To reimagine learning, we must reimagine the physical space of “school” — but how?

For more than a century, the physical layout of American schools has been as consistent as any feature in American public life. Although the world around us has been in a constant state of flux, we have always been able to depend on a familiar set of symbols in our schools: neat, orderly rows of student desks; teachers delivering lessons to an entire group of children; lockers in the hallways; bell schedules — the list could go on.

But what if those timeworn structures of schooling are actually preventing us from modernizing education for a changing world? What if, in fact, the physical environment is — after parents and peers — the “third teacher” of our sons and daughters?

The latest short film in our multimedia story series about the future of learning, 180: Thrive provides a window into one school’s efforts to directly tackle those questions, and do so in a way that results in a deeper alignment between what we know about how people learn — actively, collaboratively, differently — and how our schools are physically structured. It is intended to spark useful broader thinking about the relationship between a school’s physical environment and its students’ emotional readiness to learn.

This is how we reimagine learning.

This is how we #changethestory.

#Thisis180

Is this the template for the 21st Century school building?

The founder of Intrinsic School and her architects certainly think so. What do YOU think?

Personally, I see some cool stuff, and yet overall something doesn’t sit right. Why, for example, is a school that is pushing the envelope on personalized learning still organizing its students by grade level? Shouldn’t mass groupings by age be the first thing to go?

And is it a good thing to have kids spending 50% of their day on a computer? I suppose the right way to think of it is that a kid is spending half of his or her day doing research, but for a new model of personalization, it feels awfully . . . well . . . depersonalized.

And why is that coastline place set up to have kids literally facing a brick wall? Who thought that was a good idea?

I don’t know — I think this feels more like something that was designed for kitsch, not kids. It’s angular, when learning is round.

What am I missing here? What do you see?