Principles for Planning and Designing Schools

Principles for Planning and Designing Schools

My co author, the late Jeff Lackney developed a list of 33 principles of design that apply to schools.  Here I will share 11 of them and encourage you to seek our and discuss the others. This section is summarized from our book entitled Educational Facilities Planning (2006) published by Longman.  This is the draft version of part of our revised work.  I hope you will enjoy the material here as well as the following blogs and reflect on how these principles apply to your situation. Jeff was an architect and an intellectual, so none of the issues I raise in my blogs have gone without serious discussion with this master of words and design, my friend and colleague Dr. Jeff Lackney.  
Posted by Ken Tanner – June 2011

Principles for Site & Building Organization

Many of the principles for site and building organization have evolved from earlier forms but have taken on new significance in twenty-first century school design. For instance, neighborhood schools, a cornerstone of early nineteenth century schools has taken on new significance with controversies to end ‘forced’ busing in urban school districts as well as create smaller learning communities. There is a new emphasis on formalizing the learning that can take place within the surrounding community of the school. In addition, the size and scale of school buildings is being seriously challenged. Schools are becoming smaller and more intimate in many urban school centers. Finally, buildings are being organized in ways that help transition from smaller home environments that are safe, secure and inviting.

1. Plan Schools as Neighborhood-Scaled Community Learning Centers

The potential exists to transform the traditional school building into a community-learning center that serves the educational needs of the entire population in the community. Typically, a community-learning center can be created by interlacing residential neighborhoods, various existing community and school organizations, functions and facilities  (Bingler et al, 2003; Decker & Romney, 1994, August; US Dept of Ed., 1999, April; OECD, 1996). The community school most often functions as a cohesive facility or network of closely adjacent facilities (Hodgin, 1998, January; Fanning/Howey Associates, 1995). Locating the community-learning center in neighborhoods will provide a symbolic identity for that community. Facilities that are close to the neighborhoods of the children they serve provide opportunities for children to walk and bike with the added public health benefit of increasing their physical activity, rather than relying on more costly modes of transportation. Community schools often will provide a variety of services, at flexible schedules, accessible by people of different backgrounds. By providing facilities accessible for the entire community, the center will create increased involvement and awareness of the value of education (Warner & Curry, 1997). School facilities that act as true community centers serve the broader societal goals of providing the setting for meaningful civic participation and engagement at the local level.

2. Plan for Learning to Take Place Directly in the Community

A variety of social and economic factors have created an environment in which many educators recognize that learning happens all the time and in many different places (Duke, 1999, February). The school building is just one place learning takes occurs. While the school building is often perceived as a community center, the idea of embracing the whole community as a learning environment has evolved in a complementary fashion. Educational programs can, and are taking advantage of educational resources in urban, suburban and rural settings alike. Formal educational program partnerships have been established with museums, zoos, libraries, other public institutions, as well as local business workplace settings (Bingler et al, 2003; Fielding, 1999).

In addition, increasing costs of public spending for education has encouraged the sharing of school and community facilities that prevent cost duplication of similar facilities such as gymnasiums, auditoriums, performance spaces, and conferencing facilities (Fanning/Howey Associates, 1995; OECD, 1995, 1996). Sharing facilities can also realize long-term maintenance and operating cost savings over the life of the building. Sharing school facilities with a variety of community organizations may foster meaningful inter-organizational partnerships that can strengthen educational opportunities for learners.

3. Create Smaller Schools

Barker and Gump (1964) in their classic book “Big School, Small School” demonstrated through their research that small schools (100-150), in comparison with large schools (over 2,000) offer students greater opportunities to participate in extracurricular activities and to exercise leadership roles. In particular, they found that participation in school activities; student satisfaction, number of classes taken, community employment, and participation in social organizations have all been found to be greater in small schools relative to large schools. Garbarino (1980) later found that, small schools, on the order of 500 or less, have lower incidence of crime levels and less serious student misconduct. Subsequent research by others suggests a negative relationship between mathematics and verbal ability tests and elementary school size controlling for socio-economic differences  (Fowler, 1992; Howley, 1994, June).  Additionally, the same research indicates that smaller elementary schools particularly benefit African-American students’ achievement.

