Effective Practices
Inventory department spaces and their use at regular intervals, such as every five years
- See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to conduct inventories.
- Inventory offices, classrooms, instructional labs, research labs, conference rooms, study and social areas, hallways, equipment storage areas, maker and/or shop spaces, and other spaces. If your institution has recently completed a space utilization study, it may be a good starting point for identifying relevant spaces and their usage.
- Use exit interviews, surveys, and/or focus groups with department faculty, students, staff, postdocs, and guests to evaluate your department’s spaces. Ask how effectively these spaces facilitate and support learning, collaboration, and scientific work; encourage social interactions; and exhibit the culture, community, and achievements of your department. See the section on How to Select and Use Various Assessment Methods in Your Program for guidance on how to use student feedback forms for formative assessment and how to use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to learn about your students.
- Assess each space’s quality (e.g., the amount of natural light it gets, its comfort, and its location) and condition (e.g., the age of its furniture and/or the level of wear of its blackboards).
- Identify particular characteristics of your spaces that help department members feel connected, or that lead them to feel isolated. Reflect on how your spaces may need to be modified to support department members in connecting with each other in light of changing needs for remote learning and interaction.
- Review what works and what needs to be improved with respect to furniture, storage, utilities (e.g., power, internet, water, vacuum, and gas), instructional technology, and preparation rooms for teaching and research labs. Evaluate how changing needs for remote interactions may affect your assessment of what works and what needs to be improved.
- Identify spaces that have issues such as inappropriate capacity (i.e., the space is too large or too small) or maneuverability (i.e., instructors cannot easily move between students or students cannot easily work in groups), inadequate lighting, accessibility problems, noise, low air quality, poor ventilation, poor heating or cooling, inadequate utilities, and/or designs that make it impossible to see projected material or perform particular demonstrations or experiments, e.g., because obstructions block students’ view, or blinds or shades do not adequately block exterior light.
- Identify spaces used for different activities at different times (e.g., a classroom used for group work after hours), including spaces shared with other departments and programs.
- Evaluate how the locations of spaces your department members use impact how people use these spaces and connect with each other. For example, are department members able to effectively travel and collaborate among various departmental spaces? Are there ways to encourage connections among department members who spend most of their time in physically distant spaces?
- Evaluate the extent to which your spaces are appropriately equipped to address needs that may arise due to a pandemic or other disaster. Consider, e.g., whether spaces have sufficient ventilation for health and safety and/or whether they have technology needed for hybrid remote/in-person classes, such as audiovisual capabilities for streaming live content. Ensure that you have a pandemic plan that allows you to quickly adjust traffic flow, maximum occupancy of rooms, and designated entrances and exits.
- Learn about institutional policies around space usage and flexibility that may be available. Evaluate the match between your department’s space inventory and any institutional space allocation guidelines. Ensure that you have documentation to demonstrate how your space use aligns with institutional guidelines for, e.g., minimum hours of use.
- Inventory and evaluate student behaviors in classrooms and instructional labs. For example, see PhysPort for recommendations on using research-based observational protocols.
- Inventory pedagogical methods being used in your department and evaluate the extent to which the available classroom and instructional lab spaces facilitate or inhibit use of those techniques. See the section on Supporting Research-Based Teaching in Your Department for details.
- Identify research-based pedagogical methods developed and used elsewhere (e.g., ) and how and where those methods might be implemented by your department. Consider what spaces or equipment might be needed to do so.
- Have a system for documenting issues that come up in instructional laboratory spaces, e.g., power glitches or outages, problems with compressed air, excessive humidity, temperature or airflow control problem, dust, and vibrations. Determine how extensive these issues are. For example, determine whether they are widespread or confined to a corridor, floor, or side of a building; whether they are intermittent; whether they are spreading in space; and/or whether they are becoming more severe over time. Ensure that your campus facilities office is notified promptly, and keep a documented history to refer to when making follow-up requests.
- Evaluate how research spaces, including off-site research facilities, are currently used and how they might be used in the future, taking into account projected future research needs.
- Evaluate how research needs are prioritized and whether research space is distributed equitably among faculty and research areas.
- Determine space needs for research foci the department is prioritizing for the future, including requirements for specialized environments such as clean rooms, fume hoods, and vibration-isolated spaces.
