There’s a distinction that matters more than most people realize when it comes to school furniture and learning space design, and it’s buried right in the framing of the question. Are we designing for teachers, or with them?
The difference sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything.
That’s the problem Wesley Imms and Thomas Kvan identified across fifteen countries and twenty-five research projects in their 2021 edited volume, Teacher Transition into Innovative Learning Environments: A Global Perspective. The research is unambiguous, when teachers aren’t included in the design process, when new spaces are handed to them rather than built with them, the physical environment and the teaching practice never fully align. The furniture gets used, but not well. The potential gets left on the table.
What the Research Actually Shows
Imms and Kvan’s work isn’t the only evidence pointing in this direction. Young, Cleveland, and Imms (2019), through the Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change (ILETC) project, one of the largest research initiatives of its kind, found a strong correlation between innovative learning spaces and deeper student learning, but with a critical condition: the teacher has to understand how to use the space. Spaces don’t change outcomes on their own. Teaching practices do. And teaching practices change when teachers are part of building the environment they inhabit.
In a 2022 study, Julia Morris and Wesley Imms examined what teachers actually have to say about designing and using innovative learning spaces. The recurring theme wasn’t the furniture itself. It was agency. Teachers who were engaged in the design process, who had a voice in how zones were configured and what furniture entered the room, were far more likely to teach in ways that the space was intended to support. The space became an extension of their pedagogy rather than a constraint on it.
Morris and Imms’ related research on flexible furniture and student engagement adds another layer. In a two-year study involving nine teachers and more than 500 students, they found that when furniture arrangements allowed for adaptability, both teachers and students reported greater agency, greater engagement, and a stronger capacity to self-direct learning. The physical environment, in other words, wasn’t a backdrop. It was a variable, one that either activated or diminished what was possible in the room.
The numbers support what the field already suspects: researchers estimate that 10 to 15 percent of variance in student academic outcomes can be attributed directly to the physical learning environment. Something schools tend to underestimate when they treat furniture as a logistical checkbox rather than an instructional investment.
What We’re Doing Differently at Mount Prospect School District 57
Mount Prospect School District 57 didn’t wait until the building was finished to start the conversation with teachers. That’s the part most districts get wrong, and it’s the part that Mount Prospect got right. Nearly two years before students would walk through the doors of their new middle school and the Westbrook Elementary addition, the district was already bringing teachers to the table. Floor plans were still being refined. Furniture hadn’t been selected. And that was exactly the point.
What that looks like in practice is different from what most people expect. It’s not a space where teachers vote on chair colors. It’s an ongoing conversation, structured sessions where teachers are walking through floor plans and asking, Where do I need to pull a small group? Where does whole-class discussion feel natural? Where do students need to be able to work independently without distraction? The furniture choices follow those answers, not the other way around.
Starting nearly two years out created something that a last-minute selection process never could: time. Time for teachers to think carefully about how they teach, not just what they teach. Time to revisit conversations as the building took shape. Time for the furniture specifications to evolve alongside the instructional vision, rather than being imposed on top of it.
We’ve facilitated conversations with teachers across grade levels and subject areas, because the needs of a sixth-grade science classroom aren’t the same as a fourth-grade language arts room. The spatial logic has to match the instructional logic. When you build that alignment deliberately, when a teacher can walk into their room and see that the layout reflects how they actually plan to teach, the transition into a new space is fundamentally different.
And when students walk in, the teacher is ready to use what’s in front of them rather than manage around it.
The Principle Behind the Process
Imms, Kvan, Morris, and their colleagues across this body of research aren’t just making an argument about furniture. They’re making an argument about professional respect. When we design for teachers, when we hand them a finished room and ask them to adapt, we’re making an implicit assumption that the expertise driving the process lives outside the classroom. When we design with teachers, we’re making a different assumption. We’re saying: you know something we don’t. You know how kids move, how attention shifts across a 50-minute block, where the friction points are when a lesson pivots from instruction to small group. That knowledge belongs in the design process from the beginning.
That’s the philosophy at the core of what we’re doing in Mount Prospect and other districts around the country. And it’s the philosophy that the research consistently validates. The space is never neutral. It’s either working for the teacher or working against them. When it’s built with the teacher, when the furniture, the layout, and the pedagogy are aligned from the start, it becomes a tool that supports everything they’re already trying to accomplish.
That’s a result of doing this the right way.
Kay-Twelve partners with districts across the country to facilitate the teacher engagement process during new construction and renovation projects. If your district is in the planning stages, the time to bring teachers into the conversation is before the furniture is ordered, ideally years before the doors open.