On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, host Nate McClennen sits down with Michael Posthumus, Learning Design Principal at Fielding International, to explore one of education’s most overlooked levers for transformation: the physical learning environment. A fellow Teton Science School graduate and the co-architect of the pioneering Grand Rapids Public Museum School, Posthumus brings a rare perspective forged at the intersection of place-based pedagogy, competency-based learning, and architectural design. Together, Nate and Mike unpack why the $113 billion spent annually on school construction in the United States is either a massive missed opportunity or a once-in-a-generation gift to students, depending entirely on whether a clear learning vision drives the design.

Listeners will come away with a richer understanding of how strategic facility design, anchored in a community’s portrait of a graduate and long-term learner outcomes, can make transformative pedagogy stickier, more probable, and more equitable. Mike walks through two compelling case studies: Singapore American School’s research-backed, 600-million-dollar campus reimagination and Cranston Public Schools’ Pathfinder project, which renovated a single wing of a 1950s elementary school to demonstrate possibility at scale. He also offers practical, low-cost strategies for classroom teachers and school leaders who want to create the conditions for deeper learning right now, from in-school innovation RFPs to partnering with the media center for purposeful space use to handing students the agency to design their own learning environment.

Check out the deck that accompanies this conversation here.

Transcript

Nate McClennen: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. We’re excited for another great episode today. We’re thinking a lot about the learning ecosystem, part of this larger wayfinding language we use: we start with why, what is the community vision? We go into what, the long-term broad outcomes every learner should be able to do and know. Then how, what’s the actual learning model? For whom, how are they signaling out what they’ve learned and what they know? And finally, where is this learning happening?

So when we talk about learning ecosystems, we’re thinking about learning writ large, students, young people, and adults are learning all the time, whenever they’re navigating the world, wherever they’re existing, whoever they’re interacting with. In school, we think about particular things called school facilities, and sometimes we broaden those to the larger ecosystem. Mike, our guest today, and I are both fond of place-based education, how do we connect learning to the local community? We also think about technology and the virtual worlds students learn in.

Nate McClennen: So today we’re thinking about learning ecosystems, and we’re joined by Mike Posthumus. Mike, you and I have a longtime connection, we both did Teton Science School’s graduate program out here in Jackson, Wyoming a number of years ago. What year did you do yours?

Mike Posthumus: I’m a proud graduate of the 2008-2009 grad class, which I think was class 20.

Nate McClennen: I finished in 1996, ’97, which was quite a bit earlier. But our paths have crossed here and there. You were involved in the Grand Rapids Public Museum School, since you were at the museum beforehand, and then you were involved in starting this great school. It was an XQ school, so you had a huge amount of funding coming in, doing competency-based, place-based, integrated work within the museum. When did you start that?

Mike Posthumus: The XQ Super School award was actually 2016, but part of the story not a lot of people know is we actually designed the Grand Rapids Public Museum Middle School before we did the high school. We started the museum school concept really in 2014, 2015, launching the middle school, and then the high school came just after that.

Nate McClennen: Great. And it was co-located, right? It was actually in the facility?

Mike Posthumus: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The middle school we designed to be located directly on the fourth floor of the Grand Rapids Public Museum. That three-year program is in the public museum, and those students can access the exhibits and all the environments a museum offers for learning, but also the community around it.

And then the high school, incredibly, we were able to renovate and redesign the old museum building, built decades and decades ago, that was no longer inhabited. We reimagined it as a high school, and it’s still connected to the archives of the museum, so we bring real artifacts into the learning experiences every single day. And I say “we,” the curriculum was designed for that concept, and the team that operates that school still lovingly and passionately does amazing work there.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, well, we follow that team and try to report out on them when we hear good news, because there are so many interesting things happening there. They’re certainly on the front end of innovation, and that might’ve been your first intro into facility as part of place, and now you’re at Fielding International.

Fielding International is known for being an international architecture firm, and you have probably one of the more unique roles in the world of education, where you get to intersect the world of architecture, where facilities are designed and built and imagined, and the world of learning design. That’s a really unique position. So, how many years have you been there?

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, I started at Fielding in 2018, so I’m into my eighth year now, working in a variety of roles, but now I’m working as the learning design principal, a principal of the firm supervising these interdisciplinary teams, specifically the team of educators we have working inside of an architecture firm, to really get that alignment and organization, that learning ecosystem, right for every client we have.

