Podcast: Dr. Robert Dillon on Designing Learning Spaces

We’re listening to the Getting Spent Podcast. Where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. I’m your host Caroline and today we’re talking with Robert Dillon about learning space design. Robert shared with me more about his book, The Space, a guide for educators on how to create creative spaces for learning.

He pulls from personal experience as a middle school principal for 15 years at an expeditionary learning school. He saw that students there were able to take these learning experiences at EL and expand them into other parts of their lives. Aside from sharing great information, the book is beautifully designed.

It’s the type of book where you want to doodle in it, jot down ideas, and share it with others. If you check it out, you’ll love the size of it as well. Let’s listen into my conversation with Robert as we talk more about designing systems that work for all learners. Dr. Robert Dillon, welcome to the Getting Smart Podcast.

That’s great to be here and great to get to share a little bit about learning space design. Yeah, we are so excited to just hear from you and the work that you are doing. As I have shared with the listeners, you released a book called The Space, a guide for educators that is beautiful. We really enjoyed as a team just looking through it and seeing the interesting ways that you

thought about just book design and content design. I think it definitely says a lot about how you’re thinking about space and space for learning. Yeah, thanks. It certainly was a lot of fun to put that book together.

My co-author, Rebecca Herr and I really worked hard to make sure that the layout and the design really allowed teachers to have something that was accessible. I know that demand on time are what they are for teachers. We just want to make sure people could pick it up on a Friday, read it over the weekend and do something real with it on Monday.

Yeah, I love that. Why does space matter? Why does it matter how and where we learn? Why does it play such a big role? It’s interesting.

As a middle school principal for 15 years, it wasn’t right at the top of my priority list. I really have drilled back to this idea that I was the principal at a school that was an expeditionary learning school, so very place-based in nature. I saw some kids once we got out of the classroom doing some just amazing things and totally

into their learning, totally into everything. I was just like, we’ve got to be able to bridge this back to our classrooms. I think that that’s when I realized that these learning spaces, these classrooms have such an upside if we are really thoughtful about them. I think that started the journey.

Where can I start? If I’m a teacher and my school is not going through a major redesign process and we’re not getting a new building, I have a passion for this and I want to create with my students this learning space, how can I get started? I think that was one of the keys that Rebecca and I were really focused on was not creating

another gap. We didn’t want schools that had passed a bond to create another gap. We wanted teachers to be able to optimize their space. We use that term a lot. How do you optimize your space?

I think the key is staying away from cute, neat, and fancy and making sure that you’re making changes because they’re going to sync with your instructional practices. One of the easiest things you can do is really just take an audit of all the things hanging on the walls of your room to make sure they’re really supporting learning and not just becoming visual distraction.

I love that. I think too, we spend, the Getting Smart team spends time in schools every week. Oftentimes you would think that it was the new schools, the shiny schools that are going to have the most joy of learning happening, where you see the most interactions. In fact, some of our favorite schools around the countries are ones where it is just a

really unique environment when you walk in. It’s a teacher that has thought a lot with her students, who are her students, about the space and how you can set it up so that it’s equitable access for all the students. I love your focus too on that, that this doesn’t have to be breaking down walls necessarily. It can just be taking an assessment of what do you have available and what are some small

tweaks that you can make. Yeah, and it really amplifies some of the best practices we know. If we can have kids sitting where they’re talking to each other and they’re in a collaborative space and they’re in a circle and they can stand up and we can make sure that when we’re doing things that are project-based, that we have space for storage and we can use the

floor and you mentioned accessibility and just thinking about those universal design for learning practices. There’s such a crosswalk, but we have to be intentional and it has to be a priority or else like everything else. It’ll just sink to the bottom and it’ll get left to a inertia, momentum and tradition.

Let’s talk for a second about students as co-designers of the space. I know a lot of times I hear about my teacher friends and they spend their August really thinking about their classrooms and getting in there and setting them up. What does it mean to really have students as the co-designers of the space? We’re not just talking about allowing students to choose their seat.

It’s much more agency than some might think is typical in a classroom. Yeah, for sure. I think it goes all the way back to having this designer’s mindset and this idea that empathy and it’s user-centric. If students aren’t at the core of why things are set up, then it’s not going to be a good

idea. It’s going to be optimal. There’s a couple of things that teachers can do that make that really easy. Every two weeks, just ask your students what’s working for you and what’s not working for you.

