Facility Design Enhances Learning
Design detail, spatial configuration, and integration with the outdoors all contribute to student learning

By Daniel W. Cecil, AIA

Buildings can teach. Interior design and spatial configuration can enhance the learning process. Subtle details in school design can create environments that positively influence the way students relate to each other and to their surroundings. These factors have spawned a new generation of schools that not only provide spaces for learning but also enhance the learning process.

For example, the design of Brunswick High School in Brunswick, Maine, included a number of interactive features that transformed the building and its site into teaching tools. The 50-acre site includes 15 acres that are preserved in their natural state, affording students a distinctive place for nature and environmental studies. A natural brook provides opportunities for hands-on studies in biology, botany, and environmental sciences. A man-made wetlands protects a nearby bay from storm water runoff and serves as an outdoor laboratory in how wetlands and vegetation cleanse pollutants.

Additionally, certain areas within the school were designed with clear tiles that give students a glimpse of the systems needed to run the school. A computerized touch-pad monitor provides students access to operating system data throughout the building. This computer allows students to monitor oil and electricity use, as well as the energy that is recovered through the system.

The Kennebunk K-3 Elementary School in Kennebunk, Maine, is also a building that teaches: A courtyard with benches will become an educational botanical garden for biology and botany. Flowering trees, perennials, and a compost area will teach children about nature and their environment. A paved area is used as an outdoor teaching space.

Spacial Configuration Contribute to Learning
School design is gravitating toward a "school within a school" model in which the same groups of students stay together with the same teachers over serveral years. These "villages" or "houses" encourage collaboration, ease interaction, and support team teaching. At Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine, the school is divided into 15 identical schools within a school. Each community includes a large multipurpose room that funcitons much like a living room, where a family of 100 students and four teachers can meet and work can be displayed.

The teaching approach is nondepartmentalized, and teams have great freedom in setting up classes. No teacher "owns" a classroom, and teaching is focused on projects that cross disciplines. Flexible spaces are important to this learning style: Each house contains classrooms of various sizes; large classrooms can become two; a science lab's moveable tables in the middle of the lab have gas and water lines on the sides; and a large project room with storage areas facilitates student work.

The learning spaces in Kennebunk's K-3 Elementary School are designed to a similar model. The school includes villages that break the school into three K-3, 200-student schools within a school. Students remain in a village for all three years and get to know their teachers and each other very well. Each village has common space in the center for teacher offices, conference rooms, special education, bathrooms, and storage. These common spaces have special display walls for each child to display a 4-inch by 4-inch ceramic tile of a design the children created. These displays help students identify strongly with their village.

Kennebunk also features an amphitheater and learning lab (projects room) near all the villages, for easy access. These transparent multipurpose spaces are located so every student and teacher will pass by them several times a day--on the way to lunch, recess, art, music, or the library. The amphitheater provides space for plays, presentations, and performances, all viewable from the central corridor. The project room is conceived of as a cross between an art room and science lab with tables, work counters, pin-up display walls, sinks, and washable surfaces. The work generated in these spaces will be on display at the heart of the students' space in the building.

Details Make a Difference
Most older schools, and even some new ones, do not consider the variety of the student population and are designed to an average adult scale. However, at Kennebunk, the eye levels of the shortest kindergarten student and the tallest third-grader were measured. This information was used to lower the height of all the window sills, borrowed lites, display cases, and view windows in doors to accommodate the smallest student's sightline.

Transparency at the eye level makes every room accessible to students before they ever enter. Any child can walk up to the window of his or her classroom and see outside. Students' own work is on display at their own eye level so they do not have to look up to the scale of an adult world. This transparency also helps them own the building and feel secure in it because it is open and scaled to them.

Oftne schools are painted in neutral, uninspired colors, which misses an opportunity to help studnets orient themselves. At the Kennebunk school, for example, each village has a slightly different color scheme to help children find their way. Earth tones and deep accent colors--appropriate for a child's environment -- were used to great effect throughout. The use of concrete block wainscot in the hallways with drywall above helps to eliminate the institutional feeling that full-height block walls have and give the halls a smaller scale appropriate for children, while preserving durability.

Schools also should have nooks and cranies outside classrooms to foster interaction and contribute to the learning process. Both the Noble and Kennebunk schools include single-loaded corridors with rooms on one side and windows on the other. While this brings light into otherwise dark and impersonal corridors, it also provides areas for window seats and informal nooks for studying, daydreaming, and connecting with others.

Additionally, Kennebunk's front exterior scale is broken down to be closer to the children's size and scale. It has gables, porches, changes in material, big windows with divided lites, and pitched rooms to help bring the scale of the school down to the child level.

School design can and does affect the learning process. By keying in on cues and features that enhance the learning a nd teaching experience, schools of the 21st century will become the vital and creative places they are meant to be.

Written for Learning By Design magazine, 2005