Thursday 12 July 2018

Going All In on Flexible Seating

For a year or more now, I've been pondering and experimenting with Flexible Seating.   I've done some research by reading Kayla Delzer's (www.topdogteaching.com)  work and blogs, the wealth of information available at www.edutopia.org, Pinterest, as well as several books that devote chapters or sections to it (and there are many).  I've visited classrooms who have been using some form of flexible seating.  I've thought about: how I enjoy reading and working in a comfortable chair, the luxury of trying out a new book in Chapters and the whole Starbucks esthetic that is so popular, and inviting.

From my research, I've learned that there are many benefits to using flexible seating in your classroom.  (Check out this post to see some of them).  I was immediately drawn to the idea of flexible seating.  It promotes student choice, as they choose where to sit during different activities and learn about where they work best, or don't work well at all.  I love the community building aspects and how the different and more comfortable options result in more communication and the opportunity for more conversation as a class or in small groups.  Certainly the idea of comfy chairs and workspaces makes school more inviting and perhaps, fun?

But, I had my concerns as well.  I have a class of high needs learners, some in wheelchairs, some with visual, or hearing concerns, autism, and all with a Developmental Disability.  I want the room to be comfy and fun, but also inclusive, and accessible to all.  Would the change in seating become a distraction?  Would there be fights over the most popular seats?  Would students miss the "ownership" of their own desks and workspace?  Would the Administration team even support this radical change in classroom design.

Only one way to find out...try it out.  My neighbours had bought a new couch and asked if I knew anyone who could use their old one.  (It was the couch in the "good room", and while dated in a fashion sense, still looked brand new and was cozy and comfy to sit on).  I said I wanted it for my classroom, but I just had to clear it with my Principal and Vice Principal first.  As their new couch was on back order, they were willing to wait for my answer.  So, I pitched the idea to my Admin team and gave my reasons for wanting to try it.  They had some concerns, some of which were similar to my own, and they wanted to clear it with the custodial staff as well.  After some consideration, I was given the go ahead to bring that sofa in.  So, one clear October morning, my kind husband helped me load it up in the truck and carry it up to my classroom on the second floor.  He didn't question why I was doing it, maybe he just trusts that I have good research behind my decisions, or maybe he is just used to having a wife who does a lot of things he doesn't understand.  Happy wife, Happy life?

That's how the experiment began.  With just one couch.



I placed it off to the side of the classroom, by our bookshelves, hoping to inspire more independent reading with it's enticing luxury.  My students came in the room that morning and noticed it right away (It has brilliant pink flowers on it - it is hard to miss).  We started that day with a class meeting about the couch.  What was it for?  Did we need rules for the couch?  When could they use it?  We bantered and brainstormed about it.  They all took turns trying out the comfort level and pronounced it homey, if "rustic" (their word, not mine).  They decided we needed a few "couch guidelines".

1.  No laying on the couch.  It needs to be shared by up to 3 people.
2.  No feet on the couch.  We want to keep the couch clean and respect that everyone in the room uses it.
3.  No one has ownership of the couch individually.  You cannot claim a spot permanently.

These were their "guidelines"  I would help enforce them... if they needed me to, but I told them that the future of the couch in the room was up to them.  If things went well, we keep the couch.  If I needed to constantly intervene to help them with their own "guidelines", then the couch would have to go.

From that day forward, there was often one or more students on the couch.  I was rarely called on to remind someone about couch etiquette.  They did not fight over it.  They read on it, used clip boards to work on it and loved to sit and work on their iPads or Chromebooks on it.

Early in December, they asked if we could move the couch.  Student desks were usually arranged in a C formation around the room, so that we could all see each other during discussions.  If needed, they were re-aranged into small groupings for collaborative work.  The students wanted the couch to be inside that C formation, so that they could sit on it and be more a part of discussions, and in the center of the room.  It sounded reasonable to me.  So we moved it.  It was an even better spot.  It was never empty and it seemed to improve our feeling of community.

Just before March Break, our Principal told us he was replacing all the furniture in the staff room.  The old stuff would either be thrown out or donated.  I asked if I could have 3 of the sturdy, yet comfortable chairs and two end tables.  He gave me the ok, so a few students and I moved them to our classroom before he could change his mind.  The chairs are a hideous dusty rose colour, which match the pink flowers on our couch perfectly.  It was meant to be.

