iep2 - Pondering Facility Planning

I am flying home today (or last week because it took some time to post) from Kansas City and the EDspaces conference. After touring facilities, listening to speakers, interviewing vendors and testing furniture, it is time for a little reflection.  Mostly conference reaffirms and adds detail to things you already know.  For the most part, this conference did just that.  Top Topics  Flexible Seating – Yes! have more than one type of furniture in a school and in a room.   Floor seating, soft seating, wobbly chairs and standing height tables were all over the floor show and discussions on implementation and the educational reason behind the switch were in the sessions. Movement – While integrated with flexible seating, this concept was so prevalent that it needed its own bullet point. Beyond the wobble bottom stools, there were various mechanisms for students to rock, tilt and swivel.  Moving bodies created active minds and classroom m...

We have all done it; looked in the window of a restaurant or a store and then decide if that place is for us or not, but how do we know….?  When I was younger my mom said not to go into a store with wooden hangers...not sure where this came from. We all automatically stop at a counter at the doctor’s office or restaurant.  Social norms and the environment speak to us, so what does your school say about you? I am currently in the process of helping a District decide on new furniture for a STEM building. During the process  I asked the question "what are you trying to say?"  If this is a building of collaboration, investigation and creation, then what should the furniture look like?  In the end, two person tables with casters were chosen for most spaces to maximize flexibility in the creation of groups and move through a variety of activities. Work benches and science lab tables will fill out the rest of the building. Furniture can have a huge impact on...

While at a Kiwanis event this past weekend I (Ellen) ended up sitting at a table with all educators except for me and one other person, who asked how are kids different these days?  One of the educators replied with, “they are part of the microwave generation , zap and here is the answer.”  It is interesting to ponder a group of people, who for all their life, when presented with a question had the ability to just ask Google .  One of the educators went on to say that it is hard to get her students to work into the depths of a problem.  Of course, that is exactly where you want them to go, deep into a problem because Google is there for everyone, right?  So, what does going deeper into a problem look like in a classroom?  What tools and what environments provide support to the “microwave generation” to move beyond the quick answer?  Access to the internet only gives them Google…. At a workshop, I also attended recently, a STEM ( STEM  ...