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The Colors of Learning

There’s little question that the colors used in a learning environment can have a significant impact on the students … many studies over the years have confirmed the important role colors can play in learning.

The question, though, is which colors are most appropriate for a classroom and most conducive to learning? And how should those colors be used: in furniture, wall colors or other accents?

The answers vary depending upon both the students and the goals, and sometimes practical considerations as well (for example, lighter colors may be more calming, but any parent can tell you that lighter-colored furniture might not be the best choice in a room full of children).

The broad-brush consensus is that large amounts of bright colors, especially reds and oranges, are best avoided, as they can lead to overstimulation and anxiousness. The calmness and comfort engendered by cooler colors like greens and blue will offer better results in most cases, as will neutral off-whites.

Most rules have exceptions, though, and there’s a big one here: younger children tend to thrive in brightly-colored environments. Babies are born without the ability to see color, and seeing bright hues helps them learn to distinguish one color from another. Brighter colors also help to hold their attention as they age through the preschool years.

And of course the answer for your given situation depends on the physical space. A traditional main classroom area might feature neutral and calming colors, while areas designated for free play or other hands-on activities will benefit from more dramatic choices. And in a more modern setting like an agile classroom (see a previous post about agile classrooms here), fixtures and furniture can be swapped in and out with color schemes to support any given activity.

If you’re considering a redesign of an educational space, contact Douron today to schedule a tour of our showroom for ideas!

Douron’s 50th Anniversary

In 1969, Eugene and Shirley Hux started a dealership specializing in educational furniture for K-12 classrooms in the basement of their home. Struggling to name the new company, they decided to blend the first names of their two sons into a one-word brand for the firm. Taking the DOU from Doug and the RON from Ron, the DOURON name was created.

No one could have known that those humble first steps would create a regional powerhouse in the educational furniture market. A half century later, Douron is not only a leader in the field of education, but in interior environments across many disciplines including public libraries, federal and local government facilities and corporate spaces.

Douron is now one of the largest family-owned and operated furniture dealerships in the Mid-Atlantic, continuing a half-century of growth from its beginnings in a basement to its current status as a regional industry leader in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. (DMV)

From Eugene and Shirley’s original idea in 1969 to their son Ron Hux assuming leadership of the company in 1984, from a basement to our current 100,000 square-foot headquarters and showroom in Owings Mills, MD, Douron has seen many changes in design trends, and to this day we stay ahead of the curve in the always-changing field of commercial interiors.

But Douron remains a regional industry leader not only because of our ability to change with the times, but because of the things that haven’t changed: the concept of a business built on honesty and integrity, and with a corporate culture of respect for its employees, many of whom have been with us for decades.

New products and design trends have come and gone, but these basic principles have remained a constant guiding principle in the way we work with both our clients and our employees.

The Douron Way—Honesty and Integrity.

Moving Target: Technology in the Classroom

One of the great challenges in modern learning space design is accommodating the shifts in technology that have come to the classroom. The pace of change is so rapid that we really have to plan for the unknown.

Perhaps the biggest question in deploying technology in the classroom is not the “what” but the “how.” Often, new devices are employed to support the same teaching methods from decades past. In a book we’ve referenced in previous posts, From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, author David Thornburg notes that interactive whiteboards have become all the rage of late. These are wonderful and versatile tools, but when they’re used just as blackboards were – to support a teacher standing in front of a class and lecturing (the ‘campfire’) – the potential of all that new technology is diluted at best.

Thornburg also notes that many schools continue to ban classroom smartphone use by students for fear that the devices will be used to Google test answers or otherwise take shortcuts. The solution is to craft tests with answers that require independent thought and can’t be answered by an internet search, but in fairness that approach creates a much bigger demand on an educator’s already limited time, both in the creation and the grading of open-ended challenges. It’s much quicker to review multiple-choice answers than to assess the effort in independent research.

So when we don’t know what new technology the coming years will bring, and when different schools use the same technology in very different ways, where does that leave classroom design? What are the design elements that allow us to plan for the unknown?

In a word, flexibility. The same approach that allows a classroom to support different models of learning – and to quickly adapt from one to another – also supports ever-changing technology. The ideal modern learning space is a design chameleon, changing quickly to accommodate the teacher at the whiteboard, the students circled up with their smartphones to research a new assignment as a group … and whatever comes next year, and the year after that.

The Agile Classroom

In a previous post we spoke of different types of learning and the spaces to accommodate those approaches (if you missed it, read it here).

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember learning in a standard classroom setting: the teacher was at the front, the desks arranged in tidy rows facing forward, and the seats of the chairs were hard enough to crack walnuts. For an added bonus, sometimes the desk and the chair were a single unit and you had to slide in from the side. Consider for a moment that in the 5th & 6th grades alone students can vary in height from four feet to six feet and it becomes clear that settings like these were not ideal, nor were they conducive to learning.

Educational approaches have changed in so many ways: we now know, for one example, that the “stop fidgeting!” warning we heard over and over again was bad advice. Kids need to fidget, and it’s been repeatedly proven that they learn better when their environment (and their furniture) allows for movement. Fidgeting is brain development in disguise.

And more than ever, children need comfort at school as much as they do at home, not in the sense of plush chairs (don’t rule it out, though) but in the sense of a soft, quiet and welcoming space to be by themselves or with a few friends. In other words, pretty much the opposite of the metal desks lined up like gridlocked traffic.

And while all of these generalizations are true, we also need to remember that different students learn in different ways, and teachers themselves may take very diverse approaches to the same material.

So how do we reconcile all that individuality with the grid of desks? How do we take a limited amount of space and accommodate the campfire and the watering hole, the fidgeting and the time for quiet reflection?

The answer is in the agile classroom, a space that can be quickly reconfigured to address these different needs. In the agile learning environment, furniture is portable and convertible, creating spaces to engage different kinds of learners and different kinds of teachers. The agile classroom quickly and easily progresses from a traditional classroom layout to collaborative group work to student presentations, and allows the teacher’s role to progress from “the sage on the stage” to “the guide on the side.”

We love the work we do in bringing creative solutions to educational environments, and we know it makes a real difference in our collective future.

Questions about educational design? Contact us.

Campfires & Caves: A Look at Learning Environments

Douron is proud to be a part of the ongoing 21st Century Schools project launched by the State of Maryland and the City of Baltimore (read about one example here), and our work on a Montgomery County high school was featured in this article in Bethesda magazine.

We’re really enjoying From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments, by David Thornburg.

The author takes a fresh look at learning spaces through the lens of traditional gathering places throughout human history, as follows:

Campfires: Where others gather to hear information and stories told by a single individual. Think of a traditional classroom or lecture hall … the educator is in the front of the room and everyone else is listening.

Watering Holes: Where monologue turns to dialogue and learning occurs through conversation. Consider the water cooler or lunchroom in your office.

Caves: Learning continues with quiet reflection in the cave, and if all goes well, knowledge becomes understanding. Any private room, or a study cubby at the library, fills the bill.

Finally, there’s Life, where all the learning above gets applied, but for our purposes let’s stick with the physical concepts of Campfire, Watering Hole and Cave.

Which one should a modern school have? All of them, and there’s the issue: the vast majority of traditional learning spaces are devoted to the Campfire, I-talk-and-you-listen approach. Schools need traditional classrooms and lecture halls to be sure, but they also need more collaborative spaces and places for quiet reflection. This is one of the issues we address regularly with our design work at Douron.

Contact Douron today to schedule a tour of our showroom for ideas for your next project.

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