 Welcome to the K-12 online learning conference. My name is David Jakes. I'm here to talk about learning spaces, specifically reimagining the spaces in which we learn. So the presentation is broken up into four separate videos that can be viewed independently or in sequence. I want to talk about four main ideas about learning space design, and that's about mindset, landscape, process, and impact. And in terms of mindset, we want to start thinking about how we think about spaces and how we design spaces. There's perspectives and beliefs that you should understand relative to space design. We'll talk about those in the first video. Then the landscape portion looks at how spaces are changing inside school and outside school, and sort of a different kind of new ecology about how spaces serve learning. We'll talk about a process in the third video in terms of what the kinds of things you can do to improve your spaces in the logical framework for doing that. There is a process and you need a process to do this, so we'll talk about that in video number three. And finally, we'll finish with what does this all mean and what's the impact for teaching and learning. So mindset, landscape, process, and impact, let's go ahead and begin with mindset. So the mindset about teaching and learning is literally a lens of how we look at spaces and how they serve learning. And there are some ways in which we can help you design and start developing a lens that looks at space differently. The first way to do that is to look at this particular book and this idea. The book is the third teacher and the title itself is borrowed from the Reggio Emilia belief that there are three teachers or children. More about that in the second. But the importance of this book is that it provides 79 ways to look at the intersection of design learning spaces and teaching and learning. So if you're looking for a really good book to get you started on thinking about space and help you develop a new lens, take a look at this book. If you don't want to purchase the book, you can go to Google and type in third teacher flashcards and you can get all 79 ideas. Now this book was written in 2010 by Bruce Maugh Design, Canon Design and VS Furniture and in 2011 it gave rise to third teacher plus practice. Now I had the great fortune in 2013 joining the third teacher plus practice and actually spending several years working with great designers and learning how to design spaces. And so much of what I'm going to share with you through the videos is reflective of that experience. So the notion of the three teachers of children, here they are, these are the flashcards themselves. Let me just read this to you. There are three teachers of children, adults meaning parents and teachers, other children meaning their peers and their physical environment meaning the spaces in which they inhabit. So the importance of this in terms of developing a lens on the way in which spaces serve learning and how we can develop spaces that are more effective at doing that is to realize that space plays an incredibly important role in teaching and learning. And what I like about this idea is that it elevates the construct of space into something that's more important. How often do you consider space in the design of experiences? And so, you know, we have to start thinking new ways and if you don't have flexible and agile spaces then that becomes more difficult to use but more schools are getting interested in redesigning spaces. And so as that happens, we need to understand that there's opportunities to rethink the relationship of space to learning. So the final idea here on this slide is that everybody can be a designer in that there are opportunities for teachers to assume a new role in what they do. And for many years we talked about teachers as being sages on the stage and guides on the side and we've even moved into teachers facilitator. And I think that's too weak of a way to identify teachers. I think teaching is much more elegant and much more purposeful and more difficult than being just a facilitator. So I like the notion of teacher as designer and especially as a way in which to think about given a more comprehensive and flexible and agile palette to develop with if you have better spaces then what does that mean for the kind of experiences that students have at school. So in 1986, let's talk about that. This is me. And you take a look at the classroom, you know that there's big heavy tables at a very inflexible rigid environment. There are blackboards. There were no whiteboards at the time, certainly. There's certainly no interactive whiteboards. There were no digital projectors, although we did have slide projectors and overheads. And the textbook that we had was already out of date about by four or five years. And, you know, microcomputers and the internet was years away. So, you know, when you talk about life in 1986 in terms of education, we had fairly limited kinds of tools at our disposal. That doesn't mean we didn't do a great job working with kids, certainly. But given that and given what we have in 2016, obviously much, much different. And so we have an unlimited opportunity to connect with other people with resources, with ideas, through technology. Many schools have given students laptops, tablets, and one-to-one programs in addition to the very devices they carry in their pocket, which are tremendously powerful. We have different ways, and it's a different, completely different kind of landscape. In fact, it's a boundless landscape for learning. And so we start to have this shifting kind of construct away from a limited kind of design environment to one that's filled with the opportunity to have unlimited kinds of resources that provide boundless kinds of ways in which we can combine those resources into learning experiences. And the other thing that's interesting is that this is constantly shifting, right? It's always in perpetual beta. And we have a really interesting dynamic between resources, between unlimited kinds of