New Construction

Stanford Begins Construction on New Facility for Graduate School of Education

• By Matt Jones
• 03/23/23

Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., recently celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony for a new home for the university’s Graduate School of Education, according to a university news release. The project entails the renovation of the current Education Building and the construction of a new facility. These two structures will be connected to the existing Barnum Center for Family and Community Partnerships via a 13,500-square-foot courtyard (including an outdoor classroom and garden) to create a three-building, 150,000-square-foot GSE campus.

The new space will feature a wide variety of teaching, conference, convening, and community spaces. It will also allow room for growth with changing technologies and project-based work, according to the news release. It will play home to the Stanford Teacher Education Program and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

“The new campus [is] a tangible representation of all that’s happening at the school,” said Dan Schwartz, Graduate School of Education Dean, at the ceremony. “It will help facilitate new research aimed at solving some of the biggest challenges in learning…It will foster collaborations to take education into a currently unimaginable and brighter future. In the end, the campus will do what architecture does best: orchestrate social interaction.”

The construction and renovation are scheduled to take a total of about two and a half years. A significant portion of the project’s funding comes from philanthropic support from a variety of donors.

“The Graduate School of Education’s new, expanded home will be a very highly visible beacon of the promise and the potential of education,” said University Provost Persis Drell. “It will draw students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners from diverse fields who share the desire to improve outcomes for every kind of learner at any stage of their educational journey.”