 from a student use problem. On an average day, over a hundred students will visit to work on projects, make use of interactive technologies, film and edit videos, and yes, check out books.
Setting Up the Space
To begin redesigning the space, Kitchen did a clean sweep. “First thing Mr. Kitchen did was wipe it out, almost wiped out the contents,” Sturtevant explains. “Didn’t give them away or anything, but opened up the space. The books now became consolidated along the wall.”
Both Sturtevant and Kitchen knew they wanted to create a place where students could collaborate in lots of different ways, so they needed flexibility in how the space was used. To accomplish that, they looked for furniture that could easily be moved.
“You can’t have things that are in one spot,” Kitchen says. “If you put things in fours, they’re going to stay in fours. So everything we have there is movable, whether it’s the chairs, the interactive boards, or the flat panels.”
More than any other piece of equipment or technology, the furniture is what Sturtevant values most. “There wouldn’t be one (piece of) technology that I wouldn’t give up out of the furniture,” she says. “The way the kids can move and go…working together in pairs or partners or large groups, or if the teacher does come down and use it and we rearrange the furniture—that’s where I see the creativity of how they’re collaborating.”
How it Works
Kitchen meets regularly with teachers to stay informed about their curricular goals. Because he knows what the Learning Center technology can do, he’s able to help teachers consider new ways they can expand their current classroom activities into the larger space. “They come to me and say, ‘How can I make this project different?'” he says. “Because they are getting tired of doing the same thing, whether it’s just presenting on a Google slide or just standing up and doing a report or writing a paper.”
Once teachers have a plan in place and are ready to send kids down to the Learning Center, they fill out a Prescription form (see below), indicating what students should be working on during their time at the Center. As students enter, they scan their student IDs with a bar code reader, which then populates a Google Spreadsheet with their names and a timestamp. Teachers have access to the spreadsheet from their own computers, so they can see exactly when students arrive at the Learning Center. Students then hand the Prescription to Kitchen or his assistant, so the staff knows exactly what students should be doing.
This arrangement has effectively made every classroom larger. “Just imagine yourself as a classroom teacher and you probably want to send kids out to the hallway, but are afraid to because of X, Y, and Z – some teachers are hesitant of that,” Kitchen explains. “So now, this space has opened that. If you want to personalize your learning, which is what we’re doing nowadays anyway, you can send three or four kids down to the learning center with this prescription that allows us really to work with them.”
Apart from the furniture, what equipment is available for student use? Here’s a breakdown of the tech in the Learning Center:
- 2 Clevertouch Plus interactive touchscreens
- 1 Epson Brightlink Interactive Projector
- 2 wall-mounted TVs that can be hooked up to laptops and used as monitors
- 1 green screen room, which uses an iPad with a green screen app
- 5 desktop computers
- 10 Chromebooks
- 3 digital cameras
What About Books?
Can students still check out books? Absolutely. Big Walnut did not reduce its collection; they just consolidated it. In fact, students now have access to even more books than before, because Big Walnut is working on a partnership with the local public library to allow for inter-library loans with weekly deliveries to and from the school.
“So, in essence,” Sturtevant says, “we have expanded our library collection, not shrunk it.”
See it in Action
Take a look at this video to see the Learning Center in use and hear testimonials from the students who use it.
Big Walnut Middle School would like to thank the anonymous