School Design

School facilities—the physical settings that contain and support teaching and learning—play an important and underappreciated role in providing effective conditions for learning. National and international reports on the current state of the physical infrastructure of schools make it clear that the deteriorating quality of the physical environment is affecting the quality of educational delivery. Because of their age, now well over an average of 42 years, school buildings do not always contain what is now considered the essential components for a good learning environment. There is arguably an ample body of evidence that school environments influence a number of student behaviors and attitudes that influence educational outcomes. Although there is some skepticism about the relationship between building condition and educational outcomes, recent studies have found significant correlations between building condition and academic achievement. Systemic, schoolwide educational reforms place urgent demands on school buildings originally designed for an industrial-age disciplinary mass institution. Other factors include the needs of a growing ethnic diversity of the student body, ever-present overcrowding, community education, and information and communications technology.

The 1960s witnessed one of the most dramatic educational reform movements in U.S. history with the experimentation of open education, community education, middle schools, and alternative and magnet schools, with innovations in school design led by the Educational Facilities Laboratory, or EFL. One of EFL's most influential innovations was the development of the open plan school design, a concept that influenced the design of thousands of schools from the late 1950s through the early 1970s. Schools were planned with large, open, flexible spaces adaptable to team teaching and small group and individualized instruction that characterized open education. Open education, it was argued, provided more educational opportunities for children, provided freedom and autonomy for self-directed study, required less guidance by the teacher, and helped foster self-responsibility. Almost immediately, however, teachers complained of noise and visual distractions in these open plan schools. Hundreds of educational research studies were performed to determine the validity of open plan schools with inconclusive and controversial results. This period marks the most extensive empirical research conducted on educational environments and as such is a starting point for understanding the role of physical environments, good or bad, on teaching and learning.

The middle school concept, first conceived of in the 1960s, was a philosophy that challenged the junior high school model and advocated for the developmental needs of young adolescents—a balance of child-centered, supportive instruction of the elementary school with the subject-oriented teacher specialization of the high school. Middle school teachers formed a small interdisciplinary team that comprised a family of between 100 and 120 students. Gaining popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, the middle school concept spawned a whole new generation of school design that attempted to group students in “families” contained in “pods” or “houses.” Pod plans were first developed in the 1960s, whereas the house plan has a more recent history, being most fully developed in the late 1980s. House plans, it is argued, foster a sense of community for academics while providing larger common spaces such as libraries; media centers; administrative functions; and gymnasia and special programs such as art, music, computer instruction, and language arts. The house may include anywhere from four to eight self-contained classrooms oriented toward a centralized resource center and supported with a specialized classroom, teacher offices, small seminar rooms, and other support spaces. Currently, the house plan concept is being applied to secondary environments as well, as a response to advances in self-directed learning, interdisciplinary instruction, and the desire to form smaller learning communities in very large high schools. The residential metaphor of the house has been extended to include the “neighborhoods” and “main streets” in high school design, thereby extending the notion of a community of learners.

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