Summary
Contents
Subject index
This fully updated Second Edition offers an unflinching and comprehensive overview of the full range of both practical and theoretical issues facing educational leadership today. Editor Fenwick W. English and 30 renowned authors boldly address the most fundamental and contested issues in the field, including culturally relevant and distributed leadership; critical policy and practice issues predicting the new century’s conflict; the paradox of changes; and the promises, paradoxes, and pitfalls of standards for educational leaders.
New Approaches for School Design
New Approaches for School Design
Introduction and Overview
The school facility is a neglected and underutilized resource in educational planning and administration. Every activity of teaching and learning takes place in a physical setting, and as such, the school facility plays a vitally supportive role in contributing to achieving educational goals. Effective planning, design, and management of school facilities can be a powerful tool for educational leaders in ensuring that the physical settings within which learning takes place are not only adequate but also motivational for both students and teachers. In many cases, stakeholders in key decision-making roles are less interested in how school design can support the changing demands of delivering 21st-century education and more interested in how to deliver school buildings in the shortest time frame and at the lowest possible price for the sake of political expediency. As important as budgeting and scheduling are in educational administration, shortsighted thinking can severely compromise the effectiveness of the school facility in meeting the critical needs of learners now and into the future. Educational leaders and decision makers need to recognize that school facilities are, in effect, a policy statement on the relative importance a community places on education and students. School buildings are cultural artifacts that reflect the values of the community long after the original stakeholders who envisioned, planned, designed, and built them are gone. Indeed, school facilities are more than artifacts; they can influence the behavior, attitudes, and performance of those who work and learn in them. Educational leaders need to be aware of how school facilities affect learning and teaching and how school designs can be created to take full advantage of this knowledge.
The objectives of this chapter are to situate school design as a critical and integral component in educational leadership and to introduce educational leaders to the vital role of school design in supporting teaching and learning. Once the need for educational leadership in school design is established, a brief outline of the relationship between school design and educational reform is presented to place this relationship in historical context. Five emerging and interconnected issues in school design will then be discussed in more depth: (a) school designs for smaller learning communities, (b) collaborative learner-centered environments, (c) learning extensions into the community, (d) technology and school design, and (e) high-performance school design. Finally, the process through which school facilities are delivered and the role of educational leaders in that process are outlined.
The Need for Educational Leadership in School Design
A number of interrelated educational trends point to a sense of urgency with respect to the quality of school environments. 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 (General Accounting Office, 1995, 2000; Lewis et al., 2000; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1989). Given that the average age of school buildings in the United States stands at 42 years old (Lewis et al., 2000) and that existing structures do not always contain what are now considered the essential components for a good learning environment, it is critically important to understand the relationship between existing building condition and student performance. There is arguably an ample body of evidence that school environments influence a number of student behaviors and attitudes (Duke, 1998; Earthman, 2002; Gump, 1987; Lackney, 1994; McGuffy, 1982; Schneider, 2002; Weinstein, 1979) that influence educational outcomes (Earthman, 2002; Moore & Lackney, 1993; Weinstein, 1979). Although there is some skepticism about the relationship between building condition and educational outcomes (Frazier; 1993), recent studies (Berner, 1993; Cash, 1993; Cervantes, 1999; Earthman, Cash, & Van Berkum, 1996; Gravelle, 1998; Guy, 2001; Lanham, 1999; Lewis, 2001; Maxwell, 1999; O'Neill, 2000) have found significant correlations between building condition and academic achievement. The emergence of a variety of systemic schoolwide educational reforms in the last quarter of the 20th century (American Institutes of Research, 1999) has placed additional demands on aging school buildings originally designed for an Industrial Age disciplinary mass institution (Huse, 1995). Student population and ethnic diversity continue to increase, creating ever more overcrowded, multicultural, and multilingual schools across the country. The changing nature of family and community life demands that schools continue to open their doors wider to serve the ever growing and diverse educational needs of the community. Finally, information technologies and advances in telecommunication systems have placed a further burden on the educational suitability of existing school facilities. Leadership is required to advance innovations in school design to meet the challenges of these changing paradigms in education.
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