In an era of budget cuts and a pervasive do-more-with-less mentality, how do administrators redesign their approach to leadership to meet the learning needs of today’s students and the adults responsible for facilitating student learning? Area administrators are invited to an afternoon of conversation and collaboration, led by keynote speaker David Jakes, to explore learning space design principles, its effect on student learning and affordable redesign strategies.

For your consideration:

How would you design someplace where you spent time learning? Over 8 hours? Over 24 hours? Over 9 months? Over 22 years? Over a lifetime? Would your vision be the space you teach in now? What if you asked your students the same question. What would they say? Have you asked them?

Design = Invention (Liedtka and Ogilvie 2011)

What if anything was possible? No constraints, no time to design in a "Yah But" environment.

"Where is your Petri Dish?" (DesigningforGrowth.com)

How do the spaces in your school support engagement between learners, between learners and teachers? How do your spaces support relevancy? How do they make learning transactions visible to learners (Lippman)

Can your spaces be arranged to support independent, small-group, and large group learning?

How do you design a physical space for digital (online) learning? (Ira Socol)

Strategies

1. Begin with a clear expectation of what you want learning to look like, and the learning behaviors associated with learning to establish a vision
2. Inventory the learning spaces in your school to establish your current reality. Identify gaps as differences between the vision and current reality.
3. Use design thinking to develop prototype solutions to reduce or eliminate the gaps.
4.. Engage in an iterative process about how your spaces support learning
5. Commit to the importance of space to learning by assigning dollars to it.
6. Design a space learning lab.
7. Design professional development for learning spaces
8. Create non-traditional learning spaces.
9. Design digital spaces for learning
10. Permit personalization and ownership of spaces by students and teachers.My experiences in designing the library.

Resources:

Learning Spaces Suggestions | My list of 29 things to do to get started on creating true learning spaces. This list contains actionable items that can be done tomorrow, require at one week to a month to accomplish, or need a year or later to be actualized.

Design Thinking for Educators | What Schools Can Learn from Google, IDEO, and Pixar |

Developing Learning Spaces | Tools

Evidence-Based Design of Elementary and Secondary Schools | Peter Lippman

Learning Spaces | Educause / online version

Make Space | d.school

The Language of School Design | Nair, Fielding, and Lackney

Planning and Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces | JISC

Can the Physical Environment Have an Impact on the Learning Environment | Lippman

Campfires in CyberSpace | David Thornburg

IdeaPaint | anyspace becomes whiteboard / see their education design gallery

d.school z-rack | rolling whiteboards

David Jakes Presentation Resources

Pages in this Section

Leaders and Learning Spaces