5313 Creating Significant Learning Environments

Creating a significant learning environment in our classrooms will enhance learning at Armstrong through play, questioning, and imagination.  In order for learning to grow, students need to be given choice, ownership, voice, and an authentic learning opportunity as well.  The significant learning environment I want to implement is the blended learning approach using three stations, one with the teacher, a technology station, and a hands-on station.  The technology piece plays the biggest part in engaging the students and is the most challenging part of my innovation plan. 

I recently read A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and Jon Seely Brown.  In the book, they pose a very interesting question: What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century to the fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?  I feel my district likes the stable infrastructure of the twentieth century.  It’s safe and comfortable, but it isn’t best for learners.  

In order to have a significant learning environment in our classrooms at Armstrong, students need a safe, structured place to grow their ideas and learn from mistakes.  They will also need access to information networks and resources.  Thomas & Brown (2011) adopted one of the metaphors to describe this process as cultivation.  “A farmer, for example, takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of a garden or a farm.  We see the new culture of learning as a similar process-but cultivating minds instead of plants” (p.19). They also state that play, questioning, and most importantly, imagination lie at the very heart of the arc-of-life learning (p.18). Playing is a form of engagement, and questioning things is trying things out and learning from peers as you fail forward and from there the imagination soars.   

The challenges we will face at Armstrong will have to do with the technology and the safety concerns of students being online with access to resources and communicating with peers online.  We are currently using ST Math and Imagine Math, but there is no peer-to-peer communication going on with these platforms.  The moans and groans I hear when I tell kids they get to choose ST Math or Imagine Math makes my heart hurt.  My students love Prodigy and Legends of Learning.  The amount of verbal problem solving going on in my classroom between peers when on these two platforms was music to my ears.  They were having fun learning and teaching others.  I was recently told those two, free platforms were not allowed because of a chat feature.  I am in the process of trying to get them vetted again because giving students as much access to safe resources is necessary for the fluid infrastructure we are all living in today. This is probably the most challenging and frustrating issue within my school district and what could potentially be a problem when Blending Learning Implementation Plan. People vetting things or not vetting things that aren’t best for the twenty-first-century learner and not keeping up with or responding well to the constant change technology brings.