Collaboration in New Spaces: One Room, One Summer, One Two-Year Technical College
Amy Edwards Patterson, Moraine Park Technical College
Introduction
Identify the Needs of Students
Articulate Pedagogical Goals
Operationalize Goals
Continue to Change
Celebrate Rewards
Develop Solutions for Challenges
As the collaborative learning space evolves, stakeholders consider it important to celebrate rewards and benefits from this new space. These rewards include sustainability, student engagement, faculty engagement, and new connections with the community.
For example, Flood considers the sustainable components a major reward of working with the space. These components, including recycled materials such as “blue jean insulation” in the room and agrifiber corridors, put into practice stated goals of the college related to encouraging environmental sustainability.
Many Moraine Park instructors find student engagement improves within the collaborative classroom space, largely due to the human-centered design that keeps students and their needs central to the space. According to Brown & Long (2006), “Human-centered design helps us keep people—not the latest technology—in the forefront of design decisions.” Mary Vogl-Rauscher of Moraine Park says her students often want to gather in the active-learning classroom even after class ends. This engagement, Vogl-Rauscher feels, comes from the planning stages:
We wanted to make this an area where students would feel comfortable sitting down, relaxing, enjoying themselves, something to make it really homey. We at this college have been very lucky because the college believes in reinvesting in itself. We don’t have hard plastic chairs that students have to sit on. We don’t have the old desks. We don’t have things that way. Our chairs are very, very comfortable to sit in. We’ve also put in … sofa style chairs to sit in. So we’ve worked around a lot of those issues to try and make it so that it was more of a homey atmosphere. (personal communication, n.d.)
And students respond to that homey atmosphere. “Learning shouldn’t suck,” Schoeller joked. “Students find this room fun, even when completing tests” (personal communication, 2012).
Hurtienne has enjoyed the “[being] able to see the excitement of faculty and see students engaged in learning and not just sitting in a chair, listening to a lecture” (Hurtienne, personal communication, 2012). In an English class, for example, students can rearrange furniture for story circles when discussing digital storytelling projects. In addition, the space allows simplicity for peer review, whether students are discussing text-based essays or multimodal projects, since there are small group tables with their own large screen to share materials.
In addition to increased student engagement in the active-learning classroom, faculty members also become more engaged in the classroom space: “The faculty’s buy-in impressed me. They really wanted to see this happen, and they bought into active learning, bought into the concept” (Pahlow, personal communication, 2013). Although many faculty members and administrators expected the high-tech features to dominate the room, many rewards developed though simpler solutions. According to Pahlow, “We found some of the more low-tech solutions powerful. The low-tech whiteboards have been some of the biggest hits [among instructors] … They’re even getting stolen from the room and moved out to other classrooms!” (personal communication, 2013).
Finally, community partnerships also make the space successful (see video 5). Community classes such as iPad basics, as well as community meetings and orientations, are regularly held in the active-learning classroom. College and community partnerships were a focal point for this project, with involvement and feedback from instructors, instructional technology, administrators, and students during the development, implementation, and gradual progression of the active-learning classroom.
Figure 5: Community Partnerships |