The big move from Single Cell to Open Plan

As the end of another academic year draws to a close, I take myself back to day one of the year.  I was greeted my very sweet 17 New Entrants, with their crisp new school uniforms and brand new shiny black shoes.  This is not a scenario unfamiliar to me as I have greeted New Entrants for years on their first day at school. This year was a little different for me.  We had decided to introduce Learning Through Play in order to improve the transition to school. Learning Through Play was designed to make children feel settled and relaxed when they are beginning their day.  I didn't realise the amount of learning and the value of play at this stage, I think, upon reflection. I always knew it was important but it had never occurred to me that they were learning so many different skills including problem solving, communication, conflict resolution etc.  The first term in the single cell classroom was made a great deal easier by having our lovely Teacher Aide- Rachael. She was amazing and we had a lot of professional conversations around the different children and the activities they gravitated to. I later learnt that these are the urges that children display.  As much as I could, I tried to provide activities and areas that would lead to fostering these urges. We set up a construction area in the classroom complete with real road signs and wood, nails and hammers. We had a number of boys who were right into this area of the room. The noise of the hammers banging eventually got the better of me and trying to pull phonics groups and reading groups out with hammers banging, meant I had to change it up a bit- ie getting tools that were plastic.  A group of children also were displaying a real interest in shopping. Helen, another wonderful Teacher Aide, set up a shop with conveyor belt etc. It was very cool and we asked parents to bring empty boxes in so we had some produce. This was great, but if I am honest, I found it really hard in a single cell classroom with all the noise and not to mention mess. I wonder if the novelty of it all made the mess worse or were we blurring lines because we didn’t have the appropriate space.

In Term 2, two significant changes happened in my teaching world.  We moved into our teaching space and made the move from single cell to a collaborative teaching and learning environment.  The second significant change in my teaching world was that my youngest son started school in the same learning space as me and my middle child was also going to be in the same space. This seemed at the time quite a lot to get my head around.  We spent a bit of time moving into our new block and it is fair to say it wasn’t without our teething problems as we all found our feet and found our place in our team. Finally we had an appropriate space to administer our Learning Through Play, an appropriate, and to my surprise, quiet space to take our groups in the teaching room.  The middle two rooms include a provocations room where children are provided with equipment and challenging question to provoke their thinking, and a Follow Up room where children complete work from the teaching session.

This took a bit of getting used to, but the space is fantastic and the children quickly came to terms with the new routine.  

Throughout the year we have played with the spaces a bit.  We each have a “home base” area and this has been moved and tweaked a few times since moving in.  We have moved furniture and added equipment to, and removed equipment from the play area.

We are all on a journey and while things are working well enough, we still have a great deal of room for improvement.  

I love working as a collaborative team for many reasons.  I enjoy the proximity teaching, the fact that we can bounce ideas off each other,the increased professional discussions and the general collegiality which naturally occurs in a team setting.

I see room for improvement in the follow up room with regard to children being on task and the monitoring of those children as well as children in the provocations room and the Learning Through Play area while you are coaching. It is very difficult to do justice to everything with so many children.

 It is fair to say I much prefer my teaching days to my coaching days. It is also vital that the children are being challenged and extended in the provocations room and I feel this needs work.

On the whole I have enjoyed working in our new space and this was confirmed when last week I was asked, if given a choice ,would I want to go back to single cell- or stay in the open plan MLE. I surprised myself by answering, without much thought needed, - "No way- I love the collaborative learning environment and I would struggle to return to the autonomy of single cell"
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It has been a big year with it’s fair share of ups and downs but I have learnt a lot this year and changed my thinking considerably around some reservations I might have once had about play based learning and open plan MLE.