Rethinking schools

Skylights. A food court. Brightly colored walls. Ample room for sitting and mingling.

These features could be used to attract shoppers to a mall or executives to a business park along Route 128. But these architectural techniques also are appearing in new high schools across the western suburbs as educators are realizing that the building itself affects how students learn. And the recipe for a school is no longer simply cinderblock, tile, and windows.

''Schools are questioning more what their practices are, much more now than 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago," said Frank M. Locker, a consultant on a new high school project in Newton and vice president of DeJong, an Ohio-based firm that specializes in planning schools nationwide. ''Schools inherently respond to changes in communication, changes in technology, changes in culture."

Ashland, Hudson, the Lincoln-Sudbury district, and Shrewsbury all have built new high schools in recent years. After six years of discussions, Newton appears to be on the verge of breaking ground on a new school. Wellesley is about to decide whether to build a new school or renovate the old one.

What's the look of the school of the 21st century? Bright buildings, filled with sunlight. Flexible classroom space, allowing for nooks, where students can received individual attention, and wide-open areas, where perhaps history and English teachers can combine their classes to discuss 19th-century literature.

The Philadelphia school district has teamed with Microsoft to build a 750-student ''High School of the Future." The school will have a food court, a ''literacy nook" for small group discussions, and a 480-seat performing arts center that can be converted into two lecture halls. Several classrooms will have movable walls.

In planning a new Newton North High School, officials are looking to avoid the mistakes made in designing the current facility -- a large, monolithic, maze-like structure.

Current plans for the new school, for which the price tag may be approaching $160 million, include a greenhouse, a TV production room, a restaurant, and a swimming pool. All classrooms will have natural light. Some will be designed to accommodate courses on carpentry, cosmetics, cars, and cooking.

One of the problems baffling school officials: What should be the focal point?

Placing the library at the center sets a tone of academic excellence. As an alternative, placing the cafeteria at the center would foster a sense of community.

''We really want Newton North to be a school that obviously values academics as well as human interaction," Superintendent Jeffrey M. Young said during a recent meeting. ''But what is the center?"

Here is how new schools in area communities are testing out designs for the 21st century:

When Hudson constructed its new high school, educators decided to put five walls in 10 of the classrooms, a bit of architectural sleight of hand that forces students to sit in circles or horseshoes instead of in rows and columns.

''This moves your eyes around the room," said Brian Daniels, a social studies teacher. ''Rows move your eyes back and forth and up and down. There are no hiding places in any of these rooms, for students or teachers.

''In those old square classrooms, the desk maintained a central focus," Daniels said. ''Now the focus is wherever the work is happening. You share that area rather than having a defined teacher area and a defined student area."

Classrooms also are increasingly being arranged in small groups, which educators call ''pods" or ''clusters." They are place like spokes around a wheel rather than off a single long hallway. The design is meant to create a close-knit community within a larger school.

In Hudson, for example, the school has clusters with 125 students and 15 staff members.

Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School has a window in every classroom, following several studies that demonstrated learning is bolstered by natural light. Hudson's building is brightened by eight skylights.

One of the items all schools want is an area in which students can socialize. At Newton North, a long corridor runs through the center of the building. Everyone refers to the area as ''Main Street," and nearly every aspect of the school -- classrooms, the cafeteria, library, and gymnasium -- is accessible from it.

School officials now are discussing other approaches for the new school, such as creating a circle in the center rather than one long hallway.

Hudson High School has a large area at the entrance with the auditorium to one side, the cafeteria to another, and a large staircase leading to the media center.

''The opening, welcoming, community area is what parents notice immediately," said principal John Stapelfeld.

Lincoln-Sudbury found a cheap but effective way to make students happy -- carpet for them to sit on. The hallway floor is made out of tile, but several corners have carpet where students sit sprawled out in between classes.

''All you have to do is put a rug on the ground and the students are perfectly content," said Jack Ryan, who was chairman of the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School Building Committee.

When Shrewsbury opened its $62 million high school in 2002, it included $2.2 million in technology upgrades, including 700 computers (250 of which were laptops) in 10 computer labs for 1,600 students. The number of computers in the library more than quadrupled, from 12 to 50. It also included a $500,000 wireless system that allows students and faculty to access the Internet from anywhere in the building.

Lincoln-Sudbury put a computer lab in each academic department, and tripled the total number of computers in the building. Hudson gives each teacher a laptop.

Ashland's just-opened high school is outfitted for wireless Internet access.

''Students still have to learn the same math and English that we did," said Ryan, the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional building committee member. ''But they learn it in a manner that they're comfortable with -- and that is computers."

Nationally, schools are starting to rethink their school libraries. Several new schools in Florida decided not to build a central library and instead have several media centers scattered throughout the building. Schools in the Boston area, though, have stayed tied mostly with having one main library, though some have scattered computer labs throughout the building.

''The library is much more computer-oriented than it was before," Ryan said. ''There are books still there, and I'm sure there always will be. But many of the students do their work right though the Internet."

Educators want to give teachers private space to work and hold one-on-one meetings, but they also want their faculty members to be open so that students can approach them at any time. In building a new Lincoln-Sudbury school, officials decided to place the faculty offices along the interior atrium. One of the four walls is made of glass, which gives teachers a place of their own and at the same time subtly tells students that it's OK to enter.

Hudson also built teacher workstations -- which include cabinets, shelves, telephone, and Internet access -- in the corner of each room. But the area is designed so that the desk faces the wall, which school officials say eliminates the psychological barrier of having a teacher behind a desk.

''Is that a big deal? I think it is," said Stapelfeld, the principal. ''Because the student then feels as if he or she is talking to the teacher, not across the teacher desk, though. If we're going to have interactive learning, it takes the 'I am the teacher' away from the process. 'We're working together' on whatever it might be."

Several parents have made comments after parent-teacher conferences that the new arrangement made them feel like the discussion of their child's education was more of a collaboration than something the teacher was dictating.

Teachers also are demanding more collaboration. They want to know how their colleagues are teaching, and they want to coordinate curriculum so that the subjects overlap.

Teachers share a bathroom area and a planning area, and they frequently leave their office doors open.

''The best part of it is you can bring your failures to your colleagues," Daniels said. ''You can feel comfortable saying, 'What are you doing with so-and-so.' In the secretive days, you hoped your failures stayed a secret."

Concerns of school security are being weighed against a desire for schools to double as a community center. Hudson officials, for example, designed their fieldhouse, library, and auditorium -- all accessible to residents -- at the front of the building so that outsiders could access the facilities without going deep into the school. Parents and elderly residents frequently arrive in the morning to walk on the indoor track, Stapelfeld said.

Officials at Lincoln-Sudbury did something similar, opening the school's athletic facilities to residents for a $300 annual membership.

Sudbury held its Town Meeting at the Lincoln-Sudbury High School this year. More than 1,500 people attended, far too many to fit into the auditorium. So, there were two overflow rooms -- in the lecture hall and the cafeteria -- that were outfitted with cameras and video screens so that everyone who attended could participate in the meeting.

Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com.