Overview How to Participate Alumni Participating Experts Special Topics in School Design Testimonials
At school design institutes, participating experts offer presentations on topics related to facility design and planning that help superintendents think more broadly about their school design challenges. Provided below are some brief summaries of topics that have been helpful to school design institute participants. Click on the links below for more information.
Despite serious efforts to improve the performance of students in the United States through higher spending, smaller classrooms, and better teachers, student achievement has not improved since the 1970s.
Buildings that focus on creating environments for learning are the single most important product school districts can develop.
Great schools provide places for different learning styles, where all students can find their niche. To promote a good “school fit” is to design for redesign. Educators must establish a new mental model and build with the intent of rebuilding that mental model. Both the programmatic and physical designs should be able to change with the times. The designs should include using flexible building materials and adaptable structures.
Students define themselves in relation to what surrounds them. They become connected to places, adults, tools, and language in the school and in their communities. What do great schools and schools as centers of communities look like?
Rethinking issues of equity is another crucial step in school development and design. Students in the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree, while students in the top quarter have a 74.9 percent likelihood of obtaining a degree. Educators and architects can improve those disparities by creating schools that personalize relationships. When people know each other better, they can use that relationship to advance learning. A school setting should allow each student to craft his or her own experience through the personalization of space. The aesthetics of personal spaces should be well thought out and executed. The Fredrick Law Olmsted model of “prospect, mystery, and refuge” can provide a great model for personalized school design and place making.
Many schools are not ready or able to change quickly to meet the needs of new programs. Facilities must be adaptable to programmatic changes—physical space must support those changes. Therefore, school districts must promote the design of adaptable facilities. Although flexibility allows for buildings and school campuses to shift on a daily basis, adaptability allows for change over time. For example, shared facilities and small learning communities can take on a variety of uses and forms. Small learning communities can be organized as a village around shared facilities, retrofitted into a historic building, or structured into small school configurations. Also, within the building plan, the small learning communities program should be able to shift within the spaces of the building over time.
Decision makers must incorporate adaptability at the beginning stages of school planning, not as an afterthought. To achieve long-range education goals, schools—through shared facilities and small learning communities—must be embedded into a larger community design and planning process by establishing partnerships and community collaboration.
Language used by teachers, planners, and designers must be clear and should reflect common goals to create diverse teaching environments. Educators and designers today talk about small learning communities, professional learning communities, project-based learning, studentcentered learning, integrated studies, and active learning environments. This language can become confusing.
Decisions about how to design learning environments are based on concepts that require breaking the mold, thinking outside the box, creating paradigms for 21st-century schools, and developing community schools. Architects strive to create smart buildings and to use green design, sustainable design, and integrated design to promote effective learning environments. Projects must integrate a collaborative language so that schools can be designed to:
There are many benefits and challenges of partnering with outside agencies and private institutions in the design and joint use of public school facilities. This concept is being implemented in various ways across the country and harks back to the idea of the school being the center of the community. Examples of projects using this concept may include incorporating public libraries, social services, recreational facilities, community centers, and performing arts centers into the design of public schools.
Planning considerations for the design of community schools include building size and layout, liability, maintenance costs, capital expenditures, longrange funding, and economies of scale. Strategies to help manage issues related to economies of scale and shared infrastructure include the following:
The main challenges in creating community schools are that professional educators must accept and support involvement of the community in the school planning, participants must identify community needs and systematically seek solutions, and support must be gained from community leaders and residents.
Schools serve as symbols of the values held dear by the community. Any inherent resistance to “sharing” often stands in the way of fully implementing joint use. This resistance must be overcome if centers of community are to be realized.
Sustainable development reflects an understanding that meeting the needs of the present population must not compromise the needs of future generations. Consensus supports the assumption that there are long-term cost savings to developing sustainable school projects. Buildings and site components should be designed to complement the existing landscape. For instance, buildings should be oriented on an east-west axis to maximize southern exposure and solar access, and site design should take advantage of natural slopes for drainage, native plants to minimize water needs, and trees to protect against winter winds and reduce unwanted solar gain.
Planning must consider the tradeoff between initial costs and long-term benefits. Even with extensive green strategies and rising prices, construction costs can come in below budget. A project that incorporates sustainable components may cost 7 cents more per square foot, but have only a 20-day payback.
A sustainable school not only embraces the concept of sustainability, but also is, in itself, a teaching tool. Students can monitor the site and the building in terms of ecological systems. Courtyards can be developed not only as gathering spaces and outdoor classrooms, but also as natural, interactive learning environments.
The following list represents some characteristics of building green that should be considered at the initial planning stage. For further information, refer to “50 Green Strategies That Cost Less” on the web at www.innovativedesign.net/guidelines.htm. This document is arranged by topic, beginning with overall concepts and including community, site design, daylighting and windows, building shell, electrical systems, mechanical systems, and recycling and environmentally sound materials.
Building green may include the following characteristics:
*The Living Machine uses plant-based strategies to cleanse wastewater and to produce clean water to irrigate fields. A subsurface piping system can be used for irrigating athletic fields, resulting in less water use than conventional sprinkler irrigation because of reduced evaporation. This strategy is an environmentally sound, on-site treatment that is more economical than other pretreatment strategies and helps reduce the amount of nitrogen entering the watershed. It is particularly appropriate if there are no central sewer lines near the site and the cost of extending lines would be prohibitive. Savings are accomplished by using the water twice.
1799 New York Avenue NW · Washington DC 20006 · 202.626.7318 · Fax 202.626.7420 · info@archfoundation.org