Once we get in the habit of doing that, we really are putting students in the center. The other thing we do all the time is ask teachers to ask their students what’s new in the classroom. Students will start pointing to things that have been there all year long and that’s really good feedback, right?

Because if it’s invisible, it’s not helping learning. How do we make sure that we continue to notice our space? Your point there on the teacher asking what’s working, how do you create a space that has that flexibility? What happens if you build out a space together with your students and it just doesn’t work?

You’re not noticing that it’s contributing to better outcomes. It just might not have played out as well as the original design. How do you go from there and iterate in that space? Sure. One of the things that when I’m working with schools and teachers is we sometimes say,

what are three really good setups of the classroom or designs of the classroom? What types of instructional practices do they sync with? Oftentimes, we find things don’t work because they weren’t designed for the instruction that was happening. Another thing we’ll see is that really the norms of space design haven’t been set up.

We go into schools all the time where there’s rules and norms for everything, but we make these assumptions that kids are going to know how to behave and to operate in a creative learning space. We have to be really strong with saying, this is what it means to be in a space for creation. This is what it means to be in a space for quiet.

If we do that, I think there’s a good chance it’ll really work. It sounds like the classroom culture plays a big role too. It’s not just about building a space, but really building that mindset around it too. I think it’s one of the scariest things for teachers that are leaning into this is that if my classroom management is amazing, this is going to make it even better.

If my classroom management is a little shaky or I’m still trying to grow in that space, this can tip things in the wrong direction. It’s an amplifier. It amplifies great instruction, but it also amplifies the things that we know aren’t best practice as well.

How have you seen great learning spaces really address the needs of all types of learners? Really keeping equity at the center too, understanding that one type of space isn’t going to work for all learners and one type of instruction. How have great teachers used space to really focus on the equity component too? One of the pieces we see is that students that have some behavioral issues in class,

sometimes when you get to the root cause, is that they need to have some level of choice and movement in their classroom. The research really backs that up. I would say that the research is strong but growing and I really appreciate the work out of the University of Melbourne, the work that they’re doing.

Really, Australia and New Zealand are about a decade ahead of us on this, so if folks want to look back on what has and is working, they should go there. Even that, that’s an accessibility issue for kids that need to move or kids that need some level of choice. In terms of the way they’re traditionally designed, oftentimes force those types of

kids to end up in the bathroom. If I need a place to be quiet, I have to go to the bathroom. If I need a place to move, I have to go to the bathroom and that’s not okay. How have you seen teachers learn and understand how this changes their instruction? What resources are out there?

If I am passionate about this, I’ve set up my classroom now but now I need to figure out how do I manage all these spaces, students in different places, learning in different ways. How can teachers find the support needed to be able to build that classroom culture for all their students?

Yeah, and certainly I’m trying to push out as much content as I can and collect it where I can. Certainly, my account on Twitter is going to get you to a lot of places. I think there’s a growing conversation at the hashtag learning spaces or active learning. I think both of those are great pieces.

Then, some of the furniture manufacturers, some of the folks that are really putting themselves in a learning stance or posture are doing some research around this that can be really helpful for teachers and they’re pushing that material out. It’s starting to become easier and easier. The best part is now we’re getting more and more teachers to share the work they’re doing

and getting past that, well, probably what I’m doing is not a big deal and no one will learn from it. Just trying to get people to say every idea that can be a communal idea can be built on. I think that’s starting to build some momentum around that. Why are these learning spaces an important part of students really sharing their learning?

Would love for you to just tap in a little bit about the difference between showcasing and displaying work that you described in your book. Yeah. We’re finding this to be really powerful. Sometimes people ask, if you could go back and rewrite the book, which part would you

add to? I think that that’s the part where we would certainly add more content and more clarity. Really this idea in schools, we do a great job of highlighting hard work and product. You walk up and down halls, there’s artwork, there’s essays, there’s all of those things. It runs counterintuitive to the conversations we’re having in classrooms like process matters,

the learning design process, the engineering process, the scientific process. Where are we celebrating process in our classrooms? One really easy things you can do is that if you have a display of amazing student work, take a few of those down and add pictures of actually the kids doing the work. If we can add images throughout a school in classrooms, in hallways of kids doing work,

