If you step into a newly built school these days, chances are they look very different to your childhood classroom.
Instead of a standard classroom with four walls, you’re likely find a large room that contains two or three classes, with no wall to separate them, and ample room for teachers and students to move between the ‘classroom’ spaces.
Listen to host Kat Clay in conversation with Senior Associate Anika Stobart, and Education Researcher Brigitte Garbin, about how open-plan classrooms might be harming our children’s learning.
Read the article discussed in the podcast.
Transcript
Kat Clay: If you step into a newly built school these days, chances are they look very different to your childhood classroom. Instead of a standard classroom with four walls, you’re likely to find a large room that contains two or three classes with no wall to separate them and ample room for teachers and students to move between the classroom spaces.
I’m Kat Clay, and this week we’re discussing open plan classrooms and how they might be harming our children’s learning. With me are Anika Stobart and Bridget Garvin from Grattan’s education team, who have recently done research into this issue and published an op ed at The Conversation. So I’ll start with you, Bridget.
I mean, what exactly do we mean when we talk about open plan classrooms?
Brigitte Garbin: So essentially what we’re talking about are classrooms that have got multiple classes. So for example, a year three class and a year four class all in the same room, and often without any way for these classes to be separated into quiet spaces.
Sometimes they’ll be in the traditional kind of desk in rows set up, but, many of them have group tables spread around the Little, nooks off to the side. you might see beanbags in them, that kind of thing. But to give you a bit more of a picture, on a recent visit to a new primary school in Melbourne, the Granton education team entered, one of these classrooms.
So a large room with two classes, separated not by wall, but, a wide pillar, which kind of left ample room for teachers and students to move between the two classroom spaces. And what the team was struck by was how noisy it was and how difficult the students were clearly finding it to hear their teacher because their voice was being drowned out by the sound of that second classroom on the other side of the room.
But it is important to note that there is a spectrum of these so called flexible classrooms. So some of them are fully open like what I’ve just described, but others have got different arrangements. They might have collapsible walls to try and facilitate quiet spaces. We support those genuinely flexible classrooms that can truly be soundproof, where those divider walls can manage noise to allow for quiet activities, and conversely to allow for bigger group activities where That’s needed or desirable for the learning that’s taking place.
So what we don’t support are these classrooms where students are kind of permanently all stuck in this one large area.
Kat Clay: And actually those flexible learning spaces, like what you’ve just described with those kind of. Portable, movable walls are exactly what I had growing up. But, I think for the most part, the first thought I had and what you said is that these spaces would be incredibly noisy if there’s no way to kind of separate these rooms out.
Anika, what does this mean for student learning?
Anika Stobart: So we did a deep dive to look at the evidence in this space. Essentially, what we found was there wasn’t much. So there really is, Limited evidence about the impact of open plan classrooms on student learning, which is ultimately a key reason why students are at school is to learn.
So 2018 systematic review of over 5, 000 studies since the sixties, looked at this relationship between educational spaces and academic achievement, but only found 21 relevant studies. And of these studies. they found that open plan environments had mixed effects on academic performance. What we do know from some studies is that noise is bad for student learning.
There was a 2015 Australian study that compared speech perception in traditional and open plan kindergarten classrooms and found that noise coming from Other classes in the open plan setting led to students actually misunderstanding their teacher. The study also found that traditional classrooms were the only classroom type to be within or close to recommended noise levels.
Other studies have also looked at the impact of noise more generally on student learning and have found, for example, that it can impact Students speed and accuracy of reading comprehension, but it is also particularly worrying for some students, such as students with hearing impairments, auditory processing disorders or ADHD, who are negatively impacted by noisy learning environments.
And it can also be challenging for students. For second language, English learners, for example. And this really flies in the face of state government policy and school policy, that’s trying to move towards a more inclusive model for education. I will note though, of course, traditional classrooms can also be noisy.
You know, I’ve been a student at school and you can have group activities where there’s a lot of noise, but a 2013, UK survey of, A 2013 UK survey of 2, 500 high school students across six schools suggested that students at schools with traditional classrooms were more positive about their school acoustics than students at schools with open plant classrooms.
And this study also found that although less frequent than noise coming from within their own classroom, students annoyance levels were higher the sounds Coming from outside the classroom. So it’s actually this adjacent noise, which is far more common in open plan settings that students find particularly disruptive to learning.
Kat Clay: So, I mean, I struggle myself with noisy environments and I mean, I can imagine how difficult that would be for, children with disabilities. Bridgette, what did the teachers have to say?
