Just Plain Bill
Does the environment for learning
matter?
My first
meaningful contact with the business world happened in my first job after
college. I made a presentation to a large Travelers Insurance office, where
more than a hundred agents sat at desks that faced each other. There were no
partitions or cubicles. Most of the agents were talking on the phone, and most
of them were smoking.
We can
easily see the incredible amount of changes that have occurred in the business
world since, most contributing to increased productivity. Just one example is
in the area of private workspace.
Take a
similar look back into the world of education, and the big picture image seen
is that the majority of schools have experienced little, if any, significant
changes since the years when I started school in the mid 40s.
Perhaps
the desks are no longer bolted to the floor*, and
chalkboards have been replaced by white boards, but #2 pencils are still
present, along with the tendency to have instruction and/or learning evolving
from a top down, front to back, teacher-controlled dispensation of knowledge –
otherwise known as lecture.
Is that
because it’s just easy to teach that way? Or, is it that parents seem to seek
progressive change and posses the desire to fight the bureaucracy of public
education only during their own children’s school experiences – advocacy that
seems to last for just a few years, and then it’s up to the next generation’s
parents? (“But don’t raise my taxes to pay for progress for your
children,” say prior generations of parents to the next.)
As I was
completing my early career as a classroom teacher and administrator in the
early 80s, the school district in which I worked built two modular schools
where classrooms were designed in an open area concept for group learning and teaching.
(I was exuberant, as I had practiced individualized instruction in my
classroom, where the students were responsible for many learning
opportunities.) It didn’t take long for many teachers to either move bookcases
or portable room dividers to separate their classrooms from others. So we had a
change in the design of learning space, something in which I long believed, but
without the necessary accompanying changes in teacher focus, commitment, and
comfort – a version of the cart before the horse. It’s also interesting to note
that when enrollment started to drop, or shift, these two schools were the
first to be closed.
Business
and industry invest billions each year trying to create just the right
environment that will encourage and enhance productivity – designing space
that's conducive to a happy and healthy workplace. But I wonder why so little,
if any, is invested in creating similar stimulating places for our largest
group of "workers" on the planet – our school children – which holds
the keys to our future.
More on
what I see as the basic elements in successful learning environments in a
future blog, environments in which the many learning and teaching styles can be
accommodated, including the idea of sitting under a tree, in the real world,
being challenged by a philosopher.
* I've
been involved in the public education enterprise for over 72 years, starting in
my kindergarten class in Oakland, CA. That classroom hadn’t had lights
installed yet when the rush of students arrived on the first day of school,
many with mothers having just joined the war effort. That classroom was set up
with desks bolted to the floor, in rows, and that set up did not change much at
all during my 13 years of public schooling.
