Transformational Education > New classrooms
Sharon Black on windows in classrooms
Transcript
So in Aldrich classrooms you'll notice, as all students do, there are no windows. The corridors of the building are all around the perimeter of the building where the windows are, and the classrooms are nestled in the center, in the core of the building.
When it came time to design the new Hawes classrooms, windows became a topic of conversation. Some of the people that we talked to felt like the original reason that there were no windows in Aldrich, and that there should not be in Hawes is because students can be distracted. It's an opportunity to just sort of daydream and gaze. It's—you might notice if all this snow is falling, and you need to get home before too much snow falls, and you can't concentrate on what's happening in the classroom. Reasonable—reasonable assumptions, no doubt, though there was a really strong force of people who wanted to have windows in these new classrooms, and felt like grownups could certainly command themselves enough to pay attention to the teacher.
So in the long run, I think we satisfied both camps by including windows, but the faculty member has control over blackout shades. I think there are two or three different styles of window shades that will electronically drop in front of those windows from complete blackness, to just filters the sunlight a little bit.