So much of learning is still oriented to the classroom. We spend much of our time in Room 7 wrapped in its walls and routines. Textbooks dominate the courses I’m less familiar with. The juxtaposition of a wall map, National Geographic, and laptop represents geography in my classroom. As I type this, I reflect that their aught to be a window to the side because I do make geography real with walks in the neighboring parks and nature areas. There is justice in the window’s exclusion though. A trip to the park or natural history museum is rare. The picture represents the tools at hand. I thought about discarding the traditional wall map. There are three in the room: world, nation, province. They take up space that could be used for student contributions, or simply left unadorned to lessen the visual distraction. Interactive maps on the computer, with their many layers, contribute so much to learning. Yet over the past few years my students return to these three maps constantly. They seem to like the ready reference. Place names are popular spelling challenge words for example. For that and other purposes, the maps are placed too high for my fourth graders. Fortunately they like to climb on furniture. I think in a classroom increasingly dominated by personal and shared devices, it is important to still give our physical spaces some focus and order.

My class shifted into an array for assessment today. Each student tried to ignore the incidental distractions of the room and find the resources within their own memory to answer questions about arrays, related facts, and measuring time. My exit poll indicates we have not mastered all of this yet. To use our preferred edubabble, intervention is going to be required and that means some serious differentiation of learning. Time to fragment.

Easy to tap that out on my tablet, harder to arrange in room 7. I have to decide which indicators are critical and which should be left for another time. I don’t believe everything must be mastered before we move on. That must be a legacy of dealing with bloated curriculum and the supposition that age equates to readiness or development. I also have to decide on the reliability of question design. The way a question is framed may not get at what these kids know.  It is frustrating; the experiences of learning never quite match the experience of testing. I suppose that is why so many classrooms are locked in an array of desks designed to isolate learners. It makes sense to teach to the test.

Before heading off for P.E. one boy asked if we could move the desks back into our rectangle. He is not a strong independent learner. He is easily distracted but learns best through peer support. Others might settle into these rows for isolated work. I honestly don’t think it is a good fit for most. It looks like a school classroom. It doesn’t look much like the rest of the world these young people will learn in. The array suites our traditional notions of preparation for assessment. It fails to nurture cooperation and collaboration; social modes I think are far more critical at the moment. By lunch we will be back to normal here in Room 7.

My students have a common math assessment this afternon. Since it is lan idividual enterprise I shifted the desks into rows. The resulting configuration consumed all of the floor space. My three standing tables are pushed into corners. About seven of my twenty three students said they preferred it that way. Two girls, independent, well organized learners, were overjoyed to see the arrangement. “I like the personal space,” one explained quietly. I’m sitting here observing as my intern administers the test. Three boys just grabbed a few of the voting booths I keep in the room. They wanted to make study carols. For this sort of intense personal focus that was a good idea. The room is too small to dispurse the group. Even in rows, it is hard to be alone one meter away from another person.

It won’t stay this way. After thirty years it cannot stay this way. I want a different work flow for learning.  I created a short SlideShare to illustrate what the classroom generally looks like. Learning is eclectic and the isolation or grouping is both intentional and more democratically established. There are important times to exert teacher authority and bring everyone together or into groups. Otherwise I believe cooperation on personal learning and collaboration toward a common goal should be left to the discretion of students.

I’m not troubled by the large number of students in my room who prefer the rows. They like the space around them as a default. They will cooperate frequently but only at their comfort level. People enter their space or they knock on some other student’s door. The tape is on the floor. The default in my room is groups of four. I do it that way to remind them and remind myself that learning is connected and we can all be both mentors and learners in the room. 

 Like most teachers I have been preparing for opening day here in Moose Jaw. I’m not sure when I began to prepare for the new year. Teachers in Saskatchewan have been bargaining for a new contract over the last year. We negotiate compensation which essentially means salary. Somehow the discourse of this discussion assumes the vocabulary of wages. Student contact days and hours are deemed relevant. Teacher’s time away from school are referred to as holidays. The distinction between being a wage earner and a salaried professional blur in the minds of both teachers and their employers. I get privately and sometimes publically upset. I often have a hard time deciding when I am working and when I am not. Throughout my life I find myself slipping into activities related to planning or professional development. I am sure this is the common experience.

