Return to the Table
A flat surface on four legs can do amazing things for a classroom.
By Chris Rogers
My goal with this new column is to promote discussion around educational technologies. In particular, I will highlight technologies that get students to form opinions — and as a result, expand thinking, innovating, and arguing. What I am looking for are technologies that catalyze a large diversity of solutions across the classroom, instead of the traditional “everyone gets the same answer” — a diversity index of zero. Technologies like PowerPoint, digital projectors, and scanners tend to drive all students in the same (low-index) direction and therefore will not be featured here. Technologies that will be featured, like the Arduino, the 3-D printer, or my favorite, LEGO Mindstorms, allow students to go in many directions and come up with many different viable solutions, causing them to start learning from each other and thinking deeply about the material as they argue their solutions. This column is not a research article but rather a collection of ideas and thoughts based on what I have seen, and what others share with me, in classrooms from kindergarten to college around the world. So please email me with suggestions and ideas.
The first educational technology I want to highlight is one of my favorites: the table. Although a staple of kindergartens, it is absent from far too many college classrooms. Instead, they have seats bolted to the ground facing forward with a small place for a notepad (or computer). These seats are very effective at focusing the students’ attention forward (or to sleep) but minimize the interaction between students. But take some of the new “classrooms” at Olin College just outside of Boston. You walk into large rooms with lots of tables and no real “front of the class.” The tables are covered with very useful things, such as oscilloscopes and soldering irons, and are right next to even more useful things — like laser cutters and 3-D printers. Suddenly the classroom has gone from a place where students listen to the ideas of others to an environment where students are coming up with their own, arguing the merits of their ideas with other students, and then validating their ideas by building prototypes. The students are excited. They are proud. They are driving their own learning.
Of course this brings up the question of how we balance the telling or showing of our ideas and understanding with helping students develop their own understanding. I believe the table is one of the most powerful technologies to ensure that balance. It provides space for students to use their hands and make something as they learn. It does not focus the students’ attention forward but allows them to be attentive to others at the table. In an introductory physics class at Harvard, Eric Mazur uses the table to get students debating among themselves about various physics concepts. Maker spaces take the table even further by providing kinesthetic learning as students build together or individually.
Let’s consider the table of the future. Imagine a world where you enter the classroom, grab your tabletop from a storage cabinet, and place it on the legs at the soldering station so you can build your next circuit, or over by the whiteboard, so you can brainstorm with the rest of your team, or over by the laser cutter. Setup and cleanup take hardly any time, as you pick up where you left off. Further, your table is filled with tools: an embedded tablet as an engineering notebook, power, and a number of sensors. Now think of teaching heat transfer and asking everyone to measure the conduction of a different material using sensors built into the table, then sharing these data across the classroom so that the students can look for trends and develop models on the effect of thickness, chemical composition, or blowing. Suddenly what was sitting and listening has become an interactive exploration with a broad array of solutions.
Chris Rogers is a professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University. crogers@tufts.edu