Learning Spaces and Design

It's interesting that learning spaces and design is the topic of the week. I recently found out that I will more than likely be able to make the shift to flexible seating in my classroom next year. I was given a budget of roughly $3,000 to enact these changes. With that in mind, I tackled this blog post accordingly (hopefully it won't be a problem that I altered the assignment a bit, but I figured it would make for an even better blog post if the response was truly authentic). To begin, I took a panorama of my classroom prior to any changes. This was the before:

In all honesty, I feel that I have a pretty decent classroom set-up if you pay no mind to the cold, hard rows of standardized desks. I find that my biggest challenge is the size and shape of my classroom. It is fairly skinny in width and very long in length. My Promethean board is permanently drilled into the far end of my classroom, so there is not too much room for movement and diverse set ups. Especially when you consider trying to find room for 30 desks with their chairs attached. As you can see above, I have had the desks in rows, two-by-two (a la Noah's Ark) for a while now. Please don't mind the hunched over students in the front of the room. I bribed them to help me move desks around and they begged to be in the picture. Apart from that, I feel as though I have a fairly welcoming classroom. I have a good deal of color, a large classroom library, and several inspirational posters. I also had stations across the classroom along the edges for students to access if need be.

I made a couple of quick changes to my classroom at no cost. If you take a look below, my "volunteer" students helped me to rearrange the classroom so that the desks are in fairly functional collaborative groups. It's hard to see, but at the front of the classroom I dragged in an old section of carpet that has been hanging out in our storage compartment for a couple of months since our last IKEA trip. Finally, I moved the supply stations to more accessible locations across the classroom. As they are now closer to where the students actually sit, I hope it will encourage them to use them more often. I think these minimal, but effective changes will be good for our classroom as a learning space. I was unwilling to make additional changes to displays/objects on the classroom walls though, as we are required to have everything torn down for PSSAs in a week or so. 

When it comes to conceptualizing a revamped space, I have done a TON of thinking and planning for it. I've taken a lot of inspiration from a 7th grade English teacher at my alumni middle school. Brooke Markle has written about her experiences with flexible seating on Edutopia here. Knowing that it has worked so successfully for someone who teaches the exact same grade and subject in the same state with the same expectations makes me hopeful that it will work for me too. Below is the floor plan I sketched out for my superintendent during the planning process for this endeavor. 

I started with the concept seen in college classroom across the country: tiered seating. Since my classroom space is shaped so inconveniently, I thought tiering the seating would maximize my available space and allow students the best view around the classroom. I also wanted to take a bit of a do-it-yourself approach after reading Emelina Minero's article on Edutopia. I think one of my favorite takes from the article was this quote, "When preparing kids for the real world, we want students’ learning environment to reflect the environment of the real world". Our students will not be sitting in molded desks with an attached chair for the rest of their lives; they should start getting used to working in a collaborative space. 

The items shaded in orange are the ones that factor in to my $3,000 budget with the school district. The rest of the pieces are things I already own and have in my classroom or plan to repurpose from my own home. For example, the kitchen table is something I plan to coat in a hefty layer of chalkboard paint to make them more interactive, like the standing whiteboard desks I plan to purchase. Not pictured are the three area rugs I plan to set down and all of the flags and strings of ambient lighting I plan to have throughout the classroom. I believe these changes will impact my students in a massively positive manner. Minero's piece cites, "A 2012 study from the University of Minnesota found that students participated 48 percent more in discussions in a classroom with collaborative group seating versus traditional lecture-style seating, and also improved their performance on standardized tests." I expect to see the same, or similar, results in my own classroom!

Quotes from:

Minero, E. (2017) Flexible Classrooms: Assembly Required. Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/flexible-classrooms-assembly-required