Re-imagining the Spaces in Which We Learn - Process

welcome to the k12 online conference my name is David Jake's and I'm here to talk about reimagining the spaces in which we learn this presentation is broken into four videos and previously I've talked to you about the mindset around that or this associated with creating new spaces we also talked about the landscape of learning space design which was which focused on understanding the shifts and changes in learning and how spaces can respond to that and then in this video we're going to be addressing process because you need a process and learning spaces as we mentioned is is predicated on the thought that what do you want the student learning experience to be and how do we shape spaces accordingly and so that requires a thoughtful and dedicated an intentional step-by-step process that can help you do that and that process is designed I'll explore that more with you in a bit but first some language and I've been working with you over the course of the first two videos in understanding a new kind of vocabulary associated with space and so we want to continue that work and deepen it so the first idea is that spaces should exist as an ecology in other words they're connected and that spaces should not exist in isolation so learning spaces when you design them you just don't design classrooms but you want to design a spatial ecology and how do they how do all these pieces fit together to support the definition or the development of that learning experiences you've defined so there's classrooms there's libraries as maker spaces there's informal spaces think hallways here and then there's and for all those four spaces and there's probably more but there is a physical face-to-face kind of context and a digital context that can exist with all those spaces so the first idea the first notion of a more developed kind of broader view of learning spaces that they exist in ecology and they all work together to accomplish that manifestation of that student learning experience that you want the second idea is that is that spaces and at any one given time should be able to range across a range of behaviors and what I mean by that is I want you to think of attention right and one side we've got academic the other side we've got social and so spaces should you know any space should be able to negotiate that or support any kind of behavior across that range from academic to social it's an interesting design idea ok likewise it should support a range from formal to informal interactions so in other words if you have a library and you've got two or three classes that might be scheduled into that library that's a very formal kind of experience as opposed to where the library is open perhaps after school or during the day and where kids come in and self-select into spaces and self-select the kind of learning that they want to do that's much more of them the four informal kind of an arrangement that's not getting and it's not scheduled or something like that spaces can also or should support individual to collaborative work so in other words think of a classroom where you might have students engaged individually and then they may come together with appears to engage in some kind of collaborative kind of effort along the same lines you have analog to digital so we've got paper-based kind of experience traditional kinds of experience that range all the way to digital kind of experiences with technology so spaces should be able to support both very analog kinds of experiences and experiences that allow us to make use of one-to-one technologies and things like that and then the final tension is an interesting one is that how does how does learning in the spaces in which kids learn how does that look across a range from school to home and everywhere in between in the previous video I mentioned third places in those informal social locations that kids inhabit like Starbucks beyond either school or home and so there's a tension there that where kids have a full range of abilities to inhabit different kinds of experiences in different kinds of spaces given any moment in time let's continue with some more vocabulary all right so we've got seven different ideas here first of all you've got flexible spaces and agile spaces the flexible space if you're if your classrooms flexible then it means it can be reshaped quickly the interesting idea about that is that that's typically associated with being able to rearrange furniture in sort of a horizontal plane and one of the things you should understand about or realize about new spaces that are designed is height adjustable furniture standing desks and things like that so we can talk about being flexible or being agile in either a horizontal plane or a vertical plane and what I mean by agile is if flexible is ability rearrange agility is is the ability to quickly or the velocity associated with it so you can have a flexible space really heavy furniture that you could move that it might not be very agile because you can't do it very quickly so the goal is to have a very flexible agile kind of space that allows it to be adaptive and there's two ways to look at this one is that adaptive is is spaces a combination of being flexible flexible and agile but also realizing that spaces are designed based on the student experience then in ten years or maybe in five years that as your expectations forward you what you want the student experience to be change your spaces are still capable and being enough to be able to support that so they're flexible and agile enough in other words they're future-proofed right so we want to think about spaces and create spaces that have a time line probably a 15 to 20 years literally where they're viable spaces that can morph and adjust as the institution's values and beliefs are reshaped around learning what learning means it's too expensive when you're talking about spatial redesign to look at a time frame that's less when considering that that furniture alone in your typical 800 square foot classroom in the United States may cost anywhere from maybe between 12,000 and 25,000 US dollars so you have to be wise that's why we need a process for this and creating adaptive and spaces that are flexible and agile are part of that certainly technological spaces what kind of technology do you have that's a--that's a given and then that technology allows spaces to be interconnected so I'm really intrigued as designer about the role in the linkage between physical spaces that are maybe school based or beyond that are linked with digital spaces that support the work and one provocation I have for you to think about is when will than the notion of a digital space in the learning that takes place there be of equal importance to schools as the physical space is now we're not there yet certainly hopefully we can make steps and go in that direction the intentional component of this of spaces as intimately an inherently linked to the student learning experience that's a given and that makes in doing that goes a long way in achieving everything that we've talked about at this point and then finally spaces should be personalized and in other words they should allow for personal interpretations of how the space supports learning so as you walk into a space you know this you know students should be able to pick and choose that one perhaps all the time but it's sometimes they should be able to arrange the space according to how they think it supports their learning you know grant