"In my first year of teaching," remembers Harold Hawkins, "I taught in a school with the teacher's desk on a platform at the front of the room. After falling off and stumbling onto that platform for a year, I had them take it out."
Hawkins, professor emeritus of educational administration at Texas A&M University, also remembers the rows of desks bolted to rails on the floor. "There are still lots of teachers who don't view the classroom in any other way than in straight rows of desks," Hawkins says. "Teachers have little training in how to arrange a room. While there's no right or wrong way to do it, room arrangement needs to be such that teachers and students can move about the room unobstructed."
Noting the benefits of one-on-one and small-group meetings, Hawkins emphasizes the advantages of opening up classroom space for mobility, communication among students, and cooperative learning. "I encourage teachers not to just accept what's given to them, but to see things afresh," he says. "In theory, you'd set up a classroom by receiving it completely empty, and then determining what you want to do in it and how you want to work."
Heidi Hayes Jacobs, author and education consultant, points out the direct relationship between room arrangement and function. "We do best when we focus on the match between the purpose of a learning experience and what form the class should take in order to serve that purpose," Jacobs explains. "A rigid form results in restricted functions."
For example, Jacobs tells of a teacher who wants to have a group discussion with lots of participation. Arranging her students in a large circle, the teacher becomes upset when only a few students participate. "If you want more participation," advises Jacobs, "you need to put students in several smaller circles. In a large circle, not everyone can talk. This is what is meant by form follows function."
Removing Barriers
Thomas Jefferson High School, built in 1932 in San Antonio, Tex., is a national historic site. "It's gorgeous, and it looks like a small university," observes Anita Arnold, an English teacher at Jefferson since 1967.
Arnold has taken Professor Hawkins' advice to heart. To eliminate a barrier between herself and her students, she used to position her desk in a corner of the room, facing a wall. "But now," explains Arnold happily, "I don't even have a desk." And instead of student desks, Arnold's room has large tables, where she sits with her students. "This tells my students that the focus of the room is not on me, but on them."
When asked how she deals with students taking state-mandated exams while seated together at tables, Arnold states, "There's a huge difference between collaboration and cheating, and in this classroom kids learn that difference. If all the seats faced the front, it would be philosophically wrong for me. The teacher is the guide or facilitator. It would be so much easier to lecture than to open up to all the real opportunities for learning—which is what happens when you're a facilitator."
Earlier in her career, Arnold prided herself on neat bulletin boards of her own devising. "But I've scrapped all that!" she laughs. Now the bulletin boards are loaded with student papers, poems, and stories. Arnold has spanned her room with fishing line, called power lines, for displaying student anthologies. "And they love it. Student work is hanging everywhere, even from the lights. It's spilling out into the hallway. They learn so much. Sharing their work with each other, you'll hear a student say, I can't believe I used to write like that just four months ago.'"
At her classroom windows, Arnold has hung sheer white curtains that let in sunlight, giving the room a soft, homey feeling. All of her personal books are mixed in with student books in the bookcases, and the shelves include a great deal of Hispanic literature (89 percent of her students are Hispanic). "All the books are everybody's," says Arnold. "The book that's my book is the one that's in my hand. Yes, I've lost some favorite books over the years, but I remind myself that whoever has it must love it as much as I did."
Arnold says that she has only one or two discipline referrals a year. "A classroom that looks like mine communicates certain things to kids," says Arnold, reflecting on her love of teaching. "Kids know who loves them, and who doesn't—just like all of us."
Classroom Efficiency
At Cibola High School in Yuma, Ariz., Toni Badone is assistant principal. From her teaching experience, she has learned that arranging student desks in rows is conducive to quiet time. For efficiency in taking roll and conducting classroom business, she begins and ends her classes with students in rows. During class, however, Badone has her students take responsibility for regrouping their desks in clusters for collaborative work.
"You create an environment conducive to efficiency," says Badone. "Seating is something you can control to achieve your objectives. When you have students facing each other, it makes for a more social environment—and this is not good for beginning teachers unless they can control that environment. If you can't control it, then creative seating arrangements are a mistake."
Visitors to Badone's classroom notice an abundance of art. Calendar art, movie posters, art prints, and art post cards are pinned up by the dozen. "What's on the walls should arouse curiosity and stimulate the learner to think," Badone reports. "I use art masterpieces in my room because we don't do enough with art at any school. But beyond this, art is so tied in with literature. It helps students make connections."
"My visuals follow the function of the course," she says. "A good teacher takes everything into consideration. A beginning teacher might not consider that the objectives of the learning unit have to be presented in more than one way—including what's on the walls."
