Where You Can Find Me in the Fall! Redesigning My Space to Reach More Students

I was very excited to start on this journey of redesigning my learning space! In the past, I have always been very cognizant about how I set up and design my classrooms. My focus was to create a warm, inviting environment that felt like a safe place to be explorative in order to take student learning to the next level!

In January 2019, the opportunity arose for me to move into the Digital Literacy Specialist position within my building. This meant I would be splitting my time with the other middle school in the district, and I would be responsible for running both media centers. The position had been vacant for about 12 weeks before I was able to transition into the new role. Due to this, many of the media center initiatives had fallen to the wayside, and the rooms needed to be reorganized. I spent most of the remainder of that year rearranging furniture, purchasing new books for the collections, and trying to get supplies so that we could get the Makers Spaces back up and running in both buildings. I did not have a great deal of time to focus on redesigning the space.

I did not spend a great deal of time focusing on redesigning my space at the start of the 2019-2020 school year because I was focused on what I needed to do in order to reopen the media centers. Also, the district officially broke ground on a new state of the art middle school that would combine both buildings into one.

During the past school year, I was part of the Middle School Design Team committee. We spent time looking at the new building and how we wanted to lay it out to best enhance student achievement and success. Our focus then moved to how we envisioned learning to take place in this new environment. We started discussing how more often than not; students are socially promoted even if they truly do not have a full understanding of the content being presented. Sir Ken Robinson pointed this out in an expert from the book The Third Teacher (2010) as being an area of concern when he said, “the idea of the efficient way to do this is to educate kids by age – as though the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture." We identified this as a major area of concern. Our focus moving forward is to focus on mixed-grade classes where students will work on mastering content based on meeting a set of competencies. As Michael Waldin pointed out in an excerpt from the book The Third Teacher (2010), “as we start to prize creativity instead, we need to look at how creativity can be fostered, developed, and encouraged." In order to help foster this creativity and increase student achievement, there will be more student voice and choice in the new curriculum allowing students to pick how they are going to master the competencies necessary to move on to the next level.

Howard Gardner pointed out in an excerpt from the book The Third Teacher (2010), “the role of media centers, and the teaching capacities needed for expression in the new digital media, will continue to increase." This statement really made me think that in order to tie all of these changes together, I really needed to be thoughtful when it came to the redesign of my media center. I consistently have teachers coming to me looking for ideas on how to incorporate new technology and increase student learning, and I foresee this increasing moving forward. I was going to focus on redesigning my new combined space, but then I found out that with my district’s plans to reopen for the Fall the media centers would be closed in order to limit student movement. I will also be out on maternity leave at the beginning of the school year. However, I have a wealth of resources to share with the students and staff in my buildings. Last year, I redesigned my pages on the school websites, but I know they are underutilized.

"Screenshots of Current iCenter Webpage on District Website" by Melissa Bridges

I then decided to take some time to redesign my online environment in hopes of my resources reaching more students. This led me to create my Bitmoji Classroom that I plan to link to my new Canvas page that will be rolled out to all middle school students and teachers. I hope to reach a larger audience and in turn, begin fostering more creativity within my buildings.

References:

Bridges, M. (2020). Current iCenter webpage on district website. [Image]. Screenshot.

Bridges, M. (2020). Bitmoji Classroom. [Presentation]. Google Slides.

OWP/P Architects, VS Furniture, Bruce Mau Design (2010). Minds at Work. The Third Teacher (pp. 53-58). Publisher.