How Has the History of School Planning Affected the Learning Environment?

I helped Robin Accetta Riley when she was working on her dissertation at Virginia Tech on high school design changes since the implementation of the Profile of a Virginia Graduate. In her dissertation, Riley wrote,

“During the first half of the 19th-century, education reformer Horace Mann introduced the concept of the common school, designed to produce individuals capable of replicating results quickly and following directions, much like workers on assembly lines for factories (French et al., 2022). These schools consisted of standard rows of desks,” facing the front maker board, “with windows on two sides, a utilitarian design that maximized the number of students within a single space (Baker, 2012).

This traditional teaching style used in common schools provided a prescribed package of knowledge and encouraged the teacher to act as the primary source of this knowledge, essentially “lecturing” from the front of the classroom (“Sage on Stage”), transmitting information to students who passively absorb it, often by taking notes and memorizing facts; this is considered a more traditional, one-size-fits-all, teacher-centered approach to learning that is one-dimensional pedagogy and organized by departmental academic subject matter.

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