Breakthrough time (and space)

Ask the students- “What’s the best thing about Stonefields School?” and nine times out of ten the answer will be “Breakthrough”. It’s the day that children run that little bit faster to the front door.

The premise is simple. While we have a strong focus on developing areas of core literacy, of inquiry and of learner dispositions, how much time do children actually spend time doing what they are passionate about? All children have innate strengths and talents. As Ken Robinson puts it, it’s not about recognising if children are intelligent, it’s how they are intelligent, that matters. It’s about children finding fulfillment in learning and achieving mastery in something that they are good at - rather than hitting them over the head constantly with things they cannot do. Breakthrough is valued so highly that it forms one of the core vision principles.

“For me it was a dream come true - I could never have dreamt of doing what I love doing during school time”, explains Jackson, a year 6 student. For Jackson his Breakthrough project time is spent 3D modeling using Blender. He’s one of a group of students collaborating on a science fiction movie. It’s a passion that he has brought to school, enthusing others in the process. And it’s extraordinary to watch him learning; a YouTube tutorial open in one window, Blender in another, as he develops the latest element to the fantastical creature that he’s animating. No teacher has shown him how to do this; in fact the best way to cause learning here is for the teacher to stand back!

Some innovative businesses have had this approach for years; Google perhaps the best known, where employees are given 20% of their time - a day a week - to work on special projects. Companies like 3M have been doing it for decades too with huge success, and both consider that many of their innovations have flowed out of this time (Lehrer, 2012).

As a school our core purpose is quite different. It’s not about making money, about innovative product lines and engineering initiatives. But it is about student engagement; it is about developing a love of learning, about providing authentic context, about developing students who are intrinsically motivated, about utilising problem solving skills and the application of an inquiry process, about building collaborative skills, and about valuing a broader notion of what constitutes success. Breakthrough does all this, and additionally provides invaluable leverage into other learning areas.

Take a walk around school this term and you’ll see a whole school approach to Breakthrough, with Year 1 students right through to Year 8s learning together in areas of interest. So you’ll see a group working on designing a senior playground, a group learning to build a table with a parent (Breakthrough time attracts lots of parent and community support), another preparing a dance item for the end of year assembly, students painting a mural inspired by the local environment, a year 8 putting the finishing touches to his novel, and of course a group working on Blender.

So how does this relate to space? I think it’s in how children use it when they have a real sense of autonomy and purposefulness. The hubs, and in fact whole school, doe look somewhat different during Breakthrough time. There’s a naturalness in terms of how groups of students set themselves up for their learning; a deep level of engagement and ownership that reflects in how they reorganize the space and furniture to suit their needs. So you can see groups of children establishing the learning settings that are most appropriate to their requirements, finding the technology and resources they need, both indoors and outside.

Take this as an example; A teacher came in yesterday and told us this lovely story; she was in the hub just before eight in the morning, and noticed a couple of boys walk into the hub and starting to set a room up. Shortly afterwards another couple arrived, laptops in hand. Not long after four more turned, up one after another, and made a beeline for the same part of the room. The boys had set the space up, organized the technology and computers they needed, had a video camera at the ready and were absorbed in a task. At this stage the teacher decided to check out what was going on. ‘Oh’, they answered, ‘We organized a meeting for 8. We’ve got a project we’re working on and thought we’d get an hour in before the day got going.’

As Jackson so eloquently puts it: “Breakthrough is great time for me to work on my self responsibility and self awareness. It’s a time I can really pursue something that I’m good at.” Undoubtedly it is a time of the week at school that children eagerly look forward to. Just walk around school during Breakthrough time to observe the deep level of engagement, or stand by the front door first thing in the morning!

Reference

Lehrer, J. (2012). Imagine: How creativity works. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Pushing the boundaries: What might be possible?

Take a look at these: They are images of a Rosan Bosch design for the ‘School without Walls’ in Stockholm.

  

It’s an extraordinary looking school with beautiful design, custom built furniture, an iceberg that features a cinema, a relaxation room, and multiple spaces for different types of learning. It’s more like a building at Google, Nike or Lego, than it is a school - perhaps reminiscent of any number of the creative business spaces Kursty Groves features in I wish I worked there! There are certainly a lot of similarities.

What is important about seeing designs and schools like this, in my mind, is that it challenges us to consider what might be possible. Of course it may well be out of our financial reality or perhaps not aligned with our own pedagogical vision and belief but it does at the very least expose us to some new and different thinking. It's an example of what one school building does look like, although is very removed from my own experience and until now, what I have stage heard about. 

John Holt’s (1971), and still relevant today, model of Four Worlds reminds us about what we do and what we don’t know.

Julia Atkin (1999) sums it up really well:

“He says that each of us has four such worlds. The first world is the world inside our skin. The second world is the world the individual knows about from direct experience. The third world is the world the individual knows about, but has not experienced in any direct way through the senses. The fourth world is the infinite world of possibilities which the individual has not as yet heard of or even envisaged” (p. 14)

Google images of ‘classroom’ and what you end up with is a pretty standard, industrial notion of what a common learning environment looks like. Generally there are rows of desks facing the front and generally, the teacher's at the front. These are familiar images - for many of us the world we are familiar with from direct experience. 

Try ‘learning space’ instead and you find things that are looking a bit more interesting- there are different shapes and sizes of furniture, different learning settings, more obvious technology and a generally more open feel to the spaces - this for many teachers is the world that we have heard about but as yet haven’t got personal experience of.

But as teachers and educators as well as designers, how do we know what we don’t know, in terms of what schools and classrooms might look like? It's the same working with children on imagining future learning spaces too. What comes next? How can we start looking into that fourth world of infinite possibilities? 

