iep2 - Pondering Facility Planning

I am flying home today (or last week because it took some time to post) from Kansas City and the EDspaces conference. After touring facilities, listening to speakers, interviewing vendors and testing furniture, it is time for a little reflection.  Mostly conference reaffirms and adds detail to things you already know.  For the most part, this conference did just that.  Top Topics  Flexible Seating – Yes! have more than one type of furniture in a school and in a room.   Floor seating, soft seating, wobbly chairs and standing height tables were all over the floor show and discussions on implementation and the educational reason behind the switch were in the sessions. Movement – While integrated with flexible seating, this concept was so prevalent that it needed its own bullet point. Beyond the wobble bottom stools, there were various mechanisms for students to rock, tilt and swivel.  Moving bodies created active minds and classroom m...

Our blogs are often inspired by questions we are asked.  When conducting community meetings, this questioning is just a daily part of the job. Some questions are popular, like this one, "How did we get here?" and going unstated is "with so many schools that need so much work?" This is a very common question, especially in California. The question refers to the current state of the school facilities.  Normally, this is followed by our school facilities are unacceptable, deplorable, inadequate, unsafe and out of date.  We have heard these descriptors from so many community members, administrators and teachers in every district that we conduct meetings.  Can we answer this question? As in every problem that has taken our society decades to create, a complex system of circumstances and hard choices lead to our run down, out of date and generally uninspiring school facilities. Although every school district has unique factors that contribute to the condi...

Changing an Icon I draw. Little doddles cover cards and note pads at large and small gatherings. It was a note taking technique I was taught and gratefully adopted early in my career. The reason, beyond my lack of spelling talent, is really to distill the spoken word into the most basic pictorial concept because when gathering information from so many, it needs to be contained and expressed in the most condensed form. The smallness allows all input to be displayed at once. Most of the drawings are well accepted icons to today’s texters, our culture’s emogies. These symbols hold strong association. A “house” is often drawn with gable roof and two symmetrical windows on either side of the door in the middle. We faithfully hold that image in our head even though very few, if any, have ever lived in a house that looks like the icon. We have many of these connections imprinted on our brains. Think of trains, building types, flowers and genders, which all have the easy mental imag...

We have all done it; looked in the window of a restaurant or a store and then decide if that place is for us or not, but how do we know….?  When I was younger my mom said not to go into a store with wooden hangers...not sure where this came from. We all automatically stop at a counter at the doctor’s office or restaurant.  Social norms and the environment speak to us, so what does your school say about you? I am currently in the process of helping a District decide on new furniture for a STEM building. During the process  I asked the question "what are you trying to say?"  If this is a building of collaboration, investigation and creation, then what should the furniture look like?  In the end, two person tables with casters were chosen for most spaces to maximize flexibility in the creation of groups and move through a variety of activities. Work benches and science lab tables will fill out the rest of the building. Furniture can have a huge impact on...

Getting bogged down by the jargon on 21 st century learning? You are not the only one.  One of my first tasks in starting a relationship with a District is discovering the District’s terminology for departments and special programs.  Special education is always an area where terms like Special Day Class can mean a whole host of different things and require different type of spaces.  Different approaches to learning and the world of technology have exploded the learning vocabulary to the point there needs to be a dictionary.   A Dictionary For 21st Century Teachers: Learning Models & Technology Creating common language is key to making any organization work.   One of the unsung heroes of a facilities master plan is the cross pollination of jargon, philosophy and purpose different departments have in an organization and how they affect the final environment.    Teachers will ask why they can’t paint their classroom a different color and the...