Please take your seats...

[Gonzalo Garcia]

I'm sure we all remember our teachers walking into the classroom and greeting us with a pleasant; "Good morning class, please take your seats." All of this came back to me as I read the following article about aclassroom free school in Sweden. Taking notes from companies like Google and Pixar on how they structure their facility to help collaboration and creativity is a great start, but not everyone can start a new school from scratch and even less have award wining architects design these creative spaces.

So what can we do now to help change the classroom... My good friend and colleague Phil Darrin began by eliminating chairs.

The concept may not be his but the standing desk classroom has been a great move. The combination of iPads and standing desks have helped in breaking up the traditional model. Many great things have come from this arrangement and there is no doubt it is a sustainable model. Mr. Phil Darrin uses this to the advantage of all in the room. Moving around, having the students reconfigure at moments notice to set up fro debates or presentations, the standing desks have helped transition the old paradigm of having a sage on the stage to a guide on the side. I encourage faculty members to give this a try, I will add some pictures to this post soon as well as include a 360 degree video that was shot at the last debate in class.