August 16th, a year that will live in merriment. A student-centered classroom becomes even more so by doing a few simple things. Colliding with science is my moniker on Twitter as well as our class blog and website. So it made sense to use it as our class motto. A vision is important and this created a sense of wonderment and magic as they entered the room. I also call our room a community and we start the year off with a group 'mingle' activity and creating our own motto's and logo's. These are then hung on the wall, on our community board. But, alas that is a topic for the next blog post.
When I was designing my wall space I decided to go minimalist. To leave the responsibility to my students so they feel connected to the community arena completely. The back wall of the classroom is a giant collision board where students will add articles, pictures and any other artifact they desire, to build the 'big picture' and make connections between concepts. I got it started to show them last years TEK's and this years TEK's and how they are connected. Then moving forward, they will have full control over the space. When I told my students this they were very excited and already have started collecting items to fill in the gaps.
The opposite long wall in the classroom is a community board, which will be used for their 'calling cards' (the next blog post), advertisements and extra-credit ideas. It will be like in a college quad, a cornucopia of student-driven ideas and communication. The blackboard is the class graffiti wall. This is an area they will use for collaborative formative assessments. They will draw, graffiti style, cartoons and vocabulary words and work together to solve vocabulary scrambles.
The tables are arranged in a community center fashion, some coming out of the walls, one long giant 'dining table', standing circles and round tables. There are also carpet squares so they can sit on the floor and soon bean bag seats as well. It is flexible seating so when students arrived the first day of school they were surprised and excited at the myriad of options. The second day they all moved about and tried out new locations. It was fun to see them begin to own the space. To feel comfortable and cozy in their learning environment.
Smack down the center of the classroom is our makerspace. Accessible from both sides and integral to the area. It is chock full of supplies just waiting for students to tinker, design and innovate.
Our daily objectives are written as We will... what we will accomplish as a class (the topic for the day) and I will, the task students will need to have completed by the end of the period, statements. I decided to make it look like a now showing marquee and every week (for extra-credit) students will design a movie style poster about the topic of the week. Including a tagline and cartoon. I can't wait to see the first one.
I have an average of 30 students in my GT classes and 20 in my Pre-AP classes. This leaves a lot of extra seating and this will come in handy during labs so I can spread them out and they will have plenty of room. Even my teacher desk is open for student use. Every inch of my classroom is student accessible and having this in place set the tone for the community when they entered the room. These last two days have been truly amazing. Flexible seating, student-controlled walls and lots of mingling and getting to know one another and already this year is shaping up to be a joyful and engaging one.
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