BACK TO SCHOOL
Editor Ashley M Wells
Photographer Think Team
Creative Director Adam Everton
Art Contributor Satchita Melina
Questions and feedback: 1500 Sansome St San Francisco CA 94111 415.402.0888 info@mkthink.com www.mkthink.com
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contents 04
Keep the Boat Straight
& 20 Community Programs
Precursors to Makerspaces
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The foundation of school facilitites
Outrigger as a metaphor for school planning
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An illustrated history
Build a Nest
The connection between education and environment
keep the boat straight/
outrigger canoeing, a metaphor for school planning Josh Jackson, Senior Associate
This past March, I moved to Honolulu to work with the Hawaii Department of Education (HIDOE) on its district-wide Classroom Heat Abatement initiative. I was drawn to the challenge of improving thermal comfort in such an iconically tropical place and couldn’t say no to the opportunity to live in the Aloha State. So having never before set foot in Hawaii, I bought a one-way ticket to Oahu to start my work with MKThink on the project.
A school district is like a boat. Everyone has a defined role...
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Shortly after arriving, I joined an outrigger canoe club—the Waikiki Beach Boys. I signed up at my landlord’s suggestion and thought it would be a good way to meet new people and get in shape. Almost immediately I recognized an undeniable parallel between this signature Hawaiian sport and my work with the HIDOE on shore. Both an outrigger canoe and a school require that people have well-defined roles and coordinate with one another to achieve a shared goal. In a six-person racing canoe, each paddler is assigned a distinct role with a defined set of responsibilities. Seat One Known as the stroke, this position sets the paddling pace for the whole crew, which demands excellent endurance and form. In coordination with Seat Two, the stroke executes the une, the maneuver that pivots the canoe around the turning flags on the course.
Seat Two In addition to helping with the une, this position advises the stroke on whether the pace is too fast or two slow for the rest of the boat and calls changes when it’s time to paddle on the other side. Seats Three, Four, and Five These positions are the engine of the outrigger —strong paddlers that can dig deep to accelerate the boat at the start and drive the boat through open water at speed. Seat Six In addition to paddling, the steersman (my position) uses a special broad paddle to poke on either side of the hull to keep the canoe going straight and to navigate the boat around the course. As the skipper of the boat, the steersman also coordinates the actions of the team at starts and turns. Like a canoe, in a school district everyone involved has a role; the endeavor only works if everyone is in sync. The roles of the paddlers on the boat represent the roles of school district staff. Seat One The administration sets the course and directs the efforts of the team. Seat Two The principals and school leadership manage the relationships between the statewide Department of Education and the day-to-day operations of their respective schools.
PASSIVE COOLING STRATEGIES
Seats Three, Four, and Five These are the teachers. Without an engine a boat cannot move forward. Without teachers, a school cannot educate its students. Seat Six The position represents the planners and staff who manage facilities. Much as the steersman is removed from the fundamental activity of propelling the boat through the water, school facility planners and personnel are not directly involved with classroom education. Without a steersman, paddlers cannot focus their efforts on moving forward just as teachers and school staff cannot focus on educating students with ineffective facilities From paddling—and especially steering—I’ve learned three key lessons that directly apply to my work on improving thermal comfort in Hawaii’s classrooms: 1. Keep the boat straight. On the day that I started learning to steer, my coach told me that there were
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five rules to being a steersman: “Keep the boat straight. Keep the boat straight. Keep the boat straight. Try to paddle. Keep the boat straight.” When steering, the temptation is to paddle hard like everyone else. Doing so causes the rudderless boat to slip off course. In the corresponding correction, the drag from poking slows the boat down more than the extra paddling speeds it up. In school facility planning, it important to maintain focus on long term goals and empower teachers and administrators to do their jobs. New curricula, new technologies, and new programs are constantly emerging. Educators in the classroom must constantly adapt and adjust their teaching accordingly. Hawaii’s school facility planners must practice restraint in their actions, investing in infrastructure that accommodates the needs of today while anticipating the needs of tomorrow. Staying focused on the long term and resisting the urge to react to the short term is critical for successful facilities planning.
2. Poke early, poke often. When steering, I was taught to pick a spot on shore in the distance to use as a guide for steering straight. As the boat slices through the water, small, frequent adjustments are the most effective way to keep the boat pointed at the distant landmark. The goal is to anticipate the forces that can push a boat to the left or the right rather than waiting for the boat to drift off course and reacting after the fact.
