Goodbye Desks

Last night, I started to thinking about one of the suggestions I had for improving the classroom with technology in response to the question posed to us at the end of last week's class. I came across a couple of interesting articles about classroom design. The first article, "Open-Ended Learning," takes a look at new school construction. Beyond the photos of the new designs, I found the theory behind them most interesting. In many cases, the buildings were designed to "become part of the learning." And spaces were designed specifically for flexibility. The article also quoted a 1999 study of more than 21,000 students that found a correlation between daylit schools and student performance. I chuckled when I heard this and memories of my teaching experience in a school district in Texas flooded my mind. When I originally applied to Lakeview High School, I imagined myself bringing students outside to read by the beautiful lake or at moments of stress being able to relax by looking out the windows at the sunlight glistening over the calm water. It wasn't until my first tour of the building that I realized that Lakeview not only had no lake, but it had no view...of anything! There were NO windows in ANY classroom. I wonder how this affected students and teachers. I mean, even prisoners get some light, right?

But, daylight or not, most classrooms look the way they did 150 years ago. In my opinion, this is a factor that is preventing us from teaching 21st century skills. Check out IDEO's Ten Tips for Creating a 21st Century Classroom. These are things you could implement in your classroom whether they are supported by technology or not.

In the future, however, we may just need to throw out all the desks! Of course this seems rather extreme, but new technologies like the iPad enable mobility. With this kind of mobility, classrooms no longer have to be confined to a traditional structure, learning environments, don't need to be defined to four walls, and students are free to learn beyond the school building.