Four years ago, Chris Nagele did what many other technology executives have done before — he moved his team into an open concept office.
His staff had been exclusively working from home, but he wanted everyone to be together, to bond and collaborate more easily. It quickly became clear, though, that Nagele had made a huge mistake. Everyone was distracted, productivity suffered and the nine employees were unhappy, not to mention Nagele himself.
Classrooms are essentially open offices. Well, they’re even worse than open offices since the desks and chairs are usually not comfortable and their is no ownership of what little space the students get.
What’s more, certain open spaces can negatively impact our memory. This is especially true for hotdesking, an extreme version of open plan working where people sit wherever they want in the work place, moving their equipment around with them.
Whoa, that sounds a lot like how classrooms work now!
When you think about a traditional school workflow, it’s not unlike that of a business: paper is generated and moved in a systematic way between the children and the teacher. Just as cloud computing has transformed workflows in business to make them more collaborative and mobile, that same type of change has been coming to…
To be effective tinkerers, students need to achieve a state of mind in which they are primed to play and make joyful discoveries. Young kids who are playing don’t worry about making mistakes. They’re just playing, and the idea that they could make a mistake—that there’s a wrong way to play—doesn’t enter into their consciousness. It’s this freedom that…
For many middle– and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers. “Coming from somebody with severe anxiety,…
So knowing your audience is extremely important to you? That’s the only way you know you’re communicating. Otherwise you’re just giving a lecture, you’re facing the board and talking to the board, and people in the classroom behind you have to meet you at the board. The educator who says ‘Oh, these people just don’t…
So we now can work in teams despite being continental distances away from each other but we do have to acquire the skills to do that. And if we fail to do so, that has a rather grave disadvantage, which is that… Nothing has as dire an impact on productivity as poor communications. This is a truism that applies…
When Mike Bloomberg, ex-mayor of New York, said he’d like to fire the lower-scoring half of the city’s teachers and give their students to the better-scoring half, doubling the size of their classes but paying them twice as much, he was affirming his belief in a particular theory of learning. For a short demonstration of…