3. Don’t coach in the boat. It can be tempting to critique teammates during a race or in the heat of a hard practice. However well-meaning, coaching distracts paddlers from their focus and disrupts their rhythm and synchronization with teammates. The rule of “no coaching in the boat� acknowledges the focus that paddling demands; the team must schedule time to debrief after the intensity of competition and develop strategies to improve.
The same holds true of school campuses. A more effective use of resources is to consistently maintain sites and make incremental improvements rather than allow a lapse in maintenance that requires costly fixes.
For a school district, finding that space between doing the work and analyzing the work is equally important. Teachers, principals and custodians have their hands full with the day-to-day operations. When facility planners wish to engage them, that engagement should be structured to support communication and facilitate feedback. MKThink has helped the district create effective engagement by structuring workshops, developing illustrated communication tools, and creating online resources that make the planning process transparent to the public at large.
MKThink has developed a set of passive cooling strategies that prevent classrooms from getting hot in the first place; they reduce the need for energy-intensive air conditioning to mechanically cool a space. With this approach, the district can tailor solutions to the specific conditions of each school and designate resources for sites where air conditioning is essential.
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MKThink has worked with the district to approach thermal comfort through a systems-thinking lenss, pursuing a diverse range of cost-effective retrofit strategies that can be implemented incrementally at schools across the state. MKThink even launched a dynamic website for the district that lets anyone—teachers, students, parents, members of the public— interact with data on weather and classroom conditions. As MKThink and HIDOE Facilities put Hawaii’s public schools on track to become more comfortable learning environments, I’ll be steering the Waikiki Beach Boys Novice paddling crew looking for more lessons on the water. And if all goes well, maybe my boat will even win a few more races.
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Notice the Author in the Orange Hat
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before there were makerspaces/ Janelle Wolak, Designer
Collaboration, experimentation, hands-on learning, outdoor classrooms, and, of course, makerspaces are hailed as the latest trends in education. How revolutionary are all of these concepts? Their precendents can be found within the last 100 years of American history.
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Š US National Archives
A boy learns his craft on the warping machine at the Newton Cotton Mill in North Carolina, December 1908. In cotton mills at the time, 25% of employees were under 15, with half under 12. Children learned their trades through apprenticeships rather than traditional schools.
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Š Slate Magazine
Rest hour at at an open-air school in Manhattan, NYC in 1911. Open-air and outdoor classrooms were an early 20th-century trend introduced as a treatment for children recovering from tuberculosis. The fresh air and sunlight were believed to invigorate the students and keep them healthy.
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Š Heinz History Center
Students practice woodworking in a shop class at Allegheny High School in 1918. In 1917, Congress passed the Smith-Hughes Act, which provided federal funding for vocational education. It was mostly geared toward working-class farmers and recent immigrants, who were then funneled into skilled labor positions in factories.
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Š Illinois Historical Archives/Urbana School District 116
Students sit at their desks weaving baskets in a one-room schoolhouse. Educational funding increased during the 1920s due to the post-WWI economic boom and the progressive educational reform moment of the time.
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© City of Toronto Archives
In a 1934 Toronto classroom, young students design and fabricate puppets. John Dewey, the preeminent educational reformer of the time, advocated that education should not only be “experiential” and hands-on but should also prepare students to be reflective, autonomous, critical thinkers rather than docilely compliant with authoritarian work structures.
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© City of Toronto Archives
An outdoor art class during the 1930s Great Depression. As employment became harder to find, the teacher’s role became more custodial: to keep students in school and out of the adult world (and the harsh labor market). As a result, class sizes increased and academic standards were lowered.
Girls train in marksmanship as part of the Victory Corps at Roosevelt High School, Los Angeles, August 1942. The Victory Corps was intended to prepare young Americans for war and emphasized not only physical fitness but also machinery, electricity, radios, canning of food, and aeronautics.
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© Heinz History Center
Veterans Education Auto Shop at Shakespeare School in Pittsburgh c. 1950-1953. Educational stipends provided by the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (otherwise known as the G.I. Bill) provided a range of benefits for returning World War II veterans that included tuition and living expenses to attend high school, college or vocational/technical school.
Fifth graders in Maywood, Illinois craft “sunscopes” out of cardboard to watch the solar eclipse in 1963. President Eisenhower passed the National Defense Education Act in 1957, which funded the study of STEM subjects in order to outcompete the Soviets in the space race.
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Š Carsten/Getty Images
A teacher demonstrates the dissection of an animal during a biology class at Sarah Lawrence College in New York c. 1960. In the late 1960s and 1970s, curricula focused more on science- and mathematics-based approach to engineering rather than skills-based and hands-on experiential learning.
