Welcome to my Classroom

Actually – she says, bragging – I have two classrooms – one where I teach maths, one where I teach ICT and engineering. Obviously both rooms are shared with other teachers, I don’t get two to myself. This one is my main base, so that’s the one I’ll show you around first. Come on in!

The Room

Once inside the big green box, you’ll see student desks arranged in six groups; partly because that allows group work and partly because space is at a premium and groups of tables take up less room. Our department was refurbished about three years ago, so I’m lucky to have fairly new tables and chairs.

The department also got repainted when we were refurbished. Everyone thought I was crazy, because I decided to paint my own room, including the mural of triangles and quadrilaterals on the back wall. Maybe I was mad, but it looks great, even after three years – partly because I’m obsessive about keeping the room clear of graffiti and partly because I touch up the paintwork about once a year to keep it looking nice.

I had a rather battered old metal cupboard (which my form uses as a giant communal locker) and filing cabinet in the room. Our refurbishment budget didn’t stretch to replacing those, so I painted them. They ended up looking much better than I expected. Last summer I managed to trade another metal cupboard for two battered filing cabinets, which also got painted and now hold all my own files, worksheets etc. From the pictures it looks as if there’s masses of storage space in the room, but in fact but most of the cupboards hold departmental stocks of books and paper.

Whiteboards

There are quite a lot of whiteboards in the room, these are one of the best things about the space. At the front I have a SMARTboard with a standard whiteboard next to it. I use both of these (especially since I acquired a new, bright projector last summer) – often both at the same time. I don’t know how anyone manages with just an IWB – especially on the inevitable bad technology day.

The paper chain is a little unseasonal, but it is interesting – it’s a pi chain.

There are also five smaller whiteboards around the room. I made these when we were refurbished: I rescued two old teacher whiteboards that were being replaced and asked our DT technician to slice them up into smaller boards. Once I’d stuck on a bit of cheap plastic edging, they looked pretty good. Each table now has their own white board – although the one at the front has to share the teacher board with me.

We use these whiteboards pretty often:

• for groups to work together on a problem
• for students to demonstrate how they have worked out a question
• to compare different methods for solving a problem
• to discuss how clear someone’s working is
• to use as an aid when students present something to their group or the class

I have mini-whiteboards as well, but I tend to use the mini boards for individual or paired work.

Netbooks

I’m very lucky to have 16 netbooks stored in a trolley in my room. Actually I’m not sure that’s luck – I was very keen to volunteer to host them! We’re using these more and more in maths, but that’s something that’s worthy of its own post. 16 is enough for 2 per group or 1 per pair, so that works pretty well.

The Simpsons and Friends

There are a few Simpsons characters in the room. Homer was the first to appear. Sky TV kept sending me a fold out flyer in their magazine which featured Homer Simpson, so I cut him out and had him laminated. Sometimes he has a speech bubble and utters words of great wisdom, sometimes he lurks on displays, sometimes he is even a group member. For example, last week when there were 29 children present for a lesson on pie charts, Homer participated in our survey to make the numbers up to a nice ‘easy’ 30. How did he participate? Easy – there’s always at least one child in every class who can tell you what Homer thinks.

Some students brought in some extra pictures, so we have Homer, his two identical brothers and various other characters that can be pressed into service. There’s also an ITV Digital/PG Tips monkey lurking somewhere in one of the cupboards. I wasn’t sure how the students would react to Monkey, but even Y11 played along with that one.

The Maths Cafe

My last form won a £50 prize in an enterprise competition and decided to buy two kettles. Yes, it did take a bit of negotiation to have kettles in a classroom – but they were Y10. Obviously they are locked up most of the time (the kettles that is, not the students). My former group has now left, but they left their kettles with me. Excellent.

If I’m teaching a small revision group after school or in an intervention lesson, we generally pull the desks together to make a big table and provide drinks and biscuits. That’s proved popular with the students – it’s a small incentive to get them to attend.

In an Ideal World

If I could design my own room from scratch, I’d make it much bigger than this one. On the occasions I’ve taught in bigger rooms, I’ve really enjoyed the flexibility it allowed me. I’d make the heating and lighting easy to control: cool enough in summer, warm enough in winter, variable light levels would be good too. That’s all very basic stuff, but it seems to get overlooked in a lot of new build schools.

I’d keep the whiteboards (I love them!), but I’d like to have more than one interactive whiteboard – and wouldn’t multi-touch be marvellous?

Would I have netbooks or laptops? The honest answer is that I’m not sure: laptops are more powerful, but take up a lot more room – both to store and in use on students’ desks. I’d also like a lot of sockets – something that is noticeably lacking in my current room, so at present our netbook usage is punctuated by charging time.

Some breakout spaces would be nice, either inside or outside the classroom.

Anyway, that’s my room. Now it’s over to you – what are the best features of your classroom? What would you change if you could?

(My Lego stunt double (see photo at the top of this post) was created using Reasonably Clever’s MiniMizer. Thanks to David Muir for the link. His Lego MiniMe is pretty good too!)