December 2007 — Features
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A Movable Feast
"I walked into a lecture theater a few days ago that had 500 seats, all facing forward, all in rows. The lights were pointed at the stage. There was a lectern up there with a screen behind it. When you walk into a space like that, whether you are a learner or an instructor, your mental default is that the audience will sit there silently while the teacher lectures at them. If I had walked into a room with no central focal point, filled with round tables with free-standing chairs, and everyone was facing each other, and there were screens on all four walls, I would assume, as would the students, that this would be a much more collaborative environment."
site seeing
To view the design of Lake Geneva Middle School's Technology Center, go here.
Grant Strobel has learned firsthand how different classroom architecture can change an instructor's teaching style. Strobel is the tech ed teacher at Lake Geneva Middle School in Wisconsin. He works in the school's 2,600-square-foot Technology Center, an open classroom—no dividers, no cubicles—designed for a modular education program covering 18 different areas of technology. Built in 1999, the classroom is furnished with free-standing islands equipped with computers and a range of tools for hands-on projects and group problem solving. Each learning module covers a different technology, from radios to rockets, lasers to IT. Students work at the islands in pairs, Strobel explains, but the classroom also has three work tables where they can gather in greater numbers.
The wide-open design of the Lake Geneva Tech Center keeps Strobel "constantly cruising," as he puts it. The design has changed his ideas about what constitutes effective teaching. "I'll never go back into a traditional classroom," Strobel says. "The kids are so much more engaged in here. For one thing, it's completely hands-on. I'm not going to stand up in front of the classroom today and tell you how robots are used in the world or how rockets work. It's a completely different style of teaching."
Window Shopping
One way to get past the bias toward traditional models is by doing a bit of window shopping. If you want to know what constitutes an effective integration of technology and classroom design, Johnson advises, take a look at what is working in another school district.
"I think exposure to other classrooms is critical—even at colleges and universities, which tend to be ahead of K-12 in this area," he says. "At some level, a classroom is a classroom. When you are in an environment for a long time, you forget— or you've never had an opportunity to see—what it's like to do something really differently. If you don't see other sites, you may never be exposed to some radically different approaches that could inspire you. The worst thing you can do is to think that you're going to have all the answers."
