 Welcome to the K-12 online conference. My name is David Jakes, and I'm talking about reimagining the spaces in which we learn. This is the fourth and final video of the series. I've talked previously about mindset, about landscape, and about the process of creating spaces. The final video I want to talk about impact and how we know what we do is good. So just to review a little bit, this is actually parallels what I talked about, but it's from the Learning Spaces Collaboratory. What do we want students to become? In other words, what's the outcome of the learning experience that we define? Again, we talked about that being part of the process coming from discovery and actually being defined within the definition period of the design process so that coming out of or going into spatial design, we have a clear picture of the student experience and how that is defined and how that will potentially impact and will impact actually the design of the spaces. So what experiences are required to do that? We know that one of the goals of a change in space is to create teachers that are educator designers, ethnographers, and have a more capable mindset and lens to how space impacts learning and how space can be used in the design of learning experiences. The final question, of course, comes in is if we believe that we have a certain experience that's desired, we know that we craft experiences to manifest that what kind of spaces are capable of supporting that. So that's really where we've been. We follow that up with this and sort of a challenge into your thought process. Changes in spaces support different teaching and learning opportunities more frequently and effectively, and then the end, that's what we're looking for, right? We're looking for a greater wider range of capability to create experiences that expose kids, different kinds of spaces that can support content, development of content understanding, development of skills, the development of mindsets, all leading to dispositions of an independent learner. So, you know, the question becomes as we go through the process, there's opportunities for reflection, there's opportunities for evaluation, and opportunities to understand if we know what we're doing is good. And so the question becomes this, how do we know that this is actually better? than what we have now? And what would you measure to accomplish that and understand and develop an answer to that question? You know, like anything, that's a complex question in education. How do you evaluate a single factor, a single variable in the wide range of variables that contribute to learning? You know, it's the same kind of question with technology. How do you evaluate the impact of technology on the outcome of learning? And so spaces suffer, not suffer, but are engaged in the same way with that question. How do you make changes in spaces? How does that literally translate into a nuanced understanding of their impact on what learning has accomplished or what teaching is accomplished in terms of the outcomes of learning. So the question is, what would you measure? And what I'm going to do is make a case for going back to your original framework, the design drivers that you developed during your process, those five to 10, six, seven, eight kinds of ideas about learning and what you want kids to be as learners. And if those drivers are designed to build space and inform instruction and inform the design of experiences, perhaps even design or influence professional development, then I would like to suggest that it should be likewise used as metrics for evaluating spatial redesign. So if in your design drivers, your experience that you wanted as kids to be collaborative learners, then there's an opportunity to design spaces for collaboration, help teachers understand collaboration and how to structure that in the experience. And that may be a professional development question. But if the spaces, if you want learners to be collaborative in spaces that are designed to support that, why not evaluate the spaces in the context of collaboration and all the rest of those drivers. So that's the importance of design drivers, right? There are a community based inclusive exploration in a declaration of what learning should look like, but they also inform space design, experience design, and they give you an idea of what you should evaluate. So there's a couple of ways to do that. One, you can have a standardized kind of approach with formal kinds of surveys and evaluations and observations. And then there can be a very organic kind of approach where teachers are in class in making observations as learning is occurring in those spaces and those redesigned experiences. And there's ways to capture all that with technology, but I'm going to offer you a sort of a two prong approach where there's formalized kinds of opportunities for evaluating what you're doing, but also organic in situ kinds of experiences that allow teachers to become the ethnographers and evaluators. And so when you look at that, you may say, well, you know, there's attitudes, and we can look at attitudes, how students feel and what they perceive and believe about their classroom space or any learning space. Now the furniture or the designers influences perceptions, we can look at attitudes, we can look at experiences, we can look at shifts. Okay, so those are three interesting ways in which to take a look at evaluation, both from a standardized and an organic kind of way. In terms of shifts, how the space is being disruptive to their learning, how students are more likely less likely to how are you more likely to less likely to so we're looking at ways in which which look at tendencies of behavior in the shifts and how are you more likely to do this or less likely to do this. Because of your space designer, are you more likely to engage in collaborative activities or not? If they could focus on teachers as well, if are you more likely to design learning experiences that involve collaboration or less likely you based on the space design. So there's ways to do that. And so, you know, how we know this is good when we take a look at, you know, this particular classroom, it's a math classroom, this is this is some from some of the work that was done by the third teacher plus in San Francisco. And I'll give you a link to this in just a second. But this is a math classroom with 36 kids in it. And you know, what happens when you invest two days to redesign $1,000, you get something like this, which is a much more capable space, much more inviting, much more functional, and much more organized and probably much more effective. But again, you have to go through and evaluate that and take a look at that. So if you're interested in learning more about that, there's three videos online. This is the link, I'll leave it up here for a second. So you can you can actually watch the design process in in that goes from on a Friday to a Sunday, literally, and reshapes this space for $1,000 is a great display of of interesting design experiences that the designers use to reshape this, but also a wide range of practical strategies that you can use to rethink classrooms. Excuse me. So that's the first case and you can you can then have a very traditional classroom that looks like this, you know, and this won't surprise anybody with a teacher desk in front of their classroom and rows of desks. But then you can go engage in a process where you change one classroom, and then the next year go to maybe five to six classrooms, and then you learn enough to go to scale and you may create something that looks like this, the same kind of space with a much different kind of feel, the teacher leaning against a writable wall that's idea paint with steel case implementation of verb tables that allow allow this space to be reshaped very quickly and is in response to the needs of learners. It's colorful. It's an interesting space because it provides kids with options right and teachers with options and that's what we're looking for here. You can take that