Posts Tagged learning_design
Preservice students’ ultimate classroom design
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, university on July 29, 2013
In most English Curriculum units I run an activity where students work in groups to design their ultimate English classroom.
Here are some of the elements that come up in many of the designs:
- Really big bookshelf
- Reading area/chill out zone with bean bags
- Lots of windows
- Blackout curtains around the room for cinema viewing & drama background
- ‘Drama blocks’ that can be used as seating or a stage (or a dedicated stage area)
- An indoor plant
- Projector and screen
- Moveable tables (though note often teacher-centric as default)
Some groups, but not too many, also include:
- Interactive whiteboard/s
- Posters on the wall
- iPad/laptop chargers
- Student work display board
- Different ‘zones’ in one big room
- Coffee/tea making area
- An outdoor area e.g. verandah
The inclusion of a coffee/tea area is slightly worrying, given the adolescent age range of the students in mind!
Other than that though, I can see very good reasons for most of these design elements.
The only problems is…I know that these aspiring teachers have buckleys of fitting all this in to a traditional school classroom space. Until we knock down the walls and invest in new, flexible, comfortable furnishings, these dream rooms will stay just that. A dream.
What do you do to make your classroom more like your ‘ultimate room’? What else would you include in your ultimate classroom design?
Making content posters for my classroom walls
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, technology, university on February 13, 2013
Over the years I have seen many creative and high utility wall displays in other people’s classrooms. Imelda Judge for example is wizard with cardboard and hot glue – sharing a classroom with her in 2009 was a wild apprenticeship in classroom decoration!
I say ‘other people’s classrooms’ because I haven’t had a lot of success with this kind of thing!
2008: One time, I thought I had made a pretty successful poster of quotes from King Lear for my Year 12s…but they never seemed to look at it:
2009: Far more successful displays have tended to come out of students’ own work being put up, such as this display of lines of poetry after a lesson with Year 10:
2011: And the ‘tree of knowledge’ inspired display I’ve had in my uni teaching for the past 18 months was wrongly positioned at the back of the room, and a little haphazard to boot:
Today: When I saw Bianca’s tweet today with a picture of her classroom wall painted with blackboard paint, I thought ‘how cool is that!?’
…which motivated me to start designing some posters to add to my classroom this semester.
I’m going for a digital look, rather than getting all crafty with the glitter and paint. I plan to print them out in colour A3 and get the students to decide where they think they should be put up in the room. Here is the first one – two of the key concepts I focus on in my English Curriculum Studies unit:
Mind you, the room I teach in has been a blu-tak free zone for the past two years, because it got a new paint job. This has been severely limiting. While it’s lovely on one hand to teach in a clean and modern space, it’s hard to use a room when you can’t put things up where you want. Teachers who don’t have a ‘home room’ will know the feeling!
The display I have been using so far, however, has been taking up one of the big green write-on groupwork boards in the room (to avoid having to blu-tak the wall). I don’t think I can keep using that board – I need it in my class, and other teachers must too.
So walls, you’ve had two years…the blu-tak is now a-comin 😉
If anyone else has electronic copies of pedagogy-inspired posters that they would be happy to share, I would love to see some more designs. And if you have any ideas for what else you think I should be flagging for 2nd year preservice English teachers, tell me all about that too!
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