Beautiful Learning Spaces is definitely a great place to start. There are some stunning school designs featured here that will push our thinking in terms of what might be possible. Many are featured on architects and educational websites but here they have been collected together in one place. There are also videos being added too. It's a quickly growing resource, being curated by @acampbell99 and @Jennzia  I really look forward to seeing this site grow and the world of infinite possibilites explored further. 

References

Atkin, J. (1999, August). Values for a learning community: Learning to know. Paper presented at the meeting of the Victorian Principals' Conference, Melbourne. Retrieved from http://www.learning-by-design.com/

Groves, K. (2010). I Wish I worked There! Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Holt, J. (1971). What do I do Monday? London: Pitman.

Image of ‘School without Walls’ from http://www.rosanbosch.com/#/476615_498640/

Image of John Holt's four worlds from Atkin, J. (1999, August). Values for a learning community: Learning to know.

Minecraft for designing learning spaces?

Gathering student voice about existing and possible spaces has been a big part of a consultation phase prior to designing more learning hubs. Finding out what children like or would like to improve about current spaces is valuable information that is really going to help inform what happens next.

Ensuring that we’d got a variety of media for children to work in was important, so we’d gone into spend the afternoon with a group of Year 5-8 students, armed with large sheets of paper, cardboard, marker pens, scissors, templates of existing rooms, Lego, cameras and the like. Sketchup was available on a number of devices too. However the very first request I got when asked to put some possible ideas forward was ‘Could we do this on Minecraft?’

Fortunately we teach in a time when it’s ok not to be the expert and this was certainly the case here. I’d seen children using Minecraft – there’s often a group in the library exchanging ideas at lunchtime- but hadn’t recognized the potential as a means for expressing ideas about space. Because that’s want I believe this phase of the consultation is about. It’s allowing children to engage in discussion about space using a media that they are fluent at working in.

Whilst the drawings or constructions students produced are important artifacts, it’s actually the dialogue that accompanies them that is the critical part of the learning. Freeman and Mathison (2009) consider when drawing as a research tool, that “Drawings are especially valuable when combined with additional interpretation provided by participants” (p. 114). Dixon and Senior refer to the fact that they took notes of conversations while children were engaged in drawing places they learn at school (Blackmore et al., 2011).

The same concept can equally be applied to using Minecraft. It’s not about just what students constructed, it was about the conversations they had during and after. So it was left to a group of Year 6 learners to show me the light! And they certainly did. Learning spaces were quickly modeled and remodeled, constructed and improved. Screenshots were taken from multiple angles and pretty soon my email was overflowing with images. This, I am assured is just the start- just wait for the narrated 3D flythroughs!

References

Blackmore, J., Aranda, G., Bateman, D., Cloonan, A., Dixon, M., Loughlin, J., et al. (2011). Innovative Learning Environments through New Visual Methodologies. Melbourne: Deakin University Retrieved from http://www.learningspaces.edu.au/docs/learningspaces-visual-methodologies-report.pdf

Freeman, M., & Mathison, S. (2009). Researching children's experiences. New York, London: The Guilford Press.

Images courtesy of Jackson and Lachlan

Innovative interiors

A year ago I was lucky enough to visit Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne as part of a few days visiting modern learning environments. One of the most striking aspects of the interior of the school are the incredible structures that Principal Ray Trotter has constructed in the classrooms. One space had a two storey red bus at the centre of it and another a cylindrical tower leading up to a reading area. Under construction in another room was a dragon boat.

A team of our teachers returned there last week and were pleased to report the completion of the construction. Upstairs is a library area and there a couple of computers hooked up to google maps and downstairs there's a computer space and a workshop space. Surely this is a space that would qualify as a space that stimulates and a space to play.

I wish I worked there!

The premise behind I wish I worked there! is simple: In order to be constantly innovative, businesses need to create spaces in which to innovate. By isolating the environmental factors that enable this process to happen Kursty Groves sets out to show that physical space “can be used as a tool within the creative process” (p. 10). On her journey visiting some of the most successful companies in the world she identifies four main categories of creative environment. Spaces that stimulate, spaces for reflection, spaces for collaboration and spaces to play.

The book takes her far and wide to some of the most extraordinary work environments. There’s Goggle’s water lounge to encourage ‘chillaxing’; Lego’s Innovation Room, a blank canvas on which to create; Nike’s running trail dotted with bronze statues of sporting legends; and Aardman’s meeting spaces designed into corridors and staircases.

They are the types of spaces that would probably appeal to Sir Ken Robinson. Creativity, he defines in The Element (2009) is applied imagination, “It involves putting your imagination to work to make something new, to come up with solutions to problems, even to think of new problems or questions” (p. 67). And creativity he posits is something sorely missing from our education system. In fact something that he believes is systematically drained from children.

As educators we are constantly being reminded that we’re preparing learners for an unknown future. Remember the original Did you know? It suggested that, “We are currently preparing students for jobs  that don’t yet exist... using technologies that haven't yet been invented...in order to solve problems we know don’t even know are problems yet”. So how do the environments support the creativity that is being demanded of us?

The companies that Kursty Groves visits in her book are all examples of highly successful creative spaces. These are truly inspiring buildings where creativity is valued and nurtured. Suspend for a moment the constraints of budget and think, ‘How could schools benefit from the same thinking?’ How could our schools ensure there are spaces that stimulate, spaces for reflection, spaces for collaboration and spaces to play. It’s an interesting exercise and I wonder how they might look. Are they already our there? Perhaps there’s potential for a sequel Kursty, ‘I wish I learned there!’

References

Groves, K. (2010). I wish I worked there! A look inside the most creative spaces in business. Chichester: Wiley

Robinson, K. (2009). The Element: How finding your passion changes everything. London: Penguin