Transformational Education > New classrooms
Sharon Black on the Hawes Hall mock-up
Transcript
The general direction we would take at HBS if we're going to build multiples of any type of room would be to build a mockup. So whether that's a bedroom and a dormitory, or a faculty office, or a classroom, if you build the mockup then whatever mistakes you have in a design become very clear, and it's ultimately a good timesaver, cost saver, that sort of thing.
So we decided on a location, which was not terribly easy to find. But we found some very tall basement space in the bottom of the fitness center, Shad. And we decided that we would not use any sort of, you know, finish materials, but that this would be constructed of room within the room, which would be constructed of just wood studs and drywall. And that included the student desktops, the faculty area, the podium.
To build that mockup, incorporate a few changes, one of which was moving to a front of room design that included three zones. I think most of this audience will be familiar with the triple chalkboards that we have. So three that layer, but then we wanted one, two, three of those in the front of the room. Correspondingly, we really wanted to incorporate distance learning, become really a sort of portal to the world into HBS, and from HBS to the rest of the world.
Some things happen to the design of an existing classroom, or the dimensions of that when you make that one change. So going from two zones to three. We wanted to test out what happens, because the teaching pit itself, the teaching zone becomes much wider. How does that impact the teaching experience? We knew that the distance between the students on one side of the horseshoe and the other was going to be increased. How was the learning experience? How was—what happens to that sense of intimacy that's so important in our classrooms? Good sight lines for the students to be able to see each other, and interact, and hear each other. Does it push it too far away to have this advantage of so much more display area?
I mentioned the portal earlier, and then forgot to mention that in addition to the chalkboard zones we needed to incorporate display screens, and technology capabilities. So if a case protagonist is being projected on screens you can still display some written information on the chalkboards, or an Excel spreadsheet, or whatever on the display screens, as well as the protagonist. You don't want to lose any of the information the students have before them with the display. …
For faculty who have been teaching in those Aldrich classrooms for awhile, they have an incredibly sharp sense of the space around them. And it's true that some of them do notice any small increase or decrease in dimensions around the room. But we actually held—we asked some faculty to hold classes in this mockup classroom in the basement of the fitness center. One of the risks that you run in that is that simple things that you're not going to do in the mockup, such as acoustics, excellent lighting, good air circulation, it's not possible to really build to that extent in a mockup. And if people are too hot, or they're uncomfortable, or the noises, the voices are reverberating off the walls, you can all of the sudden have someone say, "This teaching pit's way too wide. I just don't like it." "Three teaching zones won't work." But they're really responding to the other things that affect what we're really trying to test out.
So, in any case, we had—we gave the students and faculty a very straightforward preface to their experience in these rooms. And we had them use the room several times to just say, "How did the experience work? Could you see each other?" So we went for specific things—the sight lines between students, the sight lines with faculty and students, that feel of intimacy—so that interaction is facilitated by these rooms, and the design of the rooms, and being part of the group. Such a big part of the whole experience at HBS. But the faculty and students were very helpful.