Comparing teachers’ experiences of innovative and traditional learning spaces: what’s going on?

Abstract The physical spaces of education are not neutral containers but influential parts of the total learning environment. Teachers’ pedagogical decisions are made partly on the basis of the availability and organization of material and digital resources. However, teacher understandings, both individual and shared, of the possibilities offered by learning spaces are key to their full use. Therefore the provision of more versatile spaces, where groupings and activities can be varied, may not result in the intended educational innovations of collaborative teaching and student-centred learning. This paper answers the need to discover how educational spaces with such designs are being understood and used by teachers. This research used the OECD’s staff survey to investigate teachers’ views and their reported use of spaces in a sample of Swedish schools with either a traditional or innovative design. Alongside many similarities in responses across the two types of school design, we found slight differences in use of space, according to school type. This evidence that teachers are indeed recognising and exploiting the possibilities of these new designs is important for Swedish municipalities and other funders globally that are investing in such schools. It is also necessary to consider the limitations to pedagogical innovation that our findings suggest in order to develop better understanding of the design and use of twenty-first century schools.