Five steps in designing your new-look classroom

Before you call in your secondary or primary school furniture suppliers – or even a designer – there’s a lot that you can do yourself to start to redesign your classroom so that it’s more flexible and engaging for your students. Here are some of the key things to keep in mind:
1) Look at what you can remove from the room
Call this Spring Cleaning if you like, but getting unnecessary things out of the classroom is both important to make room for the new secondary/ primary school furniture that you’re going to be installing, and to give teachers and students room to move around.
2) Look for ways to give students different seating options
Plan out the classroom so that you will end up with some desks in rows, some allowing for individual seating, while others in a “boardroom-style” so that the desks are facing one another. And then give students the option of where they would like to sit. Giving students agency like that, to interact with the space in their own terms, is the best way to improve their comfort levels with the classroom.
3) Design spaces for collaboration
Draw out spaces in the classroom specifically designed for students to collaborate with one another. Modern learning should have a strong focus on encouraging students to find solutions in a group, rather than as an individual, and so these spaces are important to facilitate this. Once you’ve mapped out these collaboration spaces, be sure to get specialised secondary/ primary school furniture designed to further encourage collaboration installed into those spaces.
4) Remove the teacher’s footprint
Teachers don’t really need desks in the modern classroom, and indeed a teacher’s desk can reduce the agency that a student might feel in the room; they might feel that parts of the classroom are “off limits”.
5) Create quiet spaces as well
It’s important to be able to give students spaces where they can quietly read and study, too. Blocking out a space that’s surrounded by bookshelves, plants, and has comfortable seating inside is a useful way of drawing a line between the noise of the rest of the class and that quiet space.

Once you’ve got the design of the classroom sorted, it’s time to talk to Abax Kingfisher about how to convert those ideas into a functional classroom. For both secondary and primary school furniture suppliers, we are one of Australia’s leaders, and will be able to translate your plans for a healthier and better outcomes-focused classroom into a reality. Contact us today at 1300 811 054.