If you’ve gone back to visit your old elementary or high school recently, you may have been surprised to find it’s still there. And, it’s pretty much the way you left it — dark classrooms, narrow hallways.
A typical “cells and bells” school building. Hillel Academy in Tampa, FL, before renovation. (Prakash Nair)
But after a big slowdown during the recession, spending on new school construction — renovating old schools and building new ones — is slowly picking up again. It was more than $13 billion last year.
Many newer schools are being designed with the latest technologies and teaching models in mind, schools like the new Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep charter school in San Jose, California.
Bright blue, purple and orange paint cover the classroom walls. The design is clean. The spaces are open. Natural light streams into the building from skylights above. There’s open duct work. Throughout the school, there are small, private “breakout spaces” where kids can work with teachers or each other.
At the center of it all is a wide-open computer lab, about the size of four classrooms, with polished concrete floors. It’ll soon be full of 160 kids, each on their own laptop, working on their own lessons.
The computer lab at Rocketship Fuerza Community Prep in San Jose. (Adriene Hill/Marketplace)
“Individualized instruction for students is the right way to go,” said Laura Kozel, vice president of facilities at Rocketship, a network of elementary charter schools where computers are a part of every kids’ day. Kozel is in charge of making sure everything is ready in time for the hundreds of students from kindergarten through fourth grade, who’ll pour into the school next week. “You have to meet every child where they are at, and that’s really what this model is designed to do,” she said.
Kids learning on cutting edge technology raises two important questions. The first: How will a fragile computer ever survive a year with a kindergartner and a concrete floor?
And, second: How do you design a school that won’t be obsolete in 20 years, when no one has any idea what tech or teaching might look like in five?
“If we do a good job, it’s to give the teacher something that is going to be adaptable to however they want to teach,” said architect Michael Pinto, from NAC|Architecture, a firm that specializes in school design.
“The challenge is to both be specific to the things they want to do, but also preserve some generality, flexibility, that agility that adapts to new technologies, new philosophies of learning.”
In other words, the school of the future is a school that knows how to get out of the way.
Pinto shows me just such a place: Playa Vista Elementary School in Los Angeles.
Playground area at Playa Vista Elementary School. (Edmund Barr)
There are no docks to park your jetpack. Or cubbies for Google glasses.
Instead the three-year-old school is characterized by moveable partitions, open spaces and furniture that doesn’t screech across the floor when you rearrange it.
A multipurpose space, at Playa Vista Elementary, used as an event space and cafeteria, with automated roll-up doors to open up to the outside. (Edmund Barr)
Teacher Rachel Henry calls her classroom “amoebic.”
“I’m a firm believer that children need change, and they can get bored easily just with their physical environment,” she said. She changes the classroom setup about once a month.
Spaces at the school are built to transform into other spaces, in the simplest of ways. The architects made the outside walkways wider than usual so they can also be learning spaces.
There’s a bridge over the courtyard intended for dropping things over the side. In the school of the future, kids still wrap eggs in paper and cardboard and hope for the best.
All the flexibility is meant to encourage a new type of learning: Learning by doing. Learning with new technology. Learning that is collaborative, personalized. Learning that architect Prakash Nair said more traditional schools are no good at.
Nair is the founding president of Fielding Nair International and the author of the forthcoming book “Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning.”
He calls traditional U.S. schools “cells and bells.”
“Kids are in a cell called a classroom for a certain period of time,” he said. A bell goes off. “And then they go to another fairly identical cell.”
Nair says we currently have $2 trillion worth of “cells and bells” type school facilities around the country.
“If you look at the research about how we learn, it has nothing to do with being trapped in a room with people of the same age,” he said.
Nair imagines schools without big auditoriums, with cafes instead of large cafeterias.
He says schools with open, flexible space can cost less to build than traditional schools.
Remember those lockers at the beginning of the story? This is the same space, post-renovation. (Prakash Nair)
Old-school schools use about two-thirds of the space for learning. New-school schools, said Nair, use as much as 85 percent of the space.
The Rocketship school in San Jose cost about $10 million to build, compared to about $16 million for a traditional elementary school.
Around the country, teachers and architects are working toward the same goal: to be prepared for the stream of kids headed their way in a few days and a few decades from now.
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