For educational planners and architects the research on small schools suggests that the size of learner groupings should be roughly between 60-75 students in pre-school, 200-400 students in elementary school, 400-600 in middle school and not more than 600-800 students in secondary school (Raywid, 1996, 1999; Lashway, 1998-99, Winter; Irmsher, 1997). If a community learning center must house more than 75 preschoolers, 400 elementary or middle-school students, or more than 800 high-school students, it is often recommended that the facility be decentralized not just in the size of student body, but also curriculum, administration and architecture. Architectural forms of these smaller units may include a village, campus, or multi-faceted building comprised of a series of interconnected schools-within-a-school for a maximum of 400 students. Another strategy for reducing the scale of educational facilities is to distribute and network various school and community functions throughout the neighborhood in both new and existing sites.

4. Respect Contextual Compatibility While Providing Design Diversity

As real estate development sprawl has expanded, the principle of creating well-defined neighborhoods has been ignored in urban planning. While a strong neighborhood may not directly influence educational performance, the sense of cohesion experienced by community members may help increase parental involvement in neighborhood schools. Research has shown that parental involvement in the school is critical to a learner’s success. By creating a contextually compatible school, people may feel that the school is part of the neighborhood, and in turn, part of them. While maintaining a sense of continuity through contextual design, creating diversely designed environments that have their own identity is equally important in enabling community members to recognize the school as a symbol of their community (Moore & Lackney, 1994).

Well-defined neighborhoods blend schools into the pattern and character of the local, surrounding community. In a complementary fashion, one might create differently styled schools with for example, variations on the overall design theme, to respond to the need for community identity and as a response to active parental, children, teachers, administration, and community participation (OECD, 1996).

5. Consider Home as a Template for School

The transition from the home setting to institutional settings such as the school environment can be stressful, especially for younger children in childcare settings. Experience tells us that building in physical and social home-like characteristics may reduce anxiety on the part of both parent and child, help children feel more comfortable and enable to concentrate on learning (Moore et. al., 1979).

Use friendly, "home-like" elements and materials in the design of the school at all scales when appropriate and possible (Crumpacker, 1995). Home-like characteristics might include: creating smaller groupings of students often called “families” in the middle school philosophy, designing appropriately-scaled elements, locating restrooms near instructional areas, providing friendly and welcoming entry sequences, creating residentially sloping roofs, and creating enclosed ‘back-yards’ (Moore et. al., 1979). Use familiar and meaningful elements from the surrounding residential neighborhood as the "template" for the imagery of the new school.

6. Meander Circulation While Ensuring Supervision

Providing for meaningful social interaction in schools is important in encouraging a positive school climate. Unfortunately in many large school buildings not all learners and faculty share a common room or floor where they can come into regular contact with each other. Often social anonymity can result. Many times the only meeting these occupants have is in areas of circulation. It is important to take advantage of these impromptu meetings by designing the circulation space within the school as a place to converse and share of information and ideas.

Simultaneously, public circulation space is known to be one of the most difficult places in a school to keep safe from illicit activity. The goals of encouraging positive social behaviors and reducing violence do not have to be mutually exclusive.  In fact, if appropriately addressed through design, encouraging positive behaviors can have a mediating effect on the reduction of unwanted social behaviors (Moore & Lackney, 1994).

Circulation pathways such as hallways and corridors are a costly percentage of a school building construction. However, circulation can double as an active learning space for the school. Whenever possible design meandering pathways to increase opportunities for social interaction. Use circulation to create gentle transitions from different spaces, taking advantage of turns and bends to create unique areas of learning. Conversely, for issues of safety, circulation paths should be designed to ensure adequate supervision not only by administrators, but also by students, teachers and parents to create a condition of natural surveillance that has been found to reduce disruptive behaviors (Crowe, 2000). Creating central activity nodes that connect short paths is one strategy for maintaining visual supervision without creating long institutional-style corridors (Moore et. al., 1979).

