The School at Marygrove

The School at Marygrove

The Marygrove Teaching School is a collaborative venture between Detroit Public Schools and the University of Michigan School of Education. It establishes a new K-12 teaching environment modeled on a P-20, cradle-to-career, pedagogical model and will provide professional training for recent graduates from the U of M School of Education. The Immaculata building serves grades K-5 and plays an important role in establishing a foundational, collaborative educational environment.

The original historic Immaculata building is given new life through careful design incisions. Classroom spaces are provided to facilitate focused group learning but are reduced in size to allow more generous common spaces at a variety of scales. Visual transparency supports the project-based curriculum of the P-20 vision and fosters a community of learners. As students move through the grades in Immaculata, they encounter increasingly open and flexible common spaces that allow for educational activities to expand from the defined classroom spaces into open and dynamic group settings. Color plays an important role to establish unique identities for individual classrooms, signal the vibrancy and joy of collaborative learning, and meet the budgetary constraints of the project.