A Sixth-Grade Program That Shaped a Career

Nate McClennen: Awesome. So we’re going to come back to that, we’re going to spend the bulk of this pod on it. There’s 113 billion dollars in capital that was spent on schools in 2024, about 10-11% of all K-12 budgets in the public space. So it’s a huge amount of money, and you and I have talked before, which is the genesis for this podcast, that this is a huge opportunity.

Nate McClennen: But let’s think about learning design, and let’s go back in history a little bit. Give me a learning experience in K-12 that you found most effective or most inspiring, one where you felt engaged, you felt like you belonged, and you felt like you learned a lot. What jumps out at you with that prompt of memory lane?

Mike Posthumus: Love the question. I’ve been asked a similar question many times, and my answer has never changed. I’m a proud student of Grand Rapids Public Schools in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and in Grand Rapids they offer an incredible environmental education program called Blandford. Blandford has been around for over fifty years now, or close to it.

Mike Posthumus: When I had the chance to go there, it was two trailers, old trailers, and then a third one placed across, so really three trailers in the middle of a field, situated next to a nature center in Grand Rapids. Sixty sixth-grade students would show up to Blandford every single day, and we were completely embedded in a truly unique setting for learning. What always stood out to me is how powerful it was to use the physical environment as the integrated context for learning. I thrived at Blandford, I found so much out about myself, how I learned best, learned about reflection, learned about what it meant to be a collaborator with peers, because the unique setting Blandford created helped me flourish.

That’s exactly why I do what I do today, and why I love place-based education, because I realized how important the actual setting for learning is in helping young people connect to why learning matters. So, easy answer, it’s always the same: Blandford Environmental Education Program in Grand Rapids Public Schools, and that whole year was transformative. It totally shaped who I am.

Nate McClennen: And was it a sort of day program where you’d go for periodic visits, or did you go for a long stretch, how did that work?

Mike Posthumus: Yep, so think kind of like magnet school era, what was happening is Grand Rapids Public Schools said, “We’re going to take between two and four students from every elementary school in the district, and they’ll have the chance to go to this Blandford program for an entire year.” So that was my school for one year for sixth grade, and I met friends who are still my friends today. Some of the closest people in my life, from different neighborhoods, different communities, different backgrounds, different experiences. They put us all together in this space for one year, where we had to build a completely new community of learners, really dig into this unique experience as a team, and walked away with a lifetime of partnerships with all of these people. So yeah, it’s a pretty amazing program.

Nate McClennen: And still going on today?

Mike Posthumus: Still going on today. I’ve had nieces and nephews and friends who’ve had kids go through the program, and one of the teachers there now, Nick, was a student at Blandford. I was his camp counselor, I went back to be a counselor at Blandford, so Nick and I have that connection, and the legacy lives on in that program. It really does amazing work for students who sometimes need a unique experience.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and this really relates to what we were talking about, learning ecosystems, right? This is a public school system that created this unique experience to help serve the needs of a group of students who would really thrive in that setting, including you, Mike. I love learning about examples of that. I did Teton Science Schools out here too, and that’s different in that it’s not part of the public schools, though many public schools send their students there. It would be really innovative for something like that to actually be part of the public schools. But I love that this is an example from your own history of it being deeply integrated into the public system.

Mike Posthumus: Absolutely. And I’ll mention what’s unique about Grand Rapids in this type of model is they’ve learned that these kinds of unique, contextualized learning experiences can be really effective for reaching learning goals and targets that maybe a traditional setting can’t achieve. So they’ve actually expanded these one-year investments in unique contexts to other programs. We also have the Grand Rapids Zoo School, which operates out of the zoo, and the Center for Economicology, which operates out of a school located in a more urban context but looks at economics, environment, and sustainability as the integrated theme. These sixth-grade experiences happen at a unique time developmentally for learning to take place in interesting ways, and the district is really expanding access to programs like that because they see the impact it actually has on kids.

Nate McClennen: Well, certainly it sparked your thinking and what you’re doing now.

Mike Posthumus: Absolutely.

