justplainbil

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Perhaps the desks are no longer bolted to the floor*, and chalkboards have been replaced by white boards, but #2 pencils are still present, along with the tendency to have instruction and/or learning evolving from a top down, front to back,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.