it starts to value the fact that that’s a place of work and a place of learning and that the process really matters. And then just whatever we can do to showcase that learning is messy. We learned a lot from Regimilia around documentation and that work. Anything we can do around that really sends this nonverbal message to kids that the process

matters. I love what you said too, just about feedback. Opening yourself up to feedback and understanding that part of that process is hearing from your peers and understanding what you could do differently and how you can keep improving as well. So one of the things I think we lose is that we talk a lot about student-to-student feedback

and cooperative learning and giving the kids opportunities to talk about each other’s work. But teacher-to-teacher feedback, especially around learning spaces, is really important. And we can get in a trap here, and I think it’s important to point out, is that we can go into a colleague’s room and say, oh, it looks so beautiful in here. And this looks amazing.

And it kind of has Pinterest all over the place. And that kind of positive feedback actually creates a loop of decoration as opposed to design. So I think we have to be really good about asking tough questions to our peers and really taking time to be in each other’s space because no matter what space you’re in, whether it’s your own home or your neighborhood, you start not to see things.

And so that feedback loop between teachers is really important in this as well. And so this is about collaboration and really listening to your peers. But there’s also a great part in the book too, where you do start to talk more about that time for quiet and the sort of building the reflection time. It seems like that is an important component of learning spaces that you guys discuss.

It is. And the Pew study that just came out that said that the number one worry for kids is stress and anxiety in schools really has us leaning into this point in schools. And this isn’t just about the cute tent or the pillows in the corner in the primary classroom. It really is. Where can a middle school and where can our high school kids be in a classroom so they don’t lose out on instructional time?

That the norms of that space are that, hey, I can choose to be there. You can choose for me to be there. But when we’re here, people are leaving us alone. And our introverts really get pushed so hard in education to be extroverts. And classroom design can help kids have a moment for processing, a moment for reflection, a moment to reset from whatever happened before they walked in the door.

I work at a school district in St. Louis where 80% of our kids are impacted by poverty every day. There are just moments where we need a breath. And so we want the classroom to support that. Because if it doesn’t, kids will find another place. Can you share some of your favorite examples of learning spaces around the country, whether it’s a specific school or just things that you’ve appreciated,

that you’ve seen in classrooms that have paid a lot of attention to what students need? Yeah, there’s a journey going on in Cleveland at Menlo Park Academy, a charter school that moved into an 80,000 square foot factory, old factory. And they are working so hard to really think about a modern space that allows for kind of fluid multi-age learning. And it’s not perfect yet, but I really appreciate the journey that they’re on.

I’ve had a chance to spend some time at St. Andrew’s Episcopal in Potomac, Maryland. And they are really bringing together this idea about mind-brain education and the learning space design. And it’s been really good. And we’re actually doing some additional work there over the summer. And so those are two places that I can really point to. And then there are some just scrappy schools here in St. Louis where our principals gotten on the phone and said, hey,

will you just come and start to kind of turn the Titanic for us? Let us know that it’s okay to get rid of some things. Let us know that it’s okay to kind of not have a scarcity mentality. And so I really appreciate those schools that know that they’re not adding a whole bunch of new things, but they can do a ton of addition by subtraction. And I’ve just seen these mid-career teachers really light up with the possibility that this can transform their impact on kids. And so all of

those things are great pieces of the puzzle. But we’re seeing more and more. This isn’t going away for the next five to 10 years. This is only going to get bigger. And are there, if you think about where to start and sort of the basics of the room, are there sort of basic design principles or structures that you would use for every classroom? For example, are there certain areas you think each classroom should have? Or is that really tailored based on the age range and the school

and who the educator is? So super highly customizable is probably the easy answer. The harder part is, I think that some schools have been able to say like, hey, we’re going to pursue four or five big principles. And so I think no matter if you’re in a high school social studies class, a pre-K class, a middle school French class, you can say things like next year, I’m going to have less in my classroom rather than more. I’m going to find some things that are no longer serving

kids. I’m going to make sure that the writable space in my classroom is accessible to kids, because we know that drawing and sketching the research is clear, helps the cement learning. We’re going to make sure that the foreground of our classroom isn’t distracting. And so maybe we take some things down on the wall that’s the predominant wall in the room. We can have a long conversation about whether that wall should exist, but in 90 percent of classrooms it does,