The Genesis of Fielding International

Nate McClennen: So let’s now flash to the present. You’re working for Fielding, an awesome organization, and you have this really unique position. What does the integration of design and facility look like? Bonds get passed, or schools invest in large-scale, multi-million-dollar projects to build buildings, but it’s often separate from the pedagogy, and I think what you all are doing is starting to merge that. Talk us through what that looks like, what’s the genesis of it, how do people receive it, just give us some context.

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, wow, that’s like seven questions, I’m excited to answer all of them, we’ll piece through it. Let’s start with the genesis. Fielding International started as an international design team, two of the founding partners, Randy Fielding and Prakash Nair, came together. Prakash actually came out of the facilities world in New York Public Schools. Randy was a designer who operated out of Minneapolis, had experience in Chicago doing amazing school projects, and had started a website called DesignShare, where he said, let’s get everyone together and look at what amazing schools are, what’s working in this field.

Prakash and Randy came together and started this company, really to push on the idea that schools weren’t being designed the right way, because we were seeing new needs, new challenges, new opportunities that schools needed to take advantage of, and yet we had these very traditional models of schools being designed and constructed all around the United States.

So they started Fielding International, and since then the team has grown, we’re still a relatively small firm, about twenty-five people. But the way we see ourselves in the world is to create the environments for learners to thrive, and we do that in an integrated way. The process of learning, what does it actually look like to help young people prepare for the world, the experiences we need to provide every single day, the practice students need to succeed, has to be at the forefront of design. We need to clearly understand what our aspirations are, what the vision for learning is, and what the physical environment can then do to support those things.

So when we talk about the emergence of project-based learning, place-based education, higher-quality technical education and career and tech programs, the emergence of AI, whatever the conditions are, what we’ve always found is that the traditional model of classrooms and corridors, “cells and bells,” a hallway with all these individually isolated rooms, really restricts the potential of professional educators and restricts the potential of young people to learn in more intuitive, hands-on, experiential ways.

So Fielding partners with schools and communities to first envision what’s possible, what’s happening around the world in terms of how you might imagine designing school differently, and then works alongside them to co-create in a participatory design process we always facilitate. This is your school, not our school, participate in the process of designing something incredible to serve your community that actually reflects the objectives, the outcomes, and the needs you’re seeing. So this public infrastructure you mentioned, at least ninety billion dollars a year probably, is where we’re projecting in terms of public infrastructure, we’re not building things designed for the last generation, we’re building things that will withstand and be resilient for the next forty or fifty years, which is the minimum useful life of a school. There’s a lot baked into that, but that’s kind of what Fielding does and how we think about the work.

Is This a Trend, or Are You an Outlier?

Nate McClennen: You also asked, well, I asked four other questions, let’s dig into this a little bit. First of all, do you see this as a trend, meaning more and more facility builds are thinking about integration with the learning model, or do you see Fielding and a few other firms out there that do this as outliers, and mostly we’re just building traditional boxes with cells and bells because that’s what everybody knows? What’s the ecosystem-level view of this work right now?

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’d say most designers designing educational facilities certainly have an eye to more progressive models of how to organize a building, so our design partners and other firms we work with, around the United States and around the world, have a sense of the variety and flexibility schools may need to inhabit.

Nate McClennen: So for example, if a school said, “We’re going to do play space, project-based, competency and mastery-based, working together,” and then the facility gets built around that with specific spaces, does it make it more embedded in the DNA of the system, do you think?

Mike Posthumus: So the short answer is yes, I think it does, and we’re starting to see some data to even suggest that the intent behind a design to support these things is actually making a difference in student experience and professional experience. We have a project we can share in a little bit that we’ve done in Singapore, at Singapore American School, where they’ve actually done the research to say, are we creating the conditions for more critical thinking, are we creating the conditions for more collaboration, do our new environments support more of this than our old environments? And the data shows a scientifically measurable yes, it does support that. I’m really excited to share that with you in a moment.

A slightly longer, and I think important, concept to understand is Atomic Habits, a very important book that I think every professional I’ve met has either heard of or read themselves. One of the principles in Atomic Habits is: create the conditions where the things you want to do are easier, and modify your environment or conditions so the things you don’t want to do are harder.

