Design Communicates Philosophy

I promise this post is about education. It just takes me a minute to get to it. Hang in there.

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If I ever get to visit Europe, there is one spot that interests me more than any other - Florence, Italy. Much of that desire is due to my college Humanities classes in which I learned about so much of the great art that resides in that place (I'm the personal general ed classes were made for). Another reason is that Florence is the home of the Galileo museum, which I believe I would enjoy very much. But high on the list of reasons I would love to visit Florence is that I would love to see this building, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The design and history of this cathedral, and specifically of the dome is a thrilling part of engineering history for nerds like me. When construction of the cathedral began, they did not actually know how they were going to construct the dome, but they knew it would be generations before they got to that part, so they started blind. One hundred years later, technology had advanced, and the initial vision of Neri di Fioravanti was realized by Filippo Brunelleschi. I'll save the details here because they are not the point of this post, but they are well worth reading, so go here when you are ready.

I'm sure you are wondering where this is going. Fear not, friends, I am leading up to something. 

Ask yourself why so much time, money, energy, and thought would have been put into something like the dome of this cathedral when no one knew how to do it. And no one would know how to do it for five generations!

It's because cathedral builders understood something we have mostly lost today. Design communicates before words are ever spoken. When you enter the worship space, your eye is drawn upward, toward paintings that teach as well. If your mind wanders during the sermon because it is in a language you don't understand, you see stories from the Bible illustrated as you look at the ceiling. 

(Yes, I'm aware that that this part of history is also filled with the corruption of popes selling indulgences for places like this. Again, I'm not trying to provide a detailed account everything, I'm using this make a point about design.)

We don't build a lot of these sorts of buildings anymore. Our values have changed. That's not a criticism; just a fact. A lot of churches now are more likely to build for efficient usage of space. Because they don't have the kind of money it would take to create separate spaces, they design for multi-purpose use. The room that serves as the sanctuary on Sunday might have the chairs cleared out for Upward Basketball on Saturday or tables put in for a church dinner on Wednesday night. What is the philosophy they are communicating? It is that they want to provide many services for their community. The cathedral drew you into a vertical perspective while most modern churches make you think horizontally.

My church strikes a balance of having simple architecture that is not ostentatious in expense but still looks like a church (steeples and pointed arch windows draw the eye upward when outside) along with an interior that draws the eye forward, landing on the communion table. It communicates both the vertical and the horizontal simultaneously. It communicates that they invested in architecture for a purpose, but not in the monetary amounts cathedrals did.

Let's look at a secular example, the recently opened Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. I'll go ahead and admit that I think this exterior of this building is ugly. According to the Wikipedia page, it conveys seriousness by being undecorated and mostly without windows, calling it "tailored and understated." For me, it's feels a little like Star Trek's Borg cube mated with the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. But that's a matter of taste. Photos from the inside of the building are lovely, and the words on the corner are meaningful. 

But the Obama Presidential Center is more than just the museum tower. There are four buildings surrounded by a multi-acre public park. The design of the tower has obviously gotten most of the attention for its unusual nature, but the design of the entire center communicates investment in the future and in community. There is an actual public library on the grounds and an athletic center, all with public gathering spaces for people to hold meetings or events. Given that his pre-political career was often referred to as "community organizer," this seems appropriate. 

Okay, I promised that his would come around to education at some point, and here we are.

The design of your classroom is critical to communication with students from the first day of school. In this case, it's not the architecture; you don't have control over that. But everything from the decoration of walls to arrangement of chairs, even the choice you make about where your "perch" is sends a message. 

Do your classroom displays distract from learning or enhance it?  There's research about over-decorating creating a working memory challenge, and as much as I didn't want it to apply to me, it did. My walls were shouting a students all day and competing with me for their attention. 

Where do you spend most of your time as a teacher?  The front of the room, the back, the side, or walking around. There's not one right answer to this question, but what you choose communicates something to your students. Make sure it is what you want to communicate. 

One of the latest Twitter dust ups involves a comparison of two seating arrangements. Layout 1 is a room full of triangular desks that fit together to make a circular, almost daisy shaped pod of desks. It also included "alternative seating" like exercise balls and stools (the lack of back support is making my middle aged muscles sore just looking at it). Layout 2 has traditional classroom rows. While I would choose Layout 2 with a seating chart every day of every year, I'm not actually writing this to judge those who like pods. I know, love, and have observed some phenomenal teachers who would rather cut of their left hand than arrange their class in rows.  It works for them, and they communicate the kind of teacher they are through that arrangement.

What I am saying is that when students walk into your room on the first day of school, the arrangement speaks volumes about what your class will be like. Pods indicate that there will be LOTS of group work, so much that you don't want to spend any of your class time arranging the furniture for groups. Traditional rows communicate that the teacher is the teacher; you might sometimes move the desks into groups, but most of the time, you'll be paying attention to the front of the room. Do what you want; but do it in the way fits your teaching style. What you don't want to do is put desks in pods if you aren't going to be lot of group work because you will have already communicated that they should pay more attention to each other than to the teacher and will have to fight that every day.

Recognizing that design communicates philosophy will save you a lot of stress. Make your classroom communicate your philosophy, and you don't have spend us much time explicitly communicating it. Think that through this summer as you make decisions about next year.