Furniture Design Ideas

In recent years, there have in our view been enormous steps forward in the curriculum and the way our children are taught, but very little has changed in the classrooms we are providing for that new learning. The ‘classroom of the future’ initiative made the assumption that classrooms are still appropriate environments to initiate new […]

Closely associated with a natural environment is a healthy environment. It is now widely known thata healthier environment, with more natural light and ventilation, aids concentration and therefore learning, but we are still designing school classrooms that are not as healthy as they could be, with too little ventilation and too much unnecessary artificial lighting […]

Technology changes our whole outlook on life; it has acquired the power to determine ideas, beliefs and myths to such an extent that all our thinking, as well as our activities, is now situated within that technological context. The word ‘nature’, which in the past described the natural world, has been displaced by ‘environment’ – […]

In 2000, the Government’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) piloted twenty-seven new school projects around the country in an initiative called ‘classrooms of the future’. By starting with a polemical question ‘what is “a classroom of the future”?’, it encouraged both a design-led approach and an exploration of where the theory of the classroom […]

Prue Chiles Editor’s introduction Twenty-seven of the recent UK Government’s ‘classrooms of the future’ pilot projects are now complete. Prue Chiles reflects on this important Government initiative as one of four architects building classrooms in the Sheffield area. She explains how she responded to the challenge of designing a ‘classroom of the future’, combining extensive […]

With reference to the question: Does the primary classroom environment enhance the effective delivery of the National Curriculum? The study clearly indicates that there is a strong relationship between the classroom environment and the teaching and learning strategies associated with the National Curriculum. The explanation of this answer lies in the collection of the research […]

With regard to questionnaires within the study, three questions were asked of the teachers. The questions were as follows: Q1 Does the way you teach or the subject mat­ter you teach require any special physical needs within the classroom? Q2 What do you think about the classroom environment? Do you think the layout and organization […]

The lesson observations took place in a varied age range of classroom environments and the research instrument used provided a detailed and descriptive analysis about the structure of lessons and the varying uses of the primary classroom environments. The following is a summary of the research findings: • Classroom layouts were arranged in either rows, […]

Whilst investigating aspects of the learning environment, we found relationships between behaviour and human experience on the one hand and the design of the physical setting on the other.38 It is a complex relationship and evaluation naturally incorporates a degree of personal interpretation. The most common method used in qualitative research is participant observation, which […]

In his study entitled Inside the Primary Classroom, which was published in 1999, Galton found that the majority of classroom spaces in use were simple enclosed rectangular rooms which were difficult to adapt.30 Of the various twenty-eight classrooms observed, twenty-two were of the type generally referred to as ‘box like’, the key characteristics of which […]