That's around the time that I noticed that my students were consistently choosing the flexible seating options over their desks.  They rarely sat at their desks anymore, and generally only because there were only 6 comfy seats available.  The quality of their work did not change.  I think the relationships in the room improved as they learned to share and rotate their seats so that everyone could use the "good seats."  In June, when I asked them to blog about the things they liked about the school year, the new seating came up in almost every post, right up there with our class trip to Medieval Times and Casa Loma in Toronto.  High praise, indeed!

Just as exams were ending, a friend of a friend offered me her leather couch and another chair.  She was moving and didn't have room for them.  On the PD day, we met her before school started and moved them into our classroom.  On the same day, my Educational Assistants and I moved all the desks out.  We kept a few different sized tables and I ordered some ball chairs.  A relative has offered up her rocking chair after they move in August.  I've included a few pictures to show you how the room looked as I left it on our last work day before summer.


Some tired Educational Assistants enjoy a few moments on the "new" furniture after moving it in and the desks out on the last work day in June.



I don't know if it will work as well as I hope it will.  I don't know if the set up of the room will change, or if I will need to bring back a few desks.  I have a new class of students and don't know if they will respond as well to Flexible Seating as last year's class did.

I do know I've gone all in on Flexible Seating.  I'll let you know how it goes.



As always, I welcome your comments, questions and advice in the comment section below.

Wednesday 4 July 2018

#HockeyMath

The Regular Season

This year my class was a group that without an exception, was obsessed with hockey.  They all had their favourite teams, their treasured players and wore their jersey or team themed t-shirts with pride.  I didn't have to tune into SportsNet or TSN or check the hockey scores on my phone.  I could not get down the hallway before school started without one of my Students coming up to me to let me know how their team had fared the night before.  I'd hear about the goals, the trades, the fights, sometimes they would even ask me to play snippets of the game in our morning class meeting so they could show a great play from the night before.  During playoffs, the pregame show from the Las Vegas Knights was high on the video request list.  Eat your heart out, Don Cherry, these kids bleed hockey!


The Playoffs

You would think that a grizzled and seasoned classroom veteran, such as myself, might have thought of a way to leverage this shared passion a lot sooner.  But, I am sad to admit, it wasn't until just before the playoffs that the red goal light went off in my head, and I came up with #HockeyMath.  The math folks at TVDSB had done a great job in December of the #12DaysofTweetmath, so I decided to try doing our own daily hockey math activities and tweet them out.  It's not a unique hashtag, and it's not the first time someone ever posted hockey math on Twitter.  But that's what I called it, for lack of any corporate sponsorship or sports marketing teams to help me.  Unfortunately, sometimes we got so absorbed in the activity, we forgot to take pictures and tweet them out.  I think we averaged a tweet about once a week during playoffs.  But we had fun with it every day.

We brainstormed around how much math you can find in hockey, and then we started coming up with hockey math problems to solve.  I have a Special Education class, so sometimes they needed a little or a lot of help with this part.  Another resource I accessed to help out was https://hockeymath.wordpress.com/ . This is a great article about various examples of math and science in hockey - and I used it for some ideas to get going.  Some of them were a bit too advanced for my group - but I found ways to break down or simplify the math in a lot of the ideas to use with my crew.

We were looking for patterns on the ice surface.  We looked at the (very simplified) odds of a team making it to the Stanley Cup Finals.  We measured distances on the ice, calculated the area of the rink and the face-off circles.  We calculated the volume of a puck.  We looked at statistics - broke them down into what they mean and why teams use them.  We looked at ticket sales, how to calculate HST on a ticket price and how and why ticket prices grow in value as you get closer to the ice surface.  We looked at the salaries the top and bottom players make and calculated what they make per game.  We became team managers and compared some player stats to see who we would play and who we would bench.  We filled out playoff brackets (for bragging rights only!...OK...maybe the winner did get a chocolate bar) and with each team that was knocked out, we experienced either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.  One student ended up with a perfect bracket.  Picked every team right, even the Capitals winning the cup.  Aww Shoot!  I just realised - we could have calculated the odds of being able to do that!

Let me tell you, those kids were so engaged in the math.  My heart gave a little "Whoopie" when I heard one Student say to another, "I hate math, but this is hockey, so it's fun."  And it was fun.  I gotta tell ya, those kids gave it 110%.

