We are moving on to the next level

Learning Environmentz by RAU is now moving on to the next stop on our journey. The first stop was to approach up a few actors in the field of learning environments and try to put things together with them. We now have three on going discussions, and we´re about to close two of them in a couple of days. One lives in the so called "spatial" area and one in the scientific side of the story. The third works in the field of digital environment, and we hope that we are going to find some interesting discussions with them in a few weeks.

It´s exciting to dive deep in to this spectacular, holistic and complex perspective on learning, and we are putting loads of bits and pieces together for ourselves every day, and our "model" is changing in to different shapes all the time.

We are constantly learning new things about the field and ourselves, and that´s an amazing experience in itself. Learning is about to growing, for sure.

Have a nice weekend folks!

The importance of sound

It is, in a way at least, easy to understand the importance of sound in a learning situation. The first thing you probably think about is of course that the student must be able to hear the teacher. We put our finger on our lips and express sssccchhhhh.  Is that the best we can do? Of course not. In terms of sound environment and the connection to the modern field of learning the territory is so much more interesting. Think about it for a second. How do you stimulate educational processes with sound or how can you increase engagement by "sound backdrop"? 

There are plenty of examples where people really have understood how ambient sound impacts human experience in the room. One example is Yasuragi outside Stockholm i Sweden. A Japanese SPA where you can spend a whole day in fantastic and relaxing sound arrangements in different forms. It clearly affects you in a positive way, to fit the purpose of the idea with a SPA.

Less good examples are available from businesses and schools who do not understand how the environment affects employees and students. Basically, you can visit the company or any school and find that there is much to do. Why not choose the canteen at the nearest factory and you know what I mean. Would´nt it be smart to stage the canteen with some relaxing sound so that the workers get a chance to recover from the factory´s monotonous sound wall while they eat?

I once visited a company that personalized sound for their employees. The company had placed a sound cone above each workplace where employees could choose exactly the sound they wanted to work in the best way. The employees used different sounds for different activities.

How do we create sound environments that enhance student learning and teachers' ability to create learning situations?

Maslow & Learning environments

What is the secret of great learning environments and how can we avoid building the same schools over and over again? Well, we might have look at Maslow.

We all know the basic traits of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: how our human needs progress from Physiological needs via Safety, Love/Belonging and Esteem to Self-actualization.  Maslow's theory came to my mind as I compared different learning environment projects. Many of them appeared to have started tend the far ends of the hierarchy and they lacked qualities in the middle. -Well, Love perhaps, but in my middle we find Pedagogy...

Many, if not most, projects focus on Basic needs, in capacity and technical requirements. The driving forces behind these projects are often a strong need to build, and build fast.  There is nothing wrong with these basic requirements, on the contrary, they are necessary in order to create healthy and functional environments. The most notable in the projects professionals in property management, planners, engineers and builders, rather than principals, teachers or designers.

There is just one major flaw with this approach: it doesn’t create any incentives for development or raised pedagogical standards. The final result of projects with this approach: We build the same school as we did last time, with some modifications at slightly higher costs. 

Some projects come from the other end of the hierarchy: Projects motivated by visions or ambitions to design and create a statement. Behind these projects you often find ambitious institutions or municipalities coached by equally ambitious designers or architects. There is nothing wrong with this approach either, schools need visions and should have great design. 

There is only one major flaw with the approach: it will not result in sustainable learning environments. There hasn’t been any real translation from the ambitions and vision to pedagogical practice and leadership. These schools are like fancy ocean liners with a crew lost in translation... These are the kind of schools we tend to rebuild in 2-5 years after their creation, often blaming either designers or teachers (too ”bold” design or ”lack of flexibility/leadership”). 

Great projects (and there are lots of them) seem to have their starting point in the middle of the hierarchy: In pedagogy and ideas of a didactic flow, in concrete ideas about strategies and methods for learning and cooperation. The behind in these project are often a mix: teachers, students, politicians, engineers and designers working together. The challenge is to express the conditions for learning in such a way that it is possible to translate them into basic needs and design. There is often a commitment to some principles or guidelines that make priorities and decisions more coherent. 

There is only one major flaw with this approach: it requires something of us that we mostly don’t do: we we have to express our professional beliefs in a way that makes sense to other professionals and we need to cooperate across disciplines. Other than that, it’s easy!

So, just have a look in your neighborhood, in your city or country: What kind of projects are going on? Or, if you’re in the middle of your own project. where did it start? -Knowing that you might guess where you will end up!

Staging Lights in Learning Environmentz?

How important is the light when it comes to learning? We know of some studies from the States that natural light has an effect on learning.  In a study from Sacramento 1999 they compared groups of students and their test results. The students who worked in natural light performed better than those in light from bulbs. 

But what do we know more about the importance of light and especially now in 2013. It is a bit more complexity to the story than the study above shows, but it is probably a lot of truth in it. It seems logic that the light quality does matter for peoples performance, don´t you think. On the other hand, we know nothing about how the students worked with their learning (methods), how the physical environment in general was constituted, if it was the same teacher etc. We do not get a clue about the "Learning Environmentz" out of an holistic perspective in that study.

What if we think in a different direction here? Can we control the processes of learning by staging light in different ways for different purposes?

We'll try to take a deep dive in to this "light designer thing". We want to learn more. There should be loads of people out there who have stories about this and perhaps some research results? In the film business perhaps? Music Business?

If you have any ideas or knowledge about this kind of things, just let us know.

Learning Environments Extraordinaire!

I ran into a cool thing that could have great impact on how we design learning environments at Kinnarps, a Swedish furniture company, in Kinnarp, a minuscule village in Sweden. Kinnarps have created an office environment at their showroom that’s composed of 18 different environments and they invite organisations to come and work in that environment for a day or so... Generous and fine enough but now to the brilliant part: they study HOW you work and WHICH environments you prefer to use. The result is kind of a fingerprint: This is how your office should look like, if if you worked in your preferred environments... Guess what the most popular environment is? -"The Library"a dark blue room with subdued light and persian rugs, not your standard office space...

Just imagine that you did the same exercise with a school (and you really could do that at Kinnarps). Imagine that you offered students and teachers the showroom for a day or a week, what would happen, which spaces and places would be used and which would not be used? Imagine they were offered a couple of classrooms alongside the showroom, how intensely would they be used?

I'm not saying we should have showrooms as schools but I do think that we should consider the connection between the kind of learning we want to take place and the places we choose or create. If given the choice, how would your preferred mix of environments look like? For one: at the showroom i Kinnarp they have a system where employees organize themselves and the working environment within one system. Just imagine this being done in a school: Teachers choosing the right learning environment for the kind of processes and learning the want to promote. -Bye, bye standard schedule!

Another interesting fact: Kinnarps has investigated average rate of utilisation in any office to somewhere between 30-40%. This creates a possibility: you can raise the quality of the working environment by paying less for square meters and put the money into well defined environments suited to your firms particular needs. 

Again, do the trick in a school: What kind of environments would be high in demand IF a school could create and environment that was 100% adapted to their preferred needs and methods? -I mean, the only reason for a school to have an environment with 90% classrooms must be that pedagogy to 90% is built on the assumptions like: of 1 class = one teacher, 25-30 students = a group, ”interaction”=”within a class”, ”teachers=work separately, not in teams”, ”classrooms=multipurpose=neutral and equal design” etc. This should be questioned since it contradicts most of our curricula and the skills we need to promote. Great schools have done this and and we at RAU are supporting some of them. - Great projects coming up soon, and we will keep you posted!

/Ante Runnquist

Let us be inspired by others

Businesses today are far more competitive than just 20 years ago. A company simply must see itself as an organism that constantly learn new things and new behaviors. Therefore, you should keep an eye on some industries and how its companies look at their working environment.

We do not believe modern businesses can learn us all about how schools will utilize the physical environment or design but we are convinced that we have much to be inspired by in their strategies.
In Sweden, knowledge-intensive firms has invested hard in their working environment. Companies like Skype, Google and Microsoft are often noted in media for their modern environment that support employees in being more effective.It is clear that they see the environment as a tool to achieve optimal results in the processes they engage in as a company.  

Municipalities and owners of independent schools should consider the same mindset now when we are about to face an even bigger challenge, namely he change in how we learn, share and collaborate in the world today and tomorrow. 

It is of course not enough to replace the chairs to more colorful, we need to link what we know about learning in our time with how the environment can support it fully to get a true Learning Environment.

That´s what drives us in our projects here at RAU.

