More structure, please
The 1970's vogue for "open classroom" designs has run its course, and schools in Cincinnati are now building walls and going back to the "traditional" schoolhouse designs:
Open classrooms came into vogue in the late 1960s and ran rampant in the 1970s. Noise, technology needs and security concerns have all contributed to their demise in many schools. Mariemont High School was built with open classrooms about 1971."It was state-of-the-art at that time," said James Renner, Mariemont High School principal. "We had people coming from around the world to see how education was going to be in the 21st century. It proved not to be the case, at least in secondary education." Open classrooms were established to provide for flexibility in scheduling, team teaching and active learning. But schools soon began putting up partitions and bookcases to divide space.
"As we quickly found out, it was just not conducive to an academic learning environment," Mr. Renner said. "It was just tougher for high school kids to deal with ... I think they forgot to take into account the distractibility.." And so, after 22 years teaching in the same room, Mariemont math teacher Debbie Keefe finally has walls and windows. When she started, the five classroo ms in her pod were open. Eight-foot barriers later went up, but didn't help the noise level much. "You could hear everything," she said. "Next door, if they were talking about algebra properties and you were giving a test on algebra properties ... It happened more than once, believe me."
"For those of us who remember new math - like new math, I think, it was a good idea gone bad," said principal Ken Baker. "It [an open-walled design] does create a sense of community and awareness. Those were probably the prominent things in the 1960s. Let's all be together - kind of a commune type of thing."
Imagine that. It's hard to believe that increased "flexibility" was once considered a good reason to build schools that afforded teachers and students virtually no privacy, security, or control.
Not that I'm in favor of the prison-walls-and-metal-detectors look that some schools install, either by design or disaster. But anyone with a drop of common sense could have told the 1970's educrats that high school students do require some structure to be able to focus on their lesson material, and that any design that increased distractability could have also had a negative effect on the students' ability to learn. I suppose, however, if the goal was to create an environment that was more hippie commune than schoolhouse, the open floorplan was the way to go.
Posted by kswygert at November 4, 2002 10:30 AM