Before that, I taught in my schools previous building for 9 years (the last of which was actually remote). The old building was interesting to say the least, mainly because it had NO WALLS. The previous building was built in the 70’s and was based off of an idea from California that if you remove all walls and create a large community area with sub-groups of desks, then students can just look around and acquire knowledge from everyone. For this reason, our school has the word “Community” as part of its name. Word on the street is that as the old building was finishing up construction, news had spread from California that their open-plan layout wasn’t working out as well as they had hoped, but it was took late - the building was almost done already.

This meant we didn’t have real classrooms - we had “pods” made up of around 8 “rooms” separated by 5-foot cubicle walls. The result was chaotic but also amazing. You could stand in the middle of the pod, spin around in a circle, and immediately get a sense of what each teacher was doing in their classroom. It also meant that all the teachers knew each other well and were in constant communication. I was lucky because I actually had three real walls since me and another teacher shared a separate area adjacent to one of the pods.

Below is the final photo taken of me in my first classroom! Notice the old brick walls, the fake whiteboard we used, and the cord that was always a tripping hazard - every time a student tripped on it, the projector came unplugged and they had to wait while I plugged it back in and restarted the projector. SO glad those days are over!

In the new building, we have three separate wings built off of a main hallway (with a birds-eye view, it looks like a capital letter E). The hallways are huge, the building is huge, and everyone seems very far away. I don’t see my fellow teachers as much as I’d like, and a walk to the main office seems like a huge undertaking sometimes, but my classroom is beautiful. All the rooms have a wall with windows, built in projects with direct plug-ins to the wall, and document cameras. We have new MATCHING student desks and high-quality magnetic whiteboards on two walls. I spent several full days in the summer of 2021 setting up and decorating my room and put finishing touches on it as the year went on.

Below is what my classroom looked like during the 2021-22 school year before trying out the ‘Building Thinking Classroom’ model. Notice I only have two walls of whiteboards (the ones that came with my room) and my teacher desk take up the back corner of the room. My Senior Wall of photos used up an entire built-in bulletin board with a green paper background.