Shatter Your View of the Classroom

Classrooms should be crumbling. But many stand firm in an ageless state.

I want to give credit to one of the catalysts for my own educational shift and reflective view of teaching. Changing Educational Paradigms (by Sir Ken Robinson) is media clip that completely changed how I thought of our current educational system. If you haven't seen this before...spend the next 10 minutes re-thinking YOUR educational experience and reflecting on YOUR school memories. If you teach, how can this reshape your view of the classroom? Your school? Your pedagogy? Your approach to students? Your goals?


One of the things that Sir Ken illuminates is the notion that the industrial age-defined classroom has been, largely, left unchanged. Think about how the world has changed in the past 100 years, 50 years, even 10 years. Now think about how many classrooms you could walk into RIGHT NOW and see the following:

• Student desk in rows
• Chalkboard at the front
• Teacher desk in front corner
• Teacher standing at the front
• Filing cabinets filled with worksheets

Are some of these things still practical? Effective? Purposeful? Necessary?

Sure.

But how many of these things are in place because of familiarity? Conformity? Safety? Tradition?

Now think about how many of these things are in place for student learning.

A classroom is for learning NOT teaching.

Students are tasked with the journey of learning and education. Teachers are tasked with how to facilitate this.

The school day is not block of time to be filled with activities to "keep kids busy." It should be an opportunity to forge positive relationships with students so THEIR learning is facilitated in an appropritately paced and meaningful manner.

If the goal of schools is merely to put in time and have the students feel like they remember something that the teacher has "taught them" by the end of the day - we are doing it all wrong. Because if that's the case, why not set up classroom like movie cinemas and bring in the cozy chairs and snacks?

If all we ask of students is to sit passively and learn through sight and sound alone - how different are we than the movies and television shows that we seem to associate with a negative use of time? No one ever suggests that listening to teachers will rot your brain - but depending on the conditions of learning and structure of the classroom environment - I think there's a possible argument there.

Let's shatter our view of the classroom. Let's allow students to put the pieces together. Facilitate the change. Facilitate the learning.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

Classrooms should be places that are linked to the outside world. One of the many ways that you can make this happen is to program for current events. As a tool for literacy, social studies, science and even math, current events create a place to share news and explore student connections to them in a controlled and safe environment. As a place for learning, classrooms offer a forum that can follow the rules of discussion and debate and encourage students to compare points of view and even bias in the media.

With the real-time coverage of the quake and tsunami disaster in Japan unfolding in front of us, students will be watching these horrific events in a way that is reminiscent of the Twin Tower explosions during 9/11, 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Tsunami that decimated parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. What does this mean? Well, for starters it means that our children and students cannot be sheltered from the harsh realities of the world. If it is a major news event - whether war, natural disaster, plane crash or terrorist attacks - our youth will be watching and attempting to process it.

It used to be that these events were mere words on the page with a black and white photo in the newspaper. Hard to come across and even harder to imagine, disturbing news items were experienced by adults and kept within mature circles of conversation. Now that our students are actively pursuing information and media stories, it is the job of teachers to prepare them for what they are going to find.

We need to teach about global issues and the power of humanitarian efforts in minimizing loss of life and supporting the international community. We need to assure them of their safety, but be careful to educate them about the reason that these natural disasters occur and perhaps why they are growing in severity and magnitude. We need to expose the linkages between media, point of view, bias and news-making. Students have to understand why these stories are covered in the manner that they are; who covers them; who owns the networks that determine what is news-worthy; how this all impacts on the final video clip, tweet, headline or streamed video link that they view.

In short, we need to create a world for them that is safe from harm, but not ignorant of it. Give the tool of critical thinking when exploring current events. Their eyes are already open to them, but how they process what they see and feel is largely up to us as teachers.