Edustange

Open Classroom Schools.

Open education is a philosophy which values the natural development and experience of the child as the primary determinants for the appropriate curriculum and methods…. The open classroom school generally had an architectural configuration of large pods containing six to twelve classrooms, each with an outside access and no interior walls.

Without traditional rooms, teachers could redefine the nature of their role. The teacher shifted from the dispenser of knowledge to the facilitator of learning. Teachers were no longer isolated from each other. They were better able to confer and plan. Learning became an activity that was child centered rather than teacher-oriented. Standard grade-level skill checklists were set aside and the differences in individual needs provided the rationale for the curricula. Students’ progress was not based on rankings, which define success in a competitive context; instead, evaluation of progress was reported in terms of the individual’s achievement in relation to growth from previous levels and the individual’s initiative and responsibility as demonstrated in academic and related arts areas.

Read more: http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2302/Open-Classroom-Schools.html#ixzz0TewSK1VL

In 1975, in my senior year my inter-city high school choir travelled from Regina to Seattle for a tour. It was memorable, but you don’t really want to hear about the parties or the impromptu concerts we performed on the Greyhound bus. I came from a family of educators so I was tuned in some way to philosophies of education. I had two remarkable experiences. The first was watching high schools students at an inner city school demonstrating African dance and drumming. It was an unfamiliar ethnic exposure for a boy raised in middle class Wisconsin and Saskatchewan. I’m pleased to say it is a far more familiar experience for me today. The second was visiting an elementary school that practiced the open concept. It was a revelation to me and I embraced the idea. Understand I was eighteen, finishing high school and three years away from a commitment to teaching. It had a rightness. It seemed a breath of fresh air in the stuffiness of my twelve years of traditional schooling.

The memory comes back to me now like Marley’s ghost rattling chains of lost opportunities. For fifteen years I taught in a rural school with an average of one hundred and twenty students. I realize now I kept tentatively groping toward an open classroom during those years. Echoes of the movement came to me in curriculum development and inservice: learning centers, learning contracts, independent study plans utilizing a variety of spaces. I think the project kept me in that school long after I should have left. It almost worked in the small multigrade environment of that time and I am convinced it is the salvation and strength that can be given to our small rural schools today.

I am back in a multigrade classroom. In a real sense we are all in multigrade classrooms and we have been struggling to remember that. We have also been struggling to make differentiated learning a practicality. I had a moment this last week when I thought it might be possible. It was just a brief hour when my students moved independently and in small groups about their tasks largely mindful of the learning habits needed to make things work in our end of the school.

Students and teachers typically spend the first weeks of the year learning how to work effectively in this space. After they have learned how to minimize disruption to their fellow students, the real work of the school year begins. Rather than having one teacher lecture to the entire group at once, students are typically divided into different groups for each subject according to their skill level for that subject. The students then work in these small groups to achieve their assigned goal, often in a cooperative system. Teachers serve as both facilitators and instructors. Open Classroom

I saw this in Seattle. I think it was authentic and practical, not just an impressionable teen’s momentary experience. I often wonder how long it was sustained before they rebuilt the walls between the classrooms and herded the children back into their cohorts. The open classroom failed for practical reasons. Our current interest in differentiated learning also runs counter to the strong current of pragmatic, economical, industrial education models. Perhaps our success lies in understanding why Open Classrooms failed to become the standard over the last fifty years. It was not simply a matter of confusing physically open spaces. Perhaps there are still collaborative teams of educators making the Open Classroom work. I would enjoy hearing from them. I’m glad that winter day in Seattle is still with me.