Setting the desks free
Michigan Engineers are studying how flexible spaces can impact learning and teaching and lead to ‘classroom culture change.’
Michigan Engineering News
For Tuesday’s class, round tables that seat 6-8 students can be arranged around the periphery of the room to give instructors a 360-degree view of groups at work and allow them to move from one team to another, offering help or checking for understanding of the day’s activity.
Thursday’s class is more of a content delivery day by the professor so a more formal lecture style is possible, with tables in rows. Yet, even this configuration is different from the usual lecture hall. Monitors throughout the room allow students to engage more with the material, and the professor can wander through the space while writing on the screens with a tablet computer.
Tables on wheels, adjustable chairs, and moveable white boards allow faculty to configure the classroom however they feel will best spur group work and discussion.
These classrooms of the future are here now at the College of Engineering, and a U-M research team is studying how engineering faculty and students use these flexible spaces.
With help from a $300,000 National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program grant, professor Cindy Finelli and research fellow Aaron Johnson are studying faculty who will transition from teaching in more traditional lecture halls to flexible classroom spaces. Finelli and Johnson will investigate how the flexible spaces make a difference in the ways students interact with one another and with faculty, and how they affect the way students learn. The researchers also are collecting faculty experiences to focus on how instructors adapt pedagogy using these spaces.
They plan to observe the courses in traditional lecture halls and in a flexible classroom, and they have begun preliminary analysis of feedback on the spaces from students and faculty alike.
“Students really love it, and they’ve asked for more classrooms that can be used by other faculty,” said Finelli, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the college’s new Engineering Education Research Program.
“The flexible classroom allows students to be more engaged, and it gives faculty a chance to use a wider variety of activities that include hands-on exercises, team-based learning, student group assignments, and study teams, among others.”
These observations are reflected in comments from two students in Finelli’s class.
“I don’t know how other students learn, but the arrangement worked for me. It let me get to know the other students and work with them,” said Jason Hebert, a junior in electrical engineering. The non-traditional student, husband and father returned to school at age 34, after working as an electrician.
“It felt more personal. Instead of being just another number in a class of 200, this class makes you want to be a better learner.”
Thiago Echeverria Saliba, a senior in aerospace engineering and mathematical sciences, had similar feelings about his experience.
“With the layout, it’s easier to find your own space. Sometimes in a regular lecture class I might drift away, but in this class it’s easier not to lose focus,” he said. “I like that I could see what we’re learning on a screen. It’s easier to do group work.”
The idea behind designing learning spaces to encourage more student engagement is not new to academia, but the concept of a flexible classroom space that can be configured for a given purpose one day and then totally reconfigured the next day is just emerging, and little research has been done to find out how well such spaces work.
Johnson, a research fellow in electrical engineering and computer science, has been conducting classroom observations, facilitating student and faculty interviews, and analyzing data, and will continue to do so under the new grant that began June 1. He said use of flexible classroom spaces represents a cultural change for the faculty.
“The hope is in the future these rooms will encourage more instructors to use more active learning. It’s exciting to see how it continues to be used in the future,” he said.
“When teaching in a traditional lecture hall, faculty often only get to interact with a few students. In these classrooms, though, they are able to interact with all students.”
In addition to observing how much more engaged faculty were with students, Johnson had some preliminary findings from the pilot study:
- Faculty members made creative use of the monitors throughout the room to show slides of the class material, have students work together on a Google Document, and collectively work through a problem.
- Faculty felt the monitors throughout the room helped students focus on the task at hand and minimized distractions.
- Faculty noted that in traditional lecture-based classrooms students tended to sit anywhere during class sessions with lecture, but in the flexible spaces, they gravitated toward their teammates. This was helpful in getting students to know each other better and build effective teams.
- Faculty developed new activities that were specifically suited for the flexible classroom. For example, the students in one senior design course engaged in two peer design reviews, in which the faculty created small groups where each member came from a different design project team. Each student then presented his or her project team’s work to the mixed group, and the faculty moved around the room observing one of the eight simultaneous presentations and providing feedback.
- Students used the rooms after hours to meet about group work for class or student project teams.
This article was written by Laurel Gnagey.