Room to Learn

Elementary Classrooms Designed for Interactive Explorations

Pam Evanshen, Janet Faulk

• Publisher: Gryphon House Inc.
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780876598115
• eBook ISBN: 9780876598122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

Environments are a complex interaction of physical elements, including sensory components, design and organization, aesthetics, nurturing attributes, and pedagogical resources. Research shows these elements can work together to improve early learning, self-efficacy and higher-order thinking skills.

Pamela Evanshen, EdD and Janet Faulk, EdD, have developed an environmental rating scale—Assessing the Pillars of the Physical Environment for Academic Learning (APPEAL)—to help educational professionals evaluate and improve the design and use of elementary learning environments. 

Transform learning spaces from teacher-centered classrooms where creativity and collaboration are stifled to student-centered, developmentally appropriate learning communities where children thrive. 

The APPEAL rating scale is a valid and reliable assessment that quantifies six environmental domains: 

• Meaningful Learning: occurs in a healthy, welcoming, and inviting classroom 
• Social Learning: encourages positive learning interactions through room arrangement and seating choices
• Purposeful Learning: facilitates discover and active engagement through learning centers and stations, personal spaces for children, and teacher space
• Responsible Learning: encourages children to take ownership of their learning, be accountable for their effort, and work together to accomplish learning goals
• Continuous Learning: showcases children's understandings of core content knowledge
• Inquiry-Based Learning: project-based learning and collaborative problem solving supported by rich resources

Room to Learn: Elementary Classrooms Designed for Interactive Explorations will help elementary educators completely reinvent their spaces to achieve the best child outcomes. 
 

Chapter 1:
The Philosophical Foundation

The organization of an elementary classroom reflects the teacher’s understandings about the ways children learn, as well as her beliefs regarding the structures that will support children in that learning. As we reflect upon the quality of the classroom environments that educators create for children, it is helpful to look at the work of theorists and school-reform practitioners, particularly Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and John Dewey, who wrote about this very subject. The work of these theorists addresses three themes that are relevant to young children’s learning:

• Characteristics of the learner
• Presentation of information and materials available in the classroom environment
• Strategies used as structures for learning

Piaget, Vygotsky, and Dewey provide insights into the importance of the learner and the structures for learning. They also give us a sense of the “why” for implementing educational practice that reflects active student engagement.

Jean Piaget

Piaget’s Ideas on the Characteristics of the Learner

Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development helps to explain how children create knowledge. Piaget identifies two stages of cognitive development that relate to children at the elementary level: preoperational and concrete operational. The preoperational stage is the period from two to seven years of age, when children develop language and begin to use symbols and mental imagery but cannot yet think in a logical way. The concrete operational stage is the period from seven to twelve years, when children develop the ability to reason logically about concrete objects and events. As children move through these stages, they develop cognitive networks of increasing complexity. Piaget recognized that young children encounter learning through their senses, manipulation of objects, play-based experiences, and real-life experiences. He determined that their thinking progresses through a series of iterations about the stimuli around them called assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is the process by which the child gathers ideas, information, perceptions, and experiences into existing mental models. Assimilation occurs when children “add on” to their established ways of thinking. For example, a young child may learn the word dog for the four-legged animal that lives in her house. As she assimilates information about other animals she sees, she may call any four-legged animal she encounters a dog. Accommodation, on the other hand, is a new way of looking at information and requires more of a cognitive shift because it takes place when concepts don’t fit into the current paradigm. For example, as the child develops and she encounters cats, she will accommodate the differences between cats and dogs and form a new schema for cat.

Progressing through the developmental stages that Piaget identified involves the interaction between the processes of assimilation and accommodation. It is the way in which a child adjusts to her environment (Singer and Revenson, 1996). That adjustment results in new learning and deeper understandings.

How Does Piaget Relate to the Classroom Environment?

Based on Piaget’s theory, the teacher provides active social learning opportunities that lead to and support children’s cognitive development. Educators serve as facilitators who can guide the children’s growth, appreciate their sense of wonder, and celebrate their curiosity. The instructional design of the classroom becomes one in which children are challenged to explore and actively participate in developing understandings.

