The American Architectural Foundation has gathered additional insights into best practices in school design and planning over the past two years. Through the Great Schools by Design initiative, the Foundation has conducted interviews, focus groups and forums with school design stakeholders across the country. This work has set the groundwork for the National Summit on School Design.

The Principles are an attempt to distill and summarize the knowledge gained from both the AAF’s efforts and the points of common ground on school design to be found among seven such previous sets of principles. A list of the sources on which this summary is based is provided below with Internet links to ease your further study.

References

These design principles represent a consolidation of design principles from the following documents: