This is a very different audience - not only are the professionals primarily architects, interior designers, and of course the sales people of the various furnishing companies, but almost all of the folks representing educational institutions are from the K-12 environment, and most of them are not necessarily faculty but people involved on the state or local level with designing schools. As a result, the presentations appear to be focusing on ideas that folks in the instructional design and instructional technology communities have been talking about for a number of years - for example, having folks talking about what a flipped classroom is seems somewhat strange to me, having folks talk about how online learning is a new trend that should be seen as disruptive innovation is also interesting - just reminding me how slowly ideas work through different segments of the work force.
On the other hand, seeing some of the examples of what K-12 schools look like and, more importantly, what they are doing, is just amazing. For example, one of the sessions on maker spaces gave the examples of multiple schools where the school culture has been profoundly impacted by introducing a maker space into an area that is publicly available. (Reminder - a maker space is not just a space with tools, either physical or digital, but a space with these tools that gives students space to explore ideas with the specific purpose of solving a problem that they perceive by building/creating a solution and testing it). One school where a maker space has allowed for a change in school culture, improving student attendance, retention, and graduation rates is Tilden High School in Chicago. Of course it is the people who make this happen, but the space makes it much easier.
Maker spaces are also described a space where you can learn to take risks - and risk taking was claimed as a core skill just like communication, leadership, and collaboration.
Showing another example of schools can be different, Chris Lehmann, founder of the Science Leadership Academy, a high school focused on letting students learn, challenged us to change our language so that we no longer say that we are teaching a subject but that we are teaching students a subject. Adding the word students shifts the focus away from the content to the people - as it should be. As the content can change rather quickly anyway, focusing on students is the only way to go (one person stated that every 73 days, medical education changes).
Part of this teaching the students is that we need to give students the space to learn - and that means the space to make mistakes and truly learn from them. We take it for granted that athletes and musicians take years of practice before being good, if not even great at their skills. For some reason, we set a different standard when it comes to other subject matters.
We also need to make sure that the environment allows for empathy and caring - change is scary, and it becomes even scarier when you do not have a safe space at home. Caring is essential, but caring does not mean that I do things for and to you (that is control and management); caring means that I do things with you and by you.
And so our schools need to reflect the caring and the focus on student learning - and this means that we need to move away from learning spaces that are designed as prisons and as crowd control, and need to move across the board towards spaces that encourage curiosity, exploration, social justice, civic engagement, and innovation - for all, not for the school districts with a high socio-economic background
And finally a little fun - we did a rapid prototyping process in one of the sessions to come up with a learning spaces design, using, among other things, playdough.
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