It’s a sound that generations of college students and instructors know all too well: the cacophony of students dragging tablet-arm chairs from orderly rows into rough circles at a request to “form into groups.”
“That certain squeaky squeal,” as Persis C. Rickes calls it, is going away. So are silent but even more intractable rows of lecture-hall seating. New ways to teach require new classroom configurations and new furniture. Ms. Rickes, president of Rickes Associates, a consulting firm that works with colleges on planning and space issues, is among those out to convince colleges that it is time to adapt.
The current revolution in pedagogy is accompanied by many buzzwords: “flipped classrooms,” “project-based learning,” “active learning,” to name a few. All describe a disruption of the traditional lecture format featuring an instructor standing at the front of a classroom, talking to ranks of students silently taking notes.
Professors continue to find ways to engage students in traditional classrooms, even in lecture-style spaces. But for many experts, the stand-and-deliver model “just doesn’t coincide, not just with the way today’s students learn, but the way people learn in general,” Ms. Rickes says.
Instead of rooms full of rows of traditional, inflexible tablet-arm chairs—a type of furniture that Ms. Rickes says “should be banned"—her firm often recommends that new classrooms be designed so that students always work in groups, at a series of tables, or at wheeled chairs and tables so that forming groups is quick, easy, and nearly silent.
Robert J. Beichner’s work at North Carolina State University is directly responsible for another term, “Scale-Up,” joining the field of buzzwords many administrators and faculty members toss around when describing this group approach.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, Mr. Beichner, a professor of physics, began experimenting with new ways to improve learning and retention, even when working with classes of 100 students or more. In his Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Physics program, as it was called then, or Scale-Up, students absorbed lecture material or readings on their own and spent class time working together in three-person groups around round tables.
Mr. Beichner has spent years experimenting with the format—he says seven-foot-diameter tables are ideal—and conducting research on how students learn with it. The Scale-Up approach not only improves conceptual understanding, according to his research; it reduces the failure rate by about 50 percent and increases average class attendance to more than 90 percent. As Scale-Up has spread, instructors have adapted the format for disciplines beyond the sciences, including English and political science, Mr. Beichner says. He says the acronym now stands for Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies.
The approach means a change in the professor’s role. “It requires a different philosophy of what should be going on in the classroom,” Mr. Beichner says. “It takes the professor out of the role of being the dispenser of information.” Instructors intervene when students are having difficulty, but otherwise students essentially teach one another the material.
If there is a revolution afoot in classroom space, it is a slow-moving one to date. New furniture and technology can be expensive. They also typically require more room—as much as double the square footage of classrooms filled with tablet-arm chairs. After years of pinched budgets, colleges may face challenges in commissioning expansive new classroom space, or even costly retrofits.
Jon Sticklen, an associate professor at Michigan State University and director of its program in applied engineering sciences, beams when he talks about teaching in Michigan State’s new Rooms for Engaged and Active Learning, aka REAL.
Mr. Sticklen says he asks students enrolled in classes in his REAL spaces to familiarize themselves with material relating to a new assignment—say, modeling carbon systems—then devotes every minute of class time to their working together at the six-seat tables.
“Our students, when they graduate and get in the real world, are all about communication and teamwork and problem solving in areas they haven’t seen before,” he says. “This facility is really on mark for getting close to that real-world experience.”
But Michigan State enrolled nearly 49,000 students in 2012, and its campus boasts countless square feet devoted to classroom space. When the fall semester began, it had only two REAL spaces, with plans to open another in January and a fourth later next year.
Barbara Kranz, director of facilities management and space planning at Michigan State, would like to have many more REAL spaces, but with no new classroom construction planned, she has to look for opportunities to retrofit existing rooms. A pair of concrete pillars blocked sightlines in a large underutilized space in the basement of the McDonel Hall dormitory, making it useless for a traditional lecture class. Fitted with flat screens and wall-hugging tables, it now serves as one of the university’s active-learning rooms.
But the spaces modeled on Mr. Beichner’s Scale-Up concept must be bigger than traditional classrooms. When Ms. Kranz is making plans to accommodate a 30-student lecture class with standard tablet-arm chairs, she bases her calculations on needing about 15 square feet of space per student. “Going to a Scale-Up type of room, that’s about 30 square feet” per student, she says. That might mean converting two existing classrooms instead of just one.
Many versions of the Scale-Up idea place monitors at each table, allowing students to look at a screen in common, or the instructor to share content around the room. Ms. Kranz says that installing a typical technology package for a standard lecture-style classroom might cost Michigan State $30,000; for a REAL room, that figure can climb to $100,000 or higher.
A number of institutions are meeting the ante to create more nontraditional classroom spaces. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, for example, has created 18 new active-learning classrooms based on the Scale-Up concept.
Plans for the Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center at the University of Maryland at College Park call for 85,000 square feet of new classroom space, none of it designed to function strictly in the traditional lecture format.
In addition to Scale-Up-style rooms with tables, plans for the project include flexible classrooms designed for active learning and a lecture hall with wider tiers and rows of tables that will allow students to listen a lecture and then turn immediately to group work. The university intends to hold much of its lower-level general-education coursework in the new complex, with every first-year student taking courses in its classrooms.
But when the architecture firm Ayers Saint Gross took on the project, it encountered another familiar challenge: official state standards for classroom design, space, and cost that often date from the 1980s or earlier, when a room crammed with tablet-arm chairs was state of the art. The initial design criteria for the Maryland project, drafted years ago, still included specifications for the placement of pencil sharpeners.
To do active learning, you need more room per student, and often that’s not factored into official guidelines, according to Adam Gross, a principal of Ayers Saint Gross. “We had to go back to the state and justify this,” he says. The design for the project is under review by the state, and the university says it expects approval soon.
About half of the states have similar criteria, and less than half of those states have updated their criteria in the past decade or so, says Luanne Greene, a principal at Ayers Saint Gross.
Yet another key factor is slowing down the adoption of nontraditional classroom space in higher education: the traditional faculty.
By definition, college professors “are people who learned how to do very well in a standard lecture setting. It worked for them, therefore it’s good enough,” says North Carolina State’s Robert Beichner.
The colleges that have made significant strides toward active-learning spaces must also invest in working with the faculty on adapting to the new pedagogy.
While administrators and partisans attempt to increase the number of active-learning classrooms, consultants, architects, and furniture companies are trying to respond to the growing demand. If clients insist on more-traditional classroom arrangements, Persis Rickes says, she recommends at least “a little more robust square-footage allowance per seat, which would then give the institution flexibility in the future.”
The furniture company Steelcase introduced a complete Scale-Up-style suite of fixtures and technology called LearnLab in 2006, but in the past three years it also introduced Verb, a system of wheeled tables and chairs with add-on white boards, and Node, a swiveling tablet-arm chair on wheels, both designed to facilitate students’ moving around the classroom. Michigan State recently replaced a fleet of outdated tablet-arm chairs with more than 1,500 new wheeled models: Node chairs, along with Learn2 chairs from the furniture manufacturer KI, says Ms. Kranz.
Lennie Scott-Webber, director of education design at Steelcase, says the company has also been selling its active-learning-oriented products to elementary and secondary schools, where many Scale-Up-type programs are also under way. “These are the children who are coming to higher ed,” she says. “What are you going to do if they come to the college classroom and it’s chalk and talk?”
Mr. Beichner believes that innovations that make classroom instruction more effective through making it more social are key to the very survival of the physical campus in higher education. “If all you’re doing is lecturing, a student can probably learn more in a well-designed online class,” he says. “The people are the value added with going to a brick-and-mortar institution.”
