What really goes into a high-impact K-12 classroom?

Most students spend an average of 14,000 hours in the classroom during their K-12 years. As a result, the learning environment is powerful in impacting relationships among students and with their teachers. Until recently, most of us were using an age-old model, with teaching’s emphasis on standardization designed to support that model.

To break out of this mold, our district decided to pilot the Inspired Classroom project during the fall of 2016. Using an infusion of technology, high-impact classroom furniture, and teachers’ creativity, this initiative helps districts create learning spaces that look, feel, and operate differently than traditional models and instead support our current Google age!

Ready, set, go!

With a donation from the Franklin I Fickett Foundation, we kicked off the initiative by meeting with pilot participants to share ideas and lesson plans that would effectively leverage the new furniture and technology. The furniture was installed in October 2016, and from November through February 2017, we held two more meetings to share ideas, needs, and experiences. Technology training took place during December.

Next page: How the district moved away from sit-and-get learning

Prior to implementing the Inspired Classroom, students in our pilot classrooms took a 10-question survey concerning the furniture in their classroom. Of the students surveyed, 43 percent felt that the classroom furniture had no impact on their learning. However, after using the new furniture for three months, 88 percent of students felt that the new modern furniture had helped them learn. In fact, two out of three students felt the furniture had a significant beneficial impact on their learning.

This project challenged our traditional sit-and-get model of student learning. For example, the technology and flexible furniture configurations provided new ways for students to learn, increased collaboration, and helped us build and strengthen other 21st-century skills. This wasn’t going to be easy. Before we started with Inspired Classroom, just 25 percent of our students felt that classroom furniture made it “easy to work” with their classmates. Afterward, 94 percent felt that the furniture made collaboration easier, with 55 percent saying that the furniture made it very easy to collaborate. In fact, students are now working with each other 60 percent of the time.

The furniture, technology, and training we infused into the classroom not only impacted the students, but it also changed our teachers’ instructional methods.

5 steps to success

As with any major organizational shift, moving from a general agreement on values to an actual strategy and tactics often requires support from outside coaches or consultants. In our case, we partnered with MeTEOR Education to come up with a five-pronged approach to developing our new, High-Impact Learning Environments™. The five areas that we focused on were:

Integrated technology. One of the very first questions to ask when planning the design of new learning environments should be: “How will our students be using technology as they pursue their learning experience?” There is no single answer to this question and each district can benefit from coming up with its own answer(s).

Learner mobility. Schools must consider how to support both formal and informal teaching and learning in order to effectively maximize current and future square footage. A properly designed environment can allow students to seamlessly move from space to space as their work changes.

Multiple modalities. All students are different, so a high-impact learning environment should be able to easily accommodate differentiated instruction or many modes of learning. Both teachers and students should be able to self-organize their respective spaces to match the specific activity, emphasis, or learning style that best suits the moment.

Adaptability. An inflexible space does very little to accommodate impromptu needs. In fact, the location of electrical sockets, casework, and other finishes may unintentionally make it difficult for teachers to veer from the traditional front-facing lecture mode.

Dynamic ergonomics. While many of us remember the hard, rigid, plastic or wooden chairs of our own school time, studies have since shown that such furniture–when used over long periods of time–can negatively impact skeletal structures, circulatory systems, and respiratory systems.

Measuring the results

After our students had used the new spaces for three months, we surveyed them and found that 94 percent felt that collaboration was much easier. Teachers in our pilot program reported that the new spaces have been a catalyst for thinking outside the pedagogical box and making lesson plans more collaborative. Additionally, flexible furniture configurations allow students to reorient themselves to different views of the room as needed and encourage the teachers to move around and be more involved.

As schools continue to fully leverage the benefits of educational technology, the need for high-impact learning environments that support collaborative learning and student voice and choice is growing exponentially. By creating learning environments that support students’ concentration, engagement, well-being, and future success, districts can prepare pupils for success now–and well into the future.