This is exactly the same principle we apply to high-quality, well-designed learning environments that support a pedagogy or mindset or specific vision, and that’s why it becomes sticky. If you want to create more conditions for project-based learning, there’s a principle called architectural probabilism. Can the architecture make it more probable that you will do those things? Subtle ways to do this might be making where direct instruction happens very specific for direct instruction, maybe a little smaller with the right type of furniture, so direct instruction is really well designed, but make it really easy to open and spill out into places that are really well equipped for project-based learning. So now a teacher or a team or a school is more incentivized to take advantage of those other environments because it’s at their fingertips and easier to use.

In the same way, you can restrict behavior. If you don’t want people siloed in their own classroom, so amazing pedagogy isn’t isolated and hidden from view, and you want your new young teachers to learn from your master educators and see the brilliant moves they’re making with their kids, then some strategic transparency in places helps you notice what’s happening. Creating conditions where teachers can come together more frequently actually limits the ability to close down and be hidden. These are strategic moves schools can be thinking about to incentivize and support the behavior you want and restrict the behavior we know isn’t in service of student outcomes.

Nate McClennen: Okay, so first of all, I love learning new words, you’ve said “architectural probabilism.”

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, the architects taught me that one, I am not a trained architect. I was like, ooh, that’s good, my education friends will like that one.

Nate McClennen: I appreciate this idea of strategic transparency, because too often in schools, as you and I both know, the door gets shut, people run their own kingdoms or empires in their classrooms. They can be extraordinary teachers, but the transparency of the system doesn’t happen. All right, well, let’s do some screen share, we’re going to try something new on the podcast, we occasionally try it. Let’s take a trip to Singapore and share what you actually mean when you talk about designing facilities that potentially impact student outcomes and learning.

Case Study: Singapore American School

Mike Posthumus: All right, can you see my screen? Singapore American School Reimagine. So the big concept here, and by the way, this school, this work started with planning and engagement, we did over a hundred community engagements over the course of many years to imagine what’s possible here. There are a couple of really important stories in the Singapore American School project that are impactful.

I’m going to try not to make this a slideshow, but I’ll click through some things relatively quickly to get to the key points. The big idea, why do this, why make this extraordinary investment in their facilities? It came down to fostering joy and purpose in learning. Part of this is similar to a profile of the graduate, their mission was, we want our school to be joyful, we want our people to develop and understand purpose and how to find purpose, kind of master their superpowers and see how it applies to the world so they can be change agents in the world. Then you see some of those learner profiles: critical thinking, content knowledge, cultural competence, character. This was at the root of the design. If we’re going to reimagine our facilities, we need to create the conditions where we can do more of this more seamlessly.

Nate McClennen: Mike, they created those prior to your engagement, so those existed, or you helped facilitate that?

Mike Posthumus: When we engaged with them, they were developing these. Singapore American School is a very motivated school, they have some of the most extraordinary educators in the world working there, and they were well on their path to having these established as we came alongside them.

Nate McClennen: For listeners who aren’t seeing the video, as Mike said, we have a great portrait of a graduate on top with a set of competencies, and then some strategic focuses around excellence, extraordinary care, possibilities. On the bottom, which I think is really important to note, are the values: compassion, fairness, honesty, respect, responsibility. So all the critical structures, you have a vision, you create a set of outcomes, and how do humans behave, the values, as they’re striving for these outcomes.

Mike Posthumus: Yeah. So this is a much more boring graphic, but it’s really the crux of how we started to think about facilities aligning with learning. You have this learning agenda with these competencies, what they ended up calling their DSLOs, the acronym they use for summarizing that content. We need time and space for learners to do their best. We need greater flexibility in how students are grouped in order to accomplish these things. We need a wider range of specialized spaces to support the huge range of students they had. At the same time, they had an aging facility, like many schools around the world. Their facilities needed work, the spaces weren’t flexible, they were encouraging the wrong behaviors of staying siloed rather than encouraging collaborative practice. So the campus upgrade, what we needed to do in this facility project, is really at the center of these two combined needs.

The result of this project is functionally a 2,000-student elementary school that’s seven floors, with three point six acres of outdoor play space surrounding it, built around a learning community model of how you take this massive school and ensure every student has that value of extraordinary care invested in them, while ensuring the facility supports this future of learning the school committed to delivering for all its students. The elementary school is the first of really multiple projects, ultimately SAS has decided to invest over six hundred million dollars in reimagining their space to align to this future of learning, because their old facilities were no longer adequate.

