---

Designing schools fit for a new century will require not only bold thinking and fresh ideas, but a willingness to engage local communities in the planning process. Two experts — one an educator, one an architect — shed some light on the trends and opportunities facing the region in recent conversations with Northwest Education.

---

THE EDUCATOR

GEORGE COPA, interim dean of the School of Education at Oregon State University and director of New Designs for Learning, has spent more than a decade researching innovations in school design. He has toured schools all over the world, served as an international consultant on school design projects, and helped shape the national dialogue on reinventing American high schools. Now, as communities across the country are faced with the challenge of rebuilding their aging or overcrowded schools, Copa has some keen insights to offer about designing schools to enhance the learning experience. "Facilities," he cautions, "are just a small piece of good school design."

Northwest Education: What other considerations are important in school design, besides the physical environment?
Copa: Too often communities focus on the design of a new school facility, but the design of the learning plan gets missed. The real challenge is how to make a connection between learning expectations and what the learning environment ought to be like.

NW: How did you come to this realization?
Copa: In about 1990, I started working on a project called New Designs for the Comprehensive High School. It was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. We pulled together people from across the country — teachers, counselors, administrators, researchers, students, policymakers, business leaders — and asked them to help us envision, if you were going to start from scratch and design a new high school for the future, what would it be like? We explored what the learning expectations and outcomes might be, the learning process, how the school should be organized, who the partners might be, how you'd staff a school like this, how you'd finance it. Finally, we got to the question: What would the facility look like?

NW: Did some general guidelines emerge from that conversation?
Copa: We found that you need a strong learning plan, a strong concept of community, and strong architecture that's supportive of both community and learning. Those are the three major pieces. And now, with the new expectations for learning we're seeing across the states — the increasing focus on results, outcomes, standards — we have a real challenge. What kind of learning process would be powerful enough to deliver on these high expectations for all students? If you want to make sure that no students get left behind, you need to create smaller learning environments. By working in smaller groups, smaller schools, and schools within schools, the teachers and students get to know each other much better. Teachers can be more responsive to more of their students.

NW: So school size should get more attention during the planning process?
Copa: Not just size. We already have a lot of small schools in this country. But if small schools operate no differently than big ones — if they have the same departments, bell schedules, and all the rest of it — then you don't get the benefits of smallness. You have to change the way you do learning in the school. Break paradigms. Break out of the ruts in terms of how we do school in this country. But if we keep designing new schools just like our old schools, we're not going to get any better results than we get today. And in most of today's schools, we already know who's going to win and who's going to lose.

NW: What else is important in school planning?
Copa: I encourage schools to look first at their assets: What's working now that you want to take into your new environment? Then, what are the problems? What are the opportunities for learning you might want to take advantage of, but can't because of the way you organize schools? You can plan so that the school fits the community and makes a contribution to the community.

NW: Why is connecting a school with its larger community so important?
Copa: We've isolated our schools, moved them to the outside of our communities. So many high schools are surrounded by parking lots, sporting fields, almost like they're surrounded by a moat. And young people sense that isolation. We send them off to these places that are huge, and they find no meaning there — because meaning has to do with connectedness. Much of what young people produce in a school during the day is carried out in the garbage at night. That says something to them about the worth of what is produced there. Instead, we could be giving young people a chance to be making a contribution to their communities. More of their learning could take place in the real world, using real things. Imagine how the energy of a thousand young people, in the course of nine months, could contribute to the betterment of their communities and the betterment of their own lives. There's so much talent in a school. We have to find better ways to release it.

NW: What does a well-designed school feel like?
Copa: There's a seriousness about learning that you notice right away. An informality. A feeling of self-management. You can see that students know what they're doing. They're about something. These schools can be very active places, sometimes messy, with a lot going on and spilling out into the hallways. You see teachers working together as teams, and there are spaces that invite them to collaborate. You sense real pride. Students don't feel as if school is being done to them.

NW: Can you plan for a school where students and staff will feel special?
Copa: Yes. I make a big thing, during the planning process, of urging communities to think about a learning signature for their school. What would be a uniqueness, a specialness, something that their students would brag about? How could they design a facility to showcase that, so that when visitors walk into the building they will know what the school is about? We find that specialness in very good private schools, but many of our public schools don't have it. Their specialness is often a set of colors or an athletic team, but it doesn't relate to everyday learning. A learning signature needs to grow out of place. You can't impose it. It has to feel authentic, otherwise it's just a slogan.

NW: Where have you seen schools that capture what you're describing?
Copa: In Minnesota, the School for Environmental Studies uses the Minnesota Zoological Gardens as a learning environment. When you walk in there, you notice plants growing everywhere. There are terrariums, aquariums, connections to the outside environment. You see dogs that the students take care of. You immediately get the feeling that this is a living place. High Tech High in San Diego uses many good ideas (see Web site at www.hightechhigh.org. And Alpha High School in Gresham, Oregon (see related story here), really moves in the direction I'm talking about. You walk in there and think, oh my, I would want my kid to go here.

NW: Are you optimistic about where we're headed with school design?
Copa: Right now, the public is beginning to sense there's a problem with our educational facilities. We need to improve them, and over the next 10 years a large amount of resources will be spent on schools. But typically, a very small amount of money goes into school planning. We need to invest more on the front end so we can be provocative and consider other possibilities. It costs money and takes time to come up with creative ideas. And if you're going to try something innovative, you have to bring along the community, the students, and the faculty. It takes strong leadership to move in new directions.