them agency and the ability to to define their own space from time to time and that's and that's a big part of being flexible and agile about a new kind of mindset and lens for how space supports learning so given that let's let's just jump into this into designing learning spaces and here's the process and we see a couple pieces of some icons that we're gonna fill this in so the very first part of spatial design involves discovery okay and what I mean by that is is that discovery is a process as inclusive that asks the right questions that explores what learning looks like and this might mean talking with students talking with parents talking with teachers talking with the admins talking with faculty talking with meetings people cafeteria people everybody and so when you start to design learning spaces a process begins with a complete discovery of all the information surrounding the provocation in this case it's maybe changing a classroom or changing classrooms what might that look like so you have to talk with everybody on that okay in this means that where design comes into play is having a group of people or a designer help you with this in terms of supporting the process that uncovers the right information so you just don't want to go buy furniture okay don't do that please don't do that engage in a process where you first talked to everybody about learning what you want learning to be okay and then that from there what you do is then you take that and you use it information to define your expectations for learning and there's maybe five to six statements ten statements that direct what learning should look like so at this particular point excuse me you've gone through a process where you've talked with everybody uncovered all the really rich information about learning and in its possibilities and its opportunities and you shape that shape that down into declarative statements that provide a framework literally the DNA of your student learning experience and what that does is provides you with direction and intent in terms of how spaces can be designed from that the next step is ideation and creating potential ways in which you can take those six to ten factors that you want learning to be and shape them into new spatial realities so in other words now we start to lay out space designs okay in what we do is we create prototypes and prototypes are plausible futures they're not perfect but they are good enough to be put into play and put under pressure with kids and teachers and see what comes out of that now you can have one prototype or a number of prototypes but they but the important thing to remember here is that this process assumes that you're going to prototype something and test it please do not rush to solution when it comes to learning spaces the financial investment is way too much to be able to do that so what you have to do is take your time engage in a process do it step by step and you have to prototype your different classrooms or prototype your library or or you have to take steps to test your ideas that result from the ideation process and finally when you get those prototypes and what you're going to do is you're going to implement that once you come back with the prototypes okay you're going to you're going to implement that prototype put it into play and continue to test that and what happens then is as you id8 and create prototypes and put them into play in schools then that arrow means that this is an iterative process so at the end of the first prototype FN the first implement I'm sorry have to end of the first implementation you might see that prototype one is your is your best option out of three perhaps you go back and continue to id8 to make it better and you put it through create a second prototype and then you implement that second prototype and you keep doing this until you get to the point where you feel comfortable with that your solution can be taken to scale and that you know you've done the testing you've done the investigation you've done the observations that tell you that your design is a solid one and one that will work for your school so the process of design in terms of spaces begins with discovery where you collect all the information and that information is then defined into a set of what's called design drivers that are the DNA of in the framework that provides your expectations for learning you take those those ideas then those drivers and start becoming very creative and what they could look like and how good they can be shaped from those ideas you assemble those into prototypes which are plausible futures of what the space could look like you might have three prototypes you might have two and you put those into plane you implement those with kids in under the pressure of teaching and learning and you learn from that and you go back and iterate and id8 and say this didn't work how might we rethink what didn't work into a new strategy and build it into a second prototype and test and can do that process till we get to a final solution that represents a design that we can take to scale so it looks like this take a look at this classroom I'm not going to mention where this is but this is a typical kind of classroom with lots of kids and flexible seating it's got some really nice day lighting that window it's got some high ceilings and lighting is your typical florescent kind of condition we see in schools and this is this is a hyper experience a very traditional kind of space and so again what do we want the experience to be you know that's the provocation that's a challenge so here's discovery so we start asking kids and we start doing visitations and observations and a lot of ethnography techniques about what this space could look like and or what the experience could be and we do that with kids we then do that with teachers and there's a wide range of different opportunities that we can do with teachers to say these are the possibilities of what spaces could look like so we're looking with teachers administrators we're looking we're working with all staff were working with parents that were what we're doing is or we're putting them through a series of design techniques that it will allow us to understand what they want for the student learning experience and when you get all that information we go to a defined process and the defined process then looks like this where we come up with in this case seven different design drivers that become part of the everyday experience and that spaces are exist in ecology and there's virtual connections to learning that that we shift from a classroom to a studio model and then we use this space to inform our culture of spaces encourage everyone to rethink spaces we build in choice we build in connected spaces and that there is a definite invitation into the space and we're thoughtful and creative about how we can fight learners into a space what does the space inform the learner to the intent of learner learning that's expected as you walk in that's called a threshold experience and so we took all that information we got by talking with people engaging them in different creative ways and then what we did is we took that information shape it into a direction a series of what's are called design drivers that form the DNA and the framework for a design and then what we're going to do is we're going to take that and take the available space and now start working with different potential arrangements we're gonna start thinking about how do we connect and start thinking