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Pedal, Sit, Bounce, Stand: Allow That Mind to Expand!
Pedal, Sit, Bounce, Stand: Allow That Mind to Expand!
By, Wendie Breitenfeld Slezinger
5th grade teacher, Welby Way Charter Elementary School and Gifted-High Ability Magnet
“We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.”- Richard Riley
An environment that incorporates movement and flexibility allows students to cultivate the skills necessary to be competitive and successful in a brand new world! My 5th grade students choose where they will learn in a room designed with flexible learning spaces, utilizing space to delineate areas for quiet learning, a large community table for collaboration, standing desks, and conversation areas to facilitate communication. Students have the seating options of couches, high backed stools, bungee chairs, yoga balls, Hokki stools, and rolling chairs, in addition to more traditional seating options. Students are supported in determining what works best for them and what will help them increase productivity.
The Partnership for the 21st Century Learning has identified four skills as the most important skills required for the 21st century education. These “Four Cs” include: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.” Flexible learning spaces create an environment to keep students motivated and healthy, and are a necessary practice to ensure success in a personalized learning setting.
Approaches to critical thinking are changing as well. We are no longer simply teaching students to solve problems; we are teaching them to look for problems. Teaching kids to find problems to solve and collaborate to come up with multiple solutions enables them to find inconsistencies, develop plans and creatively share those plans. It is not enough to share their findings with their teachers and classmates, they must also learn to share virtually, with the whole world. This is not limited to sharing documents or developing presentations and projects. Being able to conduct face-to-face interviews with experts in the field increases their knowledge, their passions, and their global awareness! Containing students in assigned seats hinders their ability to engage with others, develop ideas, and enhance their understandings through exposure to the thoughts and ideas of others. Movement encourages collaboration which in turn encourages growth, allowing students to determine how they learn best.
My students love learning and are preparing to make the world a better place. I am playing an important role in helping them prepare for the ever changing challenges of the real world. Change drives growth. Noise in the classroom is not chaos, it is learning, it is preparing, and it is developing! Giving students a comfortable and safe place to grow makes all the difference in their educational and social development. Think of meeting your friends to work on a project at the local coffee shop. You feel comfortable, and as a result, you accomplish more. Pioneered by tech companies, such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs, American Express and Facebook in the Silicon Valley, many companies now embrace the concept of open seating, a symbol of innovation and forward thinking. Creating this type of comfortable environment in the classroom, while also considering and planning for the necessity of quieter, more private areas, allows for students to work as they would in the real world, and most importantly, in their places of future employment.
Every day in my 5th grade classroom, the students participate in math rotations. Four groups of students refer to digital agendas differentiated to meet their individual needs. The students travel through four sessions, moving and changing activities approximately every 20 minutes. Sitting in high backed stools around a kidney shaped table, one group begins with interactive, concentrated small group learning with teacher support. They are cued by an upbeat 30 second music clip to rotate or dance to their next task. It is here where they will have the choice to sit around low tables or in conversation areas to practice and reflect on newly learned concepts and collaborate to find multiple solutions using viable arguments and finally share and defend their solutions in a public forum. Upon hearing another 30 second music clip, learners will transition to a community table where they will revisit past concepts in spiral reviews, using critical thinking to determine mistakes and communicate effective strategies and solutions. Finally, the next surge of musical energy sends them to creatively engage in an ongoing “real life” math project based learning activity where they might collaborate to build a candy store business involving researching entrepreneurs, scouring real estate sites to find affordable property, or determining appropriate pricing to account for expenses and still net them a profit. Students have shared that their confidence in math and their belief that they are “good at math” has skyrocketed. Improved test scores are undeniable proof of that!
“When the body is active, the brain is active." Being in a classroom that gives student choices prepares them for the ever-changing world they live in. I strive to give them every opportunity to be prepared for that competitive world. My goal is to continue to provide a classroom environment that is consistent with brain research and the needs of children in the 21st century; flexible seating arrangements allow for just that.
“The first evidence of a linkage between mind and body was scattered in various proposals over the past century. Today, the evidence has become a groundswell, and most neuroscientists agree that movement and cognition are powerfully connected. Amazingly, the part of the brain that processes movement is the same part of the brain that processes learning.” (Schmahmann, 1997)
Research shows that when teachers allow students to choose their seating options, they are better able to focus, and they feel empowered, like they are the most important part of the classroom. Herman Miller has researched the effects of comfort in the workplace. His findings show that when people have control over their environments and are given ergonomically designed furniture and comfortable workspaces to choose from, they are better able to sustain attention. Their sense of comfort helps alleviate their minds of distraction, making them better able to focus on the task at hand. Flexible learning spaces prepare students to make choices in life and guides them to build the inherent responsibility required to make those choices. Just as children have different learning styles, they have different physical needs when it comes to learning. Through the process of flexible learning spaces, students gain a better understanding of themselves as learners, and as a result, they learn to effectively collaborate, communicate, and to think critically and creatively.