The recent trend in innovative school design has provided exciting places to both learn and teach. New generation learning environments have encouraged educators to unleash responsive pedagogies previously hindered by traditional classrooms, and has allowed students to engage in a variety of learning experiences well beyond the traditional ‘chalk and talk’ common in many schools. These spaces have made cross-disciplinary instruction, collaborative learning, individualised curriculum, ubiquitous technologies, and specialised equipment more accessible than ever before. The quality of occupation of such spaces has also been encouraging. Many learning spaces now resemble places of collegiality, intellectual intrigue and comfort, as opposed to the restrictive and monotonous classrooms many of us experienced in years past.
These successes, however, have generated a very real problem. Do these new generation learning environments actually work – and if so, in whatways? Are they leading to the sorts of improved experiences and learning outcomes for students they promise? This book describes strategies for assessing what is actually working. Drawing on the best thinking from our best minds – doctoral students tackling the challenge of isolating space as a variable within the phenomenon of contemporary schooling – Evaluating Learning Environments draws together thirteen approaches to learning environment evaluation that capture the latest thinking in terms of emerging issues, methods and knowledge.
Innehållsförteckning
Acknowledgments; Introduction; Pursuing that Elusive Evidence about What Works in Learning Environment Design; Emerging Issues; New Generation Learning Environments: How Can We Find Out If What Works Is Working?; What Works: Changing Practice When Spaces Change; What Works? Emerging Issues; Architects as Agents for Organisational Change in New Generation Learning Spaces; Working Together in the Space-Between: Pedagogy, Learning Environment and Teacher Collaboration; Emerging Methods; Emerging Methods for the Evaluation of Physical Learning Environments; Developing New Learning Environments: Co-Constructing Innovation in Education Practice; A Quasi-Experimental and Single-Subject Research Approach as an Alternative to Traditional Post-Occupancy Evaluation of Learning Environments; Evaluating Learning Environments for the Inclusion of Students with Hearing Difficulties; The Role of Evaluation as an Educational Space Planning Tool; Emerging Knowledge; Emerging Evaluation Knowledge in New Generation Learning Environments; A New Curriculum and A New Learning Space: An Opportunity for Real Change in an Irish Context; A New Post Occupancy Evaluation Tool for Assessing the Indoor Environment Quality of Learning Environments; The Effective Teaching and Learning Spatial Framework: An Evaluation Tool; Afterword; The Emerging Importance of the Affective in Learning Environment Evaluations; Evaluating Spaces of Pedagogic Affect; Biographies.