Open-Concept Schools with No Walls? We Tried That in the 1970s — It Didn't Work
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder pushes back against the revival of open-concept school designs, pointing out that this experiment already failed decades ago.
Key Takeaways
- This has been tried before - Open-concept schools were popular in the 1970s and failed spectacularly
- Walls exist for a reason - Sound, visual distractions, and the need for focused instruction all require physical separation
- Don't repeat past mistakes - Before adopting 'innovative' designs, check whether they've already been tried and abandoned
Transcript
Schools of the future have no walls.
They're open concept.
They have flexible learning spaces and students can move throughout the building flexibly depending on their learning needs.
Sounds great, right?
Well, we tried it in the 70s.
It didn't work then and yet it's happening again.
It's this zombie policy that's being tried again like we didn't try it before and like it worked last time when it didn't.
It's so funny to me that we keep doing this in education.
We keep finding ideas that sound good, that have some sort of Quality to them that makes them feel better to us than what we're doing now like walls of the classroom Oh walls sounds so terrible Well, it turns out walls are really good at blocking noise Walls are really good at helping kids pay attention to what's going on in their classroom and not the classroom next door and if you talk to anybody who's ever taught in an open concept building my wife taught in an open concept building and The noise is a really, really big deal.
The distraction is a really, really big deal.
And it turns out that doors and walls, as icky as they might make us feel, are actually really, really useful.
So it's so strange.
And the UK has spent hundreds of millions of dollars recently, like this decade, in the past 10 years, building open concept schools and then seeing the idea just completely fail again.
So it's like, I'm not opposed to innovation in any way.
I'm not opposed to experimentation, but I am opposed to throwing good money after bad once we have learned that something does not work and specifically why it doesn't work.
Like if we're going to try the same things, maybe put a different spin on them.
Maybe not just a marketing spin, but maybe it'll actually like try something different instead of hoping against hope.
the thing that failed before is now gonna work.
And we're doing this in all kinds of different areas of education.
We knew that restorative practices did not work without consequences.
We knew that trying to replace consequences with restorative practices was a bad idea prior to 2019.
We've known for over five years Now, there's been lots of research, lots of evidence, lots of experience from districts that tried this on a large scale prior to the pandemic.
We knew this would not work.
And yet still, like we're doubling down on these policies that say, oh, we don't suspend kids anymore.
We don't even let kids out of the classroom ever unless they want to run around the building.
Then they can run around the building and we'll follow them until they decide to go back to class.
Like we have these bizarre, insane-o world policies that we have known for years and years and years.
do not work districts have tried them have invested heavily in them and then rolled them back because they don't work and whether the policy is an open concept building or a no suspensions discipline policy we've got to not engage in the insanity that is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results let me know what you think