This is why I love what I do. The following quote is a direct copy of an e-mail sent to me today from a teacher whom I worked with yesterday.

After talking to you yesterday, this morning I have changed my desk configuration of each group of 4 students to have access to a computer at the end of their desks, AMAZING, students immediately started working collaboratively, sharing ideas and recording their ideas ( see our wiki- I wonder questions about the Christchurch earthquake). We then put this immediately onto wiki.
My management of the class has immediately changed, I know longer need timetables of when they will get their turn- as they manage that as a group, I am also thinking of more ways to use the computers in a collaborative way.
Thanks for the discussion always is refreshing and stimulating.

I describe myself as a change agent, I put ideas in front of talented and creative teachers.  I make the case for change, they interpret those ideas and act upon them. The subsequent actions of the teachers then stimulates children.  They start to engage at a different level, they think deeper, they find the work authentic and relevant.

In this particular case all a teacher has done is move the furniture, just like David Jakes illustrates in his presentation that I featured in an earlier post, suggests. You can see the results of this change on the class wiki and I am sure there will be more evidence as the days and weeks unfold. http://2010pvsrm04.wikispaces.com/Topic

Have you heard the one about the C19th architecture, the C20th trained teachers and the C21st students they teach and how they are all mutually exclusive to one another? It is the, if only, argument. Teachers in old schools look enviously down the road at schools that have just been built and are therefore, in their eyes ideal C21 learning spaces. The reality is that an architect who endured 13 years of school in a box of four walls is going to be an expert on the needs of the modern education environment, right? Yeah Right! It is not necessarily true that a modern brand new school will provide the ideal space for the C21 curriculum.  The presentation above makes this point, but slide 28 says it all for me: “The right space does not guarantee success, but the wrong space can make success unlikely.”  This is a challenge for us all.  How can we adapt the physical environment that we have been endowed with to foster the right space dynamics for a classroom of the twenty first century?  Slide 36 says “School is no longer constrained to how far the bus can travel in the morning.  Schools will be the last to notice.”

Room dynamics can be changed as simply as moving desks.  Often we group and organise the furniture based on behaviour minimisation strategies.  Satisfied at our ploy of containment and suppression we then wonder why our pupils are not performing!  What would happen in your class if you designed your students’ desks arrangement around  a class philosphy of engagement, collaboration or interaction?  The last few slides are of  the same classroom, empty of all ornament except the desks and several configurations of the same desks.  You can feel the different vibes and energy from these desk arrangements, imagine the positive and negative impact the arrangement of your class is having on your students.  Over the holidays, move your desks around to create a vibe of engagement.

I have been working in this school since the middle of last year and in that time some tremendous changes have started to happen.  E-learning is starting to put down some strong roots and is well on the way to being an integral part of a significant number of the classrooms there.  There is still plenty of work to do, but the images above demonstrate one of the techniques that I use to foster a climate of independence in students so that they can achieve their learning goals.  To manage the different rate at which students master different tools at their disposal, I encourage the development of a class experts system.

In this particular year 2 classroom the teacher has adopted this idea and  made a wall display where students can pin their own images against a range of skills that they have mastered, it is in effect a community bulletin board of the type that you see in a supermarket.  Look at the range of skills these students have mastered in the images above.  It is a visual guide for other students who need additional support, they know who to go to, other than the teacher, to seek help.   It is an e-learning equivalent of  the”See three before me” classroom management strategy.  The bulletin board process creates a conveyor belt of skills acquisition, so what happens when everyone in class can do the same skill?  The students take a photo of themselves with ‘thumbs up’ and pin that photo by the now redundant support service on the bulletin board, this particular solution was devised by the students in this class themselves.

Running in tandem with this in class initiative, other students within the school have created their own ‘Yellow Pages” adverts and have put them into a binder.  These adverts again advertise which e-learning skills an individual student is willing to offer support for.  The key difference here is that this binder is displayed prominently in the staffroom.  These adverts are aimed directly at the staff and staff are seeking help from their students.  The benefits of this role reversal can not be underestimated where learners become teachers and teachers become learners.