This is a beautiful outdoor play space, situated on what I believe is the third level of the building, and you have learning communities and classrooms surrounding it, so students can come out and play right outside their classrooms even at higher points of the building. These conditions are all really important, but we started with those learning competencies, critical thinking, collaboration, things like that, of course you learn about those things through play as a young person, but we also have the experience inside school.

Nate McClennen: So far, I’m just reiterating the power here, you started with a strong vision, a strong set of values, a clear set of outcomes, and you’re building into that, building and saying, what will develop those? By having play spaces on multiple stories, you make it quicker to access the places where they learn to collaborate more, right? So your delay, most schools you have to go downstairs, especially in a 2,000-kid school, you have to go downstairs, go outside to a play structure that’s shared, et cetera. Okay, so now let’s talk about indoor spaces, what did it look like inside?

Mike Posthumus: Great, so I’m headed to that slide. This is fascinating. The concept of how you make a large school feel small, we kind of centralize the facilities that all students would access nearly every single day, library, STEM centers, maker spaces, the cafe, that’s kind of at the core of the building. And then on the slide you’re seeing, you see all these numbers, G1, G2, G3, these are grade one, grade two, grade three, a world language center, distributed into these smaller hubs. Each hub is organized around an outdoor space, so you have this constant flow of in and out of learning environments. This image is probably showing the grade three learning community with access to their specialized playground.

This is the core of their learning community, the community commons, and the concept they developed was, we need agile and flexible space to accommodate about ninety students at a time, and we want this space to be able to adapt and transform, really to even have students help us adapt and transform it, so they have agency of the environment. Every learning commons, like you see in this image, is surrounded by a set of classrooms, and each classroom has a different set of features, but they’re designed for core instruction. You see that strategic transparency between different parts of these learning spaces, some doors that can open, a garage door, windows outdoors so you can supervise learning that happens outside, so a team of educators can flow, see, supervise, and partner in providing just the right experience for the students in this community.

This is another image, stepping back in that space, you see these flexible walls on the left, panels that can be readjusted and moved throughout the day, creating an isolated classroom environment but also being open. Here you’re seeing them use it as a gallery space, like a pin-up board for student artwork and display. So you see a lot of modularity and flexibility in the design, so the teaching team can really organize the environment to fit whatever project, unit, or focus the students are having.

Case Study: Cranston Public Schools

Mike Posthumus: So that’s the international example, and a lot of times we talk about these spaces and people say, well, that’s great, Mike, that’s what they’re doing over in Singapore, we can’t do that here in the States. Of course we can. I have a second case to share, about Cranston Public Schools. Are you familiar with that project?

Nate McClennen: Nope, just give us a quick rundown of the similarities and differences, I think you and I could talk for a couple hours on this, but let’s use the time. So jump into Cranston and we’ll go from there.

Mike Posthumus: The key with Cranston, it’s the same, we came in early and said, look, before you design these facilities, you really need to establish a strong vision for the future, and that should be the basis of design. Not just “we want all kids to succeed,” but when you show up at this school, what are kids doing, what is the experience surrounding them? So, many engagements with this community, and essentially the core principle is, we have twenty-first century life, and that requires twenty-first century learning, and we need to do that in twenty-first century buildings. We set a set of guiding principles related to kind of a learner profile concept, how do you create an environment that really aligns to what our community is asking for.

Then we designed what we call a Pathfinder project. The key to a Pathfinder project is that it’s a smaller-scale transformation that can demonstrate possibility for bigger investments. This is one of the key strategic levers we help schools with, how can you do something that has a huge impact. SAS did this at their middle school level and used the learning to design that elementary school facility. At Eden Park, we designed essentially a wing of their building, an old, 1950s or 1960s design elementary school with outdated facilities, and we refreshed what it looks like on the outside. But more importantly, in the red box you see that “cells and bells,” classroom and corridor model.