7. Design for Safe Schools

Safe school building designs must be seen as being one important component of a larger system of crime prevention in schools that include administrative procedures, student, staff, and community training programs, and the implementation of security programs and systems (Crowe, 2000; Schneider, Walker & Sprague, 2000; Cornell, 1999). Design and use of the environment directly affects human behavior that in turn, influences opportunities for crime and fear of crime, and impacts quality of life (Department of Education & Department of Justice, 1998, August). These opportunities for crime can be reduced through appropriate planning and design decisions.

Crowe (2000) in his highly influential book, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, identifies three critical safe school design principles include access control, natural surveillance, and definition of territory. Natural access control denies access to a crime target and creates a perception of risk in offenders. Access control uses doors, shrubs, fences, gates and other physical design elements to discourage access to an area by all but its intended users. Surveillance is commonly solved through hthe use of surveillance camera technologies, which may or may not be monitored. As an important adjunct to these systems, providing for natural surveillance assures that offenders and intruders will know they are being observed. It increases the likelihood that individuals who care but are not officially responsible for regulating the use of space will observe these individuals and either challenge their behavior or report it to someone who is officially responsible. Natural surveillance is achieved by placing windows in locations that allow intended users to see or be seen, while ensuring that intruders will be observed as well. Opportunities for surveillance are enhanced through the provision of adequate lighting and glass and landscaping that allow for unobstructed views. Locate administrative areas directly adjacent to the main entrance to the school. Territorial reinforcement suggests that physical design can contribute to a sphere of influence so that users develop a sense of "ownership" that is perceived by offenders. Territory can be defined by the use of sidewalks, landscaping, porches and other elements that establish the boundaries between public and private areas.

Principles for Primary Educational Space

Based in large part on changes in curriculum and instruction, primary educational spaces are changing as well. Although many of these innovations in primary learning and instructional space began over forty years ago, they are beginning to become standard practice in new school designs. Instructional spaces are being clustered to form smaller learning communities of either same grade or multi-grade configurations. Additional space is often being provided that is shared by these clusters of learning areas. The recognition that there are a variety of learning styles precipitates the provision of a variety of learning groupings and spaces beyond the traditional self-contained classroom. Class sizes have become smaller to increase contact time with teachers. The need to provide enough space within the primary learning area for resource-rich activity areas is now seen as critical to development. The desirability of integrating early childhood education into the traditional school grade configuration has become more pronounced with the advent of the implications of brain-based research for learning in the early years.

8. Cluster Learning Areas

A central concept of clustering learning spaces around central cores of shared instructional support and resource spaces emerged in the early 1960s and remains a sound strategy for school design today (Brubaker, 1998; OECD, 1996). When clustered around larger resource spaces, learning spaces act as learning alcoves rather than the isolated self-contained classrooms of the past. The core should include informal meeting space, seminar and shared conference rooms, a small computer hub and teacher offices.

Open-plan designs of the 1960’s and 1970s may have been partially successful at broadening the educational experience of learners, but both teachers and learners found that too many physical distractions were experienced for these open physical settings to become the norm (Weinstein, 1979). The key to new clustering arrangements then, is to provide spaces that are open yet have areas of enclosure for more task specific activities.  These spaces will then be diverse in use but not have the sight and sound distractions experienced with open plan schools (Moore and Lackney, 1994).

The concept of the cluster of instructional spaces is adaptable to a number of pedagogical goals and curriculum and instructional philosophies and strategies (Taylor & Vlastos, 1983; Sanoff & Sanoff, 1988). For instance, each cluster may support either traditional disciplinary teaching such as history, mathematics, and the arts, or interdisciplinary teaching that supports thematic learning units. Each cluster may contain either grade-level groupings, or multi-age groupings of learners. To maximize the agility of instructional clusters one may use any appropriate combination of stand alone movable partitions, movable modular furnishings, or large door openings to shared core spaces.

