Pre-Assessment of your learning space

How would you describe your learning space?

Cheerful, friendly, colorful, spacious, awesome sunlight, fresh, cool, warm, inviting, loving, encouraging, long and narrow

Identify the constraints in your learning space.

Board at the front, projector at the front, desks not so easy to move, lab area is fixed, student movement can be limited depending on configuration, walls are cluttered

Share a picture of your learning space.

Space Drivers: What are 3 learning behaviors or learning experiences you want to refine by creating a new space? This will help you link the design changes you will make with skill development. You will intentionally create a space to support these skills. (collaboration, creativity, flexibility, student centered, exploration, problem solving, etc)

1. Collaboration - students need to be able to move around the room easily, form new groups easily, work with different groups of people regularly, and have enough space to work efficiently and effectively.

2. Creativity - students need to know where they can find materials to be creative, where they can find inspiration to be creative, etc.

3.  Cognitive Flexibility - students need to have a space in the room for thinking in different ways, encouragement to get through difficult and challenging problems, and space to “fail” and iterate.

Design Challenge in your Learning Space

Share one change you made or will make for next year in your learning space to support the skills mentioned above. Explain how it supports that learning goal.

COLLABORATION:   This is a simple solution to a problem that I never really thought too much about.  My classroom is always arranged in table groups of 4 or 5.  ALWAYS.  That is my permanent arrangement.  I constantly change students seats, but the desks stay in one arrangement.  However, my student groups change from 2 to 3 to 4 or sometimes even larger, but I never change my classroom arrangement. A good example is a math project I am working on to redesign the campus.  Students are working in groups of 3.  So every day, students sit in their assigned seat, and then I ask the groups to get together and find a space anywhere in the classroom to work.  Some students work in the lab area, some work in a table group of 4 or 5 desks, some students work on the floor or out in the hallway.  So I changed the seating arrangement in my classroom, so that the desks are “permanently” arranged in groups of 3.  Now, even if their groups change, the desks are arranged to accommodate a whole group, and there are enough table groups for each group to have their own space to work.

Share a picture of this change. If you have not made the change yet, share a sketch of what you will do.

Goal Setting for Learning Spaces: How will you continue to change your learning space to support learning? Set 2 goals. One change that you can make in a month or at the start of the next school year and one for one year from now. Your goal might be to write a proposal for a grant or to switch out your furniture in your classroom.

Goal 1:  COLLABORATION  The furniture in my classroom needs a makeover.  Standing desks with wheels, a foot bar, and the ability to provide a tilted surface would give more flexibility to rearranging and redesigning the classroom for a variety of projects and activities in the classroom.  In addition, new chairs on wheels with a foot bar, and which allow tilting and seating in multiple directions would also give my students greater flexibility to work comfortably and more efficiently on a variety of projects in the classroom.

Bodies in Motion, Brains in Motion

Goal 2: COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY  To encourage students to think in different ways the classroom should have a space where this is regularly practiced and encouraged. I would like to use a bulletin board space (or cupboards) in my classroom to post a problem weekly (alternating between math problems, science questions, and just other interesting problems) and then asking students to use post-it notes to share DIFFERENT solutions for solving that one problem.  I would like to give badges to students (through class dojo or classcraft) for their cognitive flexibility.

Final Reflections: How is Space the third teacher?

The idea that your physical environment can be part of your teaching was a new idea to me.  But it makes so much sense in the context of redesigning my classroom for a specific purpose.  Before starting this course, I really only thought of redesigning within the context of aesthetics and updates.  I had seen the flexible node seating before and know of 21st century redesign and all that … but I had never considered redesigning it to purposely change my instructional strategies.  Does that sound silly?  Well, it’s the truth.  

By looking at the ways that my classroom limits what I am able to do, I can intentionally target my redesign to fix those problems and make my teaching and students’ learning even better.   The classroom can serve as the third teacher by give the students space to independently grow and learn.  By design, the classroom gives information, direction, guidance, and encouragement to students.