As school designers, we’re used to thinking about how a building can be a “third teacher.” There are the teachers, there are the other students, and there’s the environment they spend their days in. And we know that each of these elements plays a key role in what students learn. So we add signs that show how the heating system works, or we call out the materials the walls are made of, or we reveal the route the roof water takes to get wherever it goes. In so doing, we’re choosing the kind of teacher our building will be: one who teaches by explaining. A lecturer-building.
And that’s a big choice. The building is the teacher that’s always there, wrapping around the others—a concrete statement of what the school believes about the kind of teaching and learning it wants to have happen inside it. When we set up the physical space, we surround students and staff with a medium whose message shapes their sense of what teaching should look like (I speak and you listen); how learning should work (by transmission from expert to novice); what knowledge is made of (a truth so sure you could write it in stone). So, when we turn our school building into a teacher, we need to think seriously about the kind of teacher we’re building.
Because what we learn—and how we learn—is shaped, too, by the character of the teacher we learn from. There’s the faraway expert who delivers information to our waiting minds. The coach who leans over our shoulder, watching what we do and pointing out how we might do better. The counselor who makes sure we know deep-down that we’ve got what it takes to meet the challenges we’re facing. What if one of the key relationships our students had—one of the “people” they learned 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 think about the different ways a building can teach is to consider the different kinds of learning they can prompt—for example, how active that learning is. A building, like any teacher, can set us up for passive absorption, where we’re just taking in information that has already been figured out. Or it can get us much more deeply involved in the work of sense-making, where we’re not just figuring out the solution, but framing the problem. Or deciding what’s worth learning about. Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie offer a helpful way to think about what learning can look like in their “ICAP” framework--the beginnings of a field guide to learning that starts with the simple opposition we’re used to (“passive” vs. “active”) and then opens things up by setting those terms on a continuum that extends into “constructive” and “interactive.”
What if the school we built asked the people in it to do more than just read a sign or look at a graph? (By giving them a way to track air quality--or the flow of traffic through the parking lot? By helping them tackle the challenge of building a plan for rainwater collection or a better way to do drop-offs?) How far past “active learning” might we go than pulling a handle or pushing a lever? Imagine a building-teacher that could get people thinking back to it. Or one that drew us into a conversation. Could we design a building that asked a follow-up question?
If, as educators often say, “the person who does the work does the learning,” then the incredible amount of work that goes into building a school might also be a great opportunity for learning. Maybe we don’t want this learning-work to be finished before students and teachers get there, leaving them little more to do than move the furniture around. What if next year’s freshman class showed up to a school that felt like the space under the kitchen table, or the “room of requirements” at Hogwarts: an all-possible space you could turn into whatever you need? 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 model of this kind of building-teacher is 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 was so obviously “temporary” that it 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 did a lot of his early research on loudspeakers, and Rainer Weiss and his team built the Cosmic Background Explorer.
What might a building like this teach someone about the world and their role in it? About what learning looks like. What it really means to be “a good student.” How much room you should get to do the thing that interests you. How much right you have to push back when you disagree. About what school is for—and who it’s for.
What if, moving through our school buildings felt less like being told how things are, and more like encountering a problem that still needs solving? Imagine a school that feels like car engines used to: you raise the hood and you can see all the parts with no shiny cover to hide the wires. The logic of how things fit together, the reasons they work or don’t, right in front of you to figure out. Imagine a school full of students who learn to take for granted that the world around them is hack-able. A school that teaches its students to see the way things are as nothing more or less than the way they were made: not an inevitable fact, nor a sacred creation, but a human invention—the last, best solution developed by someone like them.