Giving Compass' Take:

• Workspace Education located in Connecticut and developed by Cath Fraise, is five plus acre campus that incorporates a maker education attitude with STEM, design learning in order to create new pathways for students, unlike the traditional classroom. 

• How can building classrooms outside of traditional norms help students achieve higher learning outcomes? Will traditional schools try to fit their education style into this trend?

• Learn more about aspects of the maker education and it's dedication to inclusivity and equity in the classroom. 

When I arrived at Workspace Education in Bethel, Connecticut, Founder and Executive Director Cath Fraise said she needed to go get her class started. She was back in five minutes and then spent the next hour with me. The students, she said, didn’t need much from her. They knew what they were supposed to be working on and had access to the resources they needed.

In addition to the increasingly predictable “makerspace,” they have a lunchroom/library, a performance theater and DJ room, a sewing and craft room, a science lab, a virtual reality room, a working wood shop, small tutoring spaces, workspaces for parents and teachers, a bean bag-filled viewing room for watching video-based instruction and movies, and many other multi-use spaces.

Cath Fraise wanted to create a place where students could be themselves and experience school in positive ways, and where learning would be designed to help them develop their strengths and turn their ideas into reality.A little more than a year since opening its doors, Workspace is already expanding rapidly on its five-plus acre campus. Two micro-schools will allow students to focus either on a four-year STEM program developed and overseen by a Yale PhD in geobiology or a humanities program inspired by top liberal arts colleges in the Northeast.

What I find really interesting is that what Cath Fraise has mostly done is create new possibilities for the positive. Each student is viewed as having unique assets to be developed via radically individualized pathways. Workspace is curating a wide portfolio of learning options, drawing from the local and international community, and from online and open-source resources.

Read the full article about educational workspaces by Robin Lake at Getting Smart