Learner-Centered Campuses
Nov 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By David M. Zaiser
For decades, classroom design focused primarily on teaching. Now, technology and real-world experience are putting learning at the forefront.
Small meeting areas situated near classroom entries, such as these at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, West Chester, can be very effective at improving faculty-student interaction. Photo by taylorphoto.com
We spend too much time managing the 30 percent. In higher education, most of what a student learns is learned outside the classroom—up to 70 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Yet we spend very little, if any, time worrying about or designing appropriate learning environments outside classrooms.
In a presentation on TED.com titled "Why We Don’t Understand As Much As We Think We Do," British educational media consultant Jonathan Drori argues that learning without a strong experiential component may miss the mark.
"Children get their ideas not from teachers, as teachers often think, but from common sense, from the world around them, from … experience." And when we gain our knowledge only from teachers outside of the real-world context, the knowledge often is without understanding.
The truth is that most classrooms really are places created for the convenience of teaching and not as the best places to learn. Have you ever wondered why some schools move the students from room to room instead of the teachers? Or why the teacher’s desk is at the front of the room and the seats in an austere row-by-column configuration? Everything about the typical classroom clearly is about the instructor-teacher and not the student-learner experience.
We probably won’t do away with classrooms anytime soon—but we should be taking a broad design approach to learning environments that goes well beyond the classroom and encompasses the whole of the student experience. A school or college campus should foster a deep cross-section of learning experiences that supports a hands-on inquiry and engages students in a passionate search for knowledge—in other words, the anti-thesis of what often is the hallmark of many institutions. Not the big white box, sage-on-stage approach we’ve taken for the last 150 years, but a much more contextual, immediate and active learner-centered approach.
Five steps to the future
What would this learner-centered campus look like? Five important characteristics affect the buildings and outdoor spaces associated with an education institution:
•Active. Learning spaces are active spaces. Shun any idea that a student is a passive reservoir into which a teacher pours knowledge. Instead, seek out spaces that force students to engage actively with the knowledge content. Art studios and science laboratories always have been this way, but for the most part we haven’t been able to achieve the same level of interactivity in liberal-arts pursuits. Spaces that foster critical discussion, provide access to multiple forms of content, and entice the instructor off the podium and into the arena may be able to do for the liberal arts what we have done for the arts and sciences.
•Group-friendly. Students learn better when they are taught by each other than when they are taught only by a teacher. When students learn from each other, many good things happen. Instead of learning at the pace dictated by the instructor, they learn at a pace that is student-centered. They learn through the lens of their peers whose experiences—though obviously different than theirs—have generational similarities. They develop an understanding adequate to enable each to verbalize the key concepts. The spaces that foster this interaction focus on multiple small groups seated around round tables where no student is of greater stature than any other; contexts can range from formal conference room-like space to the very informal niche off the active corridor space.
•Highly interactive. Some people may say highly interactive environments already have been achieved through the explosion of electronic communications. Cell phones and the text-messaging phenomenon have changed the way students interact on campuses.
Remember when it was difficult to get in touch with another student during the day? Today, students can communicate with any other student (for whom they have a phone number) at any time quite easily. Even those they don’t know can be contacted through a Facebook or other social media account.
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