So we identified these parts of the building and ran what’s called a Pathfinder project, where we engaged specifically the teachers working in this area and said, we’re going to come alongside you and help you imagine what the ideal conditions for learning are, based on this work we did with the community, and how does that show up in day-to-day instruction. We renovated it into a far more dynamic space. You see the same principles as Singapore American School: a range of five classrooms on the bottom, each anchored with small group instructional spaces for intervention or extension. In the light pink, you see the commons area, a collaborative space for project-based learning, also used to gather multiple classrooms together to launch interesting projects. The purple is a special education resource environment, however, since using this space, they actually stopped using it that way, because they moved to an integrated model, which they found to be far more effective for their kids, so now it’s just another instructional space if you need to pull a group of kids in. And the blue is a STEM center.

So this third-through-fifth-grade community now has this range of spaces, all anchored with a yellow spot in the middle, their teacher collaboration room. You see the before of this, a likely image many of you listening probably recognize, a cinder block hallway with no windows, and the after is a beautiful space with natural lighting and learning resources, maximizing every square foot of the facility. This is what the classroom used to look like in Eden Park, students in individual desks facing each other in project groups, and afterwards it’s a far more dynamic, light-filled space with flexible and modular furniture and a variety of resources kids can connect into.

Public schools are doing this, and I’ll say the final piece, Garden City, is really the culmination of all of this. They did the Eden Park Pathfinder and then went out and got the community to support a large funding proposal to build completely new facilities designed around this concept. Garden City has recently opened, with that same design philosophy, and you see that range and dynamic groupings of students where teachers can collaborate, work in teams, kids can find the space that works best for them. Intervention and personalized learning can really excel because you can offer those spaces more easily, they have acoustic separation, these are not open-plan schools, these are schools with a huge range of variety and diversity. They’re just this year opening their second brand-new facility in that same community, and they’re really enjoying these new environments.

So it’s an amazing success story, and it starts with building that community vision and building from there. We love the work, we love our friends over at Cranston, if you’re listening, keep it up.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, and again, we’re just, I want to double-click and double-click again on this idea that you have a vision, you have a clear set of outcomes, the learning model drives toward those outcomes, and you have this opportunity to create a learning ecosystem that actually facilitates that. I think that’s the big missing link in all the older structures we have. So I want to finish, Mike, thanks for the show and tell, it’s awesome, we haven’t done this much on the podcast, but it was really great to see, especially when talking about facilities and learning spaces.

Small Steps for Districts Without a Big Facilities Budget

Nate McClennen: Two last questions for you. The first: it’s nice if you can pass a bond and facilities money is there, but what’s the relevance for someone who’s in a traditional system, who just has control over their classroom, maybe a small classroom furniture budget? What are the small steps someone could take when they don’t have the opportunities like these two examples you shared?

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, so number one is advocacy, to create the conditions your district or school is really asking you to do. I’d say almost every school I’ve ever worked with, if you look at their guiding documents, there’s language about collaboration, language about applied learning experiences, language about high levels of academic rigor. All the research says that rigor is achieved in exactly these types of contexts. So one, get yourself ready to say, this is exactly what we want to do, and then propose a path of action. One of the most effective things we’ve helped some schools do is design an internal, in-school RFP.

Teachers have to submit together and come up with a proposal for what innovation they want to implement in their school, have principals or a superintendent or curriculum director review those, and then put it into play, test it, get small-scale wins in place. Leading some type of initiative to learn what innovations, based on the problems we’re trying to solve, our own team is already doing, and just elevate or make small investments in that, I think is huge in terms of scaling what’s actually working in classrooms.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing, for those of you thinking, that’s all great, Mike, but my administrator isn’t supporting me in that way, or my district isn’t, but I feel this is what we need to be doing: one, find that teaching partner who wants to take one week out of the year and make one room look one way and another room look another way, and think about how, in one week, you can make that a dynamic experience for two groups of two classrooms of kids. That’s one really easy step, just five days.

The other strategy we’ve found really effective is to go to your library media center or your media specialist and see if you can carve out a three-day deep dive where you’re using space differently, using the media center and your classroom as two zones for learning, aligning those spaces with the modality you’re trying to get. Maybe you’re doing discussion in the classroom and research and focus in the media center, or maybe you’re doing making in the media center and literacy and focus in the classroom. But start to think about using space for an intended purpose, make it look and feel different for the students, and then document the amazing success you’ll see with your kids in that process, so you have evidence to say, we need to do more of this. Those would be my two things to start with.

