The Future of Facilities in Education

I have been thinking a lot about facilities--the sorts of learning spaces that suit schools for the decades ahead. The board I serve on in Los Angeles is busy imagining what a new high school and middle school might look like, given a tightly constrained urban environment. A client in Buffalo is exploring how to retrofit an aging, but valuable, plant to accommodate more progressive teaching and learning strategies. A client in Prague is constructing new, flexible space for middle schoolers. And almost every strategic plan we facilitate seems to say something about facilities.So, I was excited to see this item on university facilities by Brian Matthews in the Chronicle of Higher Education (the Vimeo clip from Virginia Tech is especially interesting). This section, though, resonated given where I was while reading the article:

" ... imagine large spaces filled with desks, group rooms, and lounge areas where students read, write, work on projects, socialize, mentor each other, and collaborate. Maybe during certain semesters they are grouped together by similar disciplines  — and during other semesters they are mixed up—so you’d have engineers, poets, and biochemists all colliding together daily, formally and informally."

I read this while sitting in the Ace Hotel on 29th Street in NYC, the hub of work and networking for many in the creative class. The picture below, taken just now, seems to illustrate exactly what Brian Matthews is talking about in the above.Maybe future educational spaces will start to look like today's work spaces for creatives. Not a bad idea at all.