10 Lessons We Learned Designing Our School

1. School is Our Home Away From Home

Explorer spent its first years in a rented, bungalow-like facility that was very cosy and home-like, yet also incredibly run-down and overcrowded. In the school’s fifth year, we had the good fortune to be given a building by the City of San Diego. Yet it was a gigantic, former military building that required complete renovation. Our biggest fear was that it would end up being a school with a cold, institutional feeling.

One of School Design Research Studio’s 33 Design Principles for Education is to “consider home as template for school.” For Explorer, this was a bit of a challenge, not only because of the huge institutional nature of our building, but because we shared an architect (Carrier Johnson Architects) and a building with the High Tech High family of middle and high schools who emphatically use professional work space as a template for their beautiful and highly successful schools.

Yet, instinctively, we wanted to make the interior design of the school as home-like as possible. For young children especially, we feel strongly that home-like elements create a feeling of safety, lessen anxiety, and create a sense of ownership. Instead of office quality furnishings, we opted for differentiated, residential furniture picked from individual stores and antique shops. Painted wooden cabinets display curios and children’s ceramic work in Explorer’s hallways. Small chairs and tables fill the halls for parents and children to use for reading a book or chatting with other families. There are comfortable sofas and flowers to create a feeling of warmth and invitation to friendly relationships.

2. Creative Corridors

In any school, corridors are unavoidable. For safety and circulation’s sake, they end up taking a big portion of total space. Explorer is no exception, and perhaps our corridors are even worse than most schools because we occupy a building that was once a Navy training facility – thus it has adult-size corridors, like those of a community college, rather than an elementary school. To make our corridors warmer, more human-scale, and to reduce running and too much activity, we have done our best to differentiate them, break them into smaller spaces, and fill them with art. Our interior designer (Viveca Bissonette, of Carrier Johnson Architects) had the idea to tile the floors of each corridor with a different color combination – one hallway is yellow-hued; another blue-hued; and the third brown-hued. The children and even many visiting adults are able to more easily orient themselves through this way-finding strategy. Often overheard in our corridors: “it’s all the way at the end of the yellow hallway,” or “go to the sunflower mural and it’s two doors down in the blue hallway”. One of Explorer’s teachers who is also a woodworker designed cubbies that also serve as benches; outside classrooms there is seating for small group work, one-on–one reading tutors, or parents chatting before pick up time. Even with the cubbies and colored tiles, the corridors loom in a somewhat unrelieved way, so we have broken them up with colorful chairs and tables; rocking chairs; or small seating arrangements.

3. The School As a Gallery

During the school design process, our interior designer suggested brightening our hallways with color block walls. We opted instead for plain white walls and as much tackable surface as we could afford. We also installed museum style lighting in the hallways because we hoped to turn the corridors into galleries of student art. Upon reflection, this was our most important design decision. The school now successfully functions as a giant gallery of student work. After moving in, we also splurged on gallery style spotlighting in our large, somewhat dark, gathering room. Now this room also functions as a gallery – recent exhibitions have featured work from a third grade year-long photography project; poetry and paintings about the meaning of peace in everyday life; and masks throughout history.

4. Beautiful Work Reflects Respect

Ron Berger, mentor teacher, writes that what he values most in teaching is the opportunity to support students to do beautiful work. “I use the term beautiful work broadly: with my students it applies as much to their original scientific research and math solutions as to the eloquence of their writing or the precision of their mathematical inquiry. Always, in all subjects, there is the quest in my classroom for beauty, for quality, and to critique all that we do for its level of care, craftsmanship and value.”

Explorer teachers, too, are committed to creating the opportunities and support for children to do beautiful work. Beauty offers the chance to bring pleasure and meaning to one’s experience and respects the environment in which our children learn about themselves and each other.

We feel that this insistence on high quality aesthetically beautiful work is a measure of our respect for students and their work. This respect is clear in the proud display of student’s work throughout the school. In classrooms, the value of student’s efforts is validated in charts that reflect children’s thinking and discussions. On common area walls, children’s work is well-curated by Explorer’s teachers, principal, and art teacher. By well-curated, we don’t mean that only certain children’s work is displayed, but that whole class or whole school projects are chosen which show a diversity of individual student vision and which are gracefully displayed. Well-lit and professionally framed permanent installations of past student projects demonstrate the school’s academic and aesthetic history.

5. Broken Window Theory Applies to Schools Too

Cognitive science experiments with adults have shown that if windows are broken in a neighborhood, residents take less care with their surroundings. More recently, similar experiments have even shown that messy surroundings and evidence of rules having been broken such as littering, causes significant increases in anti-social behavior: http://article.wn.com/view/2008/11/21/Messy_surroundings_affect_behaviour/

In schools, we know only too well that the physical environment effects children’s behavior. Every school gives attention to lighting, seating arrangements, outdoor space and boundaries in classrooms and hallways that promote appropriate behavior.