At the end of each class session, after students have put their desks into rows again, Badone has her students pick up around themselves. "The feeling kids have about their classroom is influenced even by little physical things," observes Badone. Cleaning their room, she says, gives students a sense of ownership and responsibility.
A Professional Workplace Setting
At Catalina High School in Tucson, Ariz., teacher Marge Christensen has organized and decorated her classroom as a "professional workplace setting." Richly carpeted, the room has swivel chairs and modular furniture arranged in workgroups, with a computer for each student. "I want my students to see the relevance between what they do in school and the real employment world," says Christensen.
Enrolled in her classes are those students who have been accustomed to failure in school—students on probation and parole, dropouts returning to school, homeless teens and teens living on their own, students reading at or below the 5th grade reading level, and ESL students who are falling behind their counterparts.
"When kids come into my room, their outlook changes," affirms Christensen. "Everything in here is a visual reminder that I care about them, and that in this classroom they are going to succeed." She insists that pride in the workplace transfers to pride in their work and in themselves. "In other rooms in my school, you might see smashed ceiling tiles and spilled Coke, but in here, if even a little grass is tracked in onto the carpet, a student usually vacuums it up." Christensen says that in 10 years in this classroom, she has never had a single instance of graffiti or vandalism. Even the silk plants she purchased for this room a decade ago still look new.
No chalkboards identify this as a schoolroom. Christensen removed them, intuiting that her students associate chalkboards with their history of failure in school. Opting for a more professional atmosphere, Christensen's students repainted their "institutional green" schoolroom a pleasant off-white, and added colorful graphics.
Funding for this learning environment has come, to a great extent, through Christensen's own networking and grant-writing efforts. "Sometimes if teachers themselves don't go after the resources, no one else will do it for them," she concedes. But Christensen has discovered just how eager people, companies, and corporations are to help a teacher who has a vision—especially when that teacher can transform dropouts into successful graduates, college-bound students, and responsible employees—as Christensen does.
The classroom does not merely house the instructional program, it is part of the instructional program, Professor Hawkins reminds teachers. There is an integral relationship, experts agree, between the quality of education and the quality of the environment.
Innovative Visions
"When we try to imagine an environment that promotes learning, we might think of a classroom as wherever the most powerful learning takes place. A school could be in a hospital or even in a zoo," says architect Steven Bingler. Indeed, when Bingler asks teachers what they'd change in their classrooms if they had a little money, "Some want more technology; some would knock out a wall, permitting a door to the outside; some say they'd like to throw all the desks out the windows, replacing them with tables; and some imagine transforming their classroom into a tropical greenhouse."
President of Concordia Architects in New Orleans, Bingler begins his work with educators through a visioning process. His first question is, "What is the most powerful learning experience you've ever had?" Responses include stories of fishing trips, of visits with grandmothers, of discovering something wonderful in a museum. "Very few of these learning experiences," notes Bingler, "happened in classrooms."
Bingler cites several examples of innovation in redefining the learning environment. In Michigan, the Wayne County School System is placing 400 high school students in the Henry Ford Museum. This integration of public education with a public institution will be called the Henry Ford Academy. Organized classes as well as individual student initiatives will make full use of the industrial and architectural objects housed in this unique and compelling learning environment. As a result of planning and design that make use of existing museum facilities, the Henry Ford Academy will be constructed for a fraction of the cost of more traditional schools.
Another innovative vision for learning environments will soon take form in Stockton, Calif. This fall, the Lincoln Unified School District will break ground for a new high school that looks and feels like a farm. Developed through an extensive one-year stakeholder visioning process that included lots of input from students, Concordia's master plan for the Lincoln High School West Campus comprises 10 learning centers that look something like gleaming high-tech barns.
Accommodating 100 students each, the learning centers are designed not as classrooms but as workshops, study rooms, conference rooms, kitchens, performing rooms, and lofts. The 40-acre complex also includes an environmental resources management center, a business center, a student lodge, a commercially run fitness center, and administrative and operations centers. To make the best fit between instruction and their new facilities, the Lincoln School District anticipates that the curriculum will be project oriented.
Bingler observes that nearly half of U.S. schools now in use were built in the '50s and '60s when the "international style" of architecture was in demand. "The international style," Bingler explains, "reflects a fascination with factories. And some of those 1950s schools are indistinguishable from factories."
Asserting that the factory model limits the quality of learning in major ways, Bingler calls the factory model a restrictive ideological shell. "We need to molt that shell that we have created," insists Bingler. "The idea of the school as a factory is a relatively new concept. Traditionally, critical thinking and skills have been learned in workshops through apprenticeships and mentorships. I think our best designs for education bring us back to that age-old, reliable method."
