Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning

The United States has about $2 trillion tied up in aging school facilities. School districts throughout the country spend about $12 billion every year keeping this infrastructure going. Yet almost all of the new money we pour into school facilities reinforces an existing—and obsolete—model of schooling.

In Blueprint for Tomorrow, Prakash Nair—one of the world’s leading school designers—explores the hidden messages that our school facilities and classrooms convey and advocates for the “alignment” of the design of places in which we teach and learn with twenty-first-century learning goals.

Blueprint for Tomorrow provides simple, affordable, and versatile ideas for adapting or redesigning school spaces to support student-centered learning. In particular, the author focuses on ways to use current spending to modify existing spaces, and explains which kinds of adaptations offer the biggest return in terms of student learning. The book is organized by area—from classrooms to cafeterias—and is richly illustrated throughout, including “before and after” features, “smart idea” sidebars, and “do now” suggestions for practical first steps. It outlines key principles for designing spaces that support today’s learning needs and includes tools to help educators evaluate the educational effectiveness of their own spaces.

Blueprint for Tomorrow will open educators’ eyes to the ways that architecture and learning are entwined and will challenge them to rethink the ways they teach and work together.

Prakash Nair is the president of Fielding Nair International (FNI), a renowned international architectural firm that specializes in the design of innovative schools. FNI has consultations in forty-three countries on six continents. Prakash is a futurist, a visionary planner, an architect, and one of the world’s leading change agents in education and school design. He has helped dozens of communities globally to align their physical space with their pedagogical needs. He is the recipient of several international awards, including the prestigious CEFPI MacConnell Award, the top honor worldwide for school design.

He has written extensively in leading national and international journals. His work has been published in Education Week, School Planning and Management magazine, School Business Affairs, School Construction News, Edutopia, Annenberg Institute’s VUE, OECD’s Programme on Educational Building, the United Kingdom’s Schools for Life, Australian Education Union’s Professional Voice, Teacher: The National Education Magazine of Australia, and Rethink!—Ideas for Inspiring School Library Design. He also coauthored, with Randall Fielding, the landmark publication The Language of School Design.

He has been interviewed many times by print, radio, and television media and is a regular speaker and keynote presenter at international education conferences. You can learn more about Prakash Nair and the projects featured in this book by visiting http://FieldingNair.com, or contact him at Prakash@FieldingNair.com.