The label “radical,’ has been used in a variety of contexts to discredit movements and individuals. The dictionary definition offers a different story for the word:
relates or refers to the basic nature of or most important features of something; far reaching, searching, thoroughgoing, favoring or making economic, political or social changes of a sweeping or extreme nature; excellent, admirable or awe-inspiring; used to describe medical treatment that is intended to remove the source of disease rather than simply treat the symptoms; forming from a root of a plan or from the base of a stem; relating to the roots of numbers or of words.
Sometimes in order to stop myself from complaining, I ask myself this question: Just for the sake of exploration, what if you could radically change the system of public education? Where would you start?
I think about the most concrete element of our schools–the physical environment in relation to preparation for this world as it is and as it may be when they are adults. Right now, most buildings are organized to keep kids in and the world out, for crowd control, for security and for a lot of sitting. Most of us know that architects who designed school buildings in the last fifty years were also architects of prisons.
We may feel that we can’t do anything about something so concrete as the physical structure of our buildings. It is true that many people who have addressed this question were able to design new buildings from scratch. They found that the physical environment impacted what students were able to do, what they expected to be able to do and their own sense of their agency in their learning.
For those of us in buildings designed with other priorities in mind, even reading about these designs can spark thinking about how we can arrange our physical environment to better achieve our school’s mission and vision.
A collaborative discussion among faculty (and students where possible) about the design principles of either of these school models, often leads to ideas for what can be done in their building. Often there are small things, such as setting up spaces for gathering in hallways, visuals on walls, and use of outside spaces that provide a shift toward other ways of learning that are ore in line with actual life in the world.
Two successful examples of buildings designed to support a vision for authentic active learning in a community are High Tech High and Big Picture Schools.
Their documents about school building design can be the basis for a text based discussion using School Reform Initiative protocols with a focus question of what is most important for your school and then adaptations that you could implement.