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Some Aromas-San Juan Unified School District students returned from winter break to find themselves in redesigned classrooms with high-concept furniture, flexible workspaces and new educational tools—all part of Superintendent Barbara Dill-Varga’s ongoing redefinition of Anzar High, Aromas and San Juan schools as centers of innovative approaches to learning.
“I know when I took courses where everything was very rigid, I did not want to go back,” Dill-Varga said. “And yet we make kids go through the same thing with no choice.”
In the lead-up to the renovation, the district hired educational designer David Jakes to conduct an extensive study of the schools which started in January 2022, and included interviews with students, teachers and administrators at each school as well as a community town hall.
“David worked with all of the teachers for several weeks,” Dill-Varga said. “Last June, they started looking at drafts he put together based on what they said they wanted to do with their classrooms in August.”
The district finalized the plans in September, then started working on emptying three classrooms at each school, repainting them and installing moveable, modular furniture.
“When everything was ready,” Dill-Varga said, “David came back to talk about configurations they could use for different learning purposes. It’s a pilot program, so every classroom is different.”
Dill-Varga said that a wide variety of classroom types at different grade levels were selected and that teachers had input into the process.
“All the teachers got to feel the chairs and look at the space,” she said. “They got to sit on the furniture and move it around to get a sense of what might be coming in the future.”
By starting with just a few classrooms, the district hopes to get a sense of which vendors are the most reliable and responsive, which chairs are the most comfortable for the students, which floor coverings are the easiest to clean, and how durable everything stands up to normal wear and tear.
“One thing we’re really trying to do,” she said, “is come up with criteria and principles for purchasing furniture on a large scale for when we rebuild San Juan School. We are also hoping to do a few more classrