Alternating the classroom

Classrooms! This first week of orientation was all about what a classroom is. Our school started with some questions to get us thinking: What do classrooms look like? What do successful students look like? What do good teachers look like? This action project is all about designing classrooms. We started with behavior and then actually designing a classroom.


Our class’s internal investigation was to ask more questions to get us thinking. What does a classroom sound like? Can a classroom be outside? As a part of our internal investigation we had to draw out a classroom design. I drew a classroom where only 12 students could sit along with it following CDC guidelines.


Our next step after our internal investigations was our external investigation. We took an FE for our external investigation to Pritzker Pavilion. Everyone got to enjoy what it was like to be surrounded by sound. This opened up the idea of how our classrooms should sound like. The sounds at Pritzker Pavilion made me think about what a classroom should smell like instead. Although I did not act on it when we actually designed our classroom I did draw it in my design.


Another thing we did as a school was create and go over expectations. As students we learned we should work in a timely fashion, be curious, not distracting, encouraging, paying attention and to participate. Without establishing these rules we could end up not doing certain things such as participating. It’s a good thing to know how teachers want and expect you to act. As a student we established what a good teacher looks to us. Our expectations for the teachers were to be accommodating, understanding, open to feedback, patient, have a personal interaction/ 1 on 1 time, and in general excited to teach. Another thing we went over was how to act inside and outside the classroom. At the end we all showed agreement that we should follow the examples we wrote on our whiteboard.

This is before the chairs

This is after the chairs





As you can see there are only 4 chairs per table. This gives us a lot of space on the table along with a good distance from these across the table. Another challenging part is how we cannot move the car seat chairs. There can only be two people per car seat nook. In total there can only be 16 people seated in the D lab. We decided that it would be a good idea to draw out what we were thinking. We drew out the room on a whiteboard. This is a picture of when we still wanted stools. If you wanted to revert the room to its original state then you would need to remove the chairs.

In conclusion I learned designing a classroom wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be. At first our group wanted to see if we could cut the tables or maybe even remove the car seats. After our teachers told us no we were not discouraged. We ended up only really changing the chairs. I am personally happy with this decision and how it turned out.