we can at least say, hey, let’s optimize the foreground. And so we’re seeing schools have those types of principles that they’re pursuing, and then they’re able to do that across the building and be supportive of each other. And so all of that’s working in a lot of spaces. And what’s sort of your best advice? I know in the book you kind of provide a sample letter, but if I’m an educator and I need to convince maybe the leadership at the school to let me pilot

this, to let me try it out in my classroom, how should they go about that? What sort of resources or approach have you seen be really successful and maybe moving a school along to allow this to happen in more of the classrooms? Yeah, one of the advice pieces that I hand is that do not do all of this over the summer and then surprise your parents with it, right? That’s the worst case scenario. You know, what we know and we always have known is that student voice overpowers adult

voice. So whatever you can do to capture images and video of kids experiencing learning in these types of spaces, that’s the number one thing I think convinces adults, convinces communities, convinces people, taxpayers, whatever that is. So gather student voice is number one. I think number two is that some people need to hear that the research is strong around this and growing, and so we can’t leave that part out. And then the other piece is that we have to bring it back

to learning, right? This can’t be cute, neat, and fancy. It can’t be that we want to really make the room beautiful. But we think that when instructional design, technology tools, and the physical space are in sync with each other, that we have the best chance of having kids that are engaged and joyful and growing in their learning. So you touch there briefly on technology and touch pretty briefly in the book on technology too. So can you just talk a little bit about how are you

seeing technology, you know, sort of woven into the design of great learning spaces? How does that look? Where should you start? Yeah, you know, one of the best, you know, when you get to visit a lot of schools, you see amazing teachers doing amazing things. I had a teacher the other day that was using her big visual display, her interactive whiteboard, to show images that were associated with what the students in the classroom were learning. So they were learning about a novel,

and she’s like, I want to use that big visual display that sometimes just sits fallow and isn’t being used in the classroom as a place where when a kid is in the middle of a conversation about this novel, he can look up, not be entertained by the image, but to let that image cement what’s being discussed in class. And so the idea that technology and images can be used to cement learning and make learning sticky was just a great use of technology in that space.

And you know, I think as we have, you know, more mobile wireless devices in classrooms, it certainly lends itself to, hey, do we need a computer lab? Do we need wired devices? Can we give table space back to things like creation? And so lots of moving parts there, depending on where a district is, but technology definitely plays a role if you’re doing this right. And, you know, one of the things that our team is really focused on and are writing a book on

right now is place-based education. So thinking about how our communities really become a powerful place for learning. How have you seen, you know, some of these principles from learning spaces, maybe inside a school building, applied in our communities and the assets that students and teachers might have access to? Yeah. And so certainly I was blessed to be a middle school principal where 20% of the year we were either outside, out in the community or outside of the

community. Seeing the power of it, seeing, you know, my daughter’s an eighth grader, she’s getting ready to spend a week in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, that’s 11 hours from our house learning down there with her class. And so we know the power of it. But where this works is when teachers say things like, who are the other five people that could teach my class? Where are the places in our community that can make sure that kids have a sense of place? And so we want to make sure that teachers,

even if they can’t go on field trips or get out into their community, we can bring a lot of that in. And there are tons of partnerships almost everywhere I go where, you know, utility companies and large corporations, they want to support this work. And I’ve been able to hook up a lot of schools when they start to say like, we want our learning space to have very thin classroom walls, we want to have experts into our classrooms, we want to call across national lines, we want to be able to

do those things. And it is just another piece of that collaboration that we describe in the book. And I like to call that kind of third level collaboration when kids are actually collaborating with other kids around the country. I love that. And I think the more that we can find really authentic ways to engage our community continues to just be really powerful and extends access, right? It means that you’re not putting as much emphasis on just what the kind of four walls of

your room look like. Yeah, when I workshop with teachers, one of the questions that I’ll ask is like, what are the five major social issues or five major issues that are impacting your community? And, you know, many of our teachers commute into their school, right? Like they drive in, they work really hard, they do amazing things with kids, but they go home. And I think it’s really hard to ask folks to be more place-based or community oriented, unless they’ve identified

these are the big things that are impacting our community. And then how can I build curriculum around that? How can I build partnership around that? And I think those are really important questions to be asking ourselves while we’re in classrooms. And I think that also plays into the, you know, we like to think about thinking global and acting local. Like how do you help students understand where they can have an impact and what that looks like in their communities too?