NW: Finally, how important is safety in school planning?
Copa: The first thing students want in a school is a safe environment. Safety needs to be there. But if we stop there, in terms of design, we'll close schools down from the community. You can't solve security concerns by further isolating schools. It might be tempting to say, we're going to build locked little cells called classrooms and supervise them closely and not allow anybody to move freely in the hallways. We can get security that way, but we don't get much learning. If you start going in that direction, the end of the path is a prison. Instead, I suggest we think about community. If you're in a place where you feel a sense of family, of neighborhood, where it's small and open enough so that people know each other by name, then you won't have many problems with security. Safety issues need to be thought about in the broader context of how we do learning.

For more information about the work of New Designs for Learning, see the program Web site at newdesigns.orst.edu/.

---

THE ARCHITECT

SHARON SUTTON has worn many hats in her 60 years: professional musician, artist, licensed architect, psychologist, activist, writer, professor. But the unifying theme of her work, she says, "has always been participation." As director of the University of WashingtonCenter for Environment, Education, and Design Studies (CEEDS), she is creating opportunities for participation in collaborative teaching, research, and service projects that have the potential to change not only K-12 schools, but also the fabric of the larger community.

Northwest Education: With the need for school construction becoming more and more apparent, are we at a moment of opportunity to think in new ways about the physical environment of our schools?
Sutton: With the nation's expanding population and the large stock of schools we have that are more than 40 years old, we're facing an urgent need for new facilities. And even if a building isn't old, it may need to be reconceived to accommodate new technology. We're also seeing more interest in building schools to be centers of their communities. There's a practical reason for that — if the building benefits more people, it's more likely to get funding approved. But having a more vibrant use of our schools will also be of great benefit to young people.

NW: What role can a program like CEEDS play in planning for new schools?
Sutton: CEEDS is an interdisciplinary program, involving faculty from fields such as architecture, education, social work, urban design, psychology, and public health. We look at school architecture not as a product, but as a process. We are interested in using the moment of school design as an opportunity for organizational change. It's a chance to rethink what you're doing in a school. And it's a chance for community-building.

NW: What lessons does the design process offer K-12 students?
Sutton: Design can be used to teach anything. It's a very integrative subject matter. Most of us spend our whole lives now in the designed environment. So kids need to have an awareness of the physical space around them. Kids learn positive and negative things from their environment, but they need to learn to think critically to understand how space affects them. That critical thinking needs to be part of their literacy. It's a fundamental life skill.

NW: How are you getting younger students to think about design?
Sutton: Last year, our graduate students [from UW] worked with elementary students from the Tukwila School District. The district had already approved a design for a new building. Our charge was to help the kids understand the building process. That's a start, but we want to go beyond the building process to get them actively involved in creating their own space. So we've been teaching them about design and are working toward a final public art product that the community will own.

NW: Does the students' involvement make the design process messier, more complicated?
Sutton: The architect in Tukwila is very excited about what we are doing. But when I first suggested that we wanted to come up with something the children could do, he said, "The building is already designed! Don't change my drawings!" Now he sees that having the children involved is going to protect the building.

NW: Why is this important?
Sutton: With so many schools, the doors open and it's a brand-new building. Two years later it looks worn. By 10 years later, it's old. But if they're involved in designing it, the kids can feel as if they own the space. And then they take better care of it.

NW: Have you seen this happen?
Sutton: When I was in graduate school, I was hired to teach architecture in the public schools in New York City. I started working with a school that had always supported arts education. The neighborhood had recently started to change. More and more upper-middle income families began sending their children to private schools, and more immigrant Black children — many from the West Indies — were starting to enroll in this public school. The community began to pressure the school for more discipline, more of a law-and-order approach, and less art. It's true that the kids were tearing through the neighborhood. But the principal — a wonderful mentor — told me, "I want you to teach the children that this is their community and they need to take care of it. Teach the kids to be good citizens. And get some of their art projects on the outside of the building, so the neighborhood can see that our children are creative."

NW: And did it work?
Sutton: I stayed there for four years. Before I started working there, the low-income parents did not feel they were included in the school. They weren't the ones running things. But my projects gave them a way to get involved. They didn't have to come just for meetings. They could help pour concrete or work on other construction projects with the students. The design process became a way for me to teach team-building skills, cooperation, environmental awareness. The art objects that we built together did not get vandalized. On pre- and post-tests, children made improvements in how much they valued being a cooperative person. The same was true on environmental awareness, on taking responsibility for solving problems in their immediate environment.

NW: You're describing a hands-on way of learning, too.
Sutton: I learned it by accident! Before I became an architect, I was a professional musician in New York. In the daytime, my quintet did a lot of concerts for public schools. And we had to play serious programs. At 9:15 a.m., I had to get up and make the French horn real to an audience of 300 children. I was living in an old brownstone with an air conditioner that ran on water. One day the water hose broke. Water was everywhere. As I cleaned it up, I realized that the hose was the same size as the tubing on a French horn. By attaching a length of hose to a kitchen funnel and a mouthpiece, I could "build" a French horn right in front of the kids, and they could play it. Well, we were a big hit!

NW: So you've continued using that approach?
Sutton: When I put that mouthpiece in the tubing and got the kids to participate, I learned the importance of involvement. I try to teach in a way so that my students are taking action for their own education. And in our community-building projects, the spark we use to get people to participate is called a charrette. It's a design workshop that gets people thinking and talking about the future of their environment. We bring together a couple hundred people — practitioners and academics, students and architects, landscape architects and urban planners — and ask them to generate ideas for using schools as places of discovery, proposals for projects that would link school and community. It's a springboard to design that's responsive to a community. And it's also a learning model. It teaches schools and communities that, not only can they share buildings, but that there are community-building activities they can do together. And involving children in planning and design inspires a level of creativity many adults do not normally experience.

For more information about Sharon Sutton's work with the Center for Environment, Education, and Design Studies at the University of Washington, see the CEEDS Web site at ceeds.caup.washington.edu.

Respond to this article