9. Provide Space for Sharing Instructional Resources

For educators to be successful, the availability of resources by students and faculty is important. Students that do not have access to learning spaces, resources, and teachers will be at a disadvantage. The reality of limited physical and economic resources in school settings demands the sharing of all available instructional resources. One way to address this concern is to provide a well-defined area directly adjacent to instructional alcoves and core spaces that provide technology-rich resources that can be shared by all learners in an instructional cluster (OECD, 1996). Resources can take a wide variety of forms from small, specialized libraries, information technology and other instructional media to special equipment and general workspace (Chupela, 1994; Feinberg, Kuchner & Feldman, 1998). By creating instructional areas that have direct accessibility to these resources, the learning process will be supported.

10. Design for a Variety of Learning Groups and Spaces

Learning naturally takes place in many different kinds and qualities of space. Although the self-contained classroom continues to have a role in facilitating instruction in schools, it can no longer provide the variety of learning settings necessary to successfully facilitate innovations in curriculum and instruction (Crumpacker, 1995; Meek, 1995). Space needs to accommodate, for instance, a wide variety of group learning sizes from an entire “family” of 100 learners, to five groups of twenty learners, to groups of twelve, four to six, and one to two learners. One approach to this problem is to create a variety of adjoining learning spaces and arrangements inside and outside the main instructional space or area. Another approach might be to create partially open space with appropriate visual and acoustical barriers, with adjacent, smaller, enclosed spaces (Taylor & Vlastos, 1983; Sanoff & Sanoff, 1988). In this manner, smaller learning spaces are separated yet connected. Articulate each cluster of instructional areas by gathering several small-group learning areas around the main instructional space for large-group instruction. Each of the small group areas can be further divided into individual activity areas to allow for quiet, individualized self-directed learning (Weinstein & Mignano, 1997; Weinstein, 1996; McMillan, 1997).

11. Keep Class Sizes Small

The size of the primary learning group in which the child spends the most time makes a significant difference in the quality of education and development (Crumpacker, 1995; NAEYC, 1999). Create instructional areas that allow for 12-16 learners in early childhood and elementary grade levels, 16-20 learners in middle school grade levels, and 20-24 learners in secondary school grade levels. Class size research points directly to a social and physical link to achievement (Department of Education, 1999, March; U.S. Dept of Education, 1998, April). In one of the largest longitudinal studies of class size to be conducted, the Tennessee Student Teacher Area Ratio (STAR) Project, (Achilles, 1992; Finn & Achilles, 1990) found that children in smaller classes (13-17 per room) outperform those in regular-sized classes (22-25 per room). In the early grades, children in smaller classes were found to outperform children from regular class sizes in all subjects, but especially in reading and mathematics test scores with average improvements of up to 15%. Smaller classes were especially helpful for children in inner-city schools. A follow-up study by Achilles and his associates, called the Lasting Benefits Study (Nye, Achilles, Zacharias, Fulton & Wallenhorst,1992, November) indicated that students previously in small classes demonstrated statistically significant advantages two years later over students previously in regular sized classes. Performance gains ranged from 11-34%. Reasons for these gains may be that, more and higher quality student-teacher interactions are possible in a smaller class (Bourke, 1986), and that spatial density and crowding are also reduced thereby decreasing distractions in the classroom (Loo, 1976).

Reference

NOTE: Some of the links in our book may be inactive, but insert the key words and you will find your answer in the Internet,  If not on the net, then  look for the hard copies of planning and design materials that are found around the world in libraries and professor’s offices.

Primary Source, with permission: Tanner, C.K. and Lackney, J.A. (2006), Educational Facilities Planning: Leadership, Architecture,

and Management, Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA.