Sweden debuts first classroom-less school | SmartPlanet.
It looks great. This isn’t a new concept though – Canada (and I’m sure other places too) experimented with “Open Concept” schools in the late 60’s. The design of the school in the article looks very 60’s.
I went to a high school that was a mix of wall-less classrooms and a few traditional ones. I thought it was grand but there were some kids that had real trouble with it.I think they ended up renovating and getting rid of most of the interesting spaces – few teachers were up to it.
We had English in a space made of curved, carpeted, step seating surrounding a ‘stage’ area that had several bean-bag chairs. It being the 60’s, we had a lot of bean-bag chairs.
We also had other spaces that looked very much like some of the spaces shown in the article.
If you go back a little farther – MOST schools were classroom-less: the one-room schoolhouse that covered all of 1-12 is one of those, no? I realize most still had desks in neat rows, but still…
Open spaces can present some interesting challenges – like what if the class next to you is obviously having a lot more fun than you are? How do you get the kids to ignore the “party next door”? It can also be a little distracting when you have smelly (or explosive) chemistry experiments going on next to you and you are trying to concentrate on biology.
On the whole though, I suspect that ‘learning outside the box’ helps you learn how to think outside the box.
