As a sea of manufacturers, dealers, designers and consumers gathered in Chicago last month to discuss coming and current trends in commercial interior design, award-winning design company OFS gave the floor to a Rowan County voice.

The voice was not that of a local business mogul or a salesman but rather an educator. North Rowan High School Principal Meredith Williams joined OFS during its exhibition at NeoCon, the National Exposition of Contract Interior Furnishings.

Working alongside North Rowan staff members, students and OFS designers, Williams brought to life a concept that is reshaping the education experience for local high school students.

“We’re seeing so many changes in the workplace,” Williams said. “Today’s offices are starting to look drastically different than your typical sea of cubicles. Until recently, it hadn’t really seemed to occur to anybody that we can use these same sorts of collaborative design concepts in education.”

In a marketing video prepared by OFS, Williams spoke at length about the consequences that lack of innovation in education had created at North Rowan High. When she arrived at the school three years ago, the student population was stagnating under an instructional model that encouraged  memorization and the regurgitation of facts rather than creativity or exploration, she said.

Representative of this outdated model was the traditional setup of immovable desks and chairs facing a teacher, something Williams called both the epitome of standardization and “the torture tool of education.”

“In the case of North area schools, the rules were literally paralyzing us from making the decisions that we needed to make for our children,” Williams said. “The rules that were supposed to make education the same for everybody were exactly what was increasing the disparity rather than fixing it.”

As the school received charter-like flexibility through restart legislation and the designation of Rowan-Salisbury Schools as a renewal district, Williams and fellow North Rowan High staffers began an instructional shift away from the factory-style education model.

At the center of the revamp is a new design lab, a collaborative exploration space where students experience challenge-based learning. They are tasked to brainstorm for solutions to real-world problems.

These real-world, hands-on experiences require a different setup than rows of desks facing an instructor, Williams said. Instead, students need a space that could flexibly fit small-group instruction, teamwork and individual work.

The school had engaged with OFS to craft a space to meet these needs, with the company eventually donating furniture for the new design space.

“Students are taught by more than the teacher,” said Williams. “They’re also taught by their environment. It was important that the environment correspond to the culture that we were trying to create.”

In attending NeoCon with OFS, Williams said she enjoyed both the opportunity to thank the company in person for its donation and its impact on North Rowan students, as well as the chance to engage with those who had never considered a physical reimagining of today’s academic experience.

“We are truly designing education for the student,” she said. “We’re making an effort for students to be comfortable in the space that they’re learning so that learning can be the priority. … That’s a big part of renewal in Rowan-Salisbury Schools as a whole. We’re putting students at the forefront of the decision-making process.”