- Determine how research activities (e.g., collaborations and shared instrumentation) are or could be facilitated by the relative locations of offices, research labs, facilities, and common areas. Reflect on how these spaces might need to be restructured due to changing needs for remote work and interactions.
- Identify equipment needs and uses for maker and/or shop spaces (e.g., machining, electronics testing and building, design and fabrication). Include needs for technical support, training, and usage and safety rules.
- Identify any additional needs for technical support for shared equipment facilities, e.g., microscopy, X-ray, NMR, and/or high-performance computing.
- Identify and evaluate spaces used for storing demonstration and instructional lab equipment, and processes for maintaining equipment.
- Identify characteristics of spaces that encourage or facilitate collaborations among faculty members, among students, and among faculty members and students, as well as characteristics that discourage or inhibit such collaborations.
- Identify spaces, both formal and informal, used for group work and/or social gatherings, how and when these spaces are currently used, and how and when they could be used.
- Identify spaces for networking and student groups, e.g., chapters, student chapters of national organizations for students of color, local clubs for women or students of color in physics, study groups, and other student social networks.
- See below for guidance on how to provide and manage inclusive and welcoming spaces where students can gather and collaborate; make departmental spaces equitable, inclusive, accessible, and sustainable; and use current and future spaces to exhibit departmental culture, community, and accomplishments.
- Review space allocations and usage periodically with an eye toward equity (i.e., everyone gets what they need), rather than equality (i.e., everyone gets the same). Track which groups are using and benefitting from your departmental spaces and which are not, and look for patterns of inequity.
- Inventory accessibility issues in your departmental spaces, e.g., rooms that can be accessed only by stairs, passages that are too narrow for wheelchair access, and inadequate sound systems in lecture halls.
- Determine whether there are adequate spaces in or near the department where students can eat, e.g., a departmental social space with a refrigerator, microwave, and tables. Consider whether there are nearby cafeterias or restaurants.
- Determine challenges students and other department members commonly face with respect to getting to your departmental spaces. Consider parking for bicycles, cars, and other vehicles; and the hours, cost, and safety of public transportation. Determine how your department might address transportation-related challenges by, e.g., providing secure bicycle storage, taking into account when parking is free and/or public transportation is available when scheduling department events, and/or advocating for parking.
Determine how current and future space can be used or modified to meet department needs within financial and institutional constraints
- Have formal and informal discussions about your departmental goals and about how spaces contribute to realizing those goals. Frame these discussions around the goal of creatively allocating, using, and/or designing spaces in ways that benefit your department as a whole, rather than as a zero-sum game in which different groups compete for resources. See the section on How to Be an Effective Chair for guidance on how to establish transparent processes for making decisions and run effective and respectful meetings.
- Identify and engage a wide range of stakeholders, including students, from within and outside your department.
- Learn about and discuss innovative space usage by physics departments at other institutions and by other departments on your campus. Take advantage of opportunities to tour departmental spaces when visiting physics departments on other campuses, particularly after major building or modification projects, to learn what peer institutions are doing with their spaces.
- Identify behaviors you wish students, faculty, and staff to exhibit in instructional spaces, social spaces, and other types of spaces and discuss how space design can encourage or discourage those behaviors. See the supplement on Connecting Desired Student Behaviors and Optimal Spaces for details.
- Consider the value of proximity among different kinds of spaces, e.g., faculty and staff offices, instructional spaces, research spaces, student spaces, and social spaces.
- Have discussions within your department about campus-level initiatives, conversations, and plans. Determine how departmental plans for your spaces can support institutional priorities.
- Document departmental discussions and decisions about spaces.
- Communicate regularly with your administration about your department’s spaces, how they are used, and high-priority improvements you would like to make to better serve your students and meet other institutional priorities.
- Consider incorporating space-related concerns, needs, and plans into your department’s strategic plan. See the section on How to Create and Use a Strategic Plan for details.
- Recognize that changing your physical environment might be a long-term, nonlinear process. See the section on How to Create and Sustain Effective Change for guidance on making large-scale changes.
- When undertaking an external departmental review, ask the review team to evaluate your department’s space use and needs as well as how well your space inventory is aligned with institutional space allocation guidelines. See the section on How to Undertake an Undergraduate Program Review for details.
