Trust and Collaboration on Creative School Practices in Open and Flexible Learning Environments

Compulsory School Teacher Margrét Einarsdóttir

Abstract

This article focuses on the eventful career and unique experience of Margrét Einarsdóttir, a compulsory school teacher and leader. It is based upon two lengthy research interviews with Margrét and previous studies conducted by the author in collaboration with other researchers on school housing and new teaching practices tied to innovative education and technology. The study highlights the interplay between administrative efforts, teaching, and the physical learning environment on Margret’s professional journey through several compulsory schools. An attempt is made to highlight how innovative and open-plan school facilities support or encourage teacher collaboration, team teaching, group work among students and project-based learning.

Through her years as a compulsory school teacher, teacher administrator, and school principal, Margret has had exceptionally rich opportunities to participate in the design of interesting learning environments and new school buildings. She started as a young school teacher in Dalvik on the north coast of Iceland, where she joined a group of devoted teachers determined to encourage student collaboration and student agency. The group used wide classroom doors and open spaces between classrooms, allowing them to organise collaborative school projects and workstations tied to selected themes.

Margret got closely acquainted with the pioneers of the Scottish Storyline Method. She made time, alongside her teaching efforts, to introduce the method to her coworkers and fellow teachers at other schools. After a short stop at Langholtsskoli, an established compulsory school in Reykjavik, where she worked with two other teachers in a set of regular classrooms and shared corridor space, she became a teacher at Korpulfsstadir, a majestic old farmhouse on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The facilities were applied temporarily and had to be used in imaginative ways on a collaborative basis.

Margret was at this point invited to participate in a consultation group established by the city of Reykjavik under the supervision of Gerdur G. Oskarsdottir and led by architect Bruce A. Jilk, and educator George H. Copa, experts brought in from Minnesota in the United States. Its mission was to lay out the design of Ingunnarskoli, a new groundbreaking school. The group comprised municipal politicians, municipal officials, educators (including the author of this article), architects, engineers and organisations representing different stakeholders. It laid the foundations of an extensive school building with an open-plan hall and library in the middle and classroom areas for up to 80–100 students on both sides.

In the continuum, Margret was asked to join a similar group that laid out the design of Korpuskoli. She enjoyed many years of practice as a teacher, administrative assistant and principal in this somewhat smaller yet open-plan building.

Margret moved on some years back, now to become the principal of Vesturbaejarskoli at the city’s western end. This led to yet another opportunity for her to participate in school building design, this time around a new extension or wing connected to an already established school building, reflecting, to an extent, open-plan trends from the previous century. This new building project is mostly remarkable for its transparency from one classroom to the next, adjoining areas in corridors that teachers and their students can easily use to their benefit in their daily school practice, and an open-plan library connecting new and older parts of the school. Open balconies on the roof contain a large greenhouse for different uses and offer a vivid view over a richly equipped and colourful playground.

Together with her team of administrative staff at Vesturbaejarskoli, Margret has made a successful effort to bring in digital devices and encourage the teaching staff to let students deploy digital technologies in collaborative work, a developmental project on making and other creative learning activities. Team teaching has furthermore been revived. After all her years of teaching and administrative practice, Margret remains a vivid advocate of team teaching and student agency supported by open and flexible school facilities.

The study findings indicate that open-plan and innovative school facilities, along with the pedagogical ideas underlying innovative school design, can become a venue for creative and dynamic school practices where the interest and collaboration of the teaching staff, together with a considerate and tactfully supportive leadership, leads to diverse teaching practices and flexible ways of learning. The research findings resonate in that respect with the understanding of many scholars that for school design to be successful in promoting collaboration and team teaching, group work and project-based learning adapted to the interests and needs of students, it has to be aligned with or supported by school organisation and culture.