Classroom Design Challenge 3: The Science Room

In this post, I talk about a room that has really stymied me: a science room.

First, let me talk about the space.  R has a science room in a 25 year-old school.  She teaches middle school science, but the school used to be a junior high so the room is equipped with things you'd find in a high school science lab (that go almost unused in a middle school classroom): a fume hood, big counters and cupboards that line almost every wall, and the sinks.  Let me tell you about the sinks.  They are the biggest pain if you don't use them on a daily basis.  Because it used to be a science room, there are 6-8 sink/plug/gas (yes: GAS but disconnected) stations spaced just under every two metres about the floor.    Because the high sink stations take up so much floor space and are spaced out around the room, it makes for very limited choices in terms of desk/furniture arrangement because you can't go very far without bumping in to one of these archaic monuments.  And that's just one of the challenges of many that the sinks present (others: visibility; an abundance of water and available electricity; aesthetics; the students get snagged on the protruding gas taps; etc.). 

 

 
Second, let me tell you about R.  As per my usual Modus Operandi, I observed her in her room.  R teaches math and science in this room.  Like E in the previous post, she uses technology (a Mac with an interactive interface and a projector) in her lessons.  Like E, R also likes to have direct eye contact with her students. Part of R's problem though is that the room forces her to space her students out so that some of her students sit way in the back.  One really clever technique that R uses for math is: during the formative/working together part of her lesson, she will give a problem and the students use individual whiteboards to try out possible solutions.  The students love the whiteboards because they have a clear place to work, and because their work is erasable, the students seem willing to take a few more chances and are not as worried about making mistakes.  After a given amount of time, the students hold up their boards and at a glance, R can see who needs more support and if she needs to adjust her instruction. 
Here are some suggestions for R:

• Get rid of the sink stations.  Easy to recommend, not so easy to execute.  R has requested that the sink stations be removed for years, but she is still waiting.
• Put R on a stage.  Elevate the teaching area at the front by her whiteboard.  This way, R will have a better view of her students, especially those in the back, and vice versa.  She could increase her whiteboard area too by putting two together, stacked like tiles on her teaching wall.  I also recommended getting one of those mic/amp systems so she could be heard easier (the room, with the tile floors, high ceiling, and hard walls, is one noisy space), but it is an expensive suggestion.
• Clear out a space at the front of her classroom during instruction times.  Have the students bring their chairs and whiteboards to the front during instructional times so that she has immediate contact with her students, and them send them to the "work areas" at the back and sides if they can work independently.
• Bring desks back in.  I know, an unusual suggestion coming from me, but it might be the most practical.  R and I were able to rearrange her large tables a bit so she had more students sitting at the front and less students in the far back, to improve the student contact, but even that was challenging with the sink stations blocking the way.  Smaller desks might give R more choices about how to arrange students in the "in-between" tight spaces between those pesky sinks.
• Make your own furniture.  I think I recommended to R that she attach plywood to the tops of her existing tables to make longer, more dimension-friendly tables. 

If you have any ideas, please pass them along!  (My Comments boxes seem to have technical difficulties, so please use Anonymous commenting or email me.  Thanks.)

Classroom Design Challenge 2: The Portable.

In my Tuesday Innovation job, I get to go around to a bunch of interesting classrooms.  Sometime teachers ask me to come in to their classrooms to help them with the classroom environment because they have heard about what I've been doing in my own class or they have seen this blog. 

In the next few posts, I am going to talk about a couple of classroom challenges that I have found, well, challenging.  In this post, the classroom belongs to E.  E teaches high school math in a portable classroom built 25 years ago.  It has that long beam running down the middle length of the ceiling, and a large seam running likewise down the floor. 

Inside, the portable has a long bank of shelves down one whole wall under the 3 windows.  Her biggest class has 30 students which means that there are 30 large desks in her class.  The desks are bigger than the ones I am used to in elementary, and hers measure 60 cm by 60 cm.  The desks are a bit of a necessity because: they came with the portable; there is no place to store the desks even if she wanted to get rid of them; the desks actually are useful in that they can hold the students' notebooks and textbooks at the same time; and no tables are available anyway.

