The Impact Of Learning Spaces on Student Success
Creative spaces featuring flexibility, a unique atmosphere, and inspiring aesthetics play an important role in student engagement. The classroom sets the foundation for innovative learning and must keep pace with technology and students’ varied learning styles to support their overall well-being, leading to greater engagement and academic success.’
Conversations concerning school environments and how space affects the learning process are happening nationwide: at conventions, school board meetings, and in the classroom. Modern design ideas about collaborative learning spaces and relaxed classroom structures have inspired teachers to make simple changes that can make a difference. Those interested in the intersection between space and pedagogy, how students react to different learning environments, and the opinions and experiences of teachers in the classroom, will find this report illuminating and useful in developing best practices for designing education spaces.
Greater Student Engagement, Greater Probability of Success
the design of learning places matter. Mounting empirical evidence by multiple authors indicates that the higher the level of student engagement, the higher the probability that he or she will do well in many aspects of his or her academic life. The research question was, “Does the design of the built environment impact student academic engagement success?”
We are 18 years into the 21st century, and teachers and designers still struggle with moving to more active learning practices and solutions. Designs supporting active learning are “innovative,” and innovation causes members of the academy to pause. It comes down to a system’s challenge—all levels of decision-making from teachers to principals, to superintendents must acknowledge this and then address each to positively move forward.
Modern Ideas and Knowledge for How the Environment Impacts Learning
We know too much to continue to operate and teach the way we did hundreds of years ago:
Modern brain science has revealed that we should move to learn and be OK with a change from novelty to direct focus and back again, and recognize our brains grow as our bodies grow.
Biophilic design principles extol the connections we all require to nature—proven to enhance wellbeing.
Design solutions afford lots of windows to the exterior and to interior spaces putting “learning on display,” but sadly, more often than not, teachers cover up windows with student work, or brown paper, as they are afraid of distractions, taking away students’ chance for a small connection to the natural world from the classroom. Actually, our brains need these brief breaks in our perspective in order to stay more fully engaged.
Environment Behavioural Psychology has identified that row-by-column seating begets a passive audience. Why? In this arrangement, students don’t see eye-to-eye, nor experience ease in communicating.
Ergonomics is the science of human to ‘machine’ interface. We know our bodies change physiologically as we age. However, we practice purchasing one-size-fits-all seating solutions perhaps because it’s easier to maintain and keep count of. Choice and control over comfort supporting and giving permission for postural changes are important.
Outdated Practices Still Dominating
The 50-minute (give or take) class session structure continues to dominate in most schools. Even if a teacher wanted to take students into a breakout area, there isn’t enough time to “herd the cats” in and out of the classroom. Innovation has provided breakout spaces, in-between areas for collaboration, and hallway designs that encourage collision and connection. Due to this systemic issue described above (fear of distraction, control of students), these spaces go under-utilized, or worse yet, not used at all, and even more distressing, become storage zones. Square footage is lost and utility compromised.
We also see teaching to the test is not getting us where we need to be. Too often, these practices (although demanded “from above”) do not allow teachers the freedom to adapt a more personalized learning experience for each student.
How Designers Can Usher in Change
What designers bring to the dance is the knowledge of how people need to learn, how to work, and collaborate with multi-disciplinary teams in the “real world.” Thus, “innovative” spatial designs are developed to challenge the status quo of a teacher-centred practice, to one that is student-centred. Research begins to share the “proof” that these 21st-century practices yield higher levels of student academic engagement.
Fixed Versus Flexible Furniture Study
The built environment impacts behaviours: Results of an active-learning post-occupancy evaluation.
Do Teachers Want Flexible Collaborative Classrooms?
For a classroom to foster 21st-century learning styles, it needs a 21st-century classroom design with multi-purpose spaces and connected learning areas that support the movement, student choice, and a collaborative environment. certain features available in modern classrooms are the ability to accommodate different learning styles and classroom design that encourages movement and decreases sedentary behaviour.
Learning Styles: Students learn better at their own pace and are motivated by a variety of different methodologies. Schools that follow a traditional structure and environment can be stifling for students who require more visual, aural, and social/solitary learning. To achieve a variety of learning styles, schools need a renovation in some way.
Increasing physical movement: Students are able to get up from their desks, walk around, have options like standing desks, soft seating, and flexibility with how and where they learn.
Providing students with the option to be social or solitary in their learning space: Some students thrive in noisy workgroups, while others work better in a more solitary, quiet setting.
Resources for visual learners: Students learn better with both words and pictures than with words alone, some learn better when they can visualize what they’re learning with the help of videos, animations, and other media.
Accommodations for audio “aural” based learning: These include headsets or other hardware for students who find that listening to text helps them learn more efficiently.
One study reported that the top learning style accommodations for a completed construction or renovation project included increased physical movement opportunities (67%), providing students with the choice of being social or solitary (54%), and more resources for visual learners (46%).
