|
Return to Table of Contents
of Teaching/Learning Activities
Some courses emphasize learning
through collaborative inquiry, while reducing the role played by
live lectures; that function is instead handled mainly through
reading, brief lectures (e.g., 5-10 minutes to introduce a class
or handle a problem that almost everyone is experiencing).
Studio classrooms are therefore designed to promote the use of
appropriate tools for the subject, coaching, and conversation in
smaller and larger groups. Students usually sit together at
tables.
North Carolina
State University's SCALE-UP Project has an extremely
valuable web site, with pictures, links to instructional
examples, and evaluation data; equally valuable is its
collection of images and data from studio classrooms at other
institutions.
One of my favorite studio
classrooms is the
TEAL
(Technology-Enabled Active Learning) classroom at MIT, currently
used for teaching physics.
This photo of TEAL (downloaded from the SCALE-UP site) hints at two of the room's most interesting features.
First, each working group can project from one of its computers
onto its own screen, by its table; the professor can also
project selected student laptop screen's onto one of the room's
big screens. Second, the room has a warm and comfortable
feeling -- like walking into a lounge -- that suggest that this
is a place for people to work together as human beings. It
was one of the more pleasant learning spaces I've encountered
thus far in my travels.
If you have other studio or
workshop classrooms that ought to be considered for this
resource page, please
contact me. |
