{"id":17849,"date":"2019-06-25T18:58:20","date_gmt":"2019-06-25T18:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.englishforums.com\/news\/?p=17849"},"modified":"2019-06-25T18:58:20","modified_gmt":"2019-06-25T18:58:20","slug":"traditional-classroom-design-is-under-question-schools-looking-for-ways-to-improve-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/traditional-classroom-design-is-under-question-schools-looking-for-ways-to-improve-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"Traditional Classroom Design is Under Question. Schools Looking for Ways to Improve Collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Can you imagine a classroom design<\/a> where huddled groups can analyze a subject around a comfy table, in a basketball-court-sized room, while at the other end of the room a student is listening to an online course on the blue cushion couch?\u00a0<\/span><\/i>
\nIt sounds like an Instagram-ready collaboration space, but it’s accurate for the Medical Academy for Science and Technology. A school for future doctors, nurses and physical therapists.<\/span>
\nThe space that once was a hospital has changed in the 2015-2016 years and still develops its’ interior. <\/span>Mobile tables and chairs, eye-catching blue and orange colors, comfortable couches and long distance between objects, give this space a relaxing and attractive look.<\/b>
\nWhen asked, teachers said that <\/span>the mobility of the objects helped them debate with a large number of students<\/b>.\u00a0 Wheeled tables and chairs can easily change the arrangement, and the classroom can transform into a conference room, <\/span>resulting in more kids participating and more attention to the centre.<\/b>
\nIt’s just a short story about the academy MAST, which is one of the hundreds of educational institutes that adopted this classroom design. They remembered a movement in the late 1960s when open classrooms were a new thing<\/a>. <\/span>Even though the 1960s weren’t ready for such classroom design, today we’re ready to develop and upgrade.\u00a0<\/b>
\nTake an example of open office space based companies like Google and Facebook.<\/span> See how they thrive in employee satisfaction and productivity?<\/b><\/p>\n

Funding is a bit tight\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

The idea of a classroom design that’s flexible and fit to the activity (it doesn’t matter if it’s individual work or group conference) faced some difficulties.\u00a0<\/span>
\nIt’s already enough that remodelling and refurbishing outdated school buildings are costly, the <\/span>critics of open classroom design argue about the productivity of such spaces and readiness of the teachers to adjust to new teaching techniques.<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>
\nExperiments like MAST Academy is indeed expensive.<\/b> And the funding of Miami on upgrading outdated school classroom designs is around $1.2 billion. But Peter Barrett, the lead researcher for a 2015 study on classroom design in the United Kingdom, says that “teachers should be explicitly trained to see the physical classroom as a holistic element to be actively thought about and used to optimize children’s learning.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Practice says it differently<\/span><\/h2>\n

Brooke Markle is a seventh-grade language arts teacher in Mechanicsburg, and she noticed that her students did better work anywhere but at their desks.<\/span> She experimented with couches, pouffes, floor, under the desk and on top of them.\u00a0<\/b>
\nA few years ago, Brooke decided to replace the desks with vinyl rockers and comfortable plush chairs. She said that her 30-children classroom is filled with desks and no opportunity to think freely. <\/span>Feeling risky, she had no idea that the results of her effort would have such a dramatic effect on how her students study.<\/b>
\n“Kids stopped raising their hands to ask for bathroom breaks,” Markle said. “There were fewer breaks in learning.<\/span>
\nTeachers like Brooke also experiment with different classroom designs<\/a> and try to adapt to a so-called open classroom concept. Whatever the budget of the remodelling of classrooms will be, and whatever the future state of the economy will throw at us,<\/span> kids will need a friendly and productive environment to absorb all the information.<\/b>
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Can you imagine a classroom design where huddled groups can analyze a subject around a comfy table, in a basketball-court-sized room, while at the other end of the room a student is listening to an online course on the blue cushion couch?\u00a0 It sounds like an Instagram-ready collaboration space, but it’s accurate for the Medical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17850,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,16],"tags":[315,316,765,1045,1135,1136,1222,1391],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17849"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.englishforward.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}