Before I made any suggestions to E, I went in and watched her teach in her current setting.  She is a great teacher. She has every lesson stored on her tablet computer (I can't imagine how long that took!), and she displays the lessons on a screen using a projector.  Her lessons are very interactive: she gives examples, and gets students to try them out, sharing their possible solutions.  The whole time, she is talking to the students, asking questions, and giving feedback and assistance.  She seems to have eyes in the back of her head because she can detect movement and off-task behaviour without even looking at the wayward student. 

Here are a couple of things I noticed about E and her classroom:

• E likes eye contact (despite having eyes in addition to ones on the face portion of her head).  She can tell when students need more help or more challenge just by looking at them.  By taking the temperature of the room, she knows how to adjust the lesson as a whole.
• E likes to move.  She moves around her students in a graceful flow instead of sitting in one spot and waiting for students to come to her. 
• E uses technology to make her lessons more effective.  She uses her tablet and projector the same way any skilled artisan does: it is used like an instrument, a tool, a natural extension of her craft. 

Here are some recommendations.  (Some of them I passed on to E, and some I did not.)

• Don't do anything about the desks.  They allow enough surface area for what the students need.  By having them in horizontal groupings of 2 or 3 facing the front, it allows the amount of student to student interaction that E needs when students are working on problems together.  Tables actually might not give the eye contact that E requires to monitor her students' understanding.
• Free up floor space to allow E unimpeded movement.  The desks take up almost all of the room so anything else that is not necessary should be removed.  E brought in this screen from home because the provided one wasn't big enough.  But her screen also takes up a lot of space because it has that big tripod base.  If there is anyway to get a big wall mounted screen, that would free up more floor space.
• Move the projector to the back of the classroom off the floor.  Currently the projector is on a rolling cart.  It takes up prime real estate because it is in the centre of the classroom.  By getting the projector up high and at the back of the class would allow this centre lane to be used by desks or even E herself.  By using hooks along the ceiling, the wires would also be out of the way (one thing I don't like about media carts). 
• Put the tablet on a podium.  E doesn't really stand and lecture, but a podium would still be useful because I noticed that every time she wrote on her tablet she had to bend down to this low table.  If the tablet was on a high podium she would not have to do all of these core exercises, and she would maintain more eye contact with her students.  If the podium had shelves she could keep all of the papers and books she needs for the day there, instead of having to use a big table that cut into her floor space.
• Unscrew the long bank of wall mounted shelves, and rejig them into a set of raised platforms (yeah, you know me and my risers). By reinforcing these shelves and laying a sheet of of plywood over them, E could raise the back row of desks so that she could maintain eye contact with even the lurkers in the back. If she ever left the portable, she could just screw the shelves back to the wall.
  
  

  

  Here's a potential floor plan I made for E. 
  I'd actually angle those side desks for more eye contact,
  remove the shelves and raise the back desks.



Here's the (elaborate) sketch I sent E to explain how the podium, projector, screen, and wire set up would work.
Mind you, see how having to bend to low table has done wonders for her waistline in my pic?

As it turns out, E found the most elegant situation to this design challenge: her admin told her she could change classrooms!  E let me know her future move and maybe we'll work on this less challenging project together.

It turns out I am a Person of Colour.

I am starting to rethink the colour debate.  (I've posted about this a couple of times before; once promoting a neutral colour scheme here, and then again talking about how the classroom has to match the outlook of the teacher here). My school district is promoting a neutral colour palette because that bright splashes of colour are overstimulating.

Kindergarten class with natural wood furniture and a few muted pastel accents.
Calm.

 

This Kindergarten class is pretty mild in terms of colour and is not too overpowering.  I guess the theory is if we are going to teach students about self regulation, then we have to give them a gentle atmosphere so we don't set them off right from the start.

