Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School is a learning space that dares to explore what can happen when learning spaces are designed more like children’s museums.
The design team and school district partnered with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh to create an entirely new type of school, one that activates learning everywhere: in corridors, indoors, outdoors, in group learning spaces, along peg walls and via environmental graphics. The school gives students agency to curate their educational journey and empowers them to engage in ways most relevant, interesting and meaningful to them. Ehrman Crest sets a new precedent for school design.
As children would see in a museum, Ehrman Crest simultaneously brings multiple learning modes together-stunning artwork and photography engage visual learners, intriguing objects captivate tactile learners and interactive exhibits allow learning to soar.
This is also a massive departure from traditional school buildings that are composed of classrooms and assembly spaces that typically direct the types of learning and interaction students experience within them. At Ehrman Crest, fluid programming offers various experiences that develop critical thinking skills throughout the building. Students embark on an academic and physical journey through a series of porous environments—a room, collaboration space, work-in-progress area or the outdoors—to exercise choice in a truly unique way. The result is a captivating environment that transforms historically unused features of a school’s built environment into educational elements that promote out-of-classroom learning.
At Ehrman Crest, students learn through individual instruction as well as group experiences. To accommodate both, each grade level is structured in communities that include classrooms, a collaborative area and small-group instruction rooms. This format caters to academic and emotional needs of students by creating adjacent spaces for teachers and students to engage in one-on-one instruction and for students to work in groups.
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