Education Minister Erica Stanford last week announced no more open-plan classrooms will be built, after receiving "overwhelming feedback" they weren’t meeting students’ needs.
Big open spaces were too noisy and distracting for many students who’d learn better in individual classrooms, she said.
There’s also been a blaze of publicity about two Canterbury schools — Rangiora High and Shirley Boys’ — spending $1.5million and $800,000, respectively, to turn their open learning spaces into individual classrooms, with their principals saying open-plan didn’t really work.
Wakatipu High principal Oded Nathan, however, begs to differ, and after last week’s announcement says he’s emailed Stanford to invite her to visit the school.
He stresses his experience of what’s now known as ‘flexible learning environments’ differs from what’s been portrayed in the media. He notes Rangiora High had 26 classes in a room.
"We don’t have any more than four classes in a particular space.
"Our experience has been broadly pretty good, clearly students are achieving very, very well in the environment."
(Buttressing Nathan’s argument, last year’s university entrance results were the second highest in New Zealand for public co-ed schools.)
"We feel like we’ve used the advantage of the flexible learning environment and done our best to mitigate against some of the disadvantages.
"That’s not to say it’s perfect — there’s certainly times where you wish you could have an extra slider and close an additional door.
"But, broadly speaking, we feel like we’re making it work pretty well for us and for our students and for our community."
Nathan says when the school was finally given its new Remarkables Park site, "we were told we were going to be what was called an ‘MLE’, a ‘modern learning environment’."
He admits the school’s not canvassed parents for their views.
"I have heard from a couple of parents for whom their children are finding the place or the space suboptimal, and we’re trying to address those individual needs.
"But we’ve heard from lots of parents for whom they also think it is working great for them."
An example of open-plan working, he says, is if you’ve got two year 10 science classes tackling the same topic.
"Then you can have a teacher that is maybe doing more of the direct instruction to the vast majority of the students, and then a second teacher can roam and hover and make sure they’re addressing any kind of questions a student might have."
As for the argument boys and, particularly, neurodiverse children are easily distracted in open-plan classrooms, Nathan takes issue with that.
"I would say there are distractions for students in any classroom, whether it’s a single cell or an open.
"The flexibility to move students and to bring students closer to the teacher or into a place or space that is less distracting is certainly within the teacher’s control."
He accepts any future classrooms the school’s given to meet its burgeoning roll won’t be open-plan.
However, he says if you look past the headlines published after Stanford’s announcement, "she does talk about the flexibility of spaces".
"I actually aligned with a lot of what she did say."
Had to give kids noise-cancelling headphones
A parent of former Wakatipu High students, speaking to Mountain Scene this week, has reservations over the school’s open-plan learning environment.
Martin Cheifetz says "generally speaking, I think open plan is a bad idea, whether it’s open plan for a school or open plan for an office, just because there’s too much noise and too many distractions, and there’s the variability of whether your kids are focused or your kids are unfocused".
Cheifetz says he never met a parent who thought the open-plan format was advantageous.
"If your kid was academically motivated, they could succeed in that environment, but they would have succeeded in any environment.
"And kids who were disinclined to succeed, because they were easily distracted, had much worse outcomes."
Cheifetz says he had to give his three children noise-cancelling headphones "because that was the only way they could block out the noise and focus".
Pivotal Point founder and CEO Lisa Leftley suggests open-plan classrooms could be difficult enough for any student, but for neurodivergent learners it’s even harder.
