The Classroom (Old and New)

As a teacher I am in a unique position to be in a district where we will be moving into a newly built facility from the prior high school building. The old building in our district has been in its current state since 1980, and our staff is very happy to have the new addition to the district. The facility is almost fully complete as I am typing this, and I have been setting up my classroom around construction workers. Currently it is still “box city,” but

progress is being made slowly but surely. Photos below: Left: The old room, boxed and stripped down Right: The new room, loosely arranged and filled with the aforementioned boxes

It was quite an undertaking to sift through, pare down, and box up over 40 years of supplies that past art teachers have acquired, but this was something needed for the department for a fresh start. There were many processes, routines, and events that took place in the old building that worked for that space, and will be reevaluated as we move into the new space. I’m really looking forward to the process of restructuring our program in the new building, which we decided to do as a department this past year.

There will be a lot of changes in the coming years that will benefit our students.

My new classroom should fit 30 students comfortably, from grades 9 – 12, though the individual desks have been replaced with large wooden tables with built in storage. I’ll be using these storage locations for student artwork and daily use instead of a separate cabinet like the old space. This does free up an awful lot of storage space in the rest of the room, of which I have acquired more than the previous building. These table configurations should provide more opportunities for group work and collaboration with my students as well as a large surface to work on smaller still life setups without rearranging desks throughout the entire room. In the past several years group work was down to a minimum due to covid spacing restrictions, and while it did keep a quieter room I think the student’s lost some of the opportunities to teach one another. I have always appreciated the collaboration that happens organically in an art classroom when students feel comfortable enough to discuss the work they are doing with their peers. I have overheard many small teachable moments where I was not the instructor, but a student I overheard explaining a process to a peer to better their own work. I look forward to many more such events in the new building. I think I may also be incorporating a form of “flexible seating” in my classroom in the form of available standing easels for those who wish to stand and work. The easels were kept in the storage room in the last building in a fashion that made it very difficult to remove them, so I welcome the change in the new space. I personally work standing many times and will offer this option to my students. There will also be tabletop easels kept in the student table space storage as well for those who wish to use them.

The new facility will have many opportunities for the use of technology that I look forward to implementing. The classroom is arranged with a Clever Touch television at the front with a magnetic whiteboard on either side. My desk is arranged on the side furthest from the door and closest to the windows, with a hub attached to the desk that allows a laptop to link into the Clever Touch, a secondary monitor, and any other peripheries that I may hook up. I will definitely continue to use my Ipevo document camera to present on the front screen for small technical demos, which I record and place on YouTube with links in Google Classroom for the students to access. This has been something we began doing since the pandemic which I honestly should have been doing before. I had a desire to make asynchronous videos but never quite got around to it. I guess that’s one good thing that came out of the pandemic. The videos have been a great benefit to students who missed a class period or just needed to refresh what was covered before. One thing that has been difficult in regards to the recorded videos was students having access to technology that would allow them to view them. Some students have been able to view on their phones and others watch at home if they have a computer or other WIFI enabled device, but in class it has been difficult if students do not always have technology available to them. In the old classroom I managed to acquire a few desktop computers that were on their way out as the digital art teacher was getting hers upgraded, and those served the need. We also could arrange for Chromebooks on a digital spreadsheet. In the new building I will have a full cart available to use that I will share with the ceramics teacher. I’m pleased to have these tools to help incorporate more technology use into the classroom to help familiarize students who might not otherwise have access to it. These Chromebooks will also have touchscreens and a stylus present, which I intend to use for some digital drawing and interactive websites like aggie.io to encourage further collaboration between students.

I have a few thoughts on processes and routines I would like to use in the new facility. First, I have 2 doors to the classroom and to keep more order I am considering having an “enter” and an “exit” door. This idea came from the one-way hallways we instituted during covid and I think it would serve us well. Another routine that I used every day in the last building was to have a daily “to-do” list on the Smart Board with directions for students to accomplish as they entered the room, with handouts on the front table. In the new space I’ll be continuing this, but with the ease of use of the whiteboards (and the fact I can actually reach them because they don’t have shelves in front) I will also be including overall due dates for the different classes and project requirements on one of the boards. I would typically have them visible in the last room but there wasn’t a good permanent location for them. I may also begin using some magnetized illustrations of processes, materials, and tools that I used when I taught elementary school. I found many students the visual was more helpful than reading blocks of text. Given that I will now be teaching two separate sections of a class (i.e. Painting 1 and Painting 2) in the same classroom at the same time, I believe having all necessary information and tasks visible will be helpful when I have to switch gears and work with one group while the other works independently.

There is still a lot to be determined in the new space. I’m sure I’ll change things at least 200 times in the coming months as we get settled in and learn what works and what doesn’t as we often do in education. Some things may stay the way I begin them years from now and some things may last about a week. The organic nature of an art classroom changes with the teacher, the group of students, the space, and the administration. Thought with some effort we’ll keep changing for the better.