Student Centered Learning and Flexible Learning Environments

I got to kick this second week of Professional Development off by spending the day with Carl Hooker and Juan Orozco. 

Loved the simple, but telling opener. Carl asked the participants, to share with the group the answer to two questions:
What does your badge say?
What should it really say?

And then we dove in. The next question was, "What do student centered learning experiences look like?". Participants were asked to record their response on Padlet. Padlet is an online collaboration tool that allows you to post both text and photos on a shared board. 

As a whole group, we brainstormed some design considerations for learning environments that may support this kind of learning. Here are some of he things that we came up with.:
    
     mobility
     flexibility
     variety
     open spaces
     lighting

In groups of 2 or 3, the participants spent some time looking around at the parts of the room and then considering what the purpose of each of those parts was. The ideas generated by this question were posted on anything from chart paper to windows. 

Next, we were asked to draw our current learning spaces, take a picture of our drawing and upload it to Padlet.

Right before lunch, Carl introduced this template for planning a Passion Project. Each participant spent a while creating an idea for a project and filling in the template. We did a gallery walk and used a variety of colored post-its to provide feed back to the creators. 

When we returned from lunch participants were given a stack of cardboard and asked to turn that cardboard into a chair that could actually support someone. Groups of 3 or 4 built their chair and then presented it to the group. The presentation included a test of the chairs ability to support one of the group members. 

The last activity of the day was the 100K Design Challenge. We were to pretend that we had gotten a $100,000 grant based on an ideal learning space from the ground up. 

At the end of the day, I think that the participants left with a clear vision of not just what they wanted their classrooms to look like, but how they could get there and why it was important for them to do so.