What happens when you have two influential events in different cities, but on the same day? You remember why you built a team: many hands make light work! The Coalition for the Advanced Understanding of School Environments (CAUSE) did just that a couple of weeks ago when they were scheduled to present at the A4LE’s annual LearningSCAPES conference in Portland, Oregon and at the Council for Great City Schools conference in Dallas, Texas on the same day. Here are some reflections and lessons learned from both events:
Q&A with Dr. Michael C. Ralph, Vice President and the Director of Research with Multistudio
Q: CAUSE has presented at other conferences - what was unique about your experience at LearningSCAPES?
A: I am grateful first and foremost for the overall enthusiasm and support from the field. We had a terrific turnout and lots of interest from folks wanting to be involved. This is a coalition and I am proud we are developing an effort people want to be a part of. There was lots of discussion about the boundaries of what types of research we want to see standardized versus what should be unique decisions left to researchers/firms. For example, participants considered how CAUSE might support making connections between measured outcomes and the stories of students and educators.
Q: Why is the work of CAUSE important and what was the response from the LearningSCAPES attendees?
A: I continue to be struck by the shared interest in these kinds of tools and resources. CAUSE is developing these research tools as fast as we can, and I am hearing from participants over and over again that they want the tools and references as soon as we can share them. As our early work has already shown, the lack of publicly available tools has been a barrier to even open discussion of post-occupancy evaluations… and I hope CAUSE is poised to further dismantle that barrier.
Q: Getting this energy from LearningSCAPES, what are you looking forward to and how will that impact CAUSE’s next steps?
A: As we move forward into 2025, I am excited to see how the growing momentum translates to opportunities for further refinement of the CAUSE tools. I hope that as CAUSE begins planning for Cohort 2 with more school districts across the United States – with the learnings from our development with Cohort 1 in Austin Independent School District – we can continue to maintain the rigor and quality that has been the centerpiece of our work thus far.
Q&A with Dr. Raechel French, Director of Planning for Austin ISD
Q: The Council for Great City Schools centers on the innovation and transformation of education. How does a post-occupancy evaluation (POE) tool fit into this?
A: The Council for Great City Schools (CGCS) is a conference all about problem solving and sharing. Both of these tenants are central to our efforts in creating an open-source, open-science post-occupancy evaluation. School districts want to leverage any tool they can to support better outcomes for students and a better learning and teaching experience. If we can bring data to the table at this event, especially at scale, we could have incredible impact on how we approach school design as one of these levers.
Q: What was the response of the CGCS attendees and how does this influence the coalition work?
A: The response to our efforts was positive. Participants were engaged in hearing about existing research and approaches to learning space design and multiple school districts expressed interested in joining our CAUSE. I can only imagine more will join in as they see the results of our pilot study. I look forward to presenting our ongoing work at future conferences and building a network of like minded school districts.