The Architecture of Belonging: Designing Schools for a Connected Student Body
The same challenges are facing everyone in the school community, including the students’ caregivers. The Multistudio Research Center’s own research has shown that school design to cultivate community is a powerful strategy for meeting this challenge.
The concept of “school” has been deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness for generations. David Tyack and William Tobin described a grammar of schooling that points out these assumptions, and their goal was to imagine how school could be otherwise. One key assumption about school is that there must be one educator who works in a classroom with a group of students… and that they must do that work alone.
However, our research, which utilized data from the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), involving thousands of teachers worldwide, has demonstrated that teaching communities are more effective within the classroom. We found that teacher participation in professional communities was associated with improvements in their individual teaching approach.
Teachers need structures for collaboration, and schools must remove the obstacles that hinder their work. What if schools were built not just for student collaboration, but also to help teachers connect and grow together?
The idea of creating community schools gained attention in the immediate aftermath of the initial COVID-19 pandemic disruptions. Early research on their impacts revealed that investments in community schools were providing a positive return on investment across all grade levels. The design of a community school can expand its consideration of school activities to include support spaces for parents and families. Welcoming entry spaces can reduce the potential anxiety and uncertainty of parents, making them feel more comfortable when they visit or engage with support services (like adult training programs).
Engaging the surrounding community as part of the school environment also has benefits for educators. In the same study looking at the international TALIS data, we found that educator engagement with surrounding community organizations had a positive correlation with teacher community formation. Building for community through multiple lenses magnifies the benefits, with each opportunity to connect expanding the overall culture of community within the school. Every day a teacher walks into a building that communicates the message that they belong, their sense of membership in the community grows.
For the Michelle Obama School in Richmond, California, the approach to providing a community school for their neighbors was built on these ideas throughout its design. The architecture of the new elementary school, which entirely replaced the previous school on the same site, includes multifunctional learning suites to bring teachers across grade levels together as a team.
By designing the physical learning spaces with an expectation that teachers would work beyond any single space, the school embeds a new assumption of teaching communities rather than teaching in isolation. Michelle Obama School also integrates community spaces to support the families of students through parent-focused programming, such as PTA events and adult learning events.
Our data-driven design philosophy has led our research team to continue working with the Michelle Obama School since its opening. As a founding member of the Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE), we have initiated a multi-phase post-occupancy evaluation of the project to assess its performance.
Our results have already shown that teachers feel supported in their use of community-focused strategies, such as team teaching. We are also finding that key architectural elements, such as operable walls strategically placed to facilitate the combination of student groups in larger spaces, are significantly associated with the use of team teaching. When walls are no longer a barrier to teachers working together, they can respond to their students' needs by efficiently combining spaces and regrouping without limitation to a single classroom space.
School can be a place where every student feels like a welcome member of their community. Teachers should also come to work feeling connected and valued. Building schools that foster community helps them achieve their goals for learning, staffing, and human well-being simultaneously.
To envision the future of a school community, we must re-examine the assumptions about what school is and how it can function. When we do, we can discover an opportunity to bring people together in new and powerful ways.