Digital Environmentz and Apple Nordic Summit

The digital environment is not a new factor for learning but it´s emerging quiet heavy around the world today. It´s ofcourse a consequense of that internet is so crucial for every society these days.

Scandinavia and particularly Sweden is far beyond many other countries speaking of infrastructure and internet-reachability. Sweden is also well positioned when it comes to development of learning (teaching) methods and "moving principles and teachers" towards a more globalized perspective and understanding of 21st Century Skills.

Next week we are moderating an interesting event here in Stockholm, Apple Nordic Summit, with lots of good examples of what the Swedish schools are doing in the area of digital learning.

We´re also preparing our conference here in Sweden called SETT, Scandinavian Educational Technology Transformation, in may 2014. Its is the biggest event of its kind in northern Europe today. SETT is a conference and exhibition with 96 speakers och workshop-leaders sharing their best practice and stories about this new learning environment. We are responsible for the content in the conference, and our partners Artexis for the exhibition. Last year SETT attracted over 8000 visitors, i.e teachers and principles and over 100 companies. This year we will add several new areas i the context "Learning Environments".

Check ou a short brieft:
http://www.settdagarna.se

A model is emerging

A very clear trend is that the issue of learning environment is an increasingly important issue for all involved in learning. But the learning environment must include more perspectives than the spatial and physical house. The psychosocial aspect is just as important and so is the digital environment.

Unfortunately, the fact remains that most people have the physical environment as the primary starting point when talking about the learning environment. It is like it is synonymous with furniture, lamps and paint on the walls, etc. And of course it's important, it's no question about it. But equally important is the course to include psychosocial aspects and methods for learning in itself. The first is namely dependent on the other in a synchronized dance.

Our project is now in a phase where we are trying to find/create a smart model that helps us understand how we address the fact that the learning environment contributes greatly to students' increased learning without questioning the teacher's future role. The teacher's roll,  in our world, will be even more important and even more powerful with consistent support of the learning environment.

If you have ideas or concerns about this area do not hesitate to contact us.

//Fredrik Svensson, RAU

The Soul of Learning Environments

We would like to start this blog by reposting an important blog post from 2011 that pretty much states the perspectives that we have here at RAU. It´s a post written by Ante Runnquist at the time he was working at Vittra with research & development. One of many reasons why Ante joined RAU a few months ago is that we share the same perspective on "the soul of learning". We will come back about this further on. This is a great intro to what this blog is all about in the future to come. Original link to the post is beneath the actual post. 

Stay tuned...

// Fredrik Svensson

Learning Environments based on Learning 

A Headmaster at one of our schools in Vittra called me one day and asked: ”- Ante, I have 400 pupils in my school but I have 600 chairs, could you explain that to me?”.  I did my best but the question stayed with me. There must be something strange with the way we use our resources in schools.

In my mind, a creative intellectual environment isn’t created by chairs and it’s certainly not a place where kids sit on their asses all day. So – why so many chairs?

Ask anyone to envision ”a school”. Ask them to describe the images that come to mind; classrooms with desks in rows (possibly in groups), corridors, blackboards (or their contemporary substitutes, whiteboards/smartboards), the tarmac schoolyard… I guess the images are almost universal and timeless.

Even though pedagogy has changed greatly over the last 100 years or so, the physical blueprint for schools, dating back to medieval monasteries remain: it is one based on time-space-topic. Behind this lies a basic assumption that the students need to be regulated , if a school doesn’t verify that the students are in the right place at the right time and doing the right things, they simply wouldn’t do it. And some schools seem to have lots of evidence to prove this.

But what would happen if we changed this assumption? Provided that the tuition is interesting and relevant to the pupils, could we find more intelligent principles than time-space-topic? I think so!

One thing is absolutely clear – we have better schools today than we did 50, or 100 years ago. You might doubt that when you take part of the debate in almost any country, but I think it’s a fact. In general, we have a more positive and democratic view on children as capable, responsible individuals. Our understanding of how children learn has increased: we don’t believe that all pupils learn best sitting behind a desk listening to a teacher. There is more widespread interest in challenge based learning and methods with focus on problem solving, creativity and communication.

Many schools across the world strive to develop 21st century skills – things are really happening! Strangely enough, these changes have left few marks on the basic blueprint of schools. The learning environment in an average school remains the same as 50 years ago. I think we have reached a point where this has to change and the catalyst is digital technology.

