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Innovative Learning Environments
The OECD Innovative Learning Environments report describes a learning environment as,
...an eco-system that includes the activity and the outcomes of the learning ... Leadership is essential to direct change and to sustain it, and to ensure that learning remains at the centre of innovation. That requires vision, but also design and strategy to implement it. OECD187
This report also identifies seven innovative learning principles.
The Innovative Learning Environments principles should run through all these different layers, activities and relationships. These principles state that to be most effective, learning environments should:
1. make learning and engagement central
2. ensure that learning is social and often collaborative
3. be highly attuned to learner motivations and emotions
4. be acutely sensitive to individual differences
5. be demanding for each learner but without excessive overload
6. use assessments consistent with learning aims, with strong emphasis on
feedback
7. promote horizontal connectedness across activities and subjects, in and out of
school
It is this combination of principles that enables a learning environment to be innovative and impact the learning in a positive way.
Supporting the work of the OECD, David Thornburg188 relates designing learning spaces to the activities that are needed within them. He identifies ‘camp fires’, ‘watering holes’ or ‘caves’ that can be situated in a single room or distributed as required, within a building. Each one of the learning spaces is located and designed according to the needs of the learners and educators who inhabit those spaces.
What is important is that these spaces are thoughtfully designed and that the design incorporates the thoughts and aspirations of all stakeholders. Better still, the learners can manage the design process by designing and carrying out the surveys and the setting of the design brief. Educators have significant input into this process, as do architects, but a team of learners should also have a role assisting in the project; after all, it is their space as much, if not more, as ours.
Initial analysis taken from the first phase of the study indicates that as schools move to occupy new spaces and inhabit them on an ongoing basis, emergent issues for teachers and leaders are concerned less with the spatial and instead with the relational, temporal, and organisational dimensions. Effective teacher collaboration in ILEs takes time, negotiation and ongoing systemic support, and is shaped and reshaped over time. Chris Bradbeer189
187 OECD. (2013). Innovative Learning Environments. Educational Research and Information. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/innovativelearningenvironmentspublication.htm
188 Thornburg, David. (2012) ‘David Thornburg on the Evolving Classroom.’ Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/david- thornburg-future-classroom-video
189 Bradbeer, C. (2015). ‘Finished beginnings’: Finding space for time in collaborative teacher practice. Mapping Learning Environment Evaluation Across the Design and Education Landscape: Towards the evidence-based design of educational facilities. Retrieved from http://e21le.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Terrains2015WebSmall.pdf (Page42)