Teachers\u27 Instructional Decisions and Student Agency in new Purposefully Designed Learning Spaces

Learning that promotes student agency and active, cognitive student engagement has a positive impact on students’ self-efficacy, learning, and achievement. When designing lessons that foster student agency and active engagement, educators must consider multiple variables, including the space where learning will take place. In order to understand how students perceive the impact of spaces in learning and how designed areas are being used by teachers, a qualitative study was conducted at a newly designed energy industry-focused high school. This manuscript presents the students\u27 perspectives related to student agency, the value of learning, students\u27 role in their learning, and how cognitively challenging lessons influence their engagement in learning. The authors argue that the teachers’ instructional decisions and their use of purposefully designed spaces have an impact on students’ engagement and their ownership of learning

Listening to High School Students: Purposefully Designed Spaces and the Impact on Students’ Engagement in Learning

Scholars have generally accepted the notion that context and students’ response to the environment influence their engagement in learning. Hence, a qualitative study was conducted to explore the impact purposefully designed learning spaces have on student engagement in a career-inspired high school. Focus groups were conducted before and after the move to a new high school. Through the group interviews, students engaged in discourse about the impact purposefully designed learning spaces have on their engagement in learning. The findings indicate that the students recognized the instructional importance and the impact of their new spaces. The student voices provide educators and architects insight into the design elements students value. For educators, the student voice informs educational processes and has implications for curricular design and delivery, leveraging purposely designed learning spaces and student preferences to achieve the best education possible. For architects, and other design professionals, these student voices detail the types of spaces that should be incorporated in order to ensure learning efficiency, learning preferences, and interdependenc

Social Emotional Learning Practices and Learning Spaces

Daniel Goleman, journalist and author, popularized the idea of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) based on his work surrounding emotional intelligence (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2022). Although recognized as a new approach, SEL was well-established during the early 1990s in American education. Since then, SEL “has emerged as a major thematic and programmatic emphasis in American education” (Hoffman, 2009, p. 533). “Well-being in education” (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2022, p. 26) has become a succinct description of SEL. Generally, SEL is learning focused on “social, emotional, behavioral, and character skills that support success in school, the workplace, relationships, and the community” (Frey et al., 2019, p. 2). Moreover, these skills are “often considered ‘soft skills’ or personal attributes rather than explicit targets of instruction” (p. 2). For this study, teachers, in a variety of Texas educational settings were surveyed regarding their beliefs about SEL as they related to the built environment. Specifically, the researchers analyzed teachers’ perceptions about their own abilities to employ SEL strategies, and whether the learning environments in which they teach supported or inhibited their instructional practices