- Identify teaching practices that are used in your department and/or that you want to encourage. Determine how current instructional spaces, existing spaces with modifications, and spaces to be constructed in the future could facilitate such teaching practices and their associated students behaviors. Ensure that spaces are appropriate for the pedagogies used in them, to prevent sending dissonant messages to students. See the supplement on Connecting Desired Student Behaviors and Optimal Spaces for details.
- Design your classroom spaces to encourage students to work together and discuss physics in small groups, rather than to orient all students toward the instructor. For example, consider using or as a model for classroom design, implementing appropriate pieces of these models even when classrooms cannot be completely renovated.
- See the section on Instructional Laboratories and Experimental Skills for guidance on how to design new or remodeled laboratory spaces that are collaborative, adaptable, and accessible.
- Work to adopt active learning practices that fit the spaces you have or can create. For example, consider student-centered pedagogical techniques designed for large lecture halls when space modifications are not possible. See the section on Implementing Research-Based Teaching in Your Classroom for details.
- Recognize that additional effort will be required to modify instruction to match new or improved spaces. Consider what resources or professional development might be needed to facilitate this modification and identify ways your institution might support the effort, e.g., professional development through your center for teaching, release time, or other recognition for redesigning a course for a classroom.
- Identify financial, dimensional, structural, and practical constraints, and strive to work around them rather than be driven by them.
- Look for classrooms whose layout and infrastructure could be changed to support research-based teaching with minimal cost and effort.
- When rooms are being built or upgraded, take the opportunity to advocate for spaces that promote research-based teaching.
- Seek resources and locations to build new spaces or make major renovations in order to support more collaborative learning environments. Keep deans and other administrators informed about department plans for improving instruction and enhancing student outcomes, and the kinds of spaces needed for such improvements.
- Create a space or spaces where students can work together on physics and see other students working on physics outside of scheduled classes and labs. Besides dedicated study or social spaces, location options could include research labs, classrooms, and associated instructional laboratories.
- Designate a space that majors can think of as their own, where they can gather and socialize, and that they work together to maintain. Encourage student groups (e.g., chapters, student chapters of national organizations for students of color, local clubs for women or students of color in physics, study groups, and other student social networks) to use this space for meetings and other activities.
- Encourage students to work together in student spaces. Recognize that making study areas available to students and promoting and/or facilitating study groups in these spaces can be particularly important for first-generation college students, commuter students, students working full time, students raising children, and/or students from other .
- Consider supporting advanced students to be available to help introductory and/or intermediate students in student spaces, e.g., through a formal or informal program for Undergraduate Instructional Assistants.
- Make student spaces as convenient as possible for students to use by making them easy to access and open as many hours as possible. Recognize that evening hours may be particularly important for commuter students and students who work during the day.
- Ensure that student spaces are adequately advertised to all students and easy to find. For spaces that need to be reserved, ensure the process for reserving them is easy and transparent.
- Include ample resources in student spaces, e.g., tables, dry-erase or chalk boards, appropriate technology (computers, shared digital displays, strong wifi connections), a printer, reference books and copies of textbooks, refreshments, a coffee maker, a refrigerator, a toaster oven, a microwave, a hot plate, and student mailboxes, cubbies, or lockers. Survey students about what they would like to have in these spaces. For example, commuter students may need a place to eat, and students with many classes in the same building may want a place to leave their belongings.
- Manage student spaces to ensure that they are inclusive and welcoming for all students, especially new students, non-traditional students, and students from ; and that no one subgroup dominates their use. For example, set clear expectations for appropriate behavior and what kinds of things can be posted on the walls; have windows and keep doors open where possible; have faculty members regularly check in with students and monitor what’s happening in students spaces; find non-invasive ways to learn why some students might not being using certain spaces; and offer multiple avenues for students to provide feedback on space use, e.g., focus groups, anonymous surveys, and/or a web form.
- Encourage faculty and other , including the chair, to visit student spaces when students ask them for help or when they have something to discuss with a student. If possible, locate student spaces near faculty offices to encourage faculty-student interactions.
- Match student learning support activities (e.g., physics help rooms, study groups, and office hours—sometimes also called “free help sessions” or “student hours”) to existing or future spaces. Ensure that these support activities are accessible to all students by making them available at times that fit the schedules of your students. For example, recognize that working students may be available only in the evening and that commuter students may be on campus only during certain hours. Hold support activities at locations where students can easily drop in between other commitments.
