After going through the material on Blackboard, I felt that my most significant takeaway from this E-Learning lesson was the importance of the classroom environment in not just fostering a positive learning space for students, but in enabling them to develop social-emotional skills.
As a student, I never really paid much attention to my classrooms - I generally felt that my learning was more dependent on my teacher and peers rather than the physical space I was in. However, looking back, I realise that some classrooms definitely did engender more positive attitudes towards learning, and these tended to be the ones that veered away from the traditional configuration of horizontal rows and bare walls. My favourite classroom was the one I had in Secondary 2, as my school organised a classroom decoration contest and gave each class a small budget to buy paints and other decorative materials with, and gave us free rein to work as a class on a design that we could call our own. The result was a bright and welcoming space, and each of us even got to paint an icon that we felt represented ourselves as individuals on the back wall. While this contest was only carried out once (logistically, it was a nightmare - the school wound up having to hire professional painters to repaint the entire building at the end of the year), I really felt that it helped to foster camaraderie amongst the students, and our "personalised classroom" created a sense of pride and symbolic identification in us. To this day, it remains one of my most cherished memories of my secondary school years.
Moving ahead to what I as a teacher could do to nurture a sense of class culture and develop social-emotional skills in my students -- I think my best teaching experiences took place in classrooms that were lively; not just in terms of my students' behavior, but in terms of the space itself. I like having my students sit in interior loop arrangements, where they can move quickly from sitting in rows (during the times when my teaching strategy is direct instruction) to groups (when collaborative learning methods are used) by simply turning around or joining their tables together. This ability to quickly transit from a teacher-focused to a student-focused environment reflects my own personal pedagogical approach. I feel that these arrangements naturally allow for camaraderie to be built, since students are always aware of the co-dependent nature of their learning, and frequent group work helps to build social ties. Furthermore, in terms of social-emotional learning, students will quite naturally develop skills such as social awareness and relationship management through collaborative learning. I would thus hope to design my future classroom as such.
