The Alignment of Pedagogy and Design

We’re almost three weeks into our first semester in our new classroom building on campus with its many dedicated active learning spaces. I’m very pleased with the environment so far, teaching two sections of first-year composition and one of my two sections of American Literature after 1865 in Mell’s new classrooms. The experience prompts me to ponder two points, the first being the misapprehension a few have that active learning is about technology or architecture, and the second being whether these physical improvements to teaching spaces actually improve student learning, or at least improve it in some measurable way.

I was reminded of the first point about what active learning actually involves yesterday when I taught my first American literature class at 8 a.m. in the Haley Center in an older, traditionally designed classroom and then taught that same course again at 2 p.m. in one of the new classrooms just opened. Both sets of students performed well, collaborating on responding to their group prompts and then sharing their answers, but the morning class performed particularly well as their responses were more in-depth and very often prompted them to ask further insightful questions, which enriched the general classroom discussion. All this occurred in the room with cinder block walls, poor acoustics, tiny desks, and a single whiteboard at the narrow end of the shoebox-shaped room, unpleasant fluorescent lighting, a dirty floor, and a column on one side of the room threatening some students with an obstructed view. The students rearranged the desks just before class into their group pods and then returned them to rows when they left.

The afternoon classroom, by contrast, had comfortable seating, large tables, plenty of glass boards, large windows and lots of natural light, carpeting, and good acoustics, and yet that day I would have to give the edge to the earlier class in terms of their overall performance. There are complicating factors such as time of day, the proportion of upper to under classmen, and my own energy levels, and yet still I found the contrast in performance notable. This serves to remind us that active learning isn’t about great furniture or the latest software; it’s about technique. It’s about getting the students to interact with the material first-hand and collaboratively, and, with effort, that may happen in any environment.

So why, we may ask, invest millions of dollars in new furniture, technology, and architecture? The answer, which seems obvious to me, is that it greatly facilitates the collaborative, first-hand engagement of students with the material and techniques that they are learning. Is it better for students, regardless of the pedagogical technique, to learn in a crowded room with dull walls and floors and harsh lighting or to learn in a spacious, colorful room with natural light? Is it better to have half the students far away from boards and screens or to be sitting close to them? If it takes five minutes to rearrange the desks every class, then could those five minutes be better applied? Energy and attention are resources, and to frequently have to find and renew those resources takes away more time from learning.

Then do those physical changes to the classroom to facilitate active learning, which consequently create a more aesthetically inspiring and generally relaxing space, increase the students’ abilities to retain and apply what they learn? This is a more pertinent question. Tom Perks, Doug Orr, and Elhamn Alomari explored this question in an article they published last year in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. They listed many of the positive features of the “new” classroom that we see in our new facilities: “flexibility, sensory stimulation, technology support, and decenteredness [their italics] (59). The surveys and interviews they conducted with students and teachers who had used the rooms before and after their remodeling strongly suggested that most students and teachers perceived the redesign as improving the learning in the class. However, they found that the design of the classroom features had no perceivable effect on improved learning if the pedagogy remained the standard lecture model. To increase the likelihood of improved learning, an outcome they described as a “qualified ‘maybe,’” depending on the outcome of future research, the classroom redesigned for active learning has to be “used in a manner for which the room was designed” (65).

These points seem patently manifest to me, and if there remains to be more evidence gathered to support the claim that active learning improves student learning, then I would wonder also what evidence exists that traditional lecture models of teaching are the more effective method for student learning. I suppose we would have to provisionally agree on what “learning” is, but until these matters are sorted, I will trust my own experience as one who has taught by both methods and whose instincts tell him that a fundamentally sounder level of learning occurs with more student engagement.

Perks, Tom, Doug Orr, and Elham Alomari. "Classroom Redesign to Facilitate Classroom Learning: A Case Study of Changes to a University Classroom." Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 16:1 Feb. 2016, 53-68.