Blended Learning at Intrinsic Schools' new Belmont Campus

The Humanities Pod during an Advisory Period

Not many educators would look at a shuttered lumber yard on Chicago’s Northwest Side and declare it the perfect place for a new school. But the leaders of the Intrinsic Charter School, along with our firm, repurposed much of the 41,000 sq. ft. structure and transformed it into an innovative space for learning. The new school, which opened in late August, features oversized pods instead of traditional classrooms that foster the personalized instruction that the school is committed to.                                                                                                

Finding the appropriate location to bring Intrinsic’s curriculum to life was the first challenge.  We looked at opportunities to remodel older school buildings, but they lacked large open spaces.  Shannon Lumber— a family business which operated on the corner of Belmont and Kolmar for seventy-two years until it closed in 2011--provided the perfect opportunity.

We adapted and reused seventy-five percent of the existing lumberyard structures, all originally bowstring truss buildings. They included an open air shed that is over forty feet tall--built in 1954 with solid wood columns cut from trees hand selected in the Pacific Northwest, and two buildings from 1911 and 1928. The bowstring truss, an early 20^th century long-span structural support, provided the wide, column-free interior spaces that were perfect for Intrinsic's needs. 

On the interior, the large open spaces divide into twelve spacious pods, arranged in tandem for grades 7-12. One-half of each tandem pod focuses on humanities instruction, and the other targets science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Three teachers, including two master teachers, supervise activities in each pod. During a typical day in a pod, up to 90 students rotate through a variety of learning stations, swapping places with their counterparts in the other half of the tandem after lunch. 

Each learning station in the pod, which are described below and in the previous post, includes easy-identifiable elements to guide students,.  Each half of the pod includes an acoustically separate seminar room or lab that holds thirty students for more traditional instruction.

 

Overview of the Tandem Pod

The Acoustically Isolated Rooms of the Tandem Pod

 

The Learning Stations Within the Pods