T Room or Think Tank

 

Senior year has started off with a kick! While most students of other schools are getting straight into classes, GCE students have gotten the opportunity to go through an orientation for a week, where we talk about getting to know the school as well as discussing what our classrooms will be set up like. One of GCE's greatest strong points is that it allows its students to be actively involved in the logistics of campus life, which includes the layout of the various rooms we will be learning in. the outcome was very interesting and has me quite excited for the coming school year.

Being a successful student in any school is generally not an easy task. Most people make the mistake of allowing themselves to be distracted easily, and for some, it's being too comfortable and prone to sleeping in class. Although I am a student of GCE Lab School, I have come to these issues many times and it got me thinking: "What makes a good and successful student?" To answer this, I asked some of my peers and teachers what they thought and they all had very similar ideas. Being a successful student requires that you are able to pay attention and retain information. The role of a successful student is also filled by your habits, your attitude, as well as your ability to efficiently complete required tasks. There's one more aspect to being a good student that is not on the list above, and that is having a good teacher. As all students can agree, having a good teacher can make one's education experience go from a 3 to a 10. But how does a teacher get identified as a "good" one or a "bad" one? A good teacher is one that is able to relate to their students' learning styles. A good teacher helps their students as they need it with their studies, they also try to bond with their students to a certain extent.

Another component for both a good teacher as well as a good student that wasn't mentioned is the space in which both are learning and doing work. This point, in particular, is what GCE's 2021 orientation was all about; Trying to understand just what type of classroom/environment would we be learning and growing in, and how can we start visualizing it. My room of focus for this idea was the T Room, which is on the upper level and closest to the rear stairwell. The original layout of the room was set up as follows: Large table vertically placed in the section with the window. a smaller table about 4 feet in front of the door, a shelving unit on the north wall, and acoustic panels on the south wall.  

It's not the best view of the room before, but this is what the T Room looked like before we decided to change things around. As you can tell, the room is very filled and everyone is all clustered together and it's just not a room that looks like a "chill and relaxable but attentive" classroom. The way we eliminated it was with a new and improved design that met all of the requirements of the CDC and these tricky times and fit the needs and desires we were looking for. The new design features the same large table placed horizontally a little farther back from the section it was in before. Then we completely eliminated the smaller table and replaced it with 6 comfortable pod chairs scattered throughout the room. We call it... the Think Tank!