- Assign existing spaces and plan future spaces in ways that encourage social interactions among department members. Provide a space where high-quality coffee is available, to enhance social and intellectual interactions in your department.
- Match current and future research needs of department members (including faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdocs) to available space and plans for future space allocations.
- Periodically review assignments and uses of research spaces to optimize their use and enable reallocation of free space.
- Consider how current and future spaces can support seminars, colloquia, and/or regional scientific meetings and conferences that your department might host. Recognize the benefits to your department of having high-quality spaces where visiting colloquium speakers can present, students can practice giving talks, and research collaborations can meet and have discussions in a seminar-style format.
- Advocate to make single-person, gender-inclusive bathrooms available within your department or very close to your department in order to ensure safety and comfort for people who are transgender or gender nonconforming. Advertise the presence and location of these facilities widely within your department.
- Ensure that your department meets and goes beyond compliance with the and section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which mandates equitable access for in institutions that receive federal funding.
- Learn about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and use to proactively ensure that your physical spaces support all learners by reflecting the variability of their needs, abilities, and interests.
- See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for resources and guidance on how to support LGBTQ+ people and how to support disabled people for details.
- Consider how your departmental spaces can incorporate sustainable materials and other green building practices, particularly when you have the opportunity to make major renovations.
- Find ways to put physics on display for everyone who comes into your building to see. Encourage department members to visibly promote the department and its activities.
- Prominently display pictures and profiles of current department members. Ask for permission before displaying pictures of or information about department members, especially students.
- Showcase recent student, faculty, and alumni research work and other accomplishments with posters, bulletin boards, and electronic display boards in hallways and common areas.
- Evaluate how well the visual messages sent by your department’s physical environment support current and prospective department members in seeing your department as a community they want to be part of. Ensure that posters, flags, murals, and other signs on the walls celebrate diversity and send welcoming messages to members of . For example, consider displaying pictures of diverse physicists, a rainbow flag, and/or signs affirming that lives matter. Ask student groups for ideas, and check in with departmental or campus organizations for to confirm that displays intended to be inclusive really are. Promote new discoveries in physics and their discoverers; avoid a primary emphasis on discoveries and contributions of physicists from previous centuries.
- Ensure that your departmental culture is consistent with welcoming displays. Recognize that if your department isn’t working to meaningfully address non-inclusive and/or inequitable practices, displays of inclusion may be harmful and offensive to members of . See the sections on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and Departmental Culture and Climate for details on making your department more welcoming, inclusive, and equitable.
- For all departmental spaces, make and regularly refer to explicit agreements among everyone using the space about its purpose and value. Determine who has access to various spaces (e.g., student study or social spaces, meeting rooms, instructional spaces outside of class time, and maker and/or shop spaces) and for what purposes. For example, determine whether and how students can access lab spaces and equipment to work on projects outside of class time, whether some spaces are only for majors and minors and/or student club members, which spaces need a sign-out or usage procedure, and who schedules each space and resolves conflicts when multiple people want to use it.
- Make and discuss explicit norms for about how to use each instructional space. For example, set expectations that spaces designed for collaborative learning are not used for lecturing, and that special features of classrooms (e.g., a video camera that can focus on a part of the chalkboard that’s invisible to some students in the room or an audio system that can produce sounds loud enough for hard-of-hearing students) are used as intended.
- Ensure that explicitly communicate with students about what is normal and expected during class time, e.g., that conversation among students is expected in rooms with tables designed to promote conversation.
- For student gathering spaces, work with students to establish a written code of conduct that reflects your institution’s values, along with consequences for violating the code. Prohibit behavior that is degrading or offensive, and outline responsibilities such as cleaning the microwave after use, not leaving food in the refrigerator too long, and logging out of computers. See 2.C above for more on guidelines for student spaces. See the section on Departmental Culture and Climate for guidance on how to establish and enforce a code of conduct and/or community agreements.
Design new spaces or renovate existing ones
- Use your inventory of spaces and your identification of high-priority new spaces and/or modifications to demonstrate how your department is using space effectively and to advocate for resources. See the section on How to Be an Effective Chair for guidance on how to manage and advocate for resources.
