Classrooms on the Move: Active learning includes access to technology + tactile physical spaces with plenty of space to roam
Look at the above image; it just might be the future of education in New Brunswick.
This is a middle school class at Salisbury Middle School. Off to the left is the familiar teacher’s desk and slightly worn filing cabinet many of us remember from our public school days and which many of our kids would recognize too.
Most of the rest is new, courtesy of an applied research project led by Mario Chiasson, who oversees K-12 Innovation at Anglophone East School District.
Chiasson, who has a PhD in Education, has spent the past two decades researching how technology is changing the way students learn. His most recent work has examined how to create physical spaces that enable students to learn and adopt computational thinking. In other words, the logic of problem-solving.
“Computational thinking is increasingly an essential skill in today’s workplaces,” he says. As part of his research, Chiasson visited 30 schools from around the world and interviewed executives and employees from over 40 companies to find out what were the necessary skill-sets to succeed in a modern, digitally-enabled workplace.
All identified three skills: the ability to solve complex problems, to work in a team and to be an effective communicator.
“Our classrooms need to reflect industry spaces,” says Chiasson. “Students need to learn how to work in teams, to collaborate and to communicate.”
So how to do that? Chiasson believes it is the interdependence and interplay among three learning channels: physical spaces, digital devices and human interaction.
Enter Salisbury Middle School and teachers Jérémie Goguen and Alain Côté. They worked with Chiasson to convert their classrooms into dynamic, connected learning spaces in November 2017.
This included floor-to-ceiling white boards, large digital monitors, the elimination of desks in favour of tables for group work, an iPad for every child and new chairs on wheels, with storage spaces for backpacks beneath.
“Mario’s big question was how does the environment affect learning and how can it fit a multitude of learning styles as opposed to a framework that has been direct instruction for hundreds of years. How do we try to make learning more dynamic and less passive,” said Côté, who has over 25 years experience in New Brunswick classrooms and currently teaches grade 6 math, social science, science and health, in both French and English. “The understanding that both of us (Goguen and Côté) have is connectivity is in our lives and in our classrooms. There is no turning back.”
In Goguen and Côté’s classrooms, students can easily move around to join a group as they work on a problem, or slide on over for some alone time off to the side. The whiteboards enable brainstorming and collaboration, while the monitors have encouraged students to learn how to create class presentations that incorporate video, animation, images and professional-looking screens.
All that movement is a form of kinesthetic, or tactile, learning and as anyone with a kid can tell you, this is a natural state of being for most children and teens. They like to move, to run and to touch stuff; to actively engage with the world around them.
However, that’s not how a traditional classroom operates. It can’t, not if the model is a teacher standing at the front of the classroom delivering a lecture. For that to happen effectively, students need to sit quietly and listen. No talking. No getting up and moving around. No fidgeting.
It’s a passive way to learn, which was a good way to prepare for the old pre-digital, pre-Internet way of working. But that isn’t how most of us work now. Many of us work in teams, just about everybody uses some form of technology, and cloud computing and using the Internet are a regular part of the work day. Employees are expected to know how to access information and apply it to solve problems and complete projects.
That will require a major shift in thinking for teachers who will need to change how they teach.
“We become less a sage and more curators. We’ve become librarians,” says Côté. “We need to coach kids to become self-actuated learners, to become kids that will understand that behind that little screen there is so much there. Right now in grade 6, they don’t understand that because they can shut right down and they want you to tell them the answer. It’s a kind of learned helplessness. So in my situation I do a lot less explaining multitude of times — you have to coach that. They still want to be passive but we have to force them to do research and to do it right.”
Goguen nods in agreement. He’s been teaching for six years and describes himself as a digital native. Checking his phone for information is second nature for him and like his students Goguen is accustomed to getting instantaneous access via wireless technology.
Now his classroom can work at the same speed. That’s important because it enables him to keep his students engaged and interested in learning.
“Each kid had their own iPad so that really opened up the leveraging of digital technologies,” he said.
For instance Salisbury Middle School, like many schools in the province, uses Office 365, Microsoft’s online version of all its programs. This enables students to access their work on any Internet-enables device, anywhere.
In addition the school has adopted the My Device, My Learning initiative, which has included high-speed Internet infrastructure at the school so students can bring their own devices to school for use in the classroom.
“It’s really easy for them to bring their devices in, connect to the Internet and use those devices to their advantage,” says Goguen, adding the school equips students who don’t have access to a device. “For me I continue to find out how certain things work on the iPad and to learn to never be scared to try new things. When you try new things for sure you are going to have some flops in the classroom. There are growing pains but once you get over those obstacles, it’s great.”
He tells a story that is familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a public school classroom. Goguen was teaching math and two students put their hands up at the same time, each with a different question. He did what all teachers do, he asked one student to wait while he answered the other student’s question.
“It maybe took me five minutes. When I got to the second student he said ‘never mind I’ve already found my answer on Google,’” he remembers.
“It opens up that world to them. They become active learners.”
Lisa Hrabluk is a writer and owner of Wicked Ideas Media. Find me on Wicked Ideas’ Facebook page or on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
School Works is a solutions journalism project and partnership between Wicked Ideas and the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD).
