Location isn’t just about commuting, it’s about what is easily accessible to your school.
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Topic: Neighborhood & Facility

Email 6 (of 8)

Location isn’t just about commuting, it’s about what your school has easy access too.

Finding a location for a school is about a lot more than just getting a building with rent in your range. Location can affect the ease certain teachers can perform projects. If a project requires an end of term exhibition at a local coffee shop, will that be easy to do with a school in the suburbs?

There’s also the matter of school design. If you’re lucky enough to remodel your building, or even have it built from scratch, then what design elements will you include? This email’s lesson will touch on all of these subjects in order to make you think about these choices you’ll need to make.

Featured Materials

Below is a preview of some of the additional readings, videos, comics, and other resources to enhance your learning regarding this email’s topic. You can review these materials in full by going to the course landing page.


Choosing a Neighborhood Hear the importance of picking a location for your school when you want to serve more than just one demographic. This video shows how this process works by using the first High Tech High’s location scouting process as an example.		HTH Archived Map An interactive map of High Tech High in Point Loma. It shows various views from within the school.

New Vista Design Brochure A brochure from the New Vista Design Architecture Firm, which helped design HTH.		Architects for Achievement - Our Kids Deserve Better This video shows that by looking at alternative options for design and architecture, the video shows better ways to encourage a healthy and happy teaching environment so students will want to learn.

Newshour This is part of a news piece that aired covering the alternative methods of teaching at HTH. It takes an in depth look at what sets HTH apart in today’s school system.		Designing for Achievement In this reading, Victoria Bergsagel explores how architecture shapes how we live, and the way a school is laid out can influence its philosophy and learning culture.

Weekly Activity

Activity: Placing Your School On A Map

Instructions

Choose a school location that actually exists on a map within a geographical location. Create your own custom map of where you would like your school to be (we originally used Google Maps for this activity). Write a statement of reason for your selection. Once that’s done, create a proposed design layout of your school (we originally used Google Drive Drawing). Break the design down into parts and identify the philosophy of the design.

Feedback (Optional)

If possible, find 1 or 2 peers to look at your map. Is the location you picked ideal? Why or why not?

Activity Models

Student Activity Model 1
If you need inspiration, look at the student models provided within the document above to see how others completed this assignment. These slides come from two final presentations from the original course. These segments discuss the importance of neighborhoods and facilities.

Student Activity Model 2
If you need inspiration, look at the student models provided within the document above to see how others completed this assignment. Here is a short clip from a former course participant's final presentation, where they discuss the topics of this week's lesson.

School Talk 5:
Neighborhoods and Facility Design

During the original course run, Larry and Patrick hosted live weekly chats with thought leaders to address that unit's theme. In this email’s talk, thought leaders discuss how the neighborhood and facility design of a school can affect students.


	Video Version This is a video of the original talk as it occurred. It is a screen capture of a Google Hangouts conversation		Podcast Version This week's talk has also been converted into podcast form for you to listen to.

Next Steps

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