What could schools look like if we designed them with 21st-century learning in mind?

Reimagine America’s Schools asks some of the nation’s top thinkers to collaborate on the answer.

By Melissa Rayworth

Ashley Arhart spends her days developing cutting-edge technology for tech giants including Amazon and Microsoft. Although her days are spent looking toward the future, the elementary school her children attend is like the vast majority of public schools still in operation in America: Designed nearly a century ago as a sort of educational factory where 20th-century teachers would lecture and students would listen.  

“It's a lovely elementary school,” Arhart told an expert panel recently convened by the nonprofit initiative Reimagine America’s Schools (RAS). But “children are, frankly, processed through it. You start at one end as a kindergartener, and you quite literally move down this single hall until you're in eighth grade. And then you are literally and figuratively sort of shot out at the other end.” 

As Arhart spoke, the other members of the interdisciplinary panel -- a brain trust of educators, technologists, designers, innovators and community leaders -- could envision exactly the learning environment she was describing. 

They likely grew up in the very same type of rigidly designed school buildings she described. They had joined this gathering co-moderated by Ron Bogle, founder of Reimagine America’s Schools and Jeff Wetzler, co-founder of Transcend Education,  to explore new ideas for the design of 21st-century schools.

Few educators disagree that today’s young people will need to tackle economic, environmental and cultural challenges that we’ve yet to imagine. They will need to be effective problem-solvers and collaborators, strong communicators and creative thinkers.  And yet the restrictive physical design of most American schools doesn’t begin to encourage and support these kinds of creative problem-solving skills. 

The addition of a roomful of laptops or iPads doesn’t instantly change that. 

“As we think about the way we too often design  schools -- the physical school facility -- we tend to design dumb buildings and then fill them full of technology,” said Bogle.  “And we continue to build schools based on a 20th century model where a specific group of students needed to be in a specific room, at a specific time, to hear a specific message.”  

That question of how to design schools for the 21st century sparked more than an hour of insightful, sometimes blunt debate and innovative brainstorming. 

“Why are schools and prisons designed the way that they are?” asked Jeff Wetzler, co-leader of the education nonprofit Transcend. “Because we don't trust the occupants. … We designed that space from the beginning not from a space of trust, but from a space of control. And how do we put that back in?” 

As they explored these questions, the experts hit on several key themes. Among them:  

TECH-ENABLED SPACES MUST PRIORITIZE HUMAN INTERACTION.

Mike Yates, senior managing director of network strategies at Teach for America’s Reinvention Lab, brought up how incredibly personal digital technology was designed to be: “The reason why people will retreat into their phones and don't socialize is you have this device that is so tuned to you,” he said. 

Al Motley Jr., managing partner at Techademics, agreed: “Tech is designed for us to collaborate at a distance,” not to communicate with the person sitting right next to us. 

Educators generally agree that children need to be adept users of technology, and we know that there are incredible (and often free) digital learning resources available for them. But there is a need to make conscious choices about how they’ll use technology at school and how they might collaborate and communicate while using it. Then we can put them in physical spaces that can help foster those connections -- especially after nearly two years of pandemic-inspired social distancing.

“Continued long-term isolation with technology as the only mediator is not a desirable situation. It's not a desirable situation for adults and I think it's potentially really problematic for children,” Arhart said. “There is such a thing as chemistry in the room, and there are some things that technology is, frankly, incapable of replicating in terms of our person-to-person interactions.”

Technology “has a remarkable role to play” in education, Arhart added, and digital devices are necessary for all 21st-century learners. But “over-reliance on those things is its own kind of trap.” 

“Ashley, you are singing my song. And I'm the technologist of the group,” said Lisa Lezama, founder and CEO of APEC Technologies. 

“My thought process is more around how do you give students choices and how do you facilitate relationships, right? You learn best when you have relationships with people around you,” Lezama said, “whether that be the teacher, your classmates, et cetera.”  

WE CAN’T PREDICT THE LEARNING OR THE TECH OF TOMORROW. SO WE NEED FLEXIBLE SPACES THAT CAN ADAPT TO UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS.

Several participants mentioned the folly of putting all students in huge open rooms and expecting them to concentrate. And yet the concept of what many in the group referred to as a sort of “warehouse” space is a valuable starting point. 

“There are challenges to open workspaces and a warehouse and a group trying to do the heads-down work next to a group that's trying to use power tools in the same space,” Yates said. “But I guess the one thing that's free about them is the fact that you can try and negotiate that, and solve it.” 

One solution is designing schools with a mix of open spaces and quiet rooms for solo work, like the most effective coworking spaces that adults use. 

“How can you build a space,” Lezama asked, “where I can choose and say, ‘You know what, today I need a little bit more help. I want to go see Mr. Wetzler and get some more help here.’ Versus, ‘You know what? I just want to go sit and crank on this. … Like in college, you go to the library. ‘I'm going to go to this space over here and go think on this for a while and come back.’” 

As we design K-12 schools, she asked, “how can we think about flexible spaces, and give people choices” in the same way that college campuses do? 

Pulling knowledge from elsewhere was a recurring theme among the panelists.  

Along with advocating an omnivorous approach that includes tapping into the design of coworking spaces and college campuses to plan better K-12 schools, all of the panelists spoke of making sure a wide range of stakeholders weighs in on the future of school design. 

Educators, designers, technologists, community leaders, parents and even students must be involved in the design conversation. 

Welcoming all voices is vital, “so that when you come up with a new model, there's not that resistance just because it's so foreign to what they know,” Lezama said. “If we're designing these spaces and we're talking about the technology, the curriculum and the space, everyone needs a seat at the table.” 

DO KIDS NEED JUST ONE PLACE TO LEARN?

“During the pandemic students studied from grandma's dining room table… and now we simply go back to the singular centralized place called school?” asked Bogle. Rather than thinking of “school” as a singular place, technology really allows for a continuum of different learning situations in different learning places.”

Some of the ideas discussed:

• What if communities created small, hyper-local, tech-enabled walkable “learning cafes” in neighborhoods? The experts raised scenarios where two days per week, a mixed-age group of students could work independently or in small clusters in these learning centers with the help of adult learning facilitators. 


• Students could go to a main school building to work in larger groups during the other three days per week. But at their local learning cafe, they’d build deeper connections to their own neighborhood and to learning facilitators with whom they’d work year after year, rather than losing touch after completing each grade. 


• They’d also spend less time traveling by bus, which saves time and school district money, and helps reduce asthma-inducing pollution and carbon emissions in the community.


Fostering personal connections, creating flexible spaces and embracing the possibility of multiple learning locations: these were just three of the ideas that surfaced during this initial brainstorming process.

RAS will be continuing the conversation with cross-disciplinary groups to refine new approaches to building truly smart, 21st-century school buildings and neighborhoods. Their next stop? The Bay Area. On Feb. 17, RAS is convening leaders from the design, education, government, and tech fields to discuss how the innovation coming out of Silicon Valley can help build learning environments with technology and multi-dimensional, flexible design at their core. 

As the pandemic begins to subside, RAS plans to work with a handful of communities to put these design concepts into practice. 

If we have learned anything during the pandemic, it is that public education must change to serve the needs of all students and communities. Exploring how technologists, educators and designers can work together more effectively to create better environments for learning is a small step.

Melissa Rayworth is a writer for global and regional news outlets including the Associated Press, Parents magazine and AARP, and a communications consultant helping foundations and nonprofits to tease out and tell their stories across media. Her work is often focused on education, parenting and home design, and the many ways our physical spaces impact our lives.    

Founded by Ron Bogle, Reimagine America’s Schools works in partnership with educators, technology experts, and design professionals to create a new model for learning environments. Working with American public schools, we support innovative educators and all learners as they move forward in the 21st century.