and other handy thoughts: so many folks have asked me
for a "quick
start" set
of rules for the design of 3rd Millennium learning
spaces...
...and this Rule of Three, and some of the other
ideas here, have all been well received in conferences, seminars and most importantly
adoptd with success by practitioners. These ideas work, so I thought it was
time to park some of them on a web page:
rule of three
one: never more than three walls
two: no fewer than three points of focus
three: always able to accomodate at least three teachers, three classes.
make no mistake - this is not a plea for those ghastly open plan spaces of the 1960s with their thermoplastic floors under high alumina concrete beams - with the consequent cacophony that deafened their teachers. Today's third millennium learning spaces are multi-faceted, agile (and thus easily re-configured by users as they use them), but allow all effective teaching and learning approaches, now and in the future, to be incorporated: collaborative work, mentoring, one-on-one, large group team taught groups... and more.
knowing the 3rd millennium ABCs
A
ambition: how good might your children be?
agility: how quickly can we reconfigure to catch the wave - at a moment, over a year, across a generation
astonishment: we want people to be astonished by what these children, and teachers, might achieve - how do we showcase this? how do we respond to it ourselves?
B
brave: what are others doing, what tested ideas can we borrow, how can we feed our own ideas to others? how can brave not be foolhardy?
breadth: learning reaches out to who? embraces what?
blockers: you will need help with beating the blockers - if you run at the front, you need resources that win arguments: what is the evidence that...? why doesn't everyone do this...? where can I see it in action...? why should I change, ever...? all this exists of course, but you need to organise it and be ready with it.
C
collegiality: that sense of belonging, of us-ness, sense of family, sharing, co-exploring, research. Also a sense of us (the team working on this innovation) being learners too - and able to show that we are trying cool stuff too - you won't win hearts and minds by saying but not doing;
communication: how does a learning space / building communicate what happens within? and this is about symmetry: how does the school listen to what happens outside school? how do we share and exchange all this with others?
collaboration: we don't want to be told, but we want to do this with others. How do we share what we learn as we do it? Who do we share with? How do we learn from them?
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 5:16 PM