The Post Season

With the hockey season over, and the Capitals all wearing their new Stanley Cup rings on the golf courses of the world, I've had some time to reflect on a few things I will do differently next season:

- Start sooner.  I don't think I could sustain it every day all season, but maybe I could cut it back to maybe once a week and run it for a longer period. 
- get others involved.  We were sharing the tweets of some of the things we were doing, but getting some other classrooms involved (board-wide, or worldwide thru Twitter) and maybe creating problems for each other to solve via Google Hangout would be a great way to get at those global competencies and make more connections outside of our building
- get a bit more tech into it.  We were using our iPads to look up info, but mostly used our white boards for calculations.  I'm thinking there has to be a way they could document their learning - collaborative doc, slide show...something.  I'll keep working on that.

If you have any ideas or hockey math to share - please post them in the response section.  I'd love to hear them.  In the meantime, I have a tee time to make.  Isn't that how hockey players are supposed to  prepare for the start of the new season in September?

Blogger's Addendum:
This post was featured on VoicEdRadio's "This Week in Ontario Edublogs" on July 11, 2018 - an Episode I was a Guest on as well.  If you want to check out the discussion between Doug Peterson, Stephen Hurley and myself, check out this link.  We did have some technical difficulties - so I apologize in advance for the sound quality.


#Inquiry Mindset Book Study - C1 post

Image by Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt, InquiryMindset, https://barbarabray.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screenshot-2018-02-06-11.11.41.png


To get the #InquiryMindset book study going, we've been asked to take a look at this sketchnote by Rebecca Bathurst-Hunt and reflect on which of these characteristics we are feel we are doing well in our classroom.  I think everyone in the study can include passion as something they do well.  It's one thing to read a great book like Inquiry Mindset over the summer (showing a love of learning), but we must be passionate about what we do, if we are doing a book study that has us vlogging on FlipGrid and writing blogs about it...IN THE SUMMER!  So well done, all of us!

As I think about what I do and apply it to this graphic, I feel that my strongest trait is knowing my students.  I teach a High School Congregated Special Education class, working with 10 students aged 14-21 with various Developmental Disabilities.  They are a very diverse group with academic levels ranging from Pre-K to about grade 6.  I'm blessed to have the same great group of kids all day - all year, which is not something many High School Teachers can boast.  I may have them for only one year, or they may be with me for seven years.  The time we spend together means I get to know them and their families quite well.  But, it's not just about time.  As a class, we work hard to build our community and foster a growth mindset - because, and I know you've heard it before, but it is the absolute truth...It is all about relationships.

Without those relationships, students won't feel safe to take a risk or collaborate or share.  Relationships make tough conversations possible.  Without a relationship, there is no trust in me as their teacher, or in each other.  Without relationships, the classroom is not a safe place to ask questions and without questions - there is no wondering, no inquiry.

What are some things I do to foster those incredibly important relationships in my room?
- lots and lots of Tribes activities.  If you have the opportunity to get Tribes training - go for it!
- celebrations - after a tough day, a great breakthrough, finishing a group study, presenting a passion project, or just because it's Wednesday - we pick a song and we dance. 
- starting our day with an informal class meeting/chat to see what's happened, what's coming, where everyone is at
- Passion Projects - if you want to know the things that most excite your students, give them time to explore one of their passions and share it with the class.  We learn so much from each other by sharing these
- #P3 Playlist - the students choose 3 songs that talk about who they are and share them and their reasons for picking them.  The songs are tied to their history, their identity, and a song that just makes them happy when they hear it.  (This activity came from Noa Daniel's Building Outside the Blocks Activities - check out the link to learn more about it).  I cannot tell you how much we learn from each other doing this.
- laughing together.  If we see a funny (but appropriate) YouTube video or a James Cordon or Jimmy Fallon Sketch, we share it.  We take the time to watch it and laugh together.  Maybe this one is a little silly, but starting the day with a laugh does wonders for relationships.  And our class is huge fans of Carpool Kareoke, Broadway Crosswalk and Camp Winnipisake.





There are more, but they are not jumping out of my brain right now, so this is a good place to stop.  I'll never be the perfect Teacher I want to be - but I keep working to improve.  There are many things I'm not proficient at.  But, man oh man, I know my Students.