For nearly two decades, I taught in classrooms I had no say in designing. I don’t say that to complain. I say it because it’s true for almost every teacher I’ve ever worked with, and it turns out there’s research that names exactly what that feels like.
Teachers spend more hours inside a school building than almost anyone else in it. We know which corner gets the afternoon glare, which door sticks, which layout makes group work possible and which one makes it a daily negotiation. And yet, when it comes time to actually design or renovate a learning space, the people who live in that room all day are often the last ones asked, if they’re asked at all.
That’s not just a feeling. Researchers Jill Blackmore, Debra Bateman, Jill Loughlin, Joanne O’Mara, and George Aranda spent years studying the connection between built learning spaces and student outcomes, and one of their clearest findings, back in 2011, was that teacher voices are largely absent from the research and policy conversations that shape how schools get designed. The people actually using the space day to day are treated as an afterthought in the process that decides what that space will be.
It gets more specific than that. Their research also pointed out something I felt constantly but didn’t have language for: there’s very little recognition of the preparation teachers actually need to make a new space work. Not just handing over the keys and saying “good luck,” but real thought about pedagogy, expectations, and what happens when the transition gets messy. Because it does get messy. A beautiful new room doesn’t come with a manual for how to teach in it differently.
Researcher Brian Cleveland has studied this gap too. His work found that when spaces are genuinely different from the traditional classroom, teachers often don’t immediately recognize what pedagogical strategies they’re even supposed to use in them. It’s not that teachers lack skill or willingness. It’s that nobody built the bridge between “here’s your new space” and “here’s how your teaching changes because of it.” You can hand someone a room full of possibility and still leave them standing there wondering what to do with it.
That’s the piece that gets skipped most often, and it’s the piece I care about most.
A newer study by Fiona Young, Brian Cleveland, and Wesley Imms in 2019 makes the case plainly: the actual potential of an innovative learning space only gets realized when teachers are brought in to co-create the practice change alongside the space itself. Not consulted once at the beginning. Not trained for an afternoon after the ribbon-cutting. Genuinely involved, the whole way through.
Here’s what nearly two decades in the classroom taught me: the space you teach in is never neutral. It’s either working for you or working against you. And whether it works for you has almost nothing to do with how much was spent on it and everything to do with whether the person standing in front of thirty kids every day had a hand in shaping it.
I think about the teachers I worked alongside who inherited gorgeous new buildings and still felt like strangers in them. Not because the design was wrong, but because nobody had asked what their teaching actually looked like, hour to hour, before the walls went up. When you’re not part of that conversation, you end up doing what teachers have always done: adapting, quietly, on your own, to a room that was decided without you.
And honestly, there’s an emotional piece to this too that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough. When a teacher is left out of the design process, it sends a message, even if nobody means it that way. It says your daily experience of this room doesn’t count as expertise. Teachers notice that. Kids notice the version of it that trickles down to them, too, in a classroom that never quite fits the way their teacher actually teaches.
It’s not really magic, closing that gap. It’s just including the person who’s going to live in the room, from the start, and staying with them through the part where a new space actually becomes a new way of teaching. That’s the whole idea behind treating a learning environment as something you design to how kids learn, and how teachers teach, rather than handing down a finished room and hoping the pedagogy catches up on its own. It’s a big part of why Kay-Twelve’s Learning Space Integrator approach stays involved through that transition instead of walking away after installation.
If you’re planning a renovation or a new build, I’d love to talk about what it would look like to bring your teachers into that process early, and to keep them in it. That conversation tends to save schools from a lot of quiet friction down the road.
Katie Jubenville is an Education Market Leader at Kay-Twelve, a Learning Space Integrator working with schools across the country to align physical environments with learning vision.