Freeform Classroom

So the idea is rooted in google rooms.

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+room&biw=1163&bih=558&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj8prGh-oXQAhUJ3YMKHSzmDwEQ_AUIBigB

Basically the idea is that you have a free flowing workspace area, plenty of open space, lots of color if possible, furniture, and lots and lots of ownership in ones own space choice. Google started doing this with their employees and saw employee satisfaction on the job, happiness, and productivity sky rocket. They have since convereted all their office spaces to this sort of setup often times having creative play areas included that people can work in and passion project time. We'll get to the latter another day. Today we'll focus on the physical setup of the room.

 In a traditional classroom this is somewhat possible if you just let your students move seats on a daily basis. I've done this before to varying degrees of success. Most of the time kids settle into one desk and end up setting down roots (leaving various things etc). This somewhat defeats the purpose of the idea of a flexible classroom that allows for flexible grouping, seating and student choice. In an effort to transition to this idea I have given students the choice to opt into bringing in a pillow from home for their seat. They can move around anywhere in the room with it (other than blocking the door). In addition we have shoved the tables against the walls and used them to setup various academic stations; a writing station, an osmo ipad station, a math manipulatives and work area station, and our laptop station. In addition to this there is a table for the students who have opted to remain in more traditional seating for now (with the option to change at any time). There is also 1 additional community work table and a coffee table that borders our rug area both of which are available for kids to work at here and there but they can not leave anything there when they are done.

Today we worked on estabilishing routines for gathering our stuff in one neat pile quickly if we need to do a momentary catch and release, talked about what to do in an emergency with our stuff, and talked about putting away everything every other time we switch subjects or come to the rug. After a day of this I can say it's working very nicely so far. Our room stays much more tidy throughout the day because they pickup and move to new spots practically every subject period. We are also finding the kids are much more on task as they are more comfortable and can move whenever they want. The final benefit that I immediately saw is the ability to move somewhere else if someone is bothering you without it becoming a fight. Overall the classroom culture improved immensely and our productivity today was fantastic! Hopefully it keeps up. We'll be reevaluating how it feels at the end of November and will make a joint decision with the students on if we wish to keep it this way or not for the foreseeable future. My next step is to figure out how to get more color diversity in the room.

Here's the room now:

http://imgur.com/a/yZswX