Yeah, you know, here in Missouri, I worry that so many of our rural communities just continue to be drained of amazing kids, right? Kids say things like, I don’t see how I could do X while I lived in Y. And the reality is so many of the things that you want to do in life can happen pretty much wherever you want to be. And that’s the beauty of where we are these days, but kind of opening kids’ eyes to the fact that, you know what, you want to code for an international company

from your own couch? Probably do that. You want to make an impact on some sort of social justice issue from Japan. And you want to do that in the United States, you can probably do that. But giving kids those skills and practicing those skills while they’re in our schools is so important. And finally, if I am a parent and I appreciate all this, I know there’s ways that I can go and encourage my son or daughter’s teachers to think about this, but how can I even think about learning

spaces in our home and what that looks like and apply some of these principles so that, you know, that our family has a culture of great learning spaces as well? Yeah, what a great question. I think that the number one piece for me is when I go into, you know, my home to do a better job of this is to have really space where kids feel like they can create prototyping materials, whiteboard, places to draw, places to sketch, places to leave messy

projects out where they don’t get, you know, yelled at out of that sort of thing. So if you’re looking at kind of one of those things, you know, what can you do to give your kids that kind of make, create, design opportunity? And, you know, I think it’s valuable for some of that to be digital, but also some of that to be analog. And I think that, you know, that would be a number one thing that I would hope that more homes could bring into what they’re doing. And what I’m finding is

something interesting is that as we talk about learning spaces, I’m seeing churches reach out and say, Hey, we want to think of our church communities a learning space, help us with that. Public libraries that are saying we really want this to be more of a community center. How can we think about that? So this work around learning spaces is starting to kind of reach out into places I never expected. Yeah, I see that too. We work with a lot of great community organizations and you

have these wonderful community assets that are just right to allow students and educators to use them for that and even parents. So it’s definitely something that we advocate for too, is how are we using different spaces in our community as learning spaces and letting us sort of expand beyond just a typical school? Yeah, I’m working with an interesting project in the Chicago area. There is a, it’s a business, but they’re trying to craft this really beautifully

designed space for kids to be able to come there between three o’clock and 10 o’clock. Sometimes it’s to get out of the stress of home. Sometimes it’s new homework. Sometimes it’s to get tutoring kids and families sign up like it’s a membership. But it’s a really intriguing concept because the bell doesn’t dictate when learning happens. So we have to be thinking about what is the 24 hour of learning space, right? Not to create more stress and anxiety, but to create

beautiful, inspiring spaces for all kids to learn when they want to learn. That is a great way to leave this, that creativity, you can’t kind of bound it by time, right? So allowing that learning to continue is really important and something that I think we care a lot about as well. Bob, if people would like to learn more about you and your work, we’ll certainly link to the book and our show notes, but where can people stay in touch with you and continue to grain some of your

wonderful resources? Yeah, I am Dr. Robert Dillon.com. Get you to my website and that also gets you to me on Twitter as well. And that’s probably the two places. I’m finding myself putting more things up on LinkedIn as well, so we can connect there as well. Great. Well, thank you so much. And again, congratulations on the success of this book. We’re excited to share it and to see more educators have a resource like this available and one that allows for creativity. It doesn’t just tell them

what to do, but lets them be part of that design process too. So again, thank you so much for your time today and for the contributions to the field on learning spaces. Thank you so much. Thanks to Robert for taking time to talk with us about designing learning spaces. I love the way that he approached it and the different ways in which parents, educators, and administrators can all contribute to different learning spaces.

We appreciate his thoughts on the experience educators can take into their own classrooms and how to build a unique classroom culture. For more resources, Robert suggests checking out his social media profiles. Don’t worry, we’ll link them for you. And the hashtag learning spaces and hashtag active learning spaces across social media. We’d love to hear from you about the type of learning spaces you’re designing over the summer. Are you doing a full redesign of your school,

redesign of your classroom, or just a corner of your home if you’re a parent? If you don’t already, we’d love for you to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review. For the Getting Smart podcast, this is Caroline, signing off.