Brigitte Garbin: Teachers views do appear to vary. So there’ve been some surveys that have shown that teachers in bigger schools are more likely to support them, and that’s possibly due to having more resources available to make them work effectively.
But even then, these teachers still noted that noise levels needed to be monitored. And I guess our argument here is that classrooms should be designed in the first place to support effective teaching, not create more work for teachers. So they shouldn’t have to be coordinating lesson timetables and teaching activities with their colleagues that they’re sharing a space with just to make sure that their students can, can hear them speak clearly.
And we’ve, you know, heard reports of some teachers Having to build walls between classes in an open plan area with whiteboards or getting, you know, creative with their use of shelving. And they’re also hard to square with internationally recognized evidence based strategies for high impact teaching, many of which are actually endorsed by the state governments that are also pushing these.
open plan environments. So to take explicit teaching, for example, which is where the teacher explains key concepts and procedures clearly, and then models how to solve problems to the whole class, that’s really hard to do in a noisy open plan environment. So if you can imagine trying to teach division of fractions to your year five class.
While the Year 4 class on the other side of the pillar is practicing their Mandarin oral language presentations. It’s a bit of a night there. or to take an example from my own teaching experience of working in a classroom with a poorly designed collapsible wall, that really didn’t sound proof anything, trying to administer a test while the neighboring English class is watching a film text.
So there’s a real sense of helplessness there as your lesson, it becomes Kind of gets derailed.
Kat Clay: So the million dollar question is Anika, why are they getting built if
Anika Stobart: they’re so bad? So the idea behind open plan classroom design is that it allows students to break into smaller groups, direct their own learning and receive support from a team of teachers working collaboratively with each other.
And they were first popular actually in the sixties and seventies, then went out of trend. Now back on part of its reemergence appears to be driven by an architectural trend. It looks good in brushes. There was a freedom of information request done by researchers at a New Zealand think tank that actually uncovered that the New Zealand government who was Supportive of open plan classrooms had minimal evidence to support its policy beyond a Ted talk, which was hosted by an architect who was actually claiming that traditional classrooms were apparently obsolete, but it now appears that, New Zealand is actually retreating from its policy in support of fully open pain classrooms.
It’s unclear how common they are in Australian classrooms. So some estimates suggest that could be one in five classrooms, but this needs to be investigated further. We think governments need to do an audit to determine just how prevalent they are and how they are being used in practice. And we know some governments explicitly supporting this.
So, for example, in New South Wales, they, in 2017, they went on an infrastructure spending blitz and committed to build open plan classrooms each for up to 120 students at more than 100 new schools. The Victorian school building authority also supports. the building of what it calls new flexible learning communities.
Kat Clay: That’s a buzzword if ever I heard one, Anika.
Anika Stobart: Yeah, sure is. A lot of the rhetoric around this is laden with buzzwords.
Kat Clay: I feel like it’s a case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It sounds like people are trying to overcomplicate the matter of a classroom sometimes. Anika, I mean, we’re all about the evidence here and the research base.
What do you think governments should do about this issue?
Anika Stobart: State governments are currently making record investments in school infrastructure. For example, the New South Wales government is spending a whopping 8. 6 billion on school infrastructure over the next five years. For years, and the Queensland government is spending 2 billion on education infrastructure this year alone.
So while investments in school infrastructure are of course welcome, the danger is that many classrooms may be built in the wrong way. So until there is robust evidence. To the contrary, state governments should stop building these noisy, open plan classrooms that can’t effectively be partitioned to manage sound.
And this is consistent with a recent New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into school infrastructure, which recommended that school design should follow the evidence, not fads. We also recommend that where necessary, state governments should provide schools funding to remediate. Open plan classrooms. So teachers can reduce these noisy distractions.
And finally, more research is clearly needed in this space. The New South Wales own audit office said in 2021, that the education department should build the evidence space in relation to contemporary learning environments. Governments need to review the existing evidence and invest in studies to identify the best classroom design that supports student learning.
Innovation is of course important, but governments shouldn’t jump the gun here before we know what classroom designs most benefit student and their learning.
Kat Clay: Thank you so much, Anika and Bridget. For discussing your recent research. It’s a fascinating area and one I would be really interested to see what the evidence base brings forward in the coming years.
You can read their opinion piece published on the conversation and on our website for free at granton. edu. au. Grattan is a not for profit organization. And if you enjoy our podcast or our research through the year, please do consider becoming a regular donor at grattan. edu. au forward slash donate. If you want to join the conversation on Twitter, find us at Grattan Inst and all other social media channels at Grattan Institute.
As always, please take care and thanks so much for listening.