- Recognize that institutional planning for new buildings, classrooms, and major renovations happens very far in advance. Get involved in planning discussions to advocate for your department.
- Connect your proposals for modifications to and uses of departmental spaces to institutional priorities and initiatives for, e.g., accessibility, undergraduate research, pedagogical innovations, and student success.
- Show how an investment in your department’s physical environment could realize significant returns, e.g., increased engagement and success of students served by your department, increased opportunities to incorporate contemporary physics into teaching and research labs, and enhanced departmental and institutional reputation.
- Be mindful of administrative priorities, guidelines, or policies for space allocation and efficient use. For example, consider multiple uses of existing and new spaces to maximize efficiency of use. If your department appears to use space inefficiently according to institutional metrics (e.g, if enrollments in upper-level labs are too low to justify the space they currently use, or if informal use of space by student clubs is not documented, so the space appears unused), provide reasonable justifications for your space usage based on, e.g., AIP Statistical Research Center data on physics enrollments nationwide and/or national recommendations for best practices for physics departments. In order to retain space for uses that might fall outside institutional guidelines, be flexible and willing to compromise on noncritical uses.
- Design spaces to reflect departmental goals for what department members should be able to do and might want to do in the future.
- Before starting your design process, speak with leaders of renovation or construction projects in other physics departments about what they have learned from the process and how people use their new spaces, and/or visit their sites.
- Consider a participatory design process that allows faculty, staff, and students to contribute to space planning.
- Learn about Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and use in all new or remodeled spaces. See the section on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for guidance on how to support disabled people (including details on UDL) and for resources on UDL and supporting in physics.
- Consider flexible designs (e.g., moveable tables and chairs) that can be used differently as the needs of and students change, and as pedagogical techniques and technologies evolve. Be cognizant of the life spans of any particular configuration and/or use of spaces.
- Remind department members that spaces are allocated based on multiple factors (e.g., the number of different uses for a space, the number of students served by a space, and the kind of space needed for particular curricular activities), and that the needs of your department and institution may change over time.
- Be mindful of how particular designs may constrain future uses of a space. For example, ensure that large windows have light-blocking blinds so spaces can be used for activities that require darkness, e.g., projection of high-contrast satellite images and demonstrations of laser interference patterns.
- Plan your space use around the times and days that your students are on campus and allowed in your departmental spaces, as well as the places where students already congregate (see 1.E.ii-iii above).
- Consider how instructional spaces (e.g., labs and classrooms) could be used during off hours as student study or social spaces, if a student study space could be staffed by , and what supervision might be needed to ensure the security of lab or classroom equipment.
- Consider whether spaces used for infrequent instructional labs (e.g., labs that occur once or twice a week for a few hours, or during only one term per year) could be used as classroom, research, or project space at other times, recognizing that this would require adequate equipment storage areas and/or additional set-up and take-down time.
- Consider whether hallways or other undesignated spaces, particularly near faculty offices, could be safely and comfortably used for individual or small group work by, e.g., putting seating and whiteboards in a quiet, accessible alcove or providing whiteboard markers to write on windows.
- Consider whether existing social spaces designed for relaxation (e.g., spaces with couches and coffee tables) could be used for more diverse study and collaboration activities if tables, chairs, and writing surfaces (e.g., dry-erase or chalk boards) were added.
- Determine what students are doing in available instructional and social spaces.
- Determine whether intended uses of an underused space are being met in some other way, e.g., whether a social space might be underused because students are socializing in a help room.
- Determine which spaces are not being used to their full potential and modify those spaces and/or their assignments appropriately.
- Address issues identified in your departmental space inventory (see 1.A.vi above), such as inappropriate capacity (i.e., the space is too large or too small), inadequate lighting, noise, low air quality, poor ventilation, poor heating or cooling, and inadequate utilities.
- Seek departmental consensus on your culture and goals for instruction, research, social, and other spaces, and ensure that this consensus is articulated clearly in discussions with designers of new spaces or renovations.
- Establish clear lines of communication with people managing or supervising renovations or construction, e.g., facilities staff, architects, and project managers.
- Review the details of architectural designs with department members before agreeing to the final design.
- Request to conduct a walkthrough after construction is complete, and prior to the institution signing off on construction, to ensure that spaces meet agreed-upon design specifications.
