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Illinois School Board Journal
September-October 2000
How Are Your Buildings Smart?
by Hank Boer and Frances Karanovich
Hank Boer, a retired school superintendent, has worked as an interim superintendent in numerous Illinois school districts. Frances Karanovich is superintendent of Olympia C.U. District 16. The authors lead a panel on this topic at the Joint Annual Conference on Friday, November 17, the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.
Increasing student success and improving academic achievement—every school board uses those touchstones to make decisions about curriculum, teaching, assessment and myriad other issues. Research on how students learn is used to keep methods and materials up to date.
This includes research that shows that there are many ways of learning and many ways of being intelligent. Howard Gardner’s landmark research identified eight specific “intelligences:” verbal/linguistic; kinesthetic/mathematical; spatial; musical; bodily/kinesthetic; interpersonal; intrapersonal; and naturalistic.
However, if you visit a traditional school in your community, you may find that facilities haven’t changed much since you were a student, even if that was a long time ago. The traditional school building reflects the focus in our culture on verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical abilities (that is, reading and mathematics). The other six intelligences are often overlooked when designing or retrofitting facilities, and so are the children whose strongest skills are in areas other than reading and math.
Traditional schools often do not provide the features needed to enhance learning in visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, and other forms of intelligence.
The same criteria used in developing curriculum and teaching methods can be used in making decisions about facilities. Research on how students learn can be used to identify ways to design or retrofit facilities that support learning.
For example, in 1993, Howard Gardner introduced the eighth intelligence, naturalist intelligence, which has to do with recognizing and classifying natural and human-made phenomena. Educators and architects are now beginning to look at the need for “green areas” in a school facility.
See the table of “Facility Attributes to Enhance Multiple Intelligences” for ways that school design can relate to each of Gardner’s eight forms of intelligence.(PDF Document)
Dee Dickinson, author of Learning through Many Kinds of Intelligence, purports that when children have an opportunity to learn through their strengths, they may become more successful at learning all subjects ... including the “basic skills.” When children become more proficient in one area, the whole constellation of intelligence may be enhanced. For this reason, school construction design should encourage children to explore and exercise all their intelligences.
How, specifically, can buildings support learning for all children? A graduate-level school facilities maintenance and operations course taught by the authors undertook a thorough examination of six selected school facilities with that question in mind.
The class then created a matrix showing design attributes that supported the various intelligences.
The sites included the following:
The class members conducted thorough site visits, kept detailed journals, talked with school-certified and educational support staff, and interviewed selected guests to collect data and reflect on how existing facilities enhanced and/or hindered the development of students’ multiple intelligences and ultimately, their academic achievement.
What began as a concluding exercise for a graduate-level school facilities course resulted in a provocative team discussion and class project to assess whether a school building provided opportunities to develop the seven intelligences described in Howard Gardner’s original theory of multiple intelligences and the eighth intelligence of naturalist.
The importance of paying attention to school facilities and noting their potential impact on student academic achievement emerged from the team discussions.
After the final building tour and discussions of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, students were divided into teams with the charge of completing a matrix that identified the six school sites on a horizontal axis and the eight intelligences on the vertical axis. Each team had to reach consensus on whether the facility had attributes that accommodated, enhanced, or enriched the development of each of the intelligences. The team awarded one vote in each cell of the matrix if the team could provide concrete facility attributes that supported learning at the facility in the intelligence represented by that cell. When the activity was completed, each team shared its observations with all of the other teams. The matrix evolved as the structure to summarize the team consensus about a facility as it related to Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences.
See the table of results for a summary of scores assigned to each of the six buildings (PDF document).
Then each team reported their observations of any physical characteristics that supported each intelligence for each building.
The results were revealing, supporting Gardner’s assertion that school systems traditionally focus on a narrow range of intelligence that involves primarily verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical abilities. Even the 100-year-old building consistently provided leaning environments that allowed students to learn through their verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical abilities. The century-old building had experienced several renovations and had traditional classrooms with computers in a lab setting once used as the teachers’ lounge. Traditional chalkboards, a gym that doubled as a lunchroom, and crowded classrooms were evident. The stage area had been converted to a classroom and flexible open-space classroom areas of an earlier addition had been walled to be more like a traditional classroom.
The findings also support the notion that traditional schools frequently undervalue the visual/spatial, bodily kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. Matrix scores are consistently lower in these areas. However, the newly constructed high school’s attention to technology, fine arts, personal space, and green areas resulted in facility areas designed and built to enhance those often forgotten intelligences.
Results showed that all but one school scored high on attributes that enhance verbal and mathematical intelligences. Three of the schools scored high in all eight categories, earning 39 or 40 of a possible 40 points. The other three schools scored 22, 25 and 34 of a possible 40 points.
In their text, Multiple Intelligences and Student Achievement: Success Stories from Six Schools, Linda and Bruce Campbell detail six schools around the country that have incorporated curriculum based on Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences into retrofitted or newly constructed teaching and learning environments for five or more years.
Each school has shown improvement in student achievement measured by locally developed, state, and nationally normed tests.
When your school board addresses the issue of student achievement, don’t overlook facility design. New construction, as well as retrofit projects, should be reviewed to ensure facilities accommodate and enhance the multiple ways that children learn. School facilities should enhance student opportunities and options for learning by providing varied learning spaces to accommodate a variety of teaching, learning, and assessment strategies that increase a learner’s chance to be successful. We must pay attention to the learning facilities we have, those we plan to build, and how all learning spaces are used for teaching and learning.
Resources
Districts interested in learning more about the School Construction and/or Maintenance grants can contact Nona Myers, Illinois State Board of Education, 100 North First Street, Springfield, Illinois 62777. (217) 785-8779.
Bete, T. (August 1997). Renovating to support the seven ways students are smart. School Planning & Management, 36(8), 14-19.
Campbell, L., Campbell, B. (1999). Multiple intelligence and student achievement. Success stories from six schools: Alexander, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Castaldi, B. (1994). Planning, Modernization, and Management. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Dickinson, D. (1998). “Learning through many kinds of intelligences” (1-3). New Horizons for Learning Electronic Journal. Available at: http://www.newhorizens.org.
Kennedy, M. (September 1999). “Making an impact.” American School & University, 72(1), 16-26.
Moore, D. (1999). “Schools for the 21st century.” American Schools and University, 38(11), 12.
“Reinventing Our Schools/A Conversation with Howard Gardner.” A video production of AIT in Cooperation with Phi Delta Kappa, 1994.