Fourteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Teachers spend over two thousand hours annually either teaching in their classrooms or working in their offices at schools, playing a critical role in the educational progress. A large body of evidence supports the connections between the design of the physical environment in schools and teachers workplace comfort. Therefore, it is vital to maintain—or in many cases increase— teachers’ workplace comfort in order to maintain motivation, performance, and efficiency, which will decrease burnout and increase retention rates. The “Habitability Pyramid” model of environmental comfort defined by Vischer (2007) was applied to the context of this critical review to investigate the effect of the workplace in general, and specifically on workplace comfort and well-being, physical comfort and health, functional comfort and productivity, and psychological comfort for teachers in schools. These aspects are related to their control over the physical environment and privacy, and thus their effectiveness as educators. The interrelationship between the physical environment and teachers comfort is not only affected by their classrooms physical environment, but also as employees by the physical environment of the workplace where they conduct work outside of teaching time. This critical review provides an understanding of the design issues and physical environment attributes that mostly affect teachers’ workplace comfort in prototype public schools, which will aid stakeholders in the future of schools’ design and construction in the twenty-first century.