>>Steve: My name is Steve Mattice, I'm a math and science teacher here
at Roosevelt Middle School.
I have been teaching for about seven years now.
>>Narrator: Steve had a problem.
His classroom was too small for the 36 students
who poured in and out every period.
And too cramped to accommodate the student-to-student collaboration he
knew encouraged deeper learning.
>>Steve: They're extending this knowledge
when they're working together, they're happier and more positive
and more likely to participate.
I've got a lot of kids and a lot of desks.
Things pile up very quickly, kids can sort of pile up quickly in here.
And the maneuverability of this room is not always fantastic.
>>Narrator: Then he met the folks at the "Third Teacher Plus,"
whose job it is to help educators re-imagine their learning spaces.
See how they all took on the challenge
of remaking Steve's classroom to be a home for exploration, creativity
and better communication.
>>Christian: Teachers around the country will totally identify
with this classroom, an incredible number of kids and limited space.
So one of the things we're going to be looking
at is how does Steve move around the classroom.
>>I'm Christian Long, and I was a high school English teacher
for about 15 years.
As a member of the "Third Teacher Plus," our job is to create spaces
that allow the people
to be remarkable students, remarkable educators.
>>Melanie: When people think design a lot of times,
they think veneer, they think decorating.
Yeah, we want it to look better, but unless we can change
and facilitate a really productive classroom,
then we're not really making a difference.
>>I'm Melanie Kale, and I'm a Design and Learning Strategist
at the "Third Teacher Plus."
We're going into a classroom identifying things that work,
and things that could work better.
Taking a thousand dollars, a designer's eye,
a lot of community resources.
We try to match the physical classroom environment
to teaching and learning goals.
In one weekend, we hopefully realize them.
>>Christian: So, Steven, tell us a little about this classroom,
how it works, how it's laid out.
>>Steve: There's very little room to sort of move through the middle,
so I kind of stay on the outskirts when I do have to move around.
I've got 36 kids, plus backpacks, books, jackets.
There's so much stuff just within the aisles.
Just trying to get through is almost like trying to get through rush hour.
>>Melanie: In your world here, what is crucial that you have up here
to be successful in class?
>>Steve: I use the ELMO or the overhead a lot.
Just for more direct teaching.
The ELMO is a document camera that connects to a projector
and projects anything that I'm writing up onto the screen.
It's not a big workspace.
Like obviously, I've got a stool here to sort of make-do.
I do "McGuiver" this stuff.
>>Christian: What we're hoping to do here with Steven's class is
to really support this idea of collaboration.
He's got to focus on teams, so you see these groupings of four.
But at the same time, there's very little room
from grouping to grouping.
>>Melanie: So the workshop we ran on Monday,
the goal is to get a pulse on the students.
See how they collaborate with one another,
see how they interact with other adults.
A lot of times words don't encapsulate what we're thinking.
So we created a gallery wall for them to facilitate visual listening.
The visual listening wall has hundreds of photos.
It can be any size, and we give them dots to vote with.
It allows us to quickly take the pulse of what their eye is drawn to,
place they want to learn in, a place they want to hang out in,
a place that just looks cool.
>>Let's hear about it.
>>Student: We'd be like learning from each other,
or as like not just learning based on one thing like from a book.
>>Melanie: And what we noticed with them is they like sitting
in their groups of four, but they want to feel
like they're a part of a whole.
So in this class, we're considering the perimeter,
we're considering how we can add more mobility.
While we might not have a plan right this moment, we know our priorities.
To help make teachers better designers, we ask teachers
to invite critical friends into their room.
That might mean another teacher in the same department, another teacher
in a different department, or their architect friend
from down the street.
We do this thing called a solution session
to create really concrete areas that we can prioritize and make happen.
This session is really about putting some specifics
on what we think can really make a difference for your everyday life.
And on Monday morning, you have to have a classroom to teach in.
We set up a big board.
It kind of becomes our shared brain.
It's a place where we can visualize all the things that we're thinking.
We identified a handful of key areas that we were going to focus on:
Display; Storage; Furniture; Teaching Zone; Personality.
And we picked those spatial areas
so that we can create concrete solutions around them.
We asked Steven to help us identify things
that he thinks are going to make a big impact.
>>Student: First things that kind
of caught my eye were the teacher desk as a DJ Dashboard.
The positioning of the desks, I think, could be re-imagined.
Pull the doors off the cabinets.
Activate the back wall.
The things that the designers are going to do
in this class have sort of opened my eyes.
The insights that they've shared have made me think
about things I wouldn't ever have thought about.