December 2007 — Features
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A Movable Feast
Though the focus of Johnson's work is the impact of technology on instruction and student learning, he insists that a successful synchronizing of technology and classroom puts the teaching before the gadgetry.
"Whenever we talk about technology in education, we have to start with the pedagogy," he says. "What are your teaching goals? What are you trying to achieve? What types of learning do you want to happen? It is true that we are surrounded by, and even immersed in, technology, but we still have to leverage it in a way that is educationally useful, in a way that's better than what we don't do digitally. Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's better for learning."
ONE L OF AN IDEA
TODAY'S LEARNING SPACES NO LONGER HAVE TO BE ORDINARY RECTANGLES. A DESIGN INNOVATOR SAYS THE 21ST-CENTURY CLASSROOM TAKES A WHOLE OTHER SHAPE.
CHALLENGING ENTRENCHED expectations of what a classroom
should look like is something of a
raison d'être for Henry Sanoff, an
architecture professor at North
Carolina State University.
A widely published author, Sanoff is considered one of the preeminent experts on learning-space design for the K-12 sector. His books include Creating Environments for Young Children (North Carolina State University, 1995); School Design (Wiley, 1994); and Community Participation Methods in Design and Planning (Wiley, 1999).
Over the past few years, Sanoff has been challenging one of the fundamental expectations of classroom design: shape. He has become well known for his innovative L-shaped classrooms, which he says "suggest possibilities that teachers might not have considered in a space with four corners.
"In a traditional rectangular setting there are four corners, and that doesn't suggest to teachers any special way of arranging the class, so they do it the way they were taught, or the way they have experienced," Sanoff says. "In an L-shaped classroom, the corners suggest possibilities teachers might not have considered before. The tendency is automatically to arrange the room in groups. Once the students are arranged in groups, the teacher has to move around and can't stay in one place, because the L shape doesn't allow that."
Sanoff has designed L-shaped classrooms for a new elementary school in Gibsonville, NC, and an elementary school in nearby Jamestown. He hastens to add that the L shape was actually selected by the teachers. "We use a technique where the teachers look at all kinds of possible classroom designs and arrangements based on different criteria—team teaching, student independence, collaboration, etc. In [the Jamestown project], all the teachers agreed that they wanted an L-shaped classroom, even though none of them had ever experienced such a thing. When we built it, I went down and rearranged two rooms to show them how to lay it out, and they were ecstatic about it."
