How buildings change our behaviour

There is a long held belief that, generally speaking, most of us behave in the way that we are expected to behave. This theory was most famously expounded by Rosenthal and Jacobson in their educational handbook, “Pygmalion in the Classroom”, in which teachers were deliberately given false information about the children in their care in order to see if this made any difference to the way in which children behaved in the classroom.

The answer from Rosenthal and Jacobson clearly showed that pupils behave as teachers expect them to behave. Which leads to an interesting question. Teachers’ expectations have a huge impact on the way children behave. But what else affects pupil behaviour in school? Could it be that school buildings also affect the way in which pupils respond to their academic environment?

In secondary schools which become specialist colleges in the field of sports, ICT or engineering the answer is fairly obvious. If you want a school in which every child has an opportunity to enjoy, or at least experience, Tai Chi, Tai Kwon Do, kick boxing and other eastern sporting activities you need to build some arenas conducive to such training. Build sports halls geared to these activities and you immediately announce to the pupils that these are important parts of the new curriculum, and the children treat them as such.

But what are the architectural necessities of a school that has opted to specialise in the humanities?  Let us take, for example, a school whose lead subject within the humanities is English. We might expect the school to invite in actors, directors, poets and authors. They will want to explore the essence of their art in a variety of settings and the last thing in the world they will want is to be disrupted by blazing sunlight, over-heated areas, broken blinds and inflexible spacing.

Hence, if we want to make an impact and emphasise the importance of the school’s specialism, the rooms in which we teach English and the other humanities can no longer be everyday basic classrooms. Naturally we would like to ensure that they have all the latest interactive technologies – the whiteboard, computers, etc – but there is more to it than this. What we need is the right light and indeed the right ambience, just as much as the ICT suite in the specialist IT college has the very latest computer technology available for teachers and pupils alike.

We need natural lighting without glare for the poet to illustrate his or her muse in front of the class. We also need the right ambience in which to teach. Subject areas such as “ Media and the Moving Image” from the Key Stage 3 English national curriculum, all make their own demands on the buildings and have their own natural light requirements.

And of course it is not just English lessons that suffer when the natural lighting demands of the subject are ignored. Drama, history, geography – indeed all humanities subjects – all have their own natural light requirements.

Of course, for many schools the buildings are there and fixed long before a decision was taken to apply for specialist humanities college status. But the evolution of easy to erect buildings, which can be added to existing buildings or which can stand alone on grounds adjacent to the main building, has transformed the whole issue. One of the leading operators in this field is Conport, who have developed a series of buildings for schools and colleges in which northern light from above is used to illuminate the classroom, thus developing an atmosphere that is far more conducive to the teaching of the humanities. Even more astonishingly, research in California discovered that the use of northern light could increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning by up to 27%.

Fascinated by this problem, I recently undertook an informal survey of my own and found that very few of the 71 specialist humanities secondary schools have given any thought to the way in which their classrooms should be amended to suit their new specialist status. In this regard it is the UK’s colleges and Institutes which have stolen a march on the specialist humanities schools.  Bournemouth Institute of Art, for example, used Conport to design a series of studios which could be used for fine art discussion rooms. These NorthlightTM studios ensure glare-free light on screens, plus flexible partitioning allows full use of space - with folding partitions which allow several classes to take place in the same room. The Institute can now partition the space with no loss of light; and they can change use to fit in with whatever it needs. Although these were initially planned as temporary buildings, the NorthlightTM buildings at the Institute have been so successful that they now consider all of them to be permanent.

For more details please contact Conport on 020 7730 9105 or e-mail sales@conport.com.