I experimented with colour in my own class at the beginning too.  I had this one bold blue wall (with the smushed sheep sponge painting disaster), plus a couple of commercially-made alphabet strips with a rainbow background.  See below.



But when I moved to a different classroom, I pared the colour right down. NO commercial posters, NO big walls of colour, NO borders. Okay, I did have some burgundy drapes and a couple of other accents. And for a long time, I was very happy with it. 

Here's my calm, happy window space.  Ahhhh.

But then my contentedness ended.

The first reason is: over the summer, my stinky carpet (that had stains of suspect origin) was replaced with clean, blue-grey lino tile.  After 3 months, it looks pretty much the same as it did in August.  Clean, bright, and hmmm, a bit sterile.  My colour is the best out of the other colours that went in (and yes, I picked it, so I can't celebrate or complain) because the other ones look like baby vomit, or like the rich blue tile, they looked great in September, but show every single scratch since.  My floor looks clean!  Bright!  Think: New Hospital!  Not really the look I was going for.

The second reason that the non-colour honeymoon is over is: with my job to explore interesting classrooms, I have the opportunity to visit lots of other classrooms.  Last month, I invited myself into a couple of classrooms in another district.  Many of the classrooms looked pretty much as you would expect: a bunch of desks, mostly in rows with the usual displays with the background paper and borders that look like Walt Disney had a hemorrhage in a rectangular shape.  But a couple of classrooms were pretty terrific.  See below.


 

The four pictures above come from a grade 3/4 class. 
Every space in the classroom is used in a beautiful, inviting, and useful way.




Okay, I admit it.  I had colour envy.  It wasn't just colour, though, it was warmth.  My classroom lacked the warmth that colour gives.  I have to say that as ugly, stained, and nasally repellent as my old carpet was, it muted the atmosphere of my classroom, and oddly the muddy brown tone of the carpet added a certain richness.  The pictures of this other classroom actually don't do justice to the overall impact of the space.  To get everything to show up on the camera, I had to use a flash, so the colours are more subtle in real life because of the way this teacher used accent lamps.  And there were lots of them.

Actually, the classroom I originally visited in this district belonged to L.  She was kind enough to invite me in to see some of the things she was trying.  I was particularly interested because she teaches grade 7.  She had removed almost all of her desks and replaced them with small group tables.  She also had a number of floor spaces to use as well.  It turns out that her classroom was inspired by the classroom in the photos above.  I recognized elements like the dramatic use of table lamps and the corresponding throw rugs to cover the cords.

I love this shot.  It is of L reading a picture book to
her grade 7 students while they sit on the floor.
Also check out the multilink, multicoloured foam carpet they are sitting on.

L uses furniture and lighting to define her spaces.

Above: a couple of oasis spots.

I love the fact that L was able to make changes to her classroom and that they were inspired by a primary classroom.  Her students really bought into the design changes too.  They are very proud of their classroom, and think it is a great place to learn because it feels interesting.  Also, they love the freedom of having different spots to work.

I'll probably use some of the lessons I learned from these other classrooms to return some warmth to my classroom.  Maybe I'll bring in some accent colours and then mute them with lower lighting.  I already have some cool spherical fixtures in my class, so maybe that will be enough.

So a gradual return to colour.  In moderation.

Classroom Design Challenges 1

It is pretty easy to create a nice looking classroom when you have a new school with new furniture.  New desks and tables in rooms with new carpet or flooring with good lighting and freshly painted walls look nice if not just for the sake of being clean.  But what do you do when your classroom presents a serious design challenge?

Meet C.  Her school is slated for demolition, but that does not really help her this year, her first year in the school.  You can probably picture her classroom.  It looks like it was built in the 60s.  It has a nice window that runs the length of the classroom, but the shelving underneath it (that also runs the length of the classroom) is painted in that glossy, institutional Smithrite green.  And the top of it is about four feet off the ground, so it does not work well as a workspace or a display area.  The floors are a non-descript, but luckily unobtrusive lino-tile.  The walls are a scuffed off white, and she has three massive whiteboards on two of the walls.  The final wall houses her desk and a small cupboard.  Probably the ugliest things in her classroom are the light fixtures.  You know the ones?  The open fluorescent fixtures from back in the day that look like overturned ice cube racks.

