Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Furniture That Supports Movement-Friendly Learning

  • 07/01/18
focus desk

The Focus Desk helped students at the Hyde Park Day School take control of their learning and overcome challenges in the classroom.

The Hyde Park Day School (HPDS) in Illinois provides a specialized environment for intelligent children in grades two through eight also are challenged by ADHD, dyslexia, language disorders, and other conditions. An important accommodation for their students is encouraging movement during class time. Quiet standing, shifting weight, and stretching provide sensory feedback, helping children access working memory and stay on task.

HPDS was contacted by The Marvel Group’s Nancy Dellamore, a school parent, with an idea for furniture to support a movement-friendly setting: a desk with child-operable adjustability, allowing students to self-regulate their need to move without interrupting the teacher. The desk would also address “wish list” items from teachers to support organization, versatility, and comfort.

Over the course of 12 months, The Marvel Group’s product design team worked with HPDS faculty and students on prototypes. The final version, The Focus Desk, met the school’s goals with targeted design elements, including: A silent child-operable lift system, an expandable desk workspace, integrated study carrel walls lockable casters and dedicated on-board storage spaces.

Within a year, all classrooms at HPDS were fully equipped with Focus Desks. Teachers and students at HPDS have enthusiastically embraced the desk’s benefits.

According to teacher Erin Jacobson, “The desks allow for the flexibility our students need. At any given moment in my classroom, some students are standing, sitting, using the privacy folders, utilizing the extender to hold their learning tools, or rolling desks around to rearrange for group seating during projects. It’s hard to imagine ever transitioning back to a more traditional desk style.”

www.marvelgroup.com

This article originally appeared in the School Planning & Management July/August 2018 issue of Spaces4Learning.

Featured

  • Full Sail University Announces First Student Housing Facility

    Full Sail University in Winter Park, Fla., recently announced that development has begun on its first student housing community, according to a news release. The university is partnering with Nvision Development for construction and long-term management of the facility, which will stand five stories and have the capacity for more than 570 beds.

  • North Carolina District Completes New Elementary School

    The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) in Holly Springs, N.C., recently announced that construction on a new elementary school has finished, according to a news release. Rex Road Elementary School measures in at 133,000 square feet and is the fifteenth school that general contractor Balfour Beatty has completed for the district.

  • How a Portable Sink Helped an Art Classroom Run More Smoothly

    Classroom design decisions can have outsized effects on instructional time and safety at schools juggling mismatched infrastructure, strict budgets, and crowded schedules — particularly in the arts. Between spilled paint and dirty brushes, art classes run smoother with a sink in the studio. But many schools don’t have a sink in every art classroom.

  • Utah Valley University Opens New Engineering Building

    Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, recently held a grand-opening ceremony for the new Scott M. Smith Engineering Building, according to a news release. The facility is one of the largest engineering buildings in the state at almost 200,000 square feet, and it plays home to the university’s Smith College of Engineering and Technology (SCET).