Tag: furniture

Innovative Classrooms

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.

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.

What is SMART Teaching?

‘Smart teaching’ is a phrase we use to represent changes to teaching practices and processes underpinned by technology, new, different physical spaces and an interest to use more flexible, adaptable approaches to curriculum delivery.

The use of technology is often key in ‘freeing’ teaching from the constraints of place, time and paper and when combined with innovative use of physical space can help teachers to work with students in more flexible and mutually beneficial ways.

‘Flexible or adaptable teaching in an organisation encompasses:

  • a range of ways to deliver classes face-to-face
  • changes to the way teachers interact with students in class
  • changes to the furniture and other tools within a classroom
  • integration of online learning with what happens in the classroom