None of this would matter, but she felt the space just wasn't working for her.  She felt cut off from her students because of the labyrinth of desks she has.  Her room is skinny and long, and the defacto teaching area was at the end of one of the long parts which forced her into a lecture style of teaching.  After talking with C, I came to know that she was all about community and that she needed to connect more with her students as individuals.  The room did not allow this.  She could only really see and hear the kids in the front rows of desks.  But the hardest part was that her kids had no interest in giving up their desks or even seeking alternate arrangements for the room.  In their eyes, this was the way school was supposed to be.

Taking the feedback from her students and what I knew about C, I went away and tried to come up with some suggestions.  It was really difficult because: there was no budget for any of this, the students were resistant, and the room had some inherent problems (Did I mention that there were only two outlets in the room?).  This is what I came up with:

This is not to scale, but will give you the basic idea.  Here are the suggestions I gave C:

• Put the desks along the walls for the kids that must have desks, but during instructional time, they turn their chairs inward or toward where you are teaching. If they are working independently, they can turn their chairs back towards their desks.
• It might be a good idea to have a chart paper stand. Why? When you pull down your screen, you block your white board, so sometimes it is good to have a screen to show things from your computer, and then have the chart paper for quick brainstorming or for criteria. Also, if you need to have a homework chart, you can put it on chart paper; that way you can eliminate at least one of your whiteboards (which can be unsightly and take up too much room for kids’ work, etc.).
• Have a set of low risers along the shelf/window wall. These serve at least two purposes. Kids can sit on them when you are giving instructions. Kids can stand on them and work standing up using the window counter as a workspace. You mentioned some of your kids work best standing up. Your window counter really is the only space for this unless they stand at a desk.  The risers can be rearranged easily later for group work, art projects, campfire, etc. I only include low risers in this particular set up. You can always use high risers for the tables in the centre.
• I like the table in the corner. It is a nice intimate place to work or conference.
• The rug could be a place to work or meet. You could put a low riser on it and that great padded bench you have to create a lounge. I recommend that you put a rug down in any big blank floor space just to cut down the echo of the floor. I originally had the rug up by the screen, but you mentioned that your students are resistant to sitting on the floor, even with rugs. (I realized that mine aren’t as willing to sit on the floor this year either. Must be the cold lino).

Flashforward to a month and a half later.  C invites me back to see her classroom.  I walk in and a big smile spreads across my face.  I realize she has adopted almost none of my suggestions because what she came up with is better.  The fluorescent lights are off which takes the attention away from them.  Instead, she has a number of accent lamps and natural light coming from her big windows.  There are nice area rugs in places with throw pillows on one rug, and a padded bench and some faux suede cubes on the other for a casual meeting area. 

The biggest thing I notice is that ALL of her desks are gone.  There are tables instead with their ends up against the side walls.  Now, there is a large, unimpeded walkway down the centre for C to travel on so that there is no separation between her and her students.  When I ask her about how she was able to "convert" her students she told me that it happened gradually.  It kind of began when I sent her my suggestions, and she showed a Powerpoint document I had also sent her that had slides of all kinds of different possibilities for classrooms on it.  When the students saw some possibilities that didn't look like preschool, some of them jumped on board.  It was one student in particular, F, who really got into it and would come in every day and ask what changes they were going to make next.  He was the one who really got others excited about the possibilities.  The changes to the classroom were not going to be done to them, but with them.

A recent addition: I love this room within a room idea.

There are so many lessons here:

• Students can be advocates for change if you let them.
• You will get greater buy in if students can see what their part is or how they can benefit.
• Sometimes students can't see their way in unless they are given a few non-prescriptive possibilities.
• There is no one way to do anything, but there are some right ways, and you know when it is right when it feels right.

