The Classroom is Done
- Paige Dersham
- Nov 4, 2015
- 2 min read
Documenting the Creation of the Exploration and Learning Hub - Part 4
My new classroom started to take shape in August about a week before school started. The giant sharewall was installed and my new tables and chairs were built.
My first chance to try out the furniture part of rethinking my room came during our PD on one of the first days that teachers were at work. We had a data meeting in my room and the teachers just rolled the tables around and connected them to make larger groups so that our 2 groups could start discussing intervention data, it just happened organically, as we had hoped when planning.
I was so excited for the first day of school, I could not wait for my kids to see the transformation.
My classroom went from this:
To this:
After all the planning and work since last January we were there, we were done. But now the real work started, transforming my teaching and students learning to work with the new environment. We all had old habits that need to be broken and new horizons that needed to be expanded.
One change of thinking was about how to use the ShareWall so that it was more than an enormous whiteboard for the teachers use. You can see one way my class and I are using the wall in my past post about Backchannelling. The students are also using the wall for collaborative and design projects as they work on science and STEAM exploration.
I think one of the biggest changes to the room is how our class flows now. There is more room to move around. Students have choice about standing or sitting to work, and have a variety of seating options as well. We are also finding that transitions are much faster as all the materials they need are under the tables in the storage available. This gives us a much more focused classroom with more learning time.
At lunch the standing table pulls out and becomes our dedicated makerspace. Students are using this space to create hand made books, exploring electronics, and a multitude of other projects. Again all the materials then need are stored in shelves and cupboard under the table for easy access.
I am sure we will continue to discover new ways to use our room as the year progresses. After the long journey because I decided to dream big, my little makerspace project I dreamed of last January is now an amazing learning environment that is changing the way I think about teaching and how kids learn.
