Creating Spaces that Change Lives

This week during class we had a speaker from the Struxture program which is based in Waterloo. She is a certified interior design specialist who works with Struxture. This first idea she talked about was integrating 21st century learning into the design of our classrooms to impact future teaching and learning. We typically start with an interactive space where preschoolers and investigate new items and there are many different things to stimulate their learning. This quickly turns into a sterile, formal environment with straight row seating. What can we do to change this and make our classrooms look differently?

She also talked about different learning styles. Some styles she addressed were one-on-one instruction, lecture or center stage style, and project-based learning. She uses these styles to take into account what a classroom should look like. Should there be collaborative spaces? Access to the outdoors? Where will the teacher spend most of their time? There are many different ways an educator would want their classroom to look like and every teacher may want a different end result. Struxture works with schools to make classrooms as diverse and welcoming as possible. They have developed designed for rooms such as learning suites and learning communities that provide space for innovative learning and teaching. This program seems like a great resource for surrounding schools to partner with.