Often library or learning commons spaces are designed or redesigned without significant input from customers(i.e. students, teachers, or librarians).  Including student voice in design helps activates students' sense of engagement and teaches problem solving skills.  Libraries are increasingly coming to recognize that including student voice in library policies and library design is not only good for students as learners, but also good for building strong and collaborative library-student relationships.  As outlined in the U.S. Department of Education's Future Ready Librarians framework,  the role of the librarian as a facility planner means that the librarian needs to engage in best practices around gathering "client" information and empowering clients as "owners" of the space.   The framework also recognizes the role of librarians in inspiring students as creators. This one week course will introduce library school students and school administrators to methods for incorporating student and teacher input into a library design project.  A core part of the module includes introducing library students to the Design Thinking Process as a vehicle for more customer-centered design.  Students will then create their own activities for gathering student or faculty input.  A variety of inspiring readings on libraries and design from both inside of OER Learning Commons, Creative Commons licensed materials, and other sources will be utilized as well as materials introducing the Design Thinking Process. Objectives:Through example, lecture, and practice students will become familiar with the Design Thinking Process and begin to use it as a method for solving library design challenges.Students will be able to identify how the Design Thinking Process interviews contribute to empathy and lead to more user centered design.Students will experience using principle of open learning to build a library environment that is inviting to all.Students will work collaboratively, modeling the collaborative work they want their future students to engage in.

This is a tool to use in evaluating school library facilities. It can be used by a team of evaluators, as a precursor to renovations, to look at equity throughout a school district, or by an individual librarian or administrator.

In this space planning module we are going to explore taking our open learning environments to the next step beyond technology, to a richer higher level of mindfulness.  It is a step away from the ledge that is catapulting students into robotic mindlessness and a lack of cognitive control.  In our eagerness to connect students with technology we forget the human side of learning.  Our brains function with either a perception-action, bottom-up learning cycle or a more advanced top-down goal, attention setting process. “The perception-action cycle is fed by sensory inputs from the environment—sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations, whose signals enter the brain via an expansive web or specialized nerves.” (21 Gazzaley) There has always been a role for our senses to play not only in learning but in survival.  Enriching the sensory environment should be a goal in space design. But our ability to control the perception-action cycle or pause it is critical.  “During this pause, highly evolved neural processes that underlie our goal-setting abilities come into play, the executive functions.  These abilities of evaluation, decision making, organization, and planning disrupt the automaticity of the cycle and influence both perception and actions via associations, reflections, expectations and emotional weighting.  This synthesis is the true pinnacle of the human mind, the creation of high level goals.” (23 Gazzaley)  Creating a space for students to use all their sensory perceptions should be filled with energy.  They are the spaces we have been designing in recent course modules.  Now we should ask does that environment also encourage a pause; allow the individual to focus, be mindful of themselves, and learn cognitive control?We will start by looking at the scope of information and environmental overload,” the clutter”,  we have dropped learners into in our schools.  When technology came into libraries very little was taken out.  As technology has expanded expeditiously, libraries hesitate to remove aging equipment or under used print resources allowing the environment to become dense, difficult to navigate, simply cluttered.   Excessive clutter impends cognitive control and our ability to focus on finishing a goal. Before you can see the potential of a new library space we have to de-clutter, remove what is not contributing to student learning every day, and open the space to possibilities.  The environment can be a partner in learning, but first obsolete elements, not contributing to K-12 learners, need to be removed. In Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen’s research driven book, The Distracted Mind, they explore neutral processing and how easily young minds become addicted to distractions, especially when using digital devices while rapidly scanning through text, graphics, images and auditory sounds.  …three out of four K-12 teachers asserted that student use of entertainment media (including communication tools such as social media) has hurt students’ attention spans a lot or somewhat, 87 percent of teachers reported that the use of technologies is creating “an easily distracted generation with short attention spans” and 64 percent felt that “digital media do more to distract students than to help them academically”. (145, Gazzaley, Rosen)  The question now becomes: Have we introduced technology too pervasively without understanding its neurological side effects to developing minds?   Are our learning environments become a noisy distraction and if so how do we create more balance? We will look at design elements that can be added into the environment to shift attention back to sensory awareness and reflection. The inclusion of sensory design elements, like nature can add richness and focus to learning.  Contemporary learning environments should support active, collaborative learning but also invite quiet, reflection.  A “whole person” is coming into our schools and our learning spaces need to support that “wholeness.”  The next evolution of educational space planning, specially libraries, should focus on linking the physical, neurological and emotional well being of the learner.  We have designed educational spaces for pedagogy, for efficiency, for all the traditional educational tools and for all the new digital tools.  Now it is time to focus on the whole user and our need to encourage innovative thinkers through matching innovative environments.  Ellen J. Langer”s argues that “behavior depends on context.”  If we want students to be creative,  innovative thinkers we should pay more attention to the “context” through which they are learning.  This includes the tools and the pedagogy of their learning but also the environment.   We will explore Langer's concept of “sideways learning” which includes openness to novelty, alertness to distinction, sensitivity to different contexts, implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives and orientation in the present.  Being mindful of the present, moving beyond the comfortable categories of our past and what those two concepts mean for space planning.  

If we take a constructivist approach to learning in libraries, then library spaces should be responsive to student needs. As Theodore Creighton points out in Setting the Stage for Staff Development,  "the teacher’s responsibilities involve creating classroom environments where students think, explore, and construct meaning, while including opportunities for students to have social interaction."  Similarly, library spaces, which allow support for both classes and "free-range" learning should do the same.  In a previous OER Commons module by this author on library space design, students studied methods for gathering student input into design. The next step is to begin incorporating that input into the actual design process and to apply input to the space as a whole.   Too often librarians start with furniture rather than starting with the purposes and mission of the program and space. As Malcolm Brown points out,"Creating a vision for learning and learning spaces is a powerful leverage point; it informs almost all other decisions about learning space design. A vision also allows us to effectively articulate to all constituents what we are trying to accomplish. The vision helps organize all participants in the design and implementation of these spaces as well as the activities they support. Simply installing wireless access points and fresh carpeting isn't enough if done in isolation; such improvements pay real dividends only if they are in concert with the institution's overall teaching and learning objectives."  (Learning Spaces)Prospective librarians may not have a current space to design, but they can begin envisioning space as a construct that incorporates user needs and wants and that drives program goals, and begin to think about spaces as a whole.   This module particularly focuses on ideas contained in the book Language of School Design(Nair and Fielding) and work by Ewan McIntosh (notosh.org).  Both works  ask library designers to think of spaces in terms of zones and how those zones make a variety of student learning possible.  A series of readings and recordings will provide an introduction to these concepts with examples.  School Librarian Competencies , 4, 5, and 10http://researchguides.austincc.edu/c.php?g=554360&p=3891603ISTE Educator Standards  2 and 5https://www.iste.org/standards/standards/for-educators