What can students teach us about designing schools?

From spiking rates of anxiety and depression to surging overdose deaths, young Americans are sending loud signals that they’re scared and lonely, often due to decreased social connection. It’s clear something is wrong, but what can talking to adolescents reveal about possible solutions?

The answer is quite a lot, especially when it comes to the design of schools, as shown by the report Built for Belonging: A Nationwide Study on School Design and Adolescents’ Feelings of Social Connectedness. Originally published in the journal Children, Youth and Environments, the report was led by Maya Fraser, AIA, a staff architect at Quinn Evans, which collaborated with the University of Michigan on the study.  

In response to the current youth mental health crisis, Fraser says she became interested in discovering “what [we] as architects can do to try to address this problem and help kids who have to go to school through it.” She looked into preexisting research and found “basically nothing on how architecture can contribute to social connection and belonging at school. There is research about architecture and schools, but it tends to focus on things like whether being next to a noisy highway reduces test scores.”

To fill that void, Fraser worked on Built for Belonging with Andrew Ibrahim, MD; Lauren Szczygiel, PhD; and Mitchell Mead, an MD candidate. Together, the team surveyed over 500 current and recent high school students, gathering their thoughts on learning environments, especially regarding spaces and design elements that help students socially connect and feel at home.

Read on for insights from the report, along with commentary from Fraser and Kristina von Tish, who has written extensively about Built for Belonging in her role as a marketing/communications content strategist for Quinn Evans.

Students can easily articulate what spaces they want

The research team had no trouble getting students to open up. The study’s respondents were eager to “talk about what made them feel like they belong in a space. … Kids were running out of space in the comment boxes,” said von Tish.

Near the end of the survey, a question asked respondents how they would design their high school if they had the opportunity. The research team had some concerns that students without design training wouldn’t be able to give detailed answers, but the opposite happened. “People wrote a lot,” Fraser said. “I think we need to give people more credit for their powers of observation about their own spaces and what they need from them.”

Among different themes, students showed a desire for natural light and areas where they can bond in smaller groups, such as spaces for arts classes, performance training, and sports. Students also reported experiencing distress in overwhelming, loud, and chaotic spaces like cafeterias and hallways.  

Uniquely, the students’ feedback often resonates with adults because it makes them recall their own experiences in school. “I think a lot of people who read this report are going to have some ‘a-ha’ moments looking back. … I hated being in my school cafeteria, and now I can articulate why,” von Tish said. “It didn’t necessarily have to be that way.”

The spaces students want are missing—or inaccessible

While students are adept at naming the design features that help them connect with each other, those features are often missing from present-day schools. “Many of the spaces that students rate as top for belonging are spaces that [they] don’t actually have access to,” said Fraser, referring to spaces such as “student commons or outdoor spaces.”

Frustratingly, even when gathering spaces exist, administrative barriers may prevent students from accessing them. To give an example, Fraser said, “A lot of schools have very restrictive policies around how you’re allowed to go into the library. … We’re really leaving a lot of cards on the table for how we can make school a better experience for students.”

Let there be natural light

Students love daylight in their learning environments, the report found. As Fraser said, “It seems like such an intangible thing, but … daylight just made them feel more like they belonged.” Fraser hypothesized that students desire daylight because “there’s an element of dignity. … If you are in a nice environment, then you feel like, ‘Oh, I'm really valued,’ whereas if you’re in a bad environment, [you can feel] like a prisoner.”

To Fraser’s point, natural light’s absence produced strong reactions in respondents, with one comparing a windowless room to a “dungeon” and another using the word “prison.” The sheer number of students who praised daylight led von Tish to say, “I think an actionable takeaway is just: daylight, daylight, daylight.”

Hallways can be friendlier

Between ringing bells, simultaneous conversations, and hundreds of students going to different destinations, hallways in schools can produce overwhelmingly chaotic visual and auditory conditions. Fraser therefore said noise control is a critical component of hallway design.  

She also said it’s worth rethinking the default setup—a hallway with classrooms on both sides—and instead shifting toward circulation areas that feature adjacent lounge spaces or benches and nooks where students can find a reprieve from being in a human funnel. The goal of such decisions is to make hallways “less claustrophobic,” Fraser said. (For their part, school administrators can improve the situation with scheduling decisions that reduce the number of students using hallways at any given time.)

Inspiring case studies and useful resources already exist

While Built for Belonging shows a big gap between what students need and what they’re receiving, some schools have already made progress toward addressing the issue. Architects, designers, and school planners can look to places like these for inspiration:

• The Pilot School, designed by Quinn Evans, is a Delaware learning facility with “natural light, less-intrusive lighting sources, and enhanced acoustics,” per its project page.
• Klopfer Marten Design Group worked with the Boston Schoolyards Initiative to create green learning spaces that replaced inhospitable asphalt expanses on school properties.  
• And Fraser has compiled a list of five easy-lift improvements schools can make to help their students feel a stronger sense of belonging. The list also links out to additional case studies.

Reflecting on the report’s findings, Fraser encourages education planning and design teams to incorporate students’ thoughts into building designs. “People think that students will just say, ‘We want ball pits in the school,’ and that’s not going to be useful. But [the students gave us] useful and valuable information,” Fraser said.  

In the hopes that Built for Belonging will help students, school staff, and architects and designers alike, Fraser’s team has made the report available for free on Project MUSE.

Danielle Steger is AIA’s senior manager, editorial & publications.