Environment - Our Third Teacher!

How many children find themselves in a unique position where they can watch their school building being built, brick by brick, right in front of their eyes? Not many!! But we do have one such privileged bunch of kids at Sancta Maria.

Being an adult, and a teacher, my mind is generally taken up with my lesson plans, worksheets, meeting deadlines, and so did not envision my students’ fascination for what was taking place within the compound walls! I am talking about my second grader, Aathira. Every Wednesday, she would want to go for a walk around the construction site.

We would walk over to the site, taking all safety measures, and visit the incomplete classrooms…I wanted to comply with her wishes while achieving my student learning outcomes…So, since she was studying about the earth, we sorted out the material we saw lying at the construction site under the categories of ‘man-made’ and ‘nature-made’.

However, she was thinking on different lines altogether!! I would watch as she would run around in the class and plan where she would place the desks, where she would prefer to sit. I wondered whether these were random plans. She then shared her thoughts with me. She said that in her heart, she was planning her days in the new class. She was deciding where her friends would sit, where she would place the rug to sit on when she read books with her friends, where she would stand and giggle with her friends when they would play jokes on each other.

This got me thinking about the designing aspects of the classroom. Some people would argue that the only important aspect of a room is what takes place in it, but I maintain that the designs of classrooms can have a tremendous impact on learning. Most of today’s classrooms are designed with the teacher at the center. Not so at Sancta Maria. Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory implicitly asks the designer of the learning environment to consider a variety of learning spaces -- spaces in diverse sizes, materials, and colors as well as spaces with different transparency, connectivity, and agility. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ idea isn’t acceptable anymore.

Children develop through interactions, first with the adults in their lives -- parents and teachers -- and then with their peers, and ultimately with the environment around them. Environment is the third teacher. Our school building is one structure that fulfills the needs of a ‘learning environment’.