Designing the room around the learning

Context

Between 2019 and 2023, several policies changed what happened inside Singapore classrooms. Every secondary student received a personal learning device. Full Subject-Based Banding meant students moved between groups of different sizes for different subjects. Blended learning made home-based learning days routine. And teachers were asked to use more active, inquiry-based and differentiated approaches.

The classroom itself had barely changed. Rows of same-size desks. A teacher’s desk at the front. One screen, one whiteboard, and sockets on the wall.

Schools noticed the mismatch before the system did. A few began experimenting on their own and became reference points for others. Many more asked for help. A small team of us, five people, became the place those requests landed. Over about five years we consulted more than thirty-five schools on classrooms, libraries, laboratories, multi-purpose halls and corridors.

The question

How do you help a whole system of schools redesign their learning spaces, when every school’s needs differ and it is nobody’s job?

What made it difficult

Nobody owned the problem. The part of the system responsible for buildings and specifications reasonably declined to take a view on pedagogy. The part responsible for pedagogy reasonably declined to own buildings. Policies were changing what happened in rooms, and nobody’s job was to change the rooms.

There was no budget line. Early work ran on small research funding and on whatever schools could redirect from their own budgets. That ruled out the obvious answer, which was to fit out model classrooms and ask schools to copy them.

The evidence flattered. Most published accounts of redesigned classrooms reported early enthusiasm. Few reported what happened after the first term, when the novelty had worn off. We were being asked to recommend things whose lasting effects nobody had measured.

Demand outran the team. Requests arrived at three or four a month. Five people could not visit every school, let alone stay with each one long enough to see a redesign through.

What we noticed

Schools copied each other. A redesigned classroom at one school became the template for others, whether or not they had the same problem. What travelled was the look of the room, not the reasoning behind it.

Technology was chosen because it was new. Interactive panels and multiple screens arrived before anyone had named the activity that needed them.

Multi-functionality was treated as a cure-all. Furniture that did three jobs usually did all three a little badly, and often settled into doing one.

Mobile furniture rarely moved. Tables on castors stayed in rows unless the class had routines for moving them, layouts to move them into, and people whose job it was.

The cheapest items changed behaviour most. Somewhere to put bags, a small mobile desk for the teacher, wireless projection and power from the ceiling did more to change how a room was used than any showpiece.

The front of the room was a social norm, not a wall. In early prototype tests, students turned away from the screen in front of them to face the teacher when she spoke, and said it was a matter of respect.

Judgement

Start from the activity, not the furniture. Every consult began with what learners should be doing in the space. Furniture came last, and only as an answer to a named activity.

Compress seven principles into three clusters. In 2022 we had seven design principles. Schools treated them as a checklist to satisfy rather than ideas to reason with. In 2023 we regrouped them into three clusters, each with key features: flexible customisation, facilitating interaction, and variety and engagement. Three could be remembered in a planning meeting. The cost was nuance, and I think it was worth paying.

Publish a process, not only a classroom guide. Schools asked about libraries, labs, halls and corridors, not just classrooms. A list of classroom features would not travel to a library. An eight-step, teacher-led redesign process would.

Scale through tools, not headcount. A team of five could not visit every school. So we wrote a guide that let schools start alone, and kept consults for the hard cases. That traded depth for reach, deliberately.

Write specifications schools could paste into tenders. Principles did not survive procurement. A principle such as mobility became whatever the vendor happened to stock. Precise clauses, with dimensions and the reasons for them, did survive.

What changed

We set out design principles in 2022 and regrouped them in 2023 into three clusters with key features, alongside a list of pitfalls to avoid.

We used an eight-step, teacher-led redesign process in consults, from understanding users’ needs through to prototyping and measuring success.

In 2024 we published an online guide, and ran a webinar on learner-centred classrooms for more than three hundred teachers.

We built a library of tender-ready specifications for furniture and fittings, and eighteen layouts for classrooms with mobile desks.

We put together a try-before-you-buy kit of furniture and portable technology, so schools could trial a layout before specifying it.

What happened

More than thirty-five schools were consulted by 2024, and consults have continued since. The guide is published, the layouts and specifications are used in consults, and the process has been applied to libraries, laboratories and multi-purpose spaces as well as classrooms.

What I cannot tell you is what changed in practice a year on. We did not follow most schools past the first term of their redesign, and I have no systematic evidence of how the rooms are used now, whether teaching changed, or whether learning did.

This is the gap I would most like to close. It is also the gap this case warns about: we criticised published redesigns for reporting only early enthusiasm, and our own record mostly stops at the same point.