::The Third Teacher::

Learning how space was the third teacher was a completely new concept. It also took me a while to get on board. I have always believed that the humans in the room (teachers and students) are the pulse that keeps the learning going. Without the brilliance of my students and their hard work in collaboration my job would be near impossible. Thinking that space was just as important as them left me making thinking, "Are you sure about that?" 

Keeping an open mind, I tried to think about what I was currently doing in my classroom that is the third teacher. More toward the end of the year I let some groups of students to collaborate on the whiteboards to get ideas out there together. It was extremely beneficial for them. I noticed that for a lot of groups having the stuff taken away from physically blocking them led to more focus on the work and less focus on the book/desk/laptop/notebooks. I also had very minimal shelving that did allow them to act as standing desks and lots of students absolutely loved this too. After reflecting on this I started to understand how these certain environments allowed for certain learning interactions to happen more easily. 

The concept of the 3rd teacher is that instead of a teacher such as myself, who allows very little interaction with these learning spaces, how about I stretch it out to a larger scale to make more widely used in my classroom. Instead of only certain groups using whiteboards to brainstorm, what if I allowed this for every group? Same with standing room desk options. 

One thing that I will start immediately in my classroom is the concept of over decreasing the visual stimuli. I do a pretty good job of never using store bought posters and displaying student work and anchor charts of all of our ideas. After this course I will take more careful consideration of the color choices and the busyness of the room. I am truly inspired by the design spaces that I saw throughout this course.