How it All Started!

Your classroom, your way was the name of the survey I put out to all of my students to get them involved in a very important aspect of their learning – classroom environment!

I started thinking about environment after reading Chapter 5: Crafting an Epic Setting in the book The Epic Classroom by Trevor Muir. In this chapter he talks about the classroom setting being vital to the learning experience. Students and teachers are all used to the traditional rows of desks, but we need to push outside of the box and think about new ways that we can give students a more effective learning environment.

The first thing that came to mind for me was my teacher mentor during my senior year of college, Tom Hopper. His classroom set up is amazing! He has tables, standing desks, a couch, and my personal favorite… Fit desks!

I don’t have any pictures from his classroom but just to give you an idea of what Fit desks are I added a picture from Google below:

So, I thought about his awesome classroom setting and how much the students got out of it. But, the big question for me was how can this same idea translate into the virtual classroom?

Taking It Straight to the Students!

I got a few ideas together but then I thought, what if my students don’t like this idea? Then I remembered a section of the chapter I was reading talked about involving students in this process. “This is an opportunity to give students ownership of the setting of their story… they are owning another crucial piece of the learning.” -Trevor Muir The Epic Classroom pg 117.

So I put out a survey with my ideas, and the space for students to suggest other ideas:

The ideas I included were:

• Padlet to share personal (school appropriate) artwork
• Student feature in the announcements each week with things that students send to me (birthdays, sports/clubs/academic achievements)
• Non-graded discussion board for each unit for students to chat about topics in the course/help each other prepare for the tests
• Book/tv/movie recommendation lists that students can add to
• Sessions during or after school that we can meet as a group to discuss class topics

I hope to implement at least one of these ideas in each of my classes (right now the student feature suggestion is the most popular) and I will do a follow up blog post about how they turn out!