about invitation and connectedness and technology and culture and start reshaping this space this is one of the potential prototype for for one of the spaces and this is also the Steelcase implementation it's really a terrific with a wide wide variety of furniture that gives multiple kinds of ways in which to interact you see white boards on the Left wall and that are portable those are those Steelcase verb series and then on the right you see some traditional whiteboard space in the back you might you see some campfire series those are those are let enough those those are like l-shaped gray things that you can pick up and move in reshape into a temporary sort of semi private space they are transparent enough that teachers can see through the managed students and so on the lost kids to define space so this might be one potential option as you start I da ting and thinking about ways in which spaces can be created you could also use the same furniture to create this I'm more of a fishbowl kind of activity and you can also create something like this and then really the combination is the arrangement of these things it goes on and on and so what we're doing here is is we're starting to think about and being really creative about the way in which these spaces can be created to support the development of the expectations as the as defined by the drivers of learning so that continues on we work with teachers and now you see the teachers actively using in planning using knowing the fact that we've got this furniture in this space and we know what learning we want learning to look like how can we create different kinds of designs that allow us to to achieve that so you see teachers now becoming the designers I talked about in an earlier video and that's an important thing and they're actually working to craft a set of different kinds of spatial layouts five to six perhaps that they can begin with to understand so that they can put that into play and prototype those designs in that space so the teachers are doing here is they're actually using that Steelcase furniture and that's one of the prototypes and so what they're doing is coming up with different kinds of arrangements that they think would work for them and what they're going to do is then test those designs of kids to see what worked and so now teachers not only be our educators but they're now become designers and they're gonna go put these into play and test them in they're becoming ethnographers so we see this really this really dramatic shift in what teachers can become to think about this educator designer an ethnographer is their really robust kind of role for teachers and it's something that helps them to become much more nuanced and capable of designing spaces that work for kids so rather dona they're developing those prototypes you see here's another example of that and and here is another example we want teachers to begin learning how to sketch you know this is a prototype right so we don't want to have to do really really deep diagrams but what we want to do is sketch it out how it might look given the furniture that's in place this is an example of in the first and upper left one two three and four you have an individual work where then then the tables and the furniture is assembled into collaborative pairs of two and the collaborative pairs the form and whole class instruction and so when you're talking about a flexible agile space you know a typical class per to say 15 minutes think about the opportunity and then in the pedagogical processes that are required instructional methodologies that are required in the understanding that's required to take a space and have four different spatial arrangements within the context of a single class burden that's when we're start talking about things and really cool ways to design new conditions for learning when the spaces are flexible agile and adaptive enough to be able to support multiple arrangements from the single learning period and so once we go through all these prototypes and seeing what works and what doesn't you know we go back we test and implement we continued to build it out and one of the things that I'm very very big on is is creating a playbook in in a shared kind of understanding across or across teachers of how spaces can work so what if what if you had a pilot group or a prototype group of 10 teachers and they all I came up with with 40 different kinds of designs and tested those and could you assemble what worked and what didn't work and actually create a playbook oh no and the way in which we have a cultural way to capture and describe how spaces support learning in our school and it literally becomes a an instruction manual as much as I hate to say that but it becomes a way in which all teachers can share their expertise a way you build a community based expectations for teaching and learning in space and where you start to develop a culture where space has become the third teacher of kids and so the process itself is one that's and we talked about the process and go back and think about that it's inclusive right that discovery process at the beginning ask everybody asks everybody to participate and contribute their ideas and the focus of that then is focus on learning and out of that discovery approach the definition part of the process defines that focus on learning by creating spatial design drivers the framework the DNA that I mentioned from there you know we wanted for take those ideas in id8 I want to create prototypes and we want to put them into play and we want to test them and evaluate our best guesses at how these spaces could support learning and we want to get better at it and so that that to do that we have to iterate and just continually going to the cycle of constant continual improvement then one thing that I do want to mention that I forgot to mention earlier is that don't engage in spatial design without considering the needs of teachers we need some professional development here and for example you would never think of going into a one-to-one program and releasing that without considering professional development opportunities for teachers and how they might learn to become better educators with the use of technology but what you see in spaces and we with spatial change is that this changes are made and there's no consideration of learning for teachers to understand how that happens in a process that's defined and created for learning space change means that you have to help teachers understand those shifts that are necessary so moving forward with that means that you're intentional about professional development because if you're not there's no guarantee that they'll take that flexible m'angil furniture and they'll just rearrange it back into rows where kids are sitting in rows so spatial change guarantee is one thing the kids are going to be sitting in more comfortable seating and so you have to work hard at at preparing teachers for the changes think about the opportunity to have four different arrangements from the single class spread that's disruptive that's pretty cool though and so helping them understand is very meaningful and in in of course essential and if you do that you start building up your culture you start to begin crafting a new kind of experience for teaching and learning and that's what we're looking at here what spatial change so up next we're going to be talking about the impact of all this I hope you enjoy the series up at this point and I hope you join me for the fourth video