access to resources, bottomless opportunities for learning, and an environment that is constantly shifting. And so what do those shifts mean in terms of spaces of design, of learning, and what kids do at school? And it's an incredibly important question, and spaces have to factor into that question. And that's what I want to address for the remainder of this video and in the other three. So in terms of developing a mindset, we know a couple things. We know that spaces are incredibly important. We know that we can be designers. We know that there's boundless opportunities for learning and constantly shifting. And here's another thing to add in. It's an important question to ask, and it's the most formative kind of question you can ask. And all spatial design is focused on this. It's what do you want the experience at school to be? And that's not a mission statement. That's not a vision statement, but it's a very specific set of ideas that are associated with, these are what things that kids will do while they're at school. This is how they are going to learn. This is what our expectations are for learners and the kind of experience that they will have while at school. So this question is much different than what most people design spaces around. Most of the time you see a focus on things. What kind of furniture do we want? What kind of whiteboard do we want? What kind of technology? What colors do we want in the room? And those are important questions, but they come later. So start with this question first. What do you want the experience to be? And then once you define that, then it's a much more easy and much more effective kind of process to align things with experience. So that's the first thing to remember. To learn anything, think experience first, think second. Okay, so we certainly don't want this experience, right? And this is your typical classroom, has been for years, kids lined up in rows. You know what this looks like. And admittedly, this picture is posed, but they're really good at it, okay? And so how do we move away from something like this, which is space designed for a different era, literally? And we have to come up with ideas. You know, do you want the experience where kids sit and listen and record? Or do you want something that's much more creative and much more engaging for kids? Or put positions of them as students that have choices about how they learn and what they learn and who they learn with? So we've taken some, you know, we made some attempts at doing that. We've gone one to one. And, you know, this is fine, but it ignores the role that space is playing learning. And I think in a lot of cases, what happens here is that we disregard the role that space is playing learning by just adding technology now. You know, does this kind of spatial layout, these desk, does it advance and amplify the affordances of technology? Do we have a more likely opportunity to engage kids in collaborative work, even though we have technology? So going one to one, for example, is a tremendous driver for spatial change. If you don't consider your physical spaces when you go one to one, I think you're missing the point. The question that comes into play at this particular point is how do you design physical spaces for an increasingly digital education? Okay. So we have these kinds of experiences and we still have these spaces in school. But there's something that is a fundamental essence of a mindset around spaces about teaching and learning. And it's this, is that that space, that classroom remains a location of possibility. And I love this. This is from the hip hop ed manifesto. And it's a plancher flags, take your claim kind of statement about the value and the importance in what's class classrooms have always meant for schools. And because this is the place where kids show up to learn and they meet dedicated professionals and want to help them learn. And there's high value in that. In fact, it's what makes school school, right? But we can do better. We can do different kind of have different kinds of spaces that even take us forward. So that's a that factors into our mindset is that these spaces have been traditionally extremely important in schools. But the needs for kids, the world in which they live in demands different development of different kinds of skills, different kinds of things that they need to experience in spaces are an incredibly important part of that. So to continue the development of a mindset. Here's another thing that you should should consider. And that's this. The first step in redesigning that space or that classroom is to discard the notion that it has to be a classroom. And so when I say classroom to you, you know, though that looks like you know what that that means. And so how we talk about spaces and the vocabulary and the vernacular we use about spaces is incredibly important. If I said studio to you, instead of classroom, what is the simple name change in gender in your in your perspectives about what takes place in that space. So how we talk about spaces is part of that mindset. And so I'm going to help you with that as we move through the videos. And so the question comes up is how do we think differently about this? And it's incredibly important design question and something that will answer in the remaining three videos. And then what would it take to get this right? Important question. This is something you should ask yourself. These three questions about to present to you are extremely important. How might we think differently about this? What would it take to get this right? What would it take to get new spaces that mean everything for your kids? And what would it mean if we did? Okay, so to finalize this key point, key point experience, not things to find the student experience first things come second. And that will be a really important guiding framework for our talk in our conversation here about spaces. So up next, what we have is a discussion about landscape. So that's the first video and I hope you join me for the second.