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Swiss Cheese Schools
By: Frank M. Locker, PhD, AIA, REFP - Monday, June 18, 2007
Source:
It's the twenty-first century, but if you're standing on a school campus, you wouldn't necessarily know it. Schools have fallen behind the times to become the most out-of-date places in most students' lives. Limited technology in a world abuzz with technology is one aspect of the problem. More challenging, however, are the severe limitations on effective, innovative delivery posed by our aging school facilities. Many educators desire transformed educational delivery, but the nature of the learning areas conspires to constrain creative thoughts for change.
Most of our educational facilities were built in the twentieth century to serve solidly traditional concepts: the teacher, as the holder of knowledge, broadcasting to students in isolated rooms with little variation or collaboration in delivery. Most design considerations were focused within the rooms, not between the rooms.
Twenty-first century education promises to be considerably different. Inspired by heightened concerns for effectiveness and relevancy in a changing world, the emerging education model is personalized, active, and collaborative. Students learn alone and in teams, in the classroom and in related spaces, in the school and beyond. Teachers, in their roles as guides, simultaneously coordinate various student activities, and collaborate, plan, and share time and place with other teachers. Isolation, the mantra of twentieth century schools, is giving way to connection.
Teachers and students need greater variety, flexibility, and access to each other and to their school’s limited resources. In old-fashioned buildings, however, those four walls, the perfect container for talk-teaching, are the barriers to progressive delivery. With hopes for better connection as the guiding principle, the solution is: Cut holes!
Holes are more than mere openings between classrooms; they serve to facilitate a richly-developed educational delivery by reducing the physical barriers. As the classroom becomes more connected, teachers have more choices about how and where to facilitate learning.
 Madison Middle School in Seattle has just recently undergone a major renovation and expansion. Originally built in 1929 as a junior high and now a landmark building, it was the quintessential statement of early twentieth century education: three floors of isolated classrooms arranged in rows on double loaded corridors. Bassetti Architects "swiss cheesed" the building to transform it into the quintessential twenty-first century middle school, a school focused on clusters, not corridors.
The middle school organizational concept is founded on multiple small groups of teachers and students working in dedicated core spaces, each group needing only a small portion of the total building. By removing a 40' long section of corridor wall, reshaping the cross wall, and liberally adding doors between the newly-created spaces, Bassetti created two clusters per floor, each with four classrooms centered around a breakout space. Doors in the corridors helped meet fire regulations but, more importantly, defined each house. The central breakout spaces can be used for small group collaborations, tutorials, presentations, large group meetings, and projects. This plan offers education almost as much "future proofing" and flexibility as a brand new building would offer, and it preserves the historic structure.
Educators at St. Philip Catholic High School in Battle Creek, MI have pushed the envelope even farther. The newly developed vision for the school promises to create a school of connections through cooperative and project-based learning, team teaching, advisor-advisee programs, community service learning, and personalized  learning plans (educational planning by DeJONG). While all of these deliveries could have been squeezed into the rows of rooms that made up St. Phil’s three-story 1960s-era school, effectiveness would have been severely compromised. Add to that a strict school budget that could only afford select renovations. All things considered, "swiss cheese" was the only item on the menu.
 I worked with architect Neale Bauman of The Design Forum to create the "swiss cheese" concept. Windows will connect adjacent spaces to each other and to the main corridor. Doors will be added and openings will be cut to connect the corridor to classrooms, creating indoor "courtyards." The school has not formally decided how to best utilize these spaces, but they are critical to redefining the school, as they will be the flexible centers of personalized, integrated learning.
For the past fifty years the experience of walking through this school has been anything but exciting, primarily filled with lockers, bulletin boards, and doors. Soon, it will be vistas of learning: views into classrooms and the sights of students working in and flowing between spaces used en suite. In one courtyard, students might be working at personal workstations, just like in office buildings. In another, different furniture might facilitate group discussions, gatherings, and debates. One thing is certain, this school, originally built on the principles of twentieth century educational separation, will be the school of twenty-first century connection.
Compelling evidence of the effectiveness of "swiss cheesing" in support of transformed educational delivery comes from Western Heights College, Victoria, Australia serving years seven through ten. The school has been planning its new building with Fielding Nair International, but first wanted to run a pilot project on a smaller scale to track effectiveness while the full project was designed and built.
Year Seven was selected for the trial and the changes were made quickly and cost effectively. The physical changes made by "swiss cheesing" supported the concept of creating a learning community, or pod, for year seven by combining the entire grade into one class of 100 students and four teachers. (http://www.whc.vic.edu.au/default.htm).
Starting with a traditional room layout, school maintenance crews coupled classrooms by cutting a series of 8' openings in the corridor walls, recapturing the corridor for new uses as the center of a newly-defined small learning community, a perfect spot for small group work, tutorials, reflection, and concentrated individual study. This is not an open plan, as it still has much of the traditional configuration; classrooms still maintain their definition with 3-1/2 walls  intact, but the rooms now have the opportunity to hold different activities in a coordinated, opportune way.
Australia has a national requirement that students rate their schools. At Western Heights, the small learning community approach has resulted in significantly different student attitudes and beliefs. Surveyed just six months after implementation of the new pod, Year Seven students rated (on a scale of 0 to 100 percent) teacher effectiveness as 87 percent, over 4 times the 20 percent rating given by Year Eight students, who were still learning in traditional classrooms. Teacher empathy received a score of 77 percent from Year Seven but only 18 percent from Year Eight. The pattern continues: student motivation was 64 percent among Year Seven but a meager 14 percent among Year Eight, and morale among students was 80 percent compared with 17 percent.
The holes alone didn’t cause these phenomenal changes in student response to school. The holes support a new educational paradigm, one that needs to be released in practice as well as in facilities. So keep the foundation, but break boundaries. You may see highly effective results.
Dr. Frank M. Locker consults as an educational planner and school designer from a base in the greater Boston area. He was the 1999-2000 Planner of the Year of the Council of Educational Facilities Planners, International (CEFPI). This national award recognized his achievements over twenty-five years of educational planning, school design, and service to the profession. A frequent speaker at regional and national conferences, he was cited for his research in classroom design and participatory planning. Current projects are in Kent, England; Cayman Islands; Machias, ME; S. Burlington, VT; Battle Creek, MI; Middletown, RI; and Bethel, AK. Know any good swiss cheese examples? Try fl@franklocker.com.
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