Modern learning environment a ‘misguided philosophy’

When a rebuild of Collingwood Area School in Golden Bay was announced at the end of 2018, the school got to work helping architects draw up a design that would better connect its students and staff.

Last month, the new school opened, complete with couches and high benches – and sliding doors which meant teachers could join classrooms or open them up into shared spaces.

Principal Hugh Gully said having the option was important in the school for students aged 5-18, to help support activities like “personalised learning”.

“If you've got some students who are quite independent, then they can just move out into a space pretty much on their own, but the teacher can still have a line of sight with them.

“But if they want to pull them back into the classroom, well then they can.”

Gully predicted the doors would be opened up “quite a lot” between classes of younger students, in years 1-3, affording extra space for things like reading groups in different corners, and activities during discovery time.

The school was “adamant” it wanted classrooms that were “closed-off spaces with the flexibility to open up”, he said. Other schools with open-plan learning spaces were also switching to that approach.

Tāhunanui School in Nelson recently installed sliding doors between several adjacent classes, which were single cell classrooms before being revamped into a single open-plan block several years ago.

“What we found ... was that the acoustics didn’t match a hundred people being in one big space,” principal of the primary school, Barbara Bowen, said.

Some children with neuro-diversities didn't cope in the environment, and when pupils needed to break off into smaller groups, they had to go outside.

But many children “thrived” in the modern learning environment (MLE), and the school still used aspects of it, she said.

Being able to use the open space allowed teacher expertise to be spread across classes, and teachers could fill in for each other when others in the team were away, rather than relief teachers who often didn’t know the students well, Bowen said.

Senior research fellow at the New Zealand Initiative, Dr Michael Johnston, said there was no proof open spaces were more beneficial for learning, either before or since they were rolled out in New Zealand.

“I don’t think that there’s any evidence that a modern learning environment is ever superior to a single cell classroom.

“By and large I think they were a foolish experiment,” said Johnston, who produced a report on MLE in 2022.

At the centre of the changes was a ‘misguided philosophy’ around child-led learning that would not be easy to turn around, he said.

The Ministry of Education foisted the MLE trend – of open learning environments, also referred to as flexible or innovative learning spaces – on schools from about 2011, under National’s then education minister Hekia Parata, who vowed to revamp every primary and secondary school to the new MLE standards by 2021.

The rationale given by the ministry was that the strategy promoted studentdirected learning, but that approach was unfair to children, especially at primary

school level, Johnston said. Children learnt literacy and numeracy (and later disciplines like science and history) by solidifying knowledge one step at a time, he said.

A “wealth of literature” showed teachers needed to impart that knowledge directly, he said. “The child can’t possibly know what order to approach things; they end up suffering from cognitive overload, meaning that their short-term memory is over-taxed by trying to assimilate too many things at once.”

Once children started to experience cognitive overload routinely, they became demotivated, he said.

Some would “give up and sit quietly and think they’re dumb” while others acted out, to mask the fact they weren’t learning, he said.

“In neither case is it the child’s fault.

“It means that they’re not being taught in the way that ... every human being needs to be in order to learn these things.”

“Child-led learning” and “21st century learning” were among terms for what was “essentially an unstructured approach to teaching and learning”, that started to gather pace around 30 years ago, Johnston said.

Kiwi students’ declining academic achievement first became apparent around 20 years ago.

While it was unclear if MLE played a part, there were “certainly incidences in which it’s made it a lot worse when they [MLE] are not well managed, when they are noisy”, Johnston said.

Changing to structured teaching would require a “big professional development effort”, with most current teachers trained in the philosophy of student-led learning, and as universities “continue to turn out teaching graduates who have been trained poorly”, he said.

Teachers needed guidance in the New Zealand curriculum on how to effectively teach disciplines like English and science, he said.

Collingwood Area School principal Hugh Gully says being able to expand the school’s classrooms allows teachers to support individual student learning and group activities like reading.

FRASER HEAL Classrooms that can be opened up and closed off, like this one at Collingwood Area School, are finding favour among schools over open-plan learning spaces, after a decade-long government push for modern learning environments.

MARTIN DE RUYTER/ STUFF Tāhunanui School recently put sliding doors between classes in an open-plan block. Its principal says some children thrived under the modern learning environment model, but some, particularly neurodiverse students, struggled.