“The school was to be an inquiry-driven, project-based school where students would be assessed by the work of their own creation.
What was frightening to me was, even with that idea in hand and a lot of experience with progressive curricular design, I had little idea how to make that idea come to life in the physical spaces of the building.” - Chris Lehmann http://www.designshare.com/index.php/articles/science-leadership-academy/
Like many in the school design community, we had heard about a push to create the school of the future in Philadelphia over the last few years after Paul Vallas arrived in the district with a mandate to spark enormous systemic change across the entire public school community. This past year, 4 new public high schools were given the opportunity to test new learning boundaries — including the one of last year’s “Recognized Value” DesignShare Award winners going by the eye-catching name of the “School of the Future”(through a strategic partnership between Philadelphia and Microsoft).
While this school certainly claimed a great many headlines and sparked a fair degree of debate as to the how ’scalable’ the school could be given its budget-to-student ratio, we were also intrigued by another high school that opened up at the same time just down the street.
The Science Leadership Academy, in partnership with the Franklin Institute, not only was preparing to open up in a very innovative office building renovation in City Center at a fraction of its peer’s budget, but it was being described as one of the only examples of “School 2.0″ in the United States (and beyond). While we’d heard much talk about 21st century schools and even schools of the future, we were very curious about a school that was echoing transformations in the field of communication technology and the Internet itself. Certainly a case study of this “School 2.0″ design grabbed our attention. And even better, we were curious about the design implications as the school’s founder and architects tried to make the renovated space come to life to support a truly new way of embedding technology into the lives of their students/teachers.
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