Diamond Ranking: How a tightly structured activity with photographs frees practitioners’ thinking about educational spaces

Diamond ranking of statements was an established thinking skills activity (Rockett and Percival 2002: 99) that began to be used with images as an education research tool (e.g. Woolner et al., 2010; Clark, 2012; Niemi et al., 2015). Building on use of this activity to facilitate discussions about learning environments specifically (Muzir, 2017; Woolner, 2018; Sigurðardóttir, 2018; Stadler-Altmann 2021), CoReD included diamond ranking of images as one of the suite of tools to enable school users to understand their school spaces. The activity invites educational practitioners to take nine images, of either their own setting or chosen from image libraries of spaces in other schools, and arrange them according to criteria such as ‘good place for learning’/‘poor place for learning’.
Over the CoReD project, diamond ranking was used in a range of schools, from kindergartens to secondary institutions, in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and UK. These premises were extremely varied, ranging in age from recently built to 50 years old to over a hundred, including some renovated buildings, and based in urban, suburban and rural areas. It was used with, and by, teachers, other staff and students, with a range of intentions. The activity was carried out in various ways, some using generic images and some using photographs of the particular school, with different ranking criteria, including using differing criteria to rank one set of images (suitability for instruction; suitability for concentration). In most cases, the activity was intended to be the first stage in longer-term redesign processes, but the rankings were used in differing ways, either to highlight and discuss concerns or to begin to explore possibilities and initiate design ideas.
Across this diversity of uses, participants reported that the diamond ranking activity was engaging, and it is evident, from recordings and observations, that it supported discussion about the design and use of educational space. Therefore, in this presentation, we will consider the reasons for its success, looking at usage of the tool and feedback we received from participants. Although it is possible to argue that for diverse people, intentions, and settings, diamond ranking ‘works’, we will discuss how an activity that is so structured and ‘easy to do’ (comment from 11-12 year old student), enables school users to see school space differently. This will include considering the flexibility of the organisation of the activity (choice of images and ranking criteria) and the particular power of photographs to convey experiences.