I spent time in July and August outlining grade four curriculum outcomes and exploring the resources available. I would pop in from time to time for material that had not been digitized. These last days I have been at the school dealing with the physical layout and that is largely what prompted me to post, although curriculum planning is implicated in my concerns. I lost my tables over the summer and gained desks. I am worried about what else I have lost over the summer.

In fairness, the desks have some advantages over the six large round tables I worked with last year. I’m committed to differentiation so flexibility is desirable. Desks can be reconfigured wonderfully. My tables could not. Students who need space have a hard time achieving a sense of privacy in a small room with limited choice. Just as I have had young people who need to network constantly to learn, I have also had young people who need their own office. There are advantages to desks.

There is the other side. Just as I knew I would, I lined the desks in cautious rows facing the Promethean Board. The desks are paired to save space and allow collaboration. That is problematic because I might not pair students appropriately. I had four students at each table – easier to reduce social stress I think. Last year we shifted freely from table to table during learning. Groups formed and reformed to learn. Now I am back to students sitting in someone else’s seat; perhaps getting into someone else’s things. The connected learning will be hampered. I will have to work hard against the inertia. I look at the room now and I see I have lost my effectiveness in this environment. I could always find a place at the table. I was a participant in their learning. I could draw other students into problem solving. The tables created teams. With desks, I am back to looming over my students or crouching down beside them. I feel like a visitor, not a partner. All this seems very unsatisfactory to me.

Tables represented my commitment to collaborative, inquiry-based learning within a studio designed classroom. I plan to continue that journey around the new (and oh so familiar) landscape of my classroom.

After my long weekend I dropped into the school to see the state of my classroom. The custodial staff is finished and except for a long bookshelf for my students, a short bookshelf for the media centre and the new telephone system (a pair of youngsters were stringing lines in my direction), the bones of the classroom are in place after the maelstrom of annual cleaning. It will not take its proper form for another twenty-one days. I almost posted four pictures: one from each corner. I want to break free of an orientation toward the white boards this year. I have five orientations planned so far, six if you include the inner orientation, an unlimited number if you remember learning has no walls or ‘standard’ direction.

They are still doing rooms. The chief custodian popped his head in the door to remind me I had weeks to go before the kids came. He knows better, just teasing me. I was not the only teacher in the school. A colleague was down the hall transforming her new room into something resembling a kindergarten room. I stopped in to welcome her and she asked me how my last year had gone. I replied very well, gave proper credit to my crew and acknowledged my approach played some part. She asked me what I had done to make it successful and I froze.

I did have an answer and after a few moments I got it out. I suppose I have not worked out the response I will be comfortable with. I think I will try to repeat what I did last year (which is a refinement of what I was doing the two previous years). Saying so would not be sufficient. So much depends on the needs of this year’s group and the learning environment we can create together. I used to believe it had a good deal to do with the environment I created for them. Regardless of your educational philosophy, or management style, if you have taught for a number of years you know each new group is unique. There may be young people in my classroom who are not ready for autonomy. I have (finally) learned that this too is an element of differentiation. Those who can learn autonomously and are ready to help create their own authentic learning need to be freed from the tyranny of a classroom reduced to the lowest denominator. I won’t know how quickly I can move the class to a differentiated learning environment, integrating accessible technologies within a flexible studio design with no permanent boundaries. I do know the stages I will follow.

In The Differentiated Classroom (1999), Tomlinson suggests introducing Differentiation in my classroom in three steps. I begin by teaching all the students to do a meaningful anchor activity. This is an individual activity that will become part of the year’s routine. It is also a silent activity. I progress to asking some students to do an alternative activity silently and individually. Tomlinson says this creates an atmosphere of individual focus. I move on to short blocks of differentiated tasks involving pairs, then small groups. I’ll have students with experience both from my own classroom and other rooms. They will come into my room expecting to be able to resume the learning styles they had last year. I need to be ready for that. Tomlinson emphasizes the importance of being a metacognitive teacher: unpacking your thinking transparently. They need to know where I want us to go. I need to describe differentiation to them, describe how we are going to use the room and school, and ask them to help build it in our room. When you talk with your students, not at them, you very nearly always have to share power.

Right now I have the bones in place. I need to be ready for my young partners who will flesh it out with me.