March 2016 – SMART Teaching

What’s in a Chair?

I guess the answer is ‘usually a bottom’ but bottoms are not what I’m writing about here, though they are probably significant because of course chairs are generally very important to us humans on a daily basis.

Chairs are of course also very important in classrooms.

Traditional classrooms tend to have tables and chairs – the tables are usually 600mm x 600mm and the chairs, well, they will vary but will often be pretty basic and not unlike chairs you might find in a doctor’s waiting room or possibly in someone’s kitchen.

These days however, with an emphasis on flexibility (or I prefer adaptability) in classrooms, you will more frequently encounter chairs that are on wheels and have a built in ‘pull-across’ table or tablet. Are these types of chairs useful?

Certainly they do allow you to re-configure a classroom full of students quite quickly (in theory), one minute in rows, then in a big semi-circle round the sides of the room and then in small groups. Or you coudl even get them to wheel themselves out int ot he corridor, close the classroom door and get some peace and quiet:-)

However these chair do throw up issues. These range from the difficulties sometimes encountered in sitting down in one, (without careering across the room) through to the ‘mess’ that a room can look in when you first arrive to an empty (of people) classroom. Academic staff often remark on the shock of coming to a room and finding the chairs totally all over the place. They complain that students all huddle in one corner of a room and that it therefore takes time to arrange your class into nice neat rows.

That of course leads me to the key point – don’t have chairs on wheels in a classroom (without proper tables) if you mainly want regular rows of students in front of you. Do however, have them if you want to facilitate small group work and hopefully collaborative learning activities. If you can cope with their downsides, they really do help to get group work going in between periods of teacher talk.

Partnership with Students

Partnership is key to the effectiveness of what happens in a university classroom. Partnership between teachers and students. The students need to understand why a teacher might choose to use a particular curriculum delivery approach, whether the approach uses technology extensively or not.

Without that partnership and understanding of the role played by both sides, it is highly likely that either the teacher or at least some of the students will be disappointed. That partnership component is especially important when a teacher uses techniques that are different to those the students experience regularly.

Using technology in different ways in a classroom (e.g. to get students to participate with their own internet enabled devices) is one common situation where things can go wrong, if the students have not been prepared for what is going to happen and why its going to happen that way.

People

The most important tools within a physical classroom are the people in it, the teachers and the students. Ultimately their attitudes, enthusiasm and desire are what will make something useful happen during a class.

It is fair to say that traditionally a teaching session would be led by a teacher and to some extent that should still be true today. However clearly there is a drive to engage students more, not just so that they are more attentive in class and respond when asked a question but so that they play a more co-creational role in learning.

One of the big changes that many teachers or lectures face is that shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.

Flipping the Classroom

Flipping the classroom is a relatively new phrase, it is not a new concept. The idea centres on reversing a traditional approach to teaching where students attend class to ‘receive information and get understanding’ and then do homework or coursework. In a flipped classroom, the information is provided before a class, these days often in the form of a video. Then the class focuses on students engaging with that information and working with it, typically in groups to discuss the topic concerned, collaborate and solve problems.

As indicated ‘flipping‘ is not a new concept and some teachers have been using technology for sometime to change markedly the nature of classroom sessions so that students engage in activities around some pre-presented information or knowledge (see for example Turning the Classroom Upside Down). In general the approach, whether referred to as flipping or turning the classroom upside down, supported the ideal of student centred, active learning.

Mobile Learning

The whole World has gone mobile crazy. So many people now have smartphones or tablets. Students often have more than one such device and they are very used to using them for social activities. Integrating mobile technologies into teaching can open up a range of learning opportunities.

For example the use of mobile devices can facilitate situated learning, where students in work or just out and about experiencing something related to their course, can easily record the experience or work activity and share this with others for discussion. In class various approaches to engagement, brainstorming in groups, in class voting can be done through exploitation of handheld devices and extraordinarily easy to use web based systems to support such activities.

The use of mobile approaches to learning can help students learn any time and any place and can form an important aspect of a flipped classroom approach to curriculum delivery.

Classrooms

A physical classroom is still where it ‘happens’ most often for university and college lecturers. That almost private, very personal space within which a relationship between a teacher and many students is so crucial to student learning and to the teacher’s personal fulfilment and enjoyment.

Good things can happen in a classroom without any ICT or AV (audio-visual) tools but normally these days a teacher will tend to use slides coupled to a projector screen. Of course they can also now make use of the internet in class and show videos and websites. That’s great but what is perhaps not so great always is the fact that the content displayed is against one presentation wall and a session can become one long presentation, with not much intervention or interaction from the audience.

In SMART teaching a classroom will see much greater participation from the students. They will tend to work in groups more and they will use technology for a variety of meaningful reasons, including at times presenting to the rest of the room. But the technology in a SMART classroom is not just about ICT and AV, it is also about the furniture in the room and several ‘basics’ such as writing surfaces and lighting.