Monthly Archive

Take a look at the classroom photo. It looks like a typical classroom in our school, and probably like most schools in Australia. Yet this is the very problem. Take the computers out, and this photo could have been taken twenty years ago or even earlier. In fact all this classroom’s had done to it in its twenty-one years of life is new furniture, air conditioning and computers. While all this is great, has it really been shaped over time to meet the evolving needs of our students today, and their future needs that have not yet been realised?

Come on, it’s not too hard to work out where in this classroom the chalkboard is.

The desk arrangement this year has made some efforts to accomodate collaborative and cooperative learning, and to provide social learning networks. Yet it’s still a classroom where such learning groups are still focussed on the one task. The room needs to be restructured yet again to allow for different things to happen in different spaces in the room. Working spaces for groups as well as individuals. Spaces for sharing and presentation, spaces for reading, writing and composition. Spaces for sitting on chairs or to be sprawled out on the floor. Spaces that allow for concentration and comfort.

It may be difficult to achieve all this in the smallish space we’ve been given to work in (floor space 8 x 6.15 metres plus wet area with sink), but there’s also some wasted space that needs to be better utilised. So while other teachers are moving classrooms, I think I’ll be throwing away just as much - especially the outdated resources that no one before me has been game to throw out (and have left behind for me to inherit).

“… Now with all that stuff gone, and a bit more shifting, I won’t need all four of those bookcases anymore… that’s a start…”

With another school year coming to a close, it’s become the opportunity (with other paperwork out of the way for a few days) to start thinking about what’s going to happen next year. In doing this, I started to realise one thing - that I want the 2007 school year to be decidedly different to this one. Not that anything was wrong with this one, but change is necessary.

The reason for this desire to change is that I need to very carefully ask myself whether teaching and learning is effective as it can be. Our teacher-librarian was one of a number of Parramatta Diocesan educators who recently heard Marco Torres explain our three options when faced with this dilemma; namely “complain”, “quit”, or “innovate”.

My hope now is to take up option three. For this to happen, a lot of what happens in my rather “conventional” classroom needs to be critically appraised and changed. If the world is different today, if children are different today, then teaching and learning needs to change with it.

I’ll leave it as is for now. There’s a lot more needed to break this open, and hopefully I can now do it using this blog that for months has sat here while I’ve asked “what worthwhile purpose can I actually use this blog for?”

I have no idea whether any of this is going to work. I don’t even know if I’ll find the time and motivation to get it all done for a whole year. There’s no harm in trying though, is there? Hopefully, even the smallest success will make any effort worthwhile.