Originally posted on the TechLearning Blog on 18 September 2006.
For the past week, I have been writing about best practices. It has mostly been a conversation between me and commenting readers about the term, best practice, where it comes from, what it means, why we feel a need for best practices, and who designates them.
The conversation expanded into what I called, best field. Best practices seem to be what teachers do to improve teaching and learning in the classroom. But best field are the rules and conditions of the classroom within which teachers work. I challenged readers to describe how they would change the rules and conditions in order to be able to work/teach in a best field.
I’ve decided to resurrect an old online project that I’ve been running for the past eight years. It’s called The New Century School House.The web site represents an old 1950s style school building that has been totally gutted of all relics of industrial age education. It is an empty shell. I want to invite you to come to the building and to adopt a room — repurposing that classroom (or library) for new century teaching and learning.
Click the type of school you are most associated with:
Find an empty room. It will be labeled, Adopt this Room.You’ll be asked for some information about yourself and then to describe what you think teachers and students should be doing in that room to make students more world-ready. And then you will be asked to list and describe what needs to be in that room for the described activities to take place — what kind of hardware, software,infrastructure, furniture, books, lighting, etc.
Look at this as a canvas for professional educators to use to begin to paint a new picture of teaching, learning, and classrooms, designed to prepare our children for a future that will be information-driven,technology-rich, and rapidly changing.
Photo Citation
Susan, “Writing in My Classroom.” Susan NYC’s Photostream. 30 Aug 2006. 22 Sep 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/en321/229285117/>.
technorati tags:warlick, education, future, flatclass, technology, bestpractice, bestfield
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Great to see this project up and running again David – I am going to try and get some more Scots on the 3rd floor! Will you paint the walls in tartan?
Good morning, nice writing. Plenty of good things to explore on these page. The Hitchhiker Team stopped by and wrote about your site
http://hgttb.blogspot.com/2006/09/2-cents-worth-david-warlick.html
Would you consider adding a school for tertiary education? I have a site exploring that and am part of the Joyful Jubilant Learning going on over at Talking Story this month where 27 authors are sharing and conversing about lifelong learning.
http://www.sayleadershipcoaching.com/talkingstory/
Sounds like there is a niche for this. Or do you already have a site that I may have missed in the explore?
David,
Been ages since our Skype call this past summer, but I continue to enjoy my daily 2 Cents Worth feed and trying to keep up with your travels and call-to-arms posts!
Love the re-opening of the New Century School House…so thought I’d jump to a global audience of school planners/architects who are very passionate about how schools of the 21st century will be re-imagined. Figured your project would be a great eye-opener for them…and the DesignShare blog would be a good fit to introduce you (to those who have not run into you before) and the project. Here is the link (although it just showed up above in your automatic feed, I believe):
http://www.designshare.com/blogs/4/?p=549
In any event, I’m looking forward to hearing more about the project’s new cadre of participants. Hope it’ll create some buzz!
Be well…adn hope to cross blog-paths with you one day soon.
Cheers,
Christian
“think:lab” and designshare.com