There is evidence that the physical classroom environment plays an important role in children’s construction of knowledge (Piaget, 1963). Historically, educators created a classroom design that consisted of a large amount of space designated for teacher work, large-group instructional areas, desks in rows, and little or no space or materials devoted to interactive construction of knowledge. This classroom design generated a pedagogical structure in which teachers instruct the learners. On the other hand, Piaget’s theory encourages the organization of elementary classrooms to promote exploration and investigation of objects in the environment. Furthermore, it leads us to design classroom spaces that generate active engagement in problem solving using manipulatives and real-life experiences. In an environment inspired by Piaget’s work, teachers ask questions to extend their students’ thinking, offer opportunities for social learning, encourage the exploration of ideas, and celebrate learning through documenting and sharing the learning with one another and those who visit the classroom.

Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky’s Ideas on the Characteristics of the Learner

Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s social development theory emphasizes that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. He theorized that people learn first through person-to-person interactions and then individually through internalization processes that lead to deeper understanding (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky developed a concept called the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD); the ZPD is the difference between a person’s actual developmental level and ability to solve a problem independently, and the person’s potential level of development and ability to solve a problem with adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978). A task within a child’s ZPD is not so hard as to be frustrating but is just challenging enough that the child can learn a new skill when supported and assisted. The support and assistance, called scaffolding, that adults and/or more capable peers provide can advance children’s knowledge. The physical environment can provide an additional level of scaffolding to help them reach higher levels of functioning (Maxwell, 2007).

How Does Vygotsky Relate to the Classroom Environment?

When teachers plan the physical design of the classroom and the lessons to follow, the physical design of the room should allow for social interaction, a key component for cognitive development. Traditionally designed classrooms, where children work individually to complete assigned tasks, do not support Vygotsky’s idea that the range of skills that children can develop with adult guidance or peer collaboration exceeds the range of skills children can develop when learning alone. Vygotsky believed that social interaction helps children construct knowledge; consequently, an effective learning environment would allow for child-to-child and adult-to-child interactions. Teachers need to be able to observe children, so that they can identify a child’s ZPD for a specific skill and can respond appropriately by scaffolding or asking another child who has already achieved that skill to help scaffold.

John Dewey

Dewey’s Ideas on the Characteristics of the Learner

John Dewey’s theories on educational processes, developed in the early 1900s, are evident in a great deal of early education literature and are commonly found in many contemporary classroom settings. Inherent to Dewey’s philosophy of education is the belief that knowledge results from experience. His philosophy of teaching and learning focuses on the continuous interaction between past experiences and current situations. Learning does not occur in isolation. According to Dewey, the education process is continuous, so that each experience affects the experiences that follow. Children respond to a learning opportunity based not only upon the structure and presentation of a lesson, but also in relation to their previous experiences with related concepts or lessons. For example, children who have had experience with a pet at home will likely have information to share—often in great detail!— when their class hears a book about a pet hamster.

Dewey recognized that each person has unique experiences and individual responses to those experiences. He also acknowledged that some experiences are detrimental to the developmental process while others are supportive of it. Dewey was convinced that the role of the teacher was not to stand and deliver instruction but to facilitate the learning process for children. He proposed that the teacher’s goal should be to foster children’s positive development to help them achieve their potential.

How Does Dewey Relate to the Classroom Environment?

Quality educational design, in Dewey’s terms, is centered on personal knowing and offers multiple opportunities for nurturing the children’s areas of interest. The effective teacher kno...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Philosophical Foundation
• Chapter 2: Using the Environment as a Teaching Tool: The Instructional Foundation for Engaging Children in Learning
• Chapter 3: Assessing the Pillars of the Physical Environment for Academic Learning: Introduction to the APPEAL Rating Scale
• Chapter 4: The Physical Environment to Support Meaningful Learning
• Chapter 5: The Physical Environment to Support Social Learning
• Chapter 6: The Physical Environment to Support Purposeful Learning
• Chapter 7: The Physical Environment to Support Responsible Learning
• Chapter 8: The Physical Environment to Support Continuous Learning
• Chapter 9: The Physical Environment to Support In-Depth Learning
• Chapter 10: Using the APPEAL for Professional Development and Research
• Chapter 11: General Procedures for Administering the APPEAL
• Appendix A:
• Appendix B:
• Appendix C:
• The APPEAL Rating Scale
• References