Foto from Art Poskanzer, Flickr
What do you think when you see these pictures of old classrooms, with the chairs aligned in rows, and some phrase like, “every sector of society has changed dramatically since the 19th century except one, education”?
Simplistic, right?
I do often wonder, though, what’s wrong with rows of chairs in a classroom? Is there really anything to learning space design?
Well, I just found out that, yes, there is. Learning space design can facilitate effective learning and teaching practices, just like great kitchen design can facilitate effective cooking.
I learned this by facilitating a learning space design workshop with Randy Fielding this past week at the CoSN national conference.
Great learning space design starts with an understanding of effective pedagogy, just like great kitchen design begins with an understanding of food preparation.
We know that real effective pedagogy requires flexibility. There is a time for real world, authentic, relationship-based learning. There is a time for didactic instruction. There are times for group work. There are times for individual reflection. And there are times for whole class instruction.
Randy walked us through methods for balancing specialized spaces with flexible spaces, allowing for both watching and doing, and for watchers to feel part of a learning process. While a final design requires a trained professional like Randy, first approximations and refinements are within the domain of any educator just by keeping the ends in mind:
- What are the different methods of learning and doing that you want to employ in the space?
- How do you allow for effective movement?
- What output and sharing mechanisms are you going to encourage (LED screens, tablets, flipcharts, etc.)
- What else can the space be used for?
- How do you make the space welcoming?
You may be wondering, what was my role in “facilitating” the workshop? For the final 45 minutes, participants had the chance to do their own redesign of the existing space in Augmented Reality using the 3DBear app. 3DBear has collections for library design, learning space design, and room design. Providing a hand-on activity right after or as part of instruction is an especially powerful and engaging teaching technique. In fact, allowing students a voice in designing their own space provides an exciting exercise in design thinking and student voice.
Ah, but what is good pedagogy?
Heidi Backman is the superintendent of Kaunianen (it rhymes with Coney Island) Finland. You may know that Finland was determined to be the happiest country in the world. Kaunianen is reported to be the happiest city in Finland, and the root causes, according to the to article, are the community and school educational and enrichment activities that run under Heidi’s domain.
Heidi listed her the prime reasons for success:
- Establish a spirit of interpersonal trust within the organization and throughout the community
- High quality teacher education
- Maintain stability, with strategic objectives achieved through step by step reforms
- Maintain a social mission, with an emphasis on equity: no big differences between schools, no big differences in opportunities to different segments of the population
- Focus on learning, not testing, and understand that learning does not mean instructional time, learning means learning
There was a fascinating interchange during Heidi’s session at CoSN.
A US district administrator asked, “Can you share with us some of your failures, some of the things you’ve tried that have failed.”
The Finnish answer, after a long pause to think, “No, I don’t think so, because we don’t measure things by success or failure. We do things to gain feedback, so that we can observe, measure, and improve. Everything we’ve done has given us feedback to improve. We just don’t think of our initiatives that way.”
Interesting food for thought, right?
The scene at CoSN. No one seems worried about the Pterodactyl.