At Explorer, we have also seen that when care and respect is given to maintaining the beauty of the school itself, children respond by mirroring that care and respect. Our emphasis on keeping the school clean, orderly, and beautiful reflects high standards and concern for one another.

6. Teachers As Designers

Though it was difficult for Explorer to begin in its cramped rental space, that experience helped form our faculty’s priorities for what we hoped for in our permanent building. Two Explorer teachers served as faculty representatives to our site committee and attended all design meetings. In addition to having strong feelings about design of the classrooms, faculty workroom, and kitchen, teacher input was extremely important in the design of outdoor space, multipurpose rooms, lunch circulation.

One of our staff’s highest priorities was to create a spacious eat-in kitchen where faculty could have lunch together. To this day, the lunch room is one of the hearts of the school. Most days almost all faculty eat together; in a once a week lunch-club faculty members bring lunch for all of their colleagues. Impromptu meetings; exchange of information; birthday breakfasts and much more take place in this warm and home-like space.

7. Gathering Chaos

With limited square footage and a limited construction budget, one of our biggest design compromises was in limiting the size of the school’s gathering room (otherwise known as an auditorium). In this space, children gather every other week for an all-school gathering; graduations, talent shows, plays, and other school wide events also take place here. Without undertaking massive demolition, the space we were able to use for this purpose is 2400 square feet, an awkward rectangle, about 27 x 88. The only way for us to fit all 320 children into this space is for them to sit on the floor. We have learned how much more difficult it is for children to attend and behave appropriately in these circumstances. In retrospect, if we could do it again, we might choose to spend more or sacrifice space elsewhere in order to get a gathering space large enough for all of the children and parents to be seated in chairs.

Given these limitations, we have adapted in various ways – performances are often split between younger and older children; not everyone gets to go to graduation; at grandparents day we have to ask parents not to attend.

8. Acoustics Matter

The need for light and space in a school is relatively easy for most of us to understand. For some reason, the impact of sound is more difficult to imagine and plan for. At Explorer, we learned this the hard way. We were trying to avoid the sterile office look of dropped ceilings and carpets, and opted instead for a warehouse look, with exposed ceilings and linoleum floors. In an old, mostly concrete building, we grossly underestimated the impact

of children’s and adults’ voices bouncing and multiplying off of ceilings and walls. Our first large gathering was held in a deafening roar. In the end, we had to spend more money on sound absorbing panels in many areas of the school.

9. The Office is Not a Fortress

Our architects designed a high, corporate-style reception counter, with a walled office for the principal and administrative work. We opted for a much more accessible design – parents and teachers can easily walk through the administrative area to get to the Principal’s office, which has large interior windows, so anyone can easily see whether she is available or in a meeting. The Principal’s office has windows facing out onto the play yard so administrative eyes are always aware of what is going on outside. Also part of our front office is a cozy healing room with bunk beds, a rocking chair, and a telephone with which to call home.

Another of School Design Research Studio’s 33 Design Principles for Education is to “disperse administrative areas”. We learned the value of this principle purely by accident. Our main office, home to our principal, business manager, and administrative assistant is sited right near the front door of the school. A second administrative office, home to the development director and parent education coordinator is on the other side of the school, near the faculty work room. Walking time is increased for administrators, but the overall effect is that there is more than one area in the school where parents and faculty greet each other, communicate news, and hold impromptu meetings.

10. The Playground: It’s Not Easy to Balance Variety and Flexibility

As an urban public school, Explorer has very limited outdoor space. When designing our playground (about 20,000 square feet), we also had an extremely limited budget. With at least 150 children at a time on the playground at recess and lunch, we needed to disperse children into different areas as much as possible. Thus we were looking for variety of activities that would draw in different groups of children.

We wanted some grassy areas interspersed with blacktop. But, at the same time, our physical education teacher uses this same space for her classes, and her needs were to have as flexible a space as possible. For example, she did not want fixed basketball hoops, because she might want to use that same space to teach tennis or hockey. As a result, we had to do our best to combine variety with flexibility. The result was that we invested very little in pre-made, stationary play structures at the periphery of the yard – just a small structure with a slide for the kindergartners and a rock climbing wall in a small grassy area. The main blacktopped area has removable tether ball poles and removable basketball hoops, and is left open most days for four square, football games; or just running around. Most other zones of activity are around the periphery of the yard – lunch arbor; wallball; dancing with a boombox; a shade tree with a deck for quiet games; and garden.

Research indicates that varied play spaces which invite more complex dramatic play sustains children’s creative and engaged attention. Therefore, we included a playhouse and sandbox on our yard in addition to areas for physical activity.

We know that clearly defined spaces contribute to positive interactions.

Another decision we had to make was whether or not to separate our kindergarteners with a picket fence to provide a place for indoor and outdoor play as the classrooms open directly onto to the play yard. After a great deal of thought and because of our strongly in place “buddy” classrooms between younger and older children, we decided to have one large play space. As a result, the older children and younger children play successfully with each other.