you can take a some of the work Canon designed in when I work with Canon. This is a informal space in a private school in the independent school in the in the west. And this space was not used by students at all. You can tell it's it's not the most attractive space, but then you can take with with it with you know the combination of some great discovery work and some design drivers at that that talk about how informal spaces can be used in learning, you can take that and shift that into something like this. And that's the same exact space actually. So you're talking about some high design here are some really intriguing kinds of options in a space that now offers a completely different invitation into learning and has different capabilities for for students all predicated in the fact that there's an intelligent process that defines talks to everyone defines design drivers and then goes through an ideation process and a prototyping process that leads to ultimately a final solution for the design of space and how it how that space can now support new conditions for learning. You're all familiar with hallways. And this is your typical hallway, you know, lockers. And when you consider that that corridor space makes up 35% of the real estate in most schools, you know, we want to start thinking about ways in which we can we can rethink what what takes place in these areas. That's the significant one third of the space, right? That takes that spaces, or that, you know, in schools, you're talking about an enormous amount of space that's assigned to just transporting kids from period to period. This is from Oregon State, and you can take and it's not the same hallway, but you can get the idea that hallways have the opportunity to support different kinds of engagement. This is a tremendous informal space. You notice that this collaboration or this soft seating area is recessed away from the main hallway. And that is is to provide still in the hallway egress routes. One of the things you have to be concerned with in hallway design is that in what what you need to ask really is is sit down with a local fire marshal and figure out what you can and can't do with hallways, because first and foremost, they cannot be blocked certainly for egress during emergencies or transport of people during emergencies. So in most places that furniture you see the left may or may not be allowed. But that's why that that area is recessed back, okay, to provide still use of that space, but provide a clear and consistent path for for people to move through the space in case of emergency. You know, there's there's a great degree of of daylight there. You see the windows coming in extremely important. You want to take advantage of all the daylighting that's available in your building. That's probably the most valuable resource and space redesign is what they're considering the relationship of how much daylighting you have and maximizing the amount of daylight that comes into classrooms and learning spaces. There's a direct relationship between between how well kids learn in schools and and daylighting. You see some really nice colors there, right? In colors, you have to think about very consciously. They have a cultural bias, certainly you have to understand that if you're in a culturally diverse school, colors mean different things to different cultures. You also have to think about age appropriateness. The colors that work for adolescents don't necessarily work for for younger children and vice versa. So you can take that example the hallway and here's another design from Canon design. This is Kerry Busey Elementary in Champaign, Illinois, where there's no more hallway space really that you can see in the hallway space is reshaped into a common shared space. You can still move through it, right? You can still transport kids through it. But now the classrooms are connected into this main central gathering space that can be used for a lot of different kinds of learning experiences. And they do science typically out there. And you see that there's opportunities for the teachers to open and close walls. So their classroom can become more expensive as a result of using that informal space. So what we want to do is the impact now is literally about having teachers and giving teachers the capability to design with a wider palette. At the end of the day, teachers design experiences for kids and help create kinds of learning experiences. And the addition of spaces to that program more capable spaces allows teachers to design with with more flexibility and creativity. So the one one thing that I want to I want to end with sort of is this slide. This is I used to be fascinated by playground design when I when I worked in the architecture firm. And so I'd always ask architects, why are you are you adding tree stumps into into playgrounds? What are the kids do with those? And they would come back and smile and they would say, Well, we don't know how the kids are going to use them. But they wouldn't they came back and said that we know what they're going to use them. So what the architects were doing was designing for capacity, designing for kids to be able to be creative and use the space in their own way. They didn't know how those tree stumps were going to be used. But they did in fact know that they would be used. And when you go back and do what's called post occupancy work, when you go back into the space and see how people use the space, you would see that the kids would have designed eight to 10 games around those tree stumps. So one of the things that you want to think about is when you evaluate the impact of spaces is that there's ways to look at space and take your drivers evaluate your drivers both in a formalized kind of survey work, but also helping teachers understand when they're in classrooms to take observation in a very organic way. You know, that's going to give you a picture of how well you're going to do. But in a lot of cases, you know, over time, your spaces are going to present new opportunities that you might not even imagined that become part of your new culture of space. How do the spaces that you create become catalysts for different kinds of ways in which people see learning and engage in learning and interact with each other to become learners? That's where the really intriguing component comes in when you create spaces that have the identity of a playground where you don't know exactly what's going to happen. But you know something's going to happen is probably going to be good. So with that in mind, you know, we talked in this series about mindsets in terms of how we shape our lens about how we see spaces. We talked about the landscape of spaces, emergent spaces, both in school and outside of school and how those blend with potential new directions in learning. And we talked about at length that those directions and the fact that they do indeed have spatial consequences went through a video three was about a process a way to engage. And when you when you have the opportunity to design spaces, how much you proceed in in a way that takes you to a logical and effective and productive end. And then finally, this video was about impact. And what does it all mean for kids and for their learning and for teachers, really for the entire school community. In the end, the final thing and I want to share this is from Will Richardson, a friend of mine, certainly. This is the this is the point of where we should get to is that every classroom or every space that we have in school should be spaces where kids prove anything is possible on a daily basis. So that mine has been my pleasure to be with you. Thank you for K 12 online conference for for having me being keynote. You can learn more at David jakes designs.com. That's David jakes designs.com. If you're interested, there's lots of resources for for you there. And I just want to say thank you for your time and your attention. And again, the opportunity to help you with understand learning spaces in a more effective way for you. Thank you