Sicheii Yazhi

This year, for the first time in nine years, I won’t be planning for school to start next month. That doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it, though, and my first thoughts are usually about the physical space of the learning environment.

The Problem

In an earlier post, responding to a “layout of your working space” meme, I wrote a little about the importance of the physical environment and the affective domain in education. In my experience, far too many teachers at the secondary level seem to forget that students have bodies. I’m reminded of Sir Ken Robinson’s comment: “as children grow up, we start to educate them from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads … and slightly to one side.” ¹ In my training to become a teacher, I don’t remember any discussion or readings that addressed directly the fact that students have bodies and that those bodies influence how they learn, and even now I have found few resources on the subject.²

Many secondary educators and educational systems respond to students’ bodies by ignoring them on the one hand and controlling them on the other. Not only do these responses undermine the educational agenda, they also do a great disservice to students who are, at precisely this time, struggling to understand their bodies.

For me, there are three concerns that relate to this problem: how schools both ignore and control students’ bodies; how gender impacts learning; how cognitive science should influence what and how we teach.

In this post, I’ll write a little more about how educators ignore students’ bodies and consider some ways to remedy this. In a later post, I’ll write more about ways in which educators control students’ bodies, though the two tend to overlap. In a third post, I’ll argue that educators should be paying more attention to what we’re learning about the brain–the teenage brain specifically–and that they should be teaching students more about their brains and the concept of intelligence. I’ll also throw out a plea for more information about the role of gender in learning, but I don’t feel I have enough expertise in that area to write much.

Ignorance Ain’t Bliss

Some ways educators ignore student’s bodies:

• not planning the layout of the room in terms of efficiency or appeal
• not considering the comfort of the chairs and desks made available to students
• not providing options for where students can sit or work
• not providing opportunities for students to stretch, be active, or relax
• not providing or allowing for basic needs like water and snacks
• not creating an environment that at least attempts to be pleasing to the senses (all five of them)

I realize that some schools have policies in place that make it difficult to change some of these problems, and that resources aren’t always available. However, with some planning and creativity, most classrooms can be improved–even if the result isn’t ideal–and the students will notice and appreciate the effort.

Remembering, and planning for, students’ bodies is a foundational way to build rapport, trust, and respect in the classroom. When students enter a classroom that has been designed with their bodies in mind, it sends a message that the teacher is concerned with the students as people–not just as students, test scores, or check-marks on an attendance sheet.³ In contrast, a classroom that doesn’t seem concerned with students’ bodies implies that the teacher is not concerned with an aspect of the students’ identity about which they are nearly obsessed.⁴ Even if these messages don’t register consciously, they still affect how teachers and students relate to each other and can have a profound impact on the learning that does or does not happen in that classroom.

A Few Suggestions

Here are a few things I did as a teacher to be more considerate of my students’ physical needs:

• Comfort: I had an old couch that I didn’t need any more, so I brought that in and placed it in a corner of the room. I also bought some cheap inflatable “air-cushion” seats and some cheap mats to cover the linoleum floor. (When students met in groups, they would use both.)
• Options: When students were working individually (reading or writing) or meeting in revision groups, they always had options for where to do that work. They could stay in their desks, or they could use the cushions, mats, or couch and could take the cushions and mats into the hallway to have more space and reduce noise.
• Breaks: Most educators know that the brain needs pretty regular breaks in order to process the new information it’s gathering. I tried to stop every 15-20 minutes throughout our 85 minute periods to allow students to stretch, walk around, get a drink of water, etc.
• Refreshments: I kept a water-cooler in my classroom that gave cold and hot water. Students were always welcome to get a cup of water or to make a cup of tea. I also kept a basket full of mints (helpful for group work). Students could bring in additional food or drink to share (we kept a small refrigerator, too.) I had a “Scooby fund” (a Scooby-Doo doll with a pocket in front) for students to contribute change to help cover the expenses. They policed the sharing themselves.
• Environment: My classroom had no windows, so getting things to grow was difficult. I had two tough little plants that survived “the dungeon” and a few other fake ones. I also used a number of lamps so that I could turn off the glaring fluorescent lights. We put up posters and student artwork on the walls. I played music throughout the day when appropriate, and students could bring in their own selections.

The result was far from perfect (I discussed some of the limitations in the same post from earlier), but the students appreciated the effort and enjoyed being in my classroom. I have no doubt that this positively impacted their willingness to learn, and therefore positively impacted their ability to learn.

I also admit that most of what I did above was against the school’s stated policies. Here I can only say: I did what I thought best for my students, and I supported my actions with theory and practical results. This also brings us to the ways in which schools control students’ bodies, which I’ll write more about in a later post.

Planning the Space

To help teachers plan for the physical space, I would suggest using a program like Floorplanner.⁵ It’s a pretty cool, feature-rich floorplan creator that lets users export their work as an image or even as a widget. (I think it might be kinda neat for parents to see a floorplan of the teacher’s classroom as a widget on the class blog.) It is a little slow to load, but once loaded, it works well and is very intuitive. In about ten minutes, I recreated a classroom floorplan that I had originally created in Gliffy. Here’s the Floorplaner version:

Whether teachers use an online tool or a scrap of paper to think about their classroom layout, I hope that they will take time to plan how the classroom will look and not let it be dependent on whatever happens to be available when they show up in the fall.

Call for Responses

These are some of my suggestions for working around the tendency of many secondary schools to ignore students’ bodies. Any other thoughts, resources, or suggestions?

1. From “Do schools kill creativity?” at TED talks, Feb. 2006; also see his book: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative [back]
2. A few resources to consider: Learning with the Body in Mind by Eric Jensen; The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving Beyond Traditional Classrooms and “Tougher Standards” by Alfie Kohn; Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century by Howard Gardner for his discussion of intelligence as it relates to the body [back]
3. One of the most disturbing positive comments I received on RateMyTeachers.com was: “He … talks to us like humans.” How bad does the educational system have to be when that is a compliment worth mentioning? [back]
4. It’s foolish to write off this obsession as a distraction that has no place in the classroom … like it or not, it’s there. It’s also foolish to think that, once a person matures, he or she is no longer concerned with the body–that maturity somehow helps us (or should help us) transcend our bodies. This is based on an arcane notion that the body is “fallen” and inferior to the soul. I hope we have a more integrated approach to the concept of “person” now. [back]
5. brought to my attention through the Lifehacker blog [back]