When digital technology becomes a part of everyday life in schools things change, and some of these changes could have great impact on our learning environments:

• The point of focus changes: The idea of a teacher in front of a class, conveying ”knowledge” is not functional in a situation were the pupils are equipped with powerful digital tools. When the pupils get their hands on a sources of endless information and communication the teachers position shifts, both literally and figuratively speaking, from ”in front of” the child to ”beside” the child.
• Digital technology encourages collaborative learning: groups are more flexible and vary in both size, function and duration. The idea of a ”class” might be an administrative unit, but it’s certainly not a functional pedagogic concept.
• The technology itself invites to other ways of working: look at any kid when they interact with laptops or mobile devices, do they spontaneously sit themselves by a table, upright on an chair in the middle of a room? Not really.

Learning environments – based on learning
In august 2011, at Telefonplan – just outside Stockholm, Vittra will open a new school. Designed for challenge based learning with digital technology. The ideas behind this project are not new, most of them has been a part of Vittra’s pedagogical model since 1993, but the final pieces of the puzzle came into place in 2010. We owe Stephanie Hamilton at Apple a lot: during a seminar in London she gave us a model for learning environments based on four different environments: the campfire, the cave, the watering hole and the mountain top.*

When we designed one of our new schools, Vittra Telefonplan, we presented Stephanie’s model to some of our pupils, teachers and our designers at the Danish design firm Rosan Bosch. We ended up with new definitions and a 5th environment – The Lab. In our design manual Bosch describe the learning environments like this:

• Campfire situations are characterised by communication flowing from one to many, requiring a space that can accommodate a certain number of people in a group situation, where everybody can focus on the person talking or presenting.
• The watering hole is a place where people come and go, and a learning environment where you can gather in groups of different sizes. A watering hole is a place of exchanging communication, flowing back and forth. The watering hole areas are typically placed where you naturally would go, and where you maybe bump into somebody or something.
• Show-off situations are situations where one person communicates towards the rest of the
  world, showing what he or she can do or has done, thus requiring a physical space for display and exhibition.
• In the cave, communication flows within oneself, requiring a physical frame that furthers seclusion and contemplation. Lastly, the laboratories are places where the students can acquire hands-on experiences, working physically and practically with projects in a societal and experimental context.
• The laboratories inspire students and teachers alike, enlarging the learning experience and inspiring teachers to use different tactile approaches.

When we organise a learning environment based on these principles we radically change the blueprint based on time-space-topic. We end up with an environment based on the needs for learning. During our design process this became evident when the pupils looked at the drawing and started to talk in terms of ”Ohh, I would love to sit there…”, ”If I worked with maths, just think if we had that…”, ”In our school, we would work there everytime we needed to work in groups…”.

When you ask kids what they need to get focused and inspired in school they are very precise, you will get answers on everything from lightning ”exactly where I’m working, not from lamps high up in the ceiling” to the placement of workplaces ”I want to have my back covered and have a view”. The answers are all individual and the point is that you can accommodate their needs if you listen and if you leave the concept of time-space-topic behind.

After a month of work together we looked at the floorplan and suddenly one of the teachers realised that ”Ooops, where are the rooms for different subjects!?”. It took about 30 seconds before we saw the obvious solution: The subjects have their own mobile labs, carts where we can store material and keep the things we currently are working with. Instead of going to a classroom designated for a ”subject”, teachers and pupils will ask themselves ”what kind of environment suits us right now in these subjects?”. And… subjects will be combined when the labs for arts, maths, sciences… are placed together. It’s another blueprint!

Back to the question I got from my friend, the Headmaster. Why do we have so many chairs in our schools? First, I think we have to rethink pedagogy: what are the dynamics of an education with focus on on 21st century skills? Second, as a consequence: we need to rethink the learning environment. When we do this, things start to happen.

*Stephanie Hamilton pointed out that the ”her” ideas about learning environments were formulated by Dr. Richard Thornburg in his article ”Campfires in Cyberspace”. -We still want to credit Stephanie though, Thornburg’s article is well worth reading but Stephanie is also fun and inspirational.

If this got you interested in learning environments or Vittra Telefonplan, feel free to contact us!

Ante Runnquist

Today "Head of Research & Development" at  RAU

Original post: http://vittrabloggen.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/vittra-telefonplan-environments-based-on-learning/