How to CHANGE your PARADIGM. Edmonton Public Schools’ Journey to 21st Century Learning Environments

ABSTRACT: 

You’re a public school division in a major city with 213 schools, 101,865 students, 9,225 staff, and an operating budget of $1.23 billion. Your pedagogy is considered innovative, but your learning environments do not properly align or support much of that innovative thinking. How do you initiate change? Where do you start? How can large organizations begin to explore new ways of thinking about learning environments? This session tells the story of Edmonton Public Schools’ journey to 21st Century Learning Environments. They undertook a process of discovery, co-creation, and implementation that let pedagogy drive the design process, resulting in the creation of several new learning environments that changed their paradigm. Representatives from Edmonton Public Schools and Number TEN Architectural Group will tell the story of their journey. Discovery: The session will describe the Innovation Matrix™; a tool used to help Edmonton Public Schools learn about the principles behind 21st century learning environments, examine their current and future pedagogical goals, and align them with the appropriate learning environments to support those goals. Co-creation & Implementation: The session will describe the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) method used to co-create and implement their new paradigm. IPD creates a contractually integrated team of facility managers, educators, designers, contractors, and sub-trades who share and co-create the project vision, design innovations, lean construction techniques, and profit. Finally, the session will describe some of their new and renovated school design concepts.

Learning Objectives

OBJ #1  Learn about the Innovation Matrix™ tool that helps teachers and administrators better understand the connection between pedagogy and learning environments and the different levels of innovation.

OBJ #2  Learn about the importance of properly connecting the language of pedagogy to the language of design.

OBJ #3  Learn about Integrated Project Delivery as a powerful method to co-create successful 21st Century Learning Environments from concept to completion.

OBJ #4  Learn about the priorities & design solutions that came of out the process.