The realities of the Coronavirus threat has impacted everyone’s lives. With schools across the city closed to protect the health of our communities, learning has transitioned from the classroom and into the home. The importance of providing access to laptops and internet has never been clearer. Teachers and staff have had to be be innovative with e-learning and e-teachers, adjusting expectations, and nimbly shifting schedules. Parents have never before so strongly appreciated the daily stellar work teachers do with teaching our children a love of learning. We believe in the power of easily accessible education and the ability of design thinking to solve problems.
Berliner Architects has been contemplating how schools will change to protect the health of it’s students, teachers, and staff. This will most likely be a combination of evaluating hours of operation, curriculum, programs, class sizes, enrollment, indoor spaces, outdoor spaces, and nearby community resources. We will be posting our thoughts in the coming days on different spaces within a school that might change to make our schools safer and healthier.
Our first stop is the pervasive classroom and the 6’ rule. We test fit two standard sized classrooms, a K-8 750 square feet classroom and a 9-12 960 square feet classroom, to see how many students could be in the room in different furniture configurations for different learning environments. We found that the classrooms were able to accommodate half the number of students for the 6’ lecture and 6’ collaboration arrangements, but only around a third of students could be fit in a 6’ discussion layout.
As we are looking at different configurations we start to think about which classroom formats have the most priority for in-person learning. Perhaps lecture style classes can more easily remain online, while collaboration and discussion style classes should be in-person. Can keeping some classes online be an alternative to fit all the kids into current school’s schedules?
There are other qualities of the classroom beyond the 6’ rule spacing that affect health. Can windows be modified to allow for more light and fresh air into the classroom? Can furniture or upholstery be replaced with anti-microbial and easy-to-wipe materials? Should plexiglass partitions be positioned to provide better protection? We will explore these and other ideas in a future post.
We wanted to reach out to you, our partners, about what these new schedules and classroom sizes are looking like to you?