Nate McClennen: I love that, and you actually had sort of a third. So you had this in-school RFP, advocate to create the conditions and propose small-scale wins, and then the partner-room change, one room one way, one room the other, and the greater partnership with the media center for different purposes. I’m going to add a fourth to this, I’ve seen this in action where on the first day of school, the teacher just puts all the furniture in the middle of the classroom, and the kids come in and say, what do we want this classroom to look like? Which is hard for teachers who love to set up their classrooms, but it’s really amazing what gets created when that’s the case. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it’s a pretty awesome experience.

Mike Posthumus: Snaps, same here, one hundred percent. I think a major mental shift, we actually work with a lot of teachers on transitioning into more collaborative models as part of our practice, releasing agency to students to be the designers of the learning space is really the goal. It’s a frustration, but I also understand the want to curate a classroom so all students feel welcomed into that space. But so often I see environments where teachers have gone maybe further than their intention, and it feels like the teacher owns the environment. I like to challenge teachers to say, does the room reflect your beliefs and personalities more, or the twenty-five or thirty students you have in that classroom, does it reflect their beliefs and personalities and cultures more? Which one is overpowering? We’d argue that the more it can reflect the learners, the more impactful that learning space will be.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, no, that’s great, and I can think of an infinite number of variations, students designing, hey, for this week we’re going to rearrange, or this part of the corner, the reading nook, we’re going to test that over and over.

Mike Posthumus: Yeah, we talk a lot about setup, like, hey, we’re in collaborative mode, the students can design collaborative mode, all right, we’re in teacher mode, let’s do direct instruction. The kids can contribute to designing those settings, and then they can help move the furniture because they own it. It’s easier, it’s faster, they love it.

Closing Takeaways

Nate McClennen: Mike, awesome conversation. I think we’ve gone huge scale with Singapore and Cranston and what can happen there, but you really tied this up by saying, at the classroom level, at the teacher level, we can actually make changes happen. I’m going to give a quick summary of what I learned today. When we’re pushing for new learning models, and we know they’re going to help us reach stronger outcomes, they don’t necessarily match with our old school facility style.

So when you have an opportunity in your community to do a new facility, think about how it’s going to actually be informed by your long-term vision, your outcomes, and your learning model itself. This idea of co-creation and co-participation, which you said over and over again, I think is really important across all of the education space, but now, of course, in facility too. The idea of creating the conditions, where you have the quality of teaching but also the quality of the space, both those things can matter in the outcomes. I love your reference to Atomic Habits, love the book, creating the conditions where the things you want to do are easier. That might be my biggest takeaway, because it applies to teaching in general, but it also applies to the space. Strategic transparency, what does it look like to liberally share and create facilities and learning spaces that allow us to liberally share from each other. And then you walked us through a couple of awesome examples, Cranston, Singapore American School, of some really fabulous architectural experiences, where it wasn’t just the building of something but the pedagogy that inspired the building.

Nate McClennen: So Mike, what’s the last thing, something we haven’t asked, something you’d like to say before we sign off today?

Mike Posthumus: I believe one of the greatest gifts a decision-maker can offer its community in the facilities realm is the gift of enough time to build coherence about what you’re building. More often than not, we’re thrown into projects with really compressed timelines, really compressed budgets, and it’s like on time, on budget, those are the only two priorities. If you can be thoughtful about getting ready for that timeline, and take the time to do the visioning, the deep research, the empathy work, really understand what it is you’re trying to achieve, you’ll have a less expensive and more seamless process on the tail end of that. I can’t encourage that enough for those of you making decisions for these facilities, which are ultimately decisions for kids, and they’re not in the room to make those decisions. So it’s our responsibility to do a good job.

Nate McClennen: Mike, thank you so much for your work, Mike Posthumus, Fielding International, learning designer extraordinaire. Let’s keep these conversations going, and we’ll put a bunch of info and links in the show notes if people want to dive in more. Thanks for your time today, and appreciate the work that you do.

Mike Posthumus: Thanks, Nate. Always appreciate hanging out, especially with a fellow TSS grad. Good to see you again.

Nate McClennen: Love it.

Additional Resources

• Michael Posthumus on Fielding International
• Fielding International
• Podcast Episode Deck of Images

Past Interviews:

• Eduforum 2024 Presentation
• Educational Visioning in Ohio
• School Matters Podcast – Episode 8