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© Bay City Times
In 1999, teachers in Missouri work with students in their “state-of-the-art” computer center. With help from government grants and donations by companies like Apple, schools shifted their goals to focus on computer literacy and making computers available to every student.
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community/
the foundation of school facilities Chloe Lauer, Director, Strategic Services Private or public, K-12 or higher education, all educational institutions compete for students. They compete on test scores, rankings, college enrollments and acceptances, student diversity, extracurricular programs, teacher quality, and campus facilities. A state-of-the-art STEM lab or well-equipped Maker Space makes a strong selling point to parents shopping for schools for their children. The same holds true in higher ed. The farmers’ market-styled cafeteria or climbing wall in the recreation center (“gymnasium” is no longer a marketable enough term) are certain to wow prospective undergraduates. No doubt eye-catching, facilities have the power to sway the choice of school. While sleek, modern facilities enhance learning, they are not the be-all-end-all of the learning experience. MKThink specializes in the educational market—both K-12 and higher ed. We keep abreast of innovations in
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learning approaches and even influence shifts in the design of learning environments. Clients engage us to design, revamp, or optimize their facilities to support new approaches. Given the rate of technological change, it is essential to keep up with learning approaches that will prepare students for the workforce. But in facilities planning, it is critical to first consider the vision and values that have defined and guided a school since its inception. Vision and values are the foundation of MKThink’s planning process and consulting approach. Vision, values, and the community have the most profound and lasting impact on a student’s learning experience and ultimate life direction. Without these, facilities are but empty shells that define the structure of the school but not the experience.
Many clients are looking for ready -to-implement facilities solutions that feature the must-have attributes of 21st century learning approaches, hoping for a competitive edge to attract parents and students. MKThink’s facilities planning process takes a few steps back with a three stage approach that begins with institutional or community values and culminates in facilities planning. The following case studies present examples to illustrate the stages of the facilities pyramid planning.
Community Values
Convent & Stuart Hall, San Francisco, California Convent and Stuart Hall Schools in San Francisco are part of a network of 200 Sacred Heart Schools and colleges. The first Sacred Heart School was founded in 1801 “in the spirit of transformation.”
The San Francisco School: Engages a relevant foundational mission while looking ahead to ask what skills will be needed in the future. Located at the heart of the digital revolution, San Francisco provides a unique opportunity to discover how a centuries-old model remains boldly grounded and relevant. The conversion of a former computer lab into the Unkefer Spark Studio initially met with resistance from teachers faced with the demands of introducing design-thinking and making into their established curricula. Additionally, many of the veteran teachers felt challenged by their comfort with the technological know-how new programming would require.
Winning teacher buy-in called for dedicated programs to train teachers in design-thinking methodologies and in technology tools. Programs tapped students to help their teachers gain fluency in new technologies, exemplifying the shift in approach from teacher-centered learning to teachers as collaborators in the learning experience. The Spark Lab applies a design process that embraces the founding “spirit of transformation” and adapts the school’s mission to learning innovations.
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Thriving Programs
Greenwood Elementary School, Greenwood, Wisconsin At Greenwood Elementary School in Greenwood Wisconsin, Principal Brad Gustafson introduced a making thread into the school’s curriculum. He won essential community buy-in through a yearlong collaboration with teachers to develop the concept and teacher workshops to demonstrate learning and sharing through creative construction. The goal of the making program was to create an ethos of innovation and design-thinking and the opportunity for students to create, build, tinker, fail, and think in any classroom or hallway throughout the school. Instead of investing resources in a dedicated MakerSpace, the school
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introduced a fleet of Mobile MakerSpace Carts. This presented a low-risk opportunity to test out different making materials and technologies. Teachers had the space to integrate making into their classroom curriculum and test, refine, and assess different curricular activities. The mobile solution allowed the school to “test the waters”—f acilitating a phased-in development of maker programming and cultivating essential community commitment. Dr. Brad Gustafson emphasizes, “You do NOT need fancy facilities or expensive carts to create and ethos of innovation in your school. You can use everday objects and miscellaneous supplies from home.”
You do NOT need fancy facilities or expensive carts to create an ethos of innovation.
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Facilities
Facilities resemble a high performance workplace more than they do a school.
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High Tech High Schools San Diego County, California The High Tech High (HTH) consortium of charter schools was founded with the vision: “To create a learning environment where students are passionate about learning and acquire the basic skills of work and citizenship that prepares them for post-secondary success.” The school model is anchored in project-based learning. Teachers are hired for their ability to champion this approach. Together, teachers and students cultivate the community to realize that vision.
