Teaching activities using your school building

By Kim Thomas | 13 January 2010

Tags:

Feature

Download the free teacher resource: ‘Understanding your current school building’ (PDF, 389 kb).

The prospect of having a say in the design of your school is exciting, but also daunting. The existing design may feel so familiar that it can be hard to imagine how an alternative might look. And while we want to encourage students to think about how the design could be improved, we also want them to reflect on what’s worth preserving in their current school buildings.

Photo of a male student holding a camera

Sittingbourne Community College - students investigating what makes a successful teaching and learning environment © A&M Photography Ltd

Engaging with the past
English Heritage’s publication, ‘England’s Schools: History, architecture and adaptation’ (published January 2010) raises awareness of the wide range of school buildings currently in England and ways to re-use and re-furbish schools.

The English Heritage historic schools campaign encourages people to cherish what is valuable in old schools and to think about refurbishing them sensitively rather than demolishing them.

If your school is undergoing a refurbishment, redesign or rebuild here are some activity suggestions to engage your students in this valuable and once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity.

Activity: Looking at your school’s story
A good place to start is by talking about how the school looks now, whether it’s a crumbling Victorian redbrick or a 1960s glass-and-steel structure. Source photographs of the school when it was first built, both of the inside and out. Ask students to point out how it differs from now – perhaps there were different playgrounds for boys and girls; outside toilets; and blackboards instead of whiteboards.

In small groups, students could find out and discuss:

What materials were used in the making of your school? Why do you think those materials were chosen? Have they lasted well? How was the school lighted and heated originally?
Why do you think the architects chose this particular design for the school? How might the organisation of the school day and the structure of lessons have influenced the design?
What is good about the school building and worth keeping? Why?
What affect does the visual appearance of your school have on you?

Students could use the internet, school library, local library or your local historical society to search for newspaper reports and descriptions of what their school was like at the time it was built.

If the school is relatively modern, you could invite one of the first students in to talk about what lessons and playtimes were like then. Primary-age students could role-play a lesson from the time their school was built.

Photo of four female secondary students sitting with an adult, holding building plans

Highbury Fields School students looking at building plans © Alys Tomlinson

Activity: Thinking about the future
Ask students to think about how learning is organised at school and how the building could be changed to improve learning. In small groups, students could brainstorm questions such as:

Do all classrooms need to be the same size, or could they be different sizes? How could the space be arranged to make it easier to work in smaller or larger groups?
How could the layout of the classroom be made more flexible?
Do you need dedicated computer rooms or a wireless network? Should there be quiet spaces where students can sit and work alone on a laptop?
How can the building be made sustainable? What materials will last a long time? How can we keep the school warm in winter and cool in summer while keeping energy costs low?
Can we make some of those changes while preserving the character of the school?
How do the appearance and scale of the different spaces make you feel? Do you think the visual appearance of a learning space makes a difference to how you learn?

Alternatively, ask students to make a list of things they don’t like about their school and how changing the building could make a difference. For example:

What changes to the layout of the school could reduce bullying?
How could we design the layout of the eating area to minimise queues and jostling?
How can we reduce the amount of time spent walking between classrooms?

In a plenary session, you could show photographs of imaginative school designs from the Imagine website – an online database of best practice school designs. Ask students to compare their suggestions with the way these schools have addressed design issues.

Show examples of schools that have taken design steps, such as widening corridors, to improve the opportunities for learning and reduce bullying. You can access these examples from www.building.co.uk, which features six of the best Building Schools for the Future (BSF) schools.

Pudsey Grangefield School has large, open-plan ICT areas and folding partitions make it easy to merge classrooms.
Frederick Bremer School discourages bullying by making all areas open to view.
Kelmscott School has redesigned existing classrooms and created an internal “street” between the old and new buildings.

Discuss: would these solutions work in your school?

Photo of the interior of a communal area.

Frederick Bremer School © Tim Crocker/Penoyre & Prasad

And finally…

Ask students to develop design suggestions based on the discussions, as a class vote for the best ones.
Ask students to draw a design of how they’d like the school, or one aspect of it, to look. Younger students could build a Lego model.
Ask older students to independently research sustainability issues: which building materials will last a long time; what the school can do to reduce energy costs and recycle waste (such as installing a green roof).

Free resource download!

For further teaching activities based around the history of your school, refurbishment or redesign download the free ‘Understanding your current school building’ teacher resource (PDF, 389 kb).

This teacher resource (three pages) includes three extra activities applicable for most key stages and a range of curriculum subjects. The activities have been taken from the teacher resource produced by CABE and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT), ‘Our school building matters’, to be released February 2010. To receive a free copy visit, www.cabe.org.uk/education or email futureschools@ssatrust.org.uk.

Visit English Heritage’s website to find out more about the historic schools campaign.

To order a copy of ‘England’s Schools: History, architecture and adaptation’ by Elain Harwood (£9.99 +p&p), contact English Heritage sales at Central Books on 0845 458 9910, eh@centralbooks.com, or www.english-heritageshop.org.uk.