The Secret Life of Classroom Innovators



from http://blogs.cisco.com/wp-content/uploads/innovation.jpg

 I posted that I have this one day per week job (as well as my regular classroom) to seek out and spread innovation.  It has been so much fun!  I get to see big, little, and medium-sized ideas.

A lot of teachers who I have seen have put a lot of thought into their classroom environments.  They have come up with some really creative ways to personalize their spaces for themselves and for their students.  (In future posts, I will post some examples of things people have done to their classrooms, but for this post, I will concentrate more on innovation in general).

In broad terms, I have seen:

• teachers reaching students in unusual ways.
• creative uses of tools and technology to present ideas and to allow students to show their learning in non-traditional ways.
• integrating curriculum to meet the needs of students.
• building community within the classroom walls, but also schools reaching out to the community so that the school is a place that helps adults as well.
• a conscious effort to bring imagination back into the classroom (to downplay the idea that school is just a place where we disseminate information, and instead to promote the idea that schools foster wonder and creativity).
• collaboration among teachers, classrooms, schools, and community groups to improve learning and educate the whole student.
• learning in the natural world, and not just reading about it, but experiencing it first hand, plus finding ways to improved our environment.

I don't want to go into too much detail.  The teachers I have visited over the past few months know that I will be sharing the details of my investigations with my own district first, so I can't give too much away here yet.  But I can talk about some non-specific things until I get permission from my teachers. 

Here are some interesting patterns or observations I have found out about innovation so far.

• Innovation is supported in my district.  We have a lot of mechanisms to try new things.  A lot of the teachers I interviewed also said that it was important to have some kind of support (e.g. administration, colleagues, district structures, university cohorts, etc.).  In some cases, the support was in the form of being a sounding board, and for others, for example, it was a bit of financial support.  I found it interesting that many of these "innovators" thought it was important to have support from others because I always envisioned innovators as "lone wolves." There was some time that the innovators had to work out things by themselves, but for the most part, my small sample enjoyed the support of others.  It seems like there is no "set mind" for innovative teaching, but the support aspect seems to suggest that even if innovation can or can't be taught, it might be able to be cultivated in the right circumstances. 
• Innovation is somewhat community-minded.  The changes that these teachers made all seemed to have an impact on the classroom, the school, or the neighbourhood.  It usually was not targeted to one student or to merely the teacher him or herself.  It might have started with a narrower focus, but always seemed to expand to create some kind of change with a wider audience. 
• Innovation seemed to originate from a specific need or a problem.  Here are some examples: 
• "I felt cut off from my students, so I rearranged my classroom." 
• "Not all of my students were getting the same or correct information, so I tried _______________."
• "My students have such challenging lives at home that I had to help their parents first."
• "My kids don't sit and read, so I had to find a different way for them to learn and show what they learned."
• The path of innovation is not a straight one.  Though the original need may have been specific, the course of action was not.  People tried many things and either failed miserably or went along fine and then met some unforeseen obstacles.  Sometimes the need was there at the beginning, but NO courses of action presented themselves (for a long time), and then one seemingly random event would change things, or a series of occurrences would converge together.    
• Innovation has a playful nature.  One of the reasons why these teachers hung in there so long was because of how much fun they were having.  Though the problems were important to them, the teachers did not take themselves too seriously.  It is like when we played when we were kids: we just tried all sorts of things until one of those things stuck.  It didn't have to be perfect; it just had to feel right.  Innovators still play. 
• Innovation has a slightly subversive feel to it.  When I talk to these teachers, they get this strange gleam in their eyes, or their voices go into a low conspiratorial, but proud whisper.  They know what they are doing is not traditional, and it is actually one of the reasons they find it so fun.  Picture leaders of the French Resistance and you get the vibe (without the cool berets). 

So, if I was to sum up my findings about innovation in a few sentences, it would be something like:

"I've got this interesting problem that's bugging me, so help me or get out my way, because I am about to try something weird and I have no idea where it might go." 

Okay, one (long) sentence.