High Tech High facilities are intentionally designed to support key program elements— team teaching, integrated curriculum, project-based learning, community-based internships, frequent student presentations, and exhibitions—with key spaces that generally not found in traditional schools. High Tech High establishes new schools, offering the benefit of designing the learning environment to support the educational approach (as opposed to transforming existing facilities to support the introduction of a new one). Facilities embody key qualities that the school aspires to foster in its students.
Flexibility
Transparency
Seminar rooms and public spaces must adapt to multiple uses. For all spaces, this means wireless laptop access and sturdy but easily reconfigurable furniture. Seminar rooms and specialty labs must have hard surfaced floors for easy cleaning (projects are messy), sinks for project cleanup, adequate locked storage, good control of ambient light, plentiful electrical outlets, dependable sound and projection systems, data and voice access, and movable walls for team teaching.
HTH facilities are transparent, with every wall surface designed to either exhibit student projects or to look into seminar rooms, conference rooms, or specialty labs. Copious amounts of glass create an atmosphere of “visible learning.” Large areas such as commons rooms and studios are located along main circulation routes to promote a sense of openness and coherence.
Ownership HTH achieves a personalized environment by creating small learning clusters within its already small learning community. This approach promotes a high degree of ownership, as students and teachers decorate and customize their classrooms and studio areas to reflect who they are and what they are working on. The larger school community uses public spaces such as commons rooms and gallerias in the same way.
Originality HTH facilities may appear simple and unassuming from the outside; the interiors elicit an immediate “wow”. As teachers and students push the boundaries of active, project-based learning, facilities communicate the message that, when it comes to school, this is not business as usual.
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Model Facilities Planning
Sustainable Urban Design Academy Oakland, California The Sustainable Urban Design Academy (SUDA) at Castlemont High School in Oakland presents a premiere model of the facilities planning pyramid. The mission of the academy is: To empower students through a highly rigorous, engaging, and supportive learning environment to graduate prepared for college, career, and life as a designers and leaders of movements towards a sustainable and just world. SUDA makes education relevant through authentic, community-centered action research, interdisciplinary projects and work-based learning. Castlemont is part of a continuum that supports East Oakland’s children from cradle to career. The school engages community partners to help students develop the skills, agency and mindset to positively transform themselves and their community.
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Castlemont’s mission is rooted in the larger of vision of transforming the economically-depressed city of Oakland from an outdated manufacturing hub into a center of a technologically advanced industry. The Fablab at Castlemont is core to the academy’s four-year curriculum that emphasizes the education of an advanced manufacturing workforce. The facilities have evolved to actively support and optimize the curriculum. It is outfitted with power tools, hand tools, laser cutter, a CNC router, a carvewright and 3D printers. A recent student project transformed ROTC shooting ranges into aquaponics gardens. What differentiates the Castlemont FabLab from other MakerSpaces is that it provides a bridge to Laney College, a nearby community college, to strengthen a career pathway to design and engineering. Castlemont and Laney are developing faculty bridges to cultivate industry
involvement in Laney’s curriculum and faculty involvement at Castlemont. Castlemont teacher Timothy Bremner, who founded the Sustainable Urban Design Academy and built the integral FabLab, says, “The lab at Castlemont, hopefully, will prepare kids to be in the Laney College FabLab.” Dan Beesley, the Green Building and Technology Consultant at Laney College asserts, “3-D printing in education is not about printing plastic widgets. I mean when you look at it and think about it, that’s exactly what you’re doing, is printing plastic widgets, but it’s about empowering
youth to become active participants in the way the world is created, to empower them to go build something and make something of their own.” This values-oriented approach practices the principle of “form follows function”—the shape of a building, maker space, or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose. In schools, curricular goals, career pathways, and the values of the school and the community at large determine the activities and functions that a facility needs to accommodate, thus defining the form from the inside out.
Curricular goals, career pathways and values define the facility from the inside out
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build a nest/ Satchita Melina, Artist in Residence
soft, safe, and quiet Italian teacher and education pioneer Loris Malaguzzi famously said: “There are three teachers of children: adults, other children, and their physical environment.� This illustration was inspired by the book The Third Teacher in which educators and architects explore the critical link between learning and environment. Comfort is critical for children not only at home, but also at school. Build a Nest imagines a school environment where little ones have a safe, soft and quiet place to play and explore from.
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