How Many Teachers Can a Building Be?

By: Dan Coleman, Ph.D.

By now, most educators are used to thinking of the school building as a “third teacher:” the term coined by Loris Malaguzzi in the 70’s to describe the role played by space in the Reggio Emilia approach to education: “There are adults, other children, and their physical environment.” We know how powerfully where we learn can shape what and how. 

But even when we think of the physical school as a teacher—even when we design school buildings—we rarely think about the kind of teacher a building can be. 

We install signs that show how the heating system works, or we call out the materials the walls are made of, or we make visible the route the roof water takes. But we don’t recognize that, in doing so, we’re turning our school buildings into lecturers: teachers who teach by explaining. Who pass knowledge from the expert who knows to the novice who doesn’t. Who—without our intending it—deepen our children’s belief that the things we know are so sure and final that we could write them in stone.

And this building-teacher is more permanent—and perhaps more fundamental in its impact—than all the human educators that do their work inside it. A standing model of instruction, it offers a demonstration lesson every time we walk through it. When we design our schools, we make a concrete commitment to the kind of teaching and learning we hope to see happen inside them.

Because the ways we learn are shaped by the character of the teacher we learn from. There’s the faraway expert who delivers the information we lack. The coach who leans over our shoulder, watching what we do and suggesting how we might do better. The counselor who helps us believe we have what it takes to handle the challenges we’re facing. But what if one of the key relationships we designed for our students—one of the “people” we got them learning from and with—was their school building? What if there were as many different kinds of “third teachers” as there are teachers? 

One way to open our minds is by thinking about interactivity. Buildings, like human teachers, can invite us to learn by just absorbing information. Or they can draw us deeper into sensemaking, in ways that get us coming up with problems as well as figuring them out. And between these extremes of “passive” and “active” learning there are all sorts of other possibilities. In their research on engagement, Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie offer a framework that can help us think about these differences more subtly—and imagine a much richer range of roles for building-teachers to play. 

We all know about the power of learning by doing. But “doing” can mean a lot of different things—underlining while you read; building a video that explains your thinking; arguing your idea to others. And these different kinds of doing affect how deeply you learn. What if the physical design of our schools pushed students farther along Chi and Wylie’s spectrum? 

Imagine how a school building might teach us about rainwater collection, for example: 

Each of these space designs elicits a different response; each invites us to play a different role as students; each challenges us to do a different kind of learning-work. As we imagine schools that operate farther along this continuum, we move beyond the building-lecturer that drones on in the background like the teacher in a Charlie Brown movie. We turn our schools into something more like playgrounds, environments designed to get people acting—and interacting with one another—in particular ways. Or like the best museum exhibits, those that recognize that our agency in the world depends on our understanding of how it works. (Michael Spock’s 1962 What’s Inside? exhibit at the Boston Children’s Museum captured this principle brilliantly. Early on, it invited children to explore the insides of ordinary objects, such as a toaster, baseball, or a drop of rainwater;  over time, it grew to include a cross-section of a Victorian house and a city street—which allowed children to crawl above and below the street through manholes and sewer pipes.)

Imagine a school that felt a little like a construction site, that prompted its students and teachers to feel more like builders. A place that helps people take for granted that “learning” is a process of assembling our own mental models of how a concept holds together and bolts onto what we already know. What if our school buildings asked us to do more than just read a sign or interpret a graph? How might we design a building that asks a follow-up question? What if we treated “school-building” as a verb, an activity that starts before the space is fully planned and lasts long after it’s occupied?

One such building-teacher might be MIT’s Building 20, a space built in 1943 and meant to last “for the duration of the war and six months thereafter.” According to Paul Penfield, one of the strange mix of teachers and students assigned a room in it, Building 20’s “temporary” status licensed its inhabitants “to abuse it in ways that would not be tolerated in a permanent building. If you wanted to run a wire from one lab to another, you didn’t ask anybody’s permission—you just got out a screwdriver and poked a hole through the wall.” Over the next 55 years, this “magical incubator” was where Noam Chomsky developed modern linguistics, Amar Bose conducted his early research on loudspeakers, and Rainer Weiss and his team built the Cosmic Background Explorer. 

So what might our school buildings teach us about the world and our role in it? About what it means to be “a good student”? About what school is for–and who it’s for? Rob Riordan, President Emeritus of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education, believes that the best school buildings “tell stories about the work and learning that’s going on AND make a huge statement about who owns the space—whose house it is.”Imagine a school that feels like car engines used to: you lift the hood and see the parts with no smooth cover to hide the wires. The logic of how things fit together, the reasons they work or don’t, are right in front of you, daring you to figure them out. Imagine a school building that teaches its students to see the way things are as nothing more than the way they were made—the last, best solution developed so far, to a problem that someone like you could always solve better.

Dan Coleman is a former teacher who currently leads Big Sky Blue, a consultancy operating at the intersection of learning & innovation.