Page 34 - School Planning & Management, March 2019

CASE HISTORIES { REAL-WORLD SOLUTIONS }
Mobile Furniture Makes for Engaged Minds
AT BUFFALO GROVE HIGH School in Illinois, collaborative learning is a pillar of the cur- riculum.
Teachers and students found that tra- ditional classroom layouts obstructed their ability to integrate group work throughout the school day. “One [student] said they’d rather sit on the floor every day,” says Buffalo Grove teacher Maggie Sheehy. Students said it was a pain to move their chairs and belongings all the time, especially in smaller classrooms.
To address the problem, Buffalo Grove applied to become a test site for global fur- niture maker KI’s Ruckus Grant Program, a national project measuring how furniture impacts student learning.
One of nine schools selected for the program, Buffalo Grove partnered with KI’s education design experts to revamp
its Education Pathway classroom, where students interested in teaching professions learn state-of-the-art pedagogies.
Following winter break, students found their traditional classroom had trans- formed into an open, flexible learning space with mobile chairs, stools, desks, and lounge furniture where students and teach- ers could seamlessly change how they sat, learned, and worked together.
The results were striking. After the classroom redesign, Buffalo Grove students reported a 55-percent increase in movement and a 39-percent increase in group work.
“The furniture allows for a lot more mo- bility and moving of tables into pods of two groups of three,” teacher Corinne Ginder says. “As soon as we got the new furniture, the number of students that I would’ve thought would sit next to each other
Buffalo Grove High School in Illinois was selected for KI’s Ruckus Grant Program to measure how furniture impacts student learning.
formed different, collaborative groups.” Students also reported a 23-percent
increase in engagement and participation. Their enthusiasm was palpable.
www.ki.com
School’s Innovation Lab Greeted With Success
IT TOOK SOME TIME to accom- plish the STEM micro campus serving the 960 sixth, seventh, and eighth
graders at New Jersey’s Chatham Middle School, Danielle Dagounis, supervisor of Instructional & Design Technology, will tell you. “Five years ago, we started our STEM Program, offering a wide array of pro- grams. To get things started, we had to take over the computer lab. The one downfall of that is: it’s a computer lab,” she explains. “You didn’t have any supports to allow the students to collaborate.”
Dagounis continues, “The plan was to make a new STEM focus area with class- rooms set up to serve different purposes. The classroom we are talking about today is what we call our Innovation Lab. The Innovation Lab is the room that features SMARTdesks collaboration furniture.”
Dagounis had a difficult time finding collaborative computer desks. “Apparently,
if you want collaborative computer desks, they’re like unicorns,” she says. “I went to the New Jersey School Board Convention two or three years ago and saw some of SMARTdesks’ products being demonstrated in person. When I Googled ‘collaborative computer tables,’ SMARTdesks was the most relevant result. I got some measurements, gave them to my architect, and asked if these SMARTdesks collaboration tables would fit. And they did.”
“Yes, we had interface with the archi- tect,” adds Jeffry Korber, SMARTdesks CEO. “They called us. We have our own design department, so we did a layout. That is one way we differentiate ourselves. I was directly involved in the engineering.”
“And that is good, because now we have an effective collaborative learning class-
Chatham Middle School in New Jersey partnered with SMARTdesks to create collaborative learning spaces for their STEM Program.
room,” Dagounis says. “It is important for our students to be able to collaborate with one another, and not just come in and work on their own without having to work with other people.” SPM
www.smartdesks.com
34 SCHOOL PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / MARCH 2019
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