NEWS

Explore to Innovate: The Key to Transforming Educational Spaces

Explore to Innovate: Workshop with teachers from Argentina

4 April 2025

News

4 April 2025

News

Blog post by Rosan Bosch.

As someone who works with school leaders on redesigning learning environments, I often hear the same question:

"Can we start by testing small initiatives before committing to a big change at our school? To know whether it works or not?"

The answer is yes—of course, you can test.

There are numerous ways to do so, and later in this article, I share some inspiring ideas about schools that have successfully implemented more minor changes that ultimately sparked meaningful transformations.

Children learn most naturally through play. Through experimentation, they explore new ideas, test, maybe fail, discover, and learn. This learning cycle is essential for creating the right conditions for learning. Without it, we miss the opportunity to foster authentic curiosity and development.

I truly want to shift the focus of the conversation from testing to exploring. Exploring to innovate, I believe, is the essential driver in a transformation process.

Reframing the Question

The real question should be:

"How can we make room for more experimentation in our schools?"

Our current educational system is frozen. Teaching methods follow outdated models while student's needs evolve. Assessment focuses too much on memorization and not enough on creative exploration.

Schools need a learning culture that embraces experiments, one that inspires teachers and students to explore new ways of working, teaching, and learning.

How can we create more flexibility and space for experimentation in a stagnant learning culture?

Start Small, Dream Big

Minor disruptions or initiatives can make a significant difference before committing to a big change at your school. It's about trusting students with freedom. That's how they develop learner autonomy and student agency. Start by:

Opening classroom doors
Allowing students to work where they want with agreed return times
Using other spaces outside of school: parks, museums, or city spaces

Inspirations

Here are some examples that have worked wonderfully:

The Tourist

In this case, 120 middle school students and their teachers temporarily moved into the canteen, and during lunch times, they relocated to the school library. This went on for a month. During this period, they became a strong community, discovering new ways of working, collaborating, and learning. Importantly, the students became aware of the teachers' development process and joined in.

The result: The group of students gained more agency because the space was more flexible and adaptable. In the end, they didn't want to move back into the classrooms!

CreaLab

CreaLab was a creative and collaborative educational design process we created for a local library. The library wanted to transform an empty space into a new learning and afterschool environment where young people could hang out after school, do their homework, and be inspired to learn new things.

Two design camps engaged the students in a design thinking process to ensure that they would want to hang out in the new space after school and take ownership of the finished design.

In Camp 1, the students ideated and built a small-scale prototype of a new flexible indoor learning & afterschool environment.

In Camp 2, the children got to build and test the new learning environment in real life.

The result: Engagment was very high. The students loved the whole experience and most importantly, CreaLab became a huge success.

Corridor Takeovers

At a school, the learners took over corridors, hallways, and every little ‘negative space’ we could think of not directly linked to learning and adapted them into new learning spaces.

The result: What used to be long silent corridors now was buzzing with voices and collaboration because the students started to hang out all over the school, making the learning visible.

"Dogville"

With 12 Argentinian public schools, we carried out an exercise inspired by the movie by Danish director Lars von Trier with The Ministry of Education in Argentina. In an open, unused space, they taped up their new flexible learning landscape on the floor, then played out and imagined different scenarios (both good and bad).

The result: A great day, amazing learning, and a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges of committing to change.

"DOGVILLE": The Ministry of Education in Argentina.

The Challenge of Change

The challenge of changing is getting everybody involved and committed. Habits and practices are strong, and it takes patience to change them. By creating inspiring situations for trying out new things, or simply by making it a team effort, it becomes much easier for teachers to develop confidence.

The most important thing is to establish a learning culture—an approach based on the 'We are all in this together, and no one has to change alone' organisational spirit—where we can learn from each other and grow together.

The Four Interconnected Elements of School Transformation

A school works like clockwork - you need to address these four interconnected elements simultaneously:

People
Time
Space
Activity

One thing is certain: if you don't change anything physically, it's extremely difficult to change how you do things. We are creatures of habit, after all. Change is difficult, but with the right approach to experimentation, it becomes an exciting journey of discovery.