Five Essential Classroom Ideas that will change your Learning Environment to the better
Find us on Twitter @How_Kids_Work for more great insights and practical tips on teaching non-conventional classrooms. Get the best out of learning.
You know what would really make your learners happier and more engaged? That you stop setting it all up for them, and let them design the classroom instead!
This is a list I have compiled over the years of five absolutely essential classroom ideas and corners that can restore your learner’s agency and give them charge over their own learning.
The main reason these are so essential is that they are tremendously flexible, work for any subject areas, are easy to set up, and allow you to sit and watch as your students steal the show.
Seldom do we every learn from things we don’t experience ourselves, and these ideas (100% doable, enjoyable by learners, highly efficient, and entirely supported by personal (or snatched) examples) will allow learners to see their thinking and experience it visually, with the minimum amount of resources needed. No fancy iPads, no expensive stationary, just your regular old colored papers and a sturdy sharpie!
Essential IDEA 1: Open-Access Posters
Open-access posters are posters learners are allowed to modify, add to, or scratch out of at any moment during the lesson or activity. This will not only allow learners the freedom to move around without disturbing the classroom environment, but to also voice their ideas, questions, and new knowledge in a way that is accessible to everyone at all times.
Classic examples of such posters are wonder walls, where learners can post their urging questions on a poster or post-its on designated corners of the classroom to be wondered about later, or drive the inquiry further. Another example is a word wall. During reading sessions, my learners would look difficult words up in their dictionaries, get up, get a marker, and jot it down on a HUGE word wall in alphabetic order. This can be used for each new book or for the entire school year. Their vocabulary grew, and they became interested in jargons and word origins in other subject areas as well (such as “fungus” in science, and “hexagons” in math!).
Here is a simple $1.00 Synonym Wall.
Essential IDEA 2: Early Finisher Tasks Station
Who doesn’t hate early finishers? Those know-it-all smartie-pants who outsmart even the brightest of teachers, and demand to be given more challenging tasks on the go.
What I had for my class of 10 out of 20 already capable of reading novels in third grade was an “Early Finisher” station. Each unit, the station would have new interesting tasks in the shape of task cards. For example, for our Story Writing Unit, the station had a jar stuffed with story writing prompts (which can be found online easily, and at a very low cost on TeachersPayTeachers.com), and whenever they’d be done with an activity or assessment, they automatically head there to grab a new prompt and start crafting stories in their journals. This kept them occupied because it was an interesting, mind-squeezing activity, and they craved challenge. It also gave me the opportunity to work with struggling learners while the early finishers were lost in the land of imagination, doing something that can sharpen their writing skills at every opportunity!
You can get highly engaging, reusable, and durable ones for years to come for as cheap as $9.99 on Amazon.
Essential IDEA 3: Interactive Boards
Not everything interactive is exclusively electronic. Interactive boards are boards that allow learners to interact with one another inside the classroom, and with learners from other classes with ease, without any fuss, and at their own pace. To set up an interactive board, all you need are colored papers, markers, and buckets/pockets/clear-files/anything-to-put-papers in.
The basic idea of an interactive board is that it will pose a number of driving questions, prompts, or inquiries where others are allowed to post questions or answers as needed. One teacher did a terrific job on this here, completely transforming the classroom.
For one math unit on long divisions, learners set up an interactive board to challenge visitors and other learners to solve complicated word problems and even create their own word problems. On the board outside my classroom, I had a bucket called “challenge yourself with division”, filled with pre-made math problems, and another called “suggested word problems” where visitors could create new challenging problems, and a huge area dedicated only to those who dared try to solve them. In their own handwriting, visitors and learners would occupy their minds and show their work on small A5 papers, and then stick them on the board with a signature. This helped learners think backwards for a change, and create new problems for new-comers to solve. This two-way engagement helped them connect with every-day problems facing learners, visitors, and faculty members alike!
Essential IDEA 4: A-Puzzle-A-Day
They key to enriching learners’ problem-solving and critical-thinking is consistency and daily training. Teachers often attempt to integrate these skills into their lesson plans, but they are more of sudden outbursts occurring once or twice a week.
Well, as any habit building enthusiast will tell you, “If you do something early in the morning, you will save yourself the trouble of trying to wiggle out of it later in the day!”
It’s important to make puzzle solving a daily (preferably early morning) habit in any classroom, and I have one of my brightest colleagues to thank for that idea. This teacher at my previous school invested quite some hours at the beginning of the year to compile a large group of fun puzzles that play on puns, words, mathematics, and logic. She then didn’t even go ahead to print them, but simply opted for displaying them to class on a data-show every morning. Her learners spent this valuable time figuring out ways to brainstorm and solve the puzzle. By mid-year, their skills had improved substantially, and by the end of the second semester, they had improved so much that they were capable of creating their own puzzles by thinking backwards.
Essential IDEA 5: The “Focus” Space
Every classroom needs a space designated for those who can’t focus easily. This worked wonders with learners who had ADHD (I taught one that was officially diagnosed for over a year in an inclusive classroom, and taught several in substitute classes or one-on-one). It was even recommended as part of the Special Education program.
You see, it works wonders because things as simple as moving to another space that is free of clutter, quiet, or comfortable is sometimes all the push distracted learners need.
But there are some steps to this.
First, ensure that this space is inside your classroom — not in another room, not in the hallway, not on the teacher’s desk (by the way, get rid of that already!). For two years straight, mine was a carpet decorated with book shelves in one corner of the classroom. If you have a reading corner, turn it into “The Focus Area”.
Second, it doesn’t have to be that spacious. It’s enough that it’s removed from the basic seating arrangement in the classroom. However, it needs to be comfortable and distraction-free.
Third, it’s never a form of punishment, and you don’t get to “punish” a learner for getting distracted (because this is #HowKidsWork!). Several of my learners were allowed to go to that space (but only 2–3 at a time!) when engaging in individual tasks (such as writing, listening, or individual problem solving) at any time of the lesson when they thought they needed a space of their own. Give your learners the freedom to go there because that gives them entitlement to how they think, and the power to improve themselves without needing a one-on-one session.
Fourth, give it a suitable name because words are everything. Whenever I notice a student who is nervous, out of focus, or simply having a bad day, I ask them to join the “comfy space” or “focus area”. By the simple use of a suitable, enticing label, the learner will understand that she or he are there to be able to perform the required task better, and thus yield better results. Learners who started sitting regularly in the “focus area” when listening to a story or doing an assessment achieved more and finally got to reach their full potential.
Find us on Twitter @How_Kids_Work for more great insights and practical tips on teaching non-conventional classrooms. Get the best out of learning.
