Mosaic Senior Faculty Fellow Feedback
Findings: Most significant issues in classroom support and development
Prompt 3: What do you see as the most signiﬁcant issue(s) that we need to address as we move forward with support and development of IU classrooms?
SELECT DETAILED RESPONSES
Enrollment vs. Classroom space
- Fewer students per square foot. Allow room to move around. Stop designing classrooms that are clearly set up as traditional forward-facing, all-in-a-row lecture rooms.
- Class size and room size, my access to students individually or in small groups, ability of students to form working groups, visibility in terms of being able to see what is being presented to the room – those are the big ones for me. The equipment is icing, but the ability to interact with students on a smaller scale is the cake. It is so easy for a student to be invisible or at least not be engaged in a large class setting.
Designing for active learning
- The eradication of rooms, such as CC 236 at IUPUC, that work against active learning pedagogical strategies. These rooms can be redesigned or re-purposed. The students are the beneﬁciaries of this investment, and you make faculty lives much easier and happier!
- The giant screens in these lecture rooms take up a lot of space, leaving little area for white boards.
- The biggest challenge is moving away from classroom layouts which best serve lecture and toward those layouts which facilitate collaboration and communication. As always, [it’s also a challenge to infuse] the latest technology into the classroom (e.g., VR, AI, Electronic Whiteboards, etc.) and help professors change their paradigms for how students learn. Of course, the cost of transforming classrooms is a continuous barrier…. At the same time, if we choose to be on the leading edge of learning, we must create those spaces to enable optimum learning experiences.
Faculty and Student Voice
- Allow faculty and students to have a voice in what they need to enhance learning in their classroom. Some courses could beneﬁt from adaptations more than others and by asking the users their preferences and not focusing strictly on campus location or capacity, we could share our spaces better.
Commitment to active learning pedagogies and professional development support
- The faculty would need to embrace the new setup of classrooms to engage student learning and utilize the space … to produce the maximum amount of student engagement.
- Professional development for instructors [should] keep pace with [enhancement of] the features of the room. Even if an instructor is not in a dedicated Mosaic room, there are things instructors can do to engage their students in active learning. Much of this actually starts with the basic design and goals of the course, before the instructor even enters the classroom.
- Need to ensure that teachers assigned to Mosaic classrooms enact active learning pedagogies.