Learnt: Make your room your own.
(Update: This post is featured in the 180th Carnival of Education. Check it out!)
One of the joys of my job is that I have my own room.
I took it over at the start of this academic year. For the first few weeks it was fairly bare, but one of my priorities was to add some colour as soon as possible. Rooms can and should be decorated in ways which will enhance student learning. As well as colour, I feel it’s important to put student’s work up in the classroom, to give them a sense of ownership over the space… but more of this in a future post.
Let me show you around.
Classrooms as a Window into the Soul
I’ve always found it interesting to peek into other teacher’s rooms. Some are sterile and ordered,
(image from this interesting collection of early 20th century classroom photographs)
while others are gloriously messy
(from this Flickr set — and to be fair, that’s after a 1st grade art activity!).
I find it particularly interesting to look at the differing styles of classroom you find in different subjects. I will enlarge on this subject in a future post on the importance of observing lessons taught by fellow teachers in other subjects, but I think few people would disagree when I say that maths classrooms have a certain feel to them, distinct from, say, a language classroom… and I wonder what effect these classroom schemas have on the attitudes of the students who work in them.
As argued in this link, the layout of a classroom affects the behaviour of all those in it (both the students and the teachers).
The Maths Classroom
It seems to be quite hard to find images of maths classrooms which are not posed stock photos. Just about the only one I could find illustrating a UK classroom is this one:
(from here), and I’m not sure that’s the most flattering of all possible photos — for a start, the girl with her head on the table is probably not fully engaged in the lesson!
Given the lack of images of maths classrooms, it occured to me that people might be interested in mine. Here, then, is a snapshop of my soul room from a month or so ago:
This image was created by stitching together lots of individual images using the excellent Autostitch (free demo version available). Click the image for much (much!) bigger.
Over the school year many things have changed in this room, and the displays are perhaps a touch less interesting than they have been, but it is what it is.
A Preview of Future Posts
As well as hopefully being of interest in its own right, this photo of my room also serves as a preview for posts I will be publishing in the next few weeks. These will split between lessons I have taught which rely on, or have produced, some of the material visible in the panorama, and lessons I have learnt during my first year in teaching.
Peering into the darkness, you might be able to see some origami polyhedra. I use these for decoration, but have also used them as the basis for several lessons, and plan to do more with them in the future.
The result of a brief unit on two-dimensional transformations with one of my groups. I will discuss how I taught this unit, what we produced, and how I’ll change my teaching in the future.
The result of a very interesting investigation into tiling with regular hexagons. Some fun maths, lots of interesting patterns, and the opportunity to reflect on the need for teachers as well as students to be engaged in problem solving both in and outside the classroom.
My personal maths library. Useful for decoration, but has the scope to be much more useful than that, particularly as I will be running a maths club for primary students next year.
At the time this photo was taken, my classroom was organised into groups of four. It didn’t start the year like this, and it didn’t end the year like this. Definitely a lesson learnt!
Topic posters, produced by both of my lower school sets, on a variety of subjects. Will give rise to a ‘taught’ post concentrating on the material produced by my students, as well as a ‘learnt’ post reflecting on how to use student-created material like this more effectively.
This is one remnant of a lesson I had been teaching on arcs, sectors, circumference, and other exciting things related to circles.
This is an interactive whiteboard — in particular, a Promethean. I imagine I will spend quite a bit of time reflecting on my uses and misuses of this piece of flashy technology!
Every member of staff in the school is provided with a computer — the source of joy and pain in almost equal measure.
A hand-crafted wall display on Pascal’s triangle. Everything around the triangle is a question. All the materials needed to replicate this will be in a future post.
A gown. Yes, I have to wear it from time to time. No, I don’t have to wear it when I’m teaching :).
An umbrella. Well, I do teach in the UK! As I’ve dipped my toe into the world of educational blogs, I’ve been amazed at the variety of material available, particularly from the USA. I’m doing my best to understand the US educational system, and an article comparing and contrasting it with the UK system is in the pipeline.
A simple display on the Mandelbrot set. All the images are creative commons licenced, from Wikipedia. I taught an interesting introductory lesson on this at the end of term, which I will discuss, but the more general topics of copyright and the use of material from the internet will also appear — particularly as one of my side interests involves the digitisation of public domain books.
This year’s attempt at a filing system. Organisation in general is, well, not really my strong point, but it’s improving! More generally, I’m sure I will be posting on the need to be organised, as well as prep (homework).
Not a bad amount of discussion material from one photo!
A Final Question
So, what does your classroom look like?
Related Posts (automatically generated)
- Bad targets, good targets, and beyond targets.
- Taught: A Pascal’s Triangle wall-display
- The Joy of Hex
Tags: displays, Lessons Learnt, preview, The Classroom
July 9th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Very good, especially as I am about to have a classroom of my own! If mine looks half as good as yours at the end of MY first year, I’ll be a happy man!
August 6th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Thank you! I got an idea on how to make my room as my own house, but i have something to ask.What is more advantageous for both teacher and students during class hours, the teacher will stay in one classroom and the students will transfer from one room to another or the students will stay in one classroom and the teacher is the one who transfer from one room to another?
August 15th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Mary, that’s a very interesting question. During my teaching practice, I often had to move from room to room during the course of the day, and found it very disruptive. As a result, I much prefer having the students move, while the teachers stay put. This is also necessary when (as in my school) students are in different sets for different subjects. I understand that some schools group subject groups together when they set, and that would probably be the only way to make it viable to have students stay in the same room for more than one subject.
August 21st, 2008 at 10:12 pm
[...] the hexagons migrated over to the other side of the classroom, and took the form revealed in the very first post I made on this [...]