What If Reflection on Learning Spaces Was Part of Learning?

Written by: Agatha Partyka, Alison Giancristofaro-Keswell, Ella Camporeale, Nicole Kirby, Olivia McKim

Summary

This article explores what changes when reflecting on learning space is treated as part of learning itself, rather than something that occurs after a building is finished. Framed for educators, the piece positions spatial reflection as a curriculum-aligned practice that can support communication, self-regulation, and agency for students, while easing the often unseen burden on teachers who routinely adapt to spaces that don’t quite fit.

Informed by collaborative inquiry through Learning Environments Australasia's (LEA) Mayfield Project – a research project bringing together emerging professionals across design and architecture and teaching and education - the article reflects a growing sector conversation about creating more timely feedback loops between the daily experience of classrooms and those who shape them.

Educators are constantly reflecting: on student engagement, differentiation, behaviour, wellbeing, and learning outcomes. Reflection is embedded in curriculum planning, assessment design, and professional practice.

Students, too, are guided toward self-reflection, developing awareness of how they learn and how they contribute to shared learning cultures. Yet amid all this reflective work, the spaces where learning happens are rarely invited into the reflective rhythms of curriculum and classroom life. There has been growing recognition that the design of learning spaces alone does not guarantee meaningful pedagogical impact.

When learning spaces don’t work, teachers and students notice immediately.

If a room is too noisy, a layout restricts movement, or harsh afternoon sun renders part of a space unusable, teachers adjust seating plans, introduce routines, manage transitions, and develop workarounds with their students. Attention is drawn to space most often when something goes wrong: a broken heating system, disruptive acoustics, a dangerous corner. These moments are addressed pragmatically and locally, then absorbed into everyday practice.

In anticipation of new construction, teachers are often consulted late in the process, asked to distil years of spatial experience into hurried conversations with architects working within fixed budgets, timelines, and decisions already in motion.

Formal building evaluation, when it occurs, usually takes place at the end of a project. By then, workarounds are embedded, lived experience is difficult to reconstruct, and feedback arrives too late to support those currently teaching and learning. While pedagogy is scrutinised proactively, engagement with physical surroundings remains largely reactive. The classrooms, corridors, libraries, and playgrounds that shape attention, emotional regulation, movement, and social dynamics each day rarely become objects of shared reflection between educators, learners, and designers.

Learning Environments Australasia's (LEA) Mayfield Project - a research project bringing together emerging professionals across design and architecture and teaching and education – has begun exploring these questions.

As part of the Mayfield cohort, at the 23rd Annual LEA Conference, LEA 3001: A Learning Space Odyssey, held in Brisbane, we posed a practical question to educators and designers: what if learning space were not only something designed and delivered, but something reflected on through learning itself?

How might spatial awareness be integrated into everyday educational practice without overwhelming already busy teachers?

And what lightweight approaches might capture these reflections in ways that support classroom communities while informing future design work?

The Mayfield Loop project emerged as one response to these questions. Rather than relying on post-occupancy evaluations conducted after construction is complete, the Loop explores how ongoing, lightweight reflection on learning environments might be embedded within everyday teaching and learning practices.

At the heart of this approach lies the idea of moving beyond architectural determinism towards an evidence-based understanding of how space and pedagogy interact in practice.

Moving beyond isolated projects, continuous spatial reflection opens a longitudinal view of how learning environments function over time. Shifting from one-off evaluations to regular check-ins allows patterns to surface across days, terms, and cohorts: the corridor that consistently overwhelms students with sensory sensitivities, the classroom that supports collaboration in the morning but becomes difficult later in the day.

This attentiveness highlights which spaces reliably support learning, which require ongoing adaptation, and how identical environments can be experienced very differently by different students and teachers. Framed this way, reflection moves away from reviewing architectural outcomes and toward understanding how learning spaces are lived.

Children and young people respond to their surroundings well before they can articulate why. They seek out particular nooks during reading time, gravitate toward sunlit areas for creative work, or become restless in certain spaces while flourishing in others. Inviting students to reflect on these experiences supports the development of spatial literacy: the capacity to notice, describe, and make sense of how environments shape focus, comfort, and engagement.

As students learn to articulate how space affects their learning, they shift from passive occupants of classrooms to active participants who can name which spatial conditions support their learning and which make it harder. Involving students in evaluating and co-constructing their learning environments aligns with broader pedagogical shifts towards student voice, agency, and democratic participation.

When educators engage in this reflective practice alongside their students, the dynamics of everyday work begin to shift. Teachers’ first hand experience of space gains legitimacy as essential knowledge.

Including both educator and student perspectives brings into view the daily compromises teachers make, from rearranging furniture to developing compensatory routines, and reframes this often invisible labour as evidence.

Understanding and acting upon students’ feedback about comfort, flexibility, inclusion and emotional impact can help teachers adapt spaces in ways that better support wellbeing and curriculum delivery. Spatial friction becomes something that can be named and shared, rather than privately absorbed by individual teachers.

This reflective approach also reshapes conversations beyond the classroom. When feedback is grounded in accumulated experience rather than isolated incidents, discussions with facilities teams, designers, and decision-makers become clearer and more productive. Instead of defending individual issues, schools can communicate patterns of use, strain, and adaptation in ways that remain legible across longer planning, design, and construction cycles. The gap between how spaces are intended to work and how they are used in practice becomes easier to navigate through shared understanding, rather than blame or correction.

LEA established The Mayfield Project as a space for this kind of inquiry. By bringing educators and designers into sustained dialogue, the project creates a forum to explore questions that sit between pedagogy, immediate practice, and longer-term thinking about the design of learning environments.

As this work continues, the Mayfield team is releasing a beta set of practical resources for schools and architects to begin using. These documents are an open invitation to participate in shaping what the The Mayfield Loop becomes. Rather than presenting a finished tool, the beta materials are offered as working propositions to be tested by teachers and students in real classrooms and design projects, adapted to local conditions, and questioned through use.

Early case studies emerging from schools and architects engaging with the beta materials will circulate through this dialogue and be shared at LEA’s 24th Annual Conference, Unleash, in Perth this May 13th to 15th.

Feedback from school leaders, teachers, students, and designers is not an adjunct to this process but its driving force, shaping how the Mayfield Loop continues to develop into the future. Reflection, here, becomes a shared practice through which the community collectively defines just what spatial feedback is capable of doing.