“Spaces are themselves agents for change. Changing areas will change practice.”
Learning spaces can have a significant impact on learning. Space can and will affect learning; it can encourage exploration, collaboration and discussion. Space can lead to a built pedagogy – the ability of the space to define how one teaches.

Learning environments are increasingly designed to support project-based learning with attention to mobility, flexibility and multiple device usage. Wireless bandwidth is being upgraded to create smart rooms that support web conferencing and remote, collaborative communication. Large displays and screens are being installed to support collaboration on digital projects and informal presentations. Classrooms may start to resemble real-world work and social environments that facilitate organic interactions and cross-disciplinary problem-solving.

With all these changes teachers are increasingly expected to be proficient in a variety of technology-based and other approaches to content delivery, learner support and assessment. In the technology-enabled classroom, the primary responsibilities of the teacher are shifting from providing expert level knowledge to constructing learning environments that help students build 21st-century skills including creative enquiry and digital literacy. Teachers are now guides and mentors, mobilising responsible global citizenship and motivating students to adopt lifelong learning habits. Teachers are challenged to provide opportunities for students to direct their learning trajectories. All of these factors combined to change the way teachers engage with their continuing professional development much of which involve social media, online tools and resources in collaboration with other educators in and beyond the schools.

Your classroom is your performance stage. It is your turf, your domain. The best classrooms reflect the teacher’s personality and teaching style.

The most influential variable in any classroom is always the teacher.

The best classrooms are owned by teachers and have been decorated in such a way to indicate to students that they are entering a distinct space. As many students these days come from households where no one effectively is in charge, to alter behaviour and increase learning expectations, the teacher must own the domain.

Psychology of learning spaces
All learning takes place in a physical environment with quantifiable and perceptible physical characteristics. “In any learning environment, students are awash in environmental information only a fraction of which constitutes the sights and sounds of instruction.”
The physical characteristics of learning environments can affect learners emotion with significant cognitive and behavioural consequences:
The environment should elicit positive emotional responses and therefore enhance learning, and the student should develop a powerful emotional attachment to that learning space.
The goal of creating such conditions is to have an environment where students love to learn, the place they seek out when they wish to learn, and a place they remember fondly when they reflect on learning.

Environments that produce positive emotional state can be expected to facilitate learning and the development of an area of attachment.

Today students use the devices to take notes, access materials and applications and find relevant information. When all students in a classroom can access network tools simultaneously, many collaborative learning experiences and just-in-time teaching opportunities emerge.

Instructors must be able to engage students in the learning process, and the classroom must be designed to facilitate that design.

The term active learning has been prominent in educational circles for decades. If we consider this to be the intersection of technology, pedagogy and space, then active learning refers to a wide range of approaches that place students at the centre of the learning process.

Active learning can be defined as an instructional method that engages students in the learning process. Active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and to think about what they are doing.

• Students and their learning at the centre of learning (reading, writing, talking, listening and reflecting)
• The objective of active learning is to improve the following skills: critical thinking skills, increase retention, transfer of new information, increase motivation and improved personal skills.
• Active learning strategies include individual activities, paired activities, small informal groups, and cooperative student projects.

The keys to success with active learning include:

• Being creative! Invent new strategies and adapt existing ones to your specific needs;
• Start small and be brief;
• Develop a plan
• Start from the first day of term and stick to it
• Change groupings and ensure students work with different people
• Use the in-class activity questions in assessment tasks (tests)
• Negotiate a stop talking signal
• Randomly call on pairs to share
• Team teach and plan active learning opportunities

Collaborative learning involves educational activities in which human relationships are the key to welfare, achievement and mastery…where in teachers…help students learn by working together on substantive issues. Classroom environment, therefore, must facilitate collaborative activities, essentially they should facilitate flexible meeting places.

Engagement is often enhanced by mystery and enchantment.
People’s preference for specific environments appears to depend on the cognitive impression of the environment. Research highlights four cognitive determinants for environmental preference:

• Coherence – the ease with which a setting can be organised cognitively.
• Complexity – the perceived capacity of the setting to occupy interest and stimulate activity.
• Legibility – the perceived ease of use.
• Mystery – the perception that entering the city would lead to increased learning, interaction or interest.
• Enchantment – “the experience of being caught up and carried away” – when enchanted by what we are experiencing, we are held spellbound, our senses are heightened, and we are trapped in a moment of pure presence that we try to maintain.

Pedagogical practices in schools worldwide are shifting student focus across a wide variety of disciplines making learning more than the mere consumption of content. Creativity illustrated by the growth of user-generated videos, maker communities and crowdfunded projects in the last few years increasingly calls for active hands-on doing.
Innovation springs from the freedom to try and implement new ideas and yet, schools generally allow for top-down changes that unfold in prescribed ways. Success in teaching is closely tied to test results and teachers are seldom awarded for innovative approaches and improvements in teaching and learning. Often teachers become frustrated by rigid confines of a school in desperate need for transformation. Scaling pedagogical innovation requires adequate funding, capable leadership, effective evaluation practices and the removal of restrictive policies. The reality is that many teachers are not prepared to lead change and effective teaching practice innovations.

In the drive to reform and improve teaching and learning, is a new emphasis on re-inventing the traditional classroom paradigms and rearranging the formal learning experience. Budget and challenge-based learning models are calling for structures that enable students to move from one learning activity to another more organically, removing the limitations of disparate disciplines. These approaches are multidisciplinary, and they have helped to popularise the creative application of technology within the classroom. As learning outcomes become more fluid and student centred, some education leaders believe that schedule should be more flexible so that students have the opportunity for authentic learning and independent study. This could require shifts in the business models of schools.

Microsoft defines a smart learning classroom (SLC) as an enhanced classroom that cultivates opportunities for teaching and learning through the use of technology. However, technology is just one aspect of a smart learning classroom, and they are many other factors to consider when implementing smart learning classroom. Educators need to find current and emerging strategies for teaching and learning that facilitate active learning. An approach often referred to within 21st-century education is that of personalised learning which allows the student better ownership of the learning pathways and provides teachers with a more robust set of artefacts that can be used.

Innovative learning environments: embrace pedagogical approaches and create innovative, contemporary learning environments that;

• Promote learning for students through active investigation, social interaction and collaboration
• Support a full range of learning and teaching strategies from direct explicit instruction to facilitation of enquiry to virtual connection and communication;
• Support disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning;
• Move beyond the simplicity of flexible open spaces to integrate resource-rich, special-purpose spaces with flexible, adaptable multipurpose spaces to provide a dynamic workshop environment for learning;
• To support individual, one-to-one, small group and larger group learning (including age-appropriate learning)

Facilitate learning anywhere, anytime, by any means, through seamless access to IT, distribution of learning resources for ease of accessing the learning spaces and accessibility beyond the traditionally defined school day;
Inspire participation in and responsibility for the learner’s community.
Reference

https://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/learning-spaces/chapter-6-psychology-learning-environments

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