Out of the Box
North Shore Country Day School’s $11 million new “upper school” building redefines 21st-century school design, casting classrooms in the role of “the third teacher.”
For centuries, schools have been designed with a divide-and-conquer mentality in the name of engendering good instruction: Break the kids up into manageable groups; put them in rigid classrooms; tell them to sit still; and talk at them. And the classrooms are unyielding spaces with a single door with a single little window to keep distractions at bay.
The whole setup feels more like a prison that an environment to inspire, motivate and encourage kids to learn.
Fortunately, the cell-like classroom is on the way out. So are opaque walls designed to veil everything beyond; stationary desks and chairs that keep kids in check, immobile and ordered; and blackboards that require cringe-inducing squeaky chalk. And banish the thought of an assembly hall lined with clumsy fixed seats for meetings. It may not be long for the education world.
With airy, glass-walled learning studios outfitted with furniture on wheels, interactive whiteboards and technology so state-of-the-art that it’s rarely seen in schools, North Shore Country Day School’s newly remodeled high school is a role model for a paradigm that defies categorization. That’s because it draws from myriad educational models to perfectly suit its users’ wants and needs.
Its snazzy central meeting area is a case in point. Instead of an enormous, alienating assembly hall that’s overly bright or uncomfortably dim because it’s hard to get the light right, and isolating for smaller meetings, it has a central community space on the garden level with two sets of carpeted stepped ledges that climb up to the first floor and meet in a modified V around a court-cum-stage at its lowest point. Kids line the steps for meetings, and more. It’s an architecturally captivating space that begs to be experienced, and as such draws the kids in.
The intriguing renovation was the brainchild of a team of architects from Cannon Design led by principal Trung Le, the school’s administration and most importantly, the students themselves.
When North Shore Country Day hired Cannon Design, Le and his colleagues suggested and staged a series of town hall meetings with the entire school community — from the administration, students and parents and alumni. And they held a series of workshops using what Le calls “design thinking,” where “kids collaborated with their teachers and parents so we could see patterns,” he explains. And finally, they observed classes and shadowed the kids. “It allowed us to see what kind of physical environment they would need,” says Le.
“Our process is very inclusive. We co-design with our users,” he says.
The administrators at North Shore weren’t surprised. When they embarked on the project, they issued a standard RFP and interviewed several architecture firms. Cannon Design “described a compelling vision of architecture tied to educational theory and best practices, and we thought their view matched where we wanted to go,” says Head of School Tom Doar.
The process Trung Le implemented was deeply influenced by The Third Teacher, a book that started out as a collaborative research project Cannon Design initiated in 2005 when the firm was commissioned to do three new secondary schools on the Cayman Islands. British educational consultant Stephen Heppell was also involved in the project, and he opened their eyes to innovative changes in the school milieu. “He told us about new strategies to solve problems and reinvent pedagogy, and they demand a new way of thinking about our learning environment,” says Le.
Heppell’s points “started a conversation in our studio. We realized pedagogy and curriculum drive the environment, and needed to learn more about it,” explains Le.
Then two books that came out about that time that spurred Le’s eureka moment.
Both dealt with change, though in this case it was climate change — Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Bruce Mau’s Massive Change. Both “addressed new ways of thinking about the issue and emphasized the need to reinvent many parts of our world,” says Le.
Mau had moved to Chicago at the same time, and Le admired his optimism and propensity to find solutions. So he called Mau, a move that led to a yearlong collaboration that grew to include contributors from around the world. “We knew we had to publish it,” says Le.
The result, The Third Teacher, is part manual, part manifesto. It features 79 ideas — some big, and some small enough to do immediately. All show how design directly impacts teaching and learning, and can be used for change. The name comes from pioneering Italian teacher and psychologist Loris Malaguzzi. In the 1940s, he came up with the premise that children develop though interactions with adults first, then their peers, and ultimately their environment, which is “the third teacher.”
At North Shore, after Le and his team spent six months casing out classes and the kids, realizing the school did very little direct instruction. “Their approach is all about questioning and interaction,” he says. “What we saw was remarkable, but they were trapped in a 19th-century model where the teachers stand in the front of the class trying to get the kids to be critical thinkers.”
Indeed, the 35,000-square-foot building that housed the high school was built in 1922 and totally inflexible; rooms were sited off double-loaded corridors and sported doors with tiny little windows, just like in a prison. The furniture was painfully sturdy and stationary.
But what the school needed were rooms that could be altered at a moment’s notice to accommodate meetings, projects, group discussions, audio-visual presentations and more. “Our goal was to create an environment that would further the highly interactive nature of our teaching style and facilitate strong critical thinking and debate,” says Doar. Simply put, “they needed agile learning spaces because activities change here so quickly,” says Le.
Requests for lots of sunlight, more color, communal space, nooks and crannies, art studios and sustainability also flowed in from teachers and kids. Attaining Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, which North Shore expects to be awarded early this year, became another project aspiration.
The objectives called for a total gut job, a year-long process that forced the entire school to relocate to a trailer park of sorts, right on the school premises. “We pieced together a high school last year using 14 trailers,” explains the school’s director of operations, Cindy Hooper.
Fifteen months later, coming in on time and on budget at $11 million, North Shore got a completely renovated upper school flooded with light, teeming with colorful furnishings and loaded with state-of-the-art technology. There was also more space (the building grew from 35,000 to 44,000 square feet), intriguing little nooks and crannies, and the dramatic assembly space, which the students quickly dubbed the V — a name that has stuck.
The only thing missing were the classrooms.
In their place are spacious, glass-lined spaces where the kids have classes, with antechambers that are also lined in glass. The former are called learning studios and replace classrooms, and the latter are called seminar rooms and are used for smaller meetings, explains Hooper. And some of the glass doors fold open, allowing studios to merge into sweeping spaces for multi-disciplinary projects and meetings.
The clear walls champion transparency — a feature Doar thought initially would be too distracting for students by drawing their attention to the action beyond the glass. “Trung challenged me on it and was right,” says Doar. “The kids got used to those glass walls and stop looking pretty quickly. But those little windows in doors were more of a problem because everyone would crane their necks to see who was going by,” notes Hooper.
The learning studios are filled with ergonomic furniture on wheels. Jaunty chairs-cum-desks for the students, with big circular shelves under their seats to hold backpacks and books and wheels capping their legs so they can roll. They’re aptly named Node. And the sleek Eno whiteboards that line the walls can do it all; they’re magnetic, dry-erasable and can be used by teachers and students for wireless projection from their computers. The open space and thoughtfully chosen furnishings make them incredibly agile environments.
So does the technology. Computers galore are a given; North Shore is also lucky enough to be one of a handful of schools nationwide to have Steelcase’s new media:scape systems — a wall-sized monitor and docking system that allows kids to connect and project their work to everyone in the room, or enables an entire class to videoconference with anyone, anywhere. “We have a teacher who’s using it to set up a distance learning project via Skype with a class in South Africa,” says Hooper.
The technology has proven so popular that “now we’re trying to figure out how to get it for every classroom,” she adds.
Many of these features are straight out of The Third Teacher, points out Le, from the ergonomic chairs and natural daylight to the high-efficiency mechanical systems that improve air quality and integrated technology that isn’t a struggle to use. “This is a globally competitive world, and if we want to prepare our kids for the future we must follow the patterns of how the world is unfolding,” says Trung.
The kids at North Shore will clearly be well prepared for the future, though right now they’re so happy in the present that they just want to be in school. “When I leave here at four on a Friday afternoon, the kids are still here. They don’t want to go home,” laughs Doar. “The (school’s) doors lock at six, and quite often, we have to push them out,” chuckles Hopper.
So what could be wrong with that?
Architect Trung Le, 47, is a principal in Cannon Design and widely recognized as an advocate for incorporating multiple intelligences and learning styles into the design of education environments. Since joining the firm 20 years ago, he has designed schools, many award winning, in the metropolitan area as well as Champaign, Ill., Cleveland, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh in the U.S. as well as India and South Korea, Turkey and the Caymen Islands. The Vietnam-born Le came to school design by what he calls pure luck. “Some of my early projects happened to be schools,” he says. His work became his passion, especially as he had four children of his own. “I became attuned to the fact that we all learn differently as I’ve followed my own four kids,” he explains. He founded the firm’s educational design consultancy, The Third Teacher Plus, in 2011. Today, it is acclaimed for designing spaces that encourage student inquiry, imagination and multicultural awareness.