Friday, February 17, 2012

Classroom of the Future or of Today?


Walking into the classroom door students would do a warm-up pre-assessment for the teacher to base stations and help for the day. The class period would be dynamic to the sense that stations would be chosen by the student on where they think they need help and a combination of where the teacher sees a fit. I picture a room with 3-4 stations happening either on different topics and students rotating between them, or where the stations are differentiated to different levels of the same topic, or a little of both. The teacher would float back and forth between stations while being ubiquitous and still monitoring the whole room. Having the station function gives students the freedom to move to a different leveled station if they need more than their current station is offering. It would be a mini version of a "vote with your feet" conference, if a session isn't working for you then find a better one. All of the stations would coincide with a theme for the day or relate to a project based learning activity later on. At the end of the class time students would do a formative assessment of what they learned that day to show what they retained and to let the teacher know where some clarification and instruction may be needed.

Does this look like your room? What do you do differently that works for you? I'm interested to hear how the style of your room works.

1 comment:

  1. I love the description of this classroom! Student choice is a huge factor in your design, and unfortunately, it's the aspect that I rarely see in classrooms today.

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