Presented by Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Harvard Graduate School of Education Executive Education.
The program will explore five key themes emerging as defining elements of 21st century education: collaboration, student engagement, school community, sustainability, and universal design for learning. Program participants will work in teams – including educators together with architecture and design professionals - to apply their combined understandings in one of several school-building design focus areas. Possible focus areas include new school buildings; specialized, magnet, and charter schools; international schools; urban schools redesign; school renovation and development initiatives; vocational and technical schools; and early-learning centers.
To support the exploration of these themes, the program will engage participants through a variety of formats, including provocative plenary session, intensive workshops, and small-break out discussion groups.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- Understand what effective teaching and learning looks like today
- Engage with current research findings with implications for effective education practices, including brain research, technology integration in learning, and social-emotional development
- Explore what it means to transform educational facilities to enable effective educational practices and support vibrant school communities
- Learn how to leverage emerging technologies to best support learning within and beyond school buildings.
- Develop planning strategies for facilities that serve a broad set of stakeholders – from students, teachers and administrators to the communities in which they are based.
- Learn how physical space design influences school culture and community, access, communication, and engagement.
- Envision teaching and learning, and the requirements for facilities design, over the coming decades
- Critique learning environments and educational facilities that are seen as models of effective design
- Create and develop concepts for overall school organization and facilities design
AUDIENCE
Teams of educators and architects engaged together in a process of school design, school redesign or renovation, or school facility and space planning. Educators might be in roles as members of school building committees, superintendents, principals and assistant principals, teachers, directors of curriculum and instruction, parents, special educators, and/or local and state education leaders and policymakers. Members of the architectural professions might be in roles as principal architect, project manager, engineer, chief builder, school designer, space planner, lead construction manager, and/or interior designer.
