Your classroom walls DO talk.  What will they say about the learning experiences you want to have together?

For those familiar with The Third Teacher Book, you’ve probably been toying around with redesign concepts for your learning space.  Maybe you’ve even taken to Twitter to follow #remakeclass.

I am a designer. I will #remakeclass. @TheThirdTeacherpic.twitter.com/YpTMD0C2tA

— Kara Brem (@MrsBremTweets) November 14, 2015

The thing is, finding the motivation and means to redesign your classroom is daunting.  That is unless, you’ve met Paula Guinto.

Meet Paula the designer:

Paula, like David Jakes, reminds us of the importance of putting the ‘I’ in our school team (the biggest ‘I’ of them all, that is):

If you could identify the single most important factor that is missing in schools, what would it be?

For me, it’s an easy call.

Imagination.

I think schools can be imaginative, and have that capacity in their DNA, but its buried and hidden under the things that schools have to deal with in their current educational climate.  Has your school lost its imagination?

Christian Scheja
Imagination

Read more from David Jakes here, his post makes this gif necessary.

If you school has indeed lost its imagination, put a team of your faculty together and attend the very next Learning2 you can. At this year’s L2 in Europe, I had a ridiculous number of invigorating chats with Paula.  Her extended session was meant to help educators remember that all teachers are teachers of design.  Check out her full deck for her session “From Heart to #Hashtag”  available in full here. 

With a mere eight weeks to go in my school year, I wanted to experiment with my own classroom design, and see what I could do with a (very) modest effort.  Knowing that most teachers will delay an attempt to remodel their environment due to lack of time, funds, or means, I wanted to see what I could do with a grand total of three hours, and the help from a few friends.

I present to you my remixed learning environment: #CLIMB:

For me, the metaphor is everything.  In this final leg of the journey, I want my learners to see themselves as mountaineers, traversing even higher heights.  Because I am moving schools at the end of this year, I’ve had a number of people ask me if I am ‘checking out yet.’  The short answer: no.  The slightly longer answer:  checking out is what you do with your groceries, not what you do with learning.  In the spirit of feeling passionate about learning to the very last week, I wanted the thematic statement of the learning environment to be a revamping of the famous sentiment by world renowned climber, George Mallory:

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.”
― George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory

that’s what the hashtag #CLIMB is all about.  So, how did I go about unpacking it?

Efrén
Climb

STEP ONE:

Talk to someone you trust with your ideas.  If you don’t have someone, tweet to Paula, she’s so generous, I’ve seen her mentor so many people:

Finally…our pirate themed role play room in EY…#Pirateslife @paulaguinto @Blinkingnora1 #spaces #learning2 #ece pic.twitter.com/uN8zEuv5Ys

— Holly Fraser (@horofraser) May 2, 2016

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STEP TWO:

Try the concept out with your students. I wanted to test the waters for #CLIMB with my class, and so using this article on the ten most relevant ‘future ready skills,’ I let my students show me what ‘learning as mountaineering.’ looked like to them:

@johndalesio @MrPhilBruce @MrTTattle yes, yes it is. Students running with the vision: pic.twitter.com/7FnHSLzI9h

— Tricia Friedman (@FriedEnglish101) April 25, 2016

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Step three:

The Noun Project.  YEEEEEEEEES.  A great go to in helping your students work with visual metaphors, and to help you ‘badgify’ learning.  This is also a great resource to help model that Creative Commons mindset.

Step four:

YOUR LIBRARY!  I asked our lovely librarian Sue, if she could help me curate a nice collection on mountaineering, and not only did she say ‘yes,’ but she had the books to me less than an hour later.  Libraries want to support the learning, so be sure to include them.  Thanks, Sue!

step five:

Recycle, reuse, remix. Know the hobbies of your faculty, and you know where to go for great design leveling up gear.  A massive thank you to both Brad and Andrew for lending me climbing rope, a helmet, and spare carabiners.  I love that designing a space for community is the direct result OF my community.  #CLIMB

Kamaljith K V
Community…..

Paula was right: you start from the heart

The lesson I learned in this quick classroom revamp is that classroom redesign is about loving what we do.  I love being an educator.  I want my students to know how I feel about our learning experiences in every way possible.  The classroom can be a conductor of joy.  When that’s your mission: to put a little more joy into your school community, people will help you.  That’s why Paula, Sue, Brad, Andrew (and of course Jennifer who helped me find Brad and Andrew) supported me:  appeal to an educator’s sense of joy, imagination, and passion, and people will lug in heavy climbing rope for you (even when they bike to work in the rain).

In honor of #TeacherAppreciationWeek, I’d like to wish Paula, Sue, Brad, Andrew and Jennifer a very, very happy week.  I hope they feel appreciated, because they are. Team #CLIMB, this one’s for you:

FLICKR, where would bloggers be without your Creative Commons bounty?

Christian Scheja

Imagination

Efrén