There is a lot of talk about innovative classrooms. What is an innovative classroom? Many would think it was inevitably a classroom filled full of complex IT with screens everywhere. Well actually we think an innovative classroom is one that presents no barriers to a teacher and helps them to do their job the way they want to do it.
This of course makes the assumption that the majority of academic staff have a plan for how to get their students to learn through a mixture of presenting them wth information and giving them space and time to practice authentic tasks, sometimes individually and sometimes in groups, using that information and potentially other information that they gather themselves.
All too often academic staff do seem to us to have such a plan.
Unfortunately all too often the state of the classroom they have to teach in, and especially the furniture and the IT, put up barriers to make it hard for them.
SMART Teaching 