School design is my interest; transforming education is my passion. I post a new essay roughly once a month — observations on learning, and the spaces we build for it.
AI can already deliver content, personalize instruction and give instant feedback. So will schools survive? Yes — not as content-delivery systems, but as among the last physical places intentionally responsible for human development at scale.
Most students still spend their day inside a classroom — a relic of the Industrial Revolution built to deliver basic skills to a mass workforce. Decades of cognitive science say it can't deliver the creative, agile education this century demands.
Written for Education Week as stimulus dollars flowed toward school construction: what's good for bridges and highways may be exactly wrong for schools. Repairing obsolete buildings only revives a model of teaching that ended with the industrial era.
When Google made the open-plan office fashionable, schools were tempted to follow — then the research revealed the costs. The lesson isn't open versus closed. It's variety: the right space for the right kind of work.
A selection of published work. The full research library — books, white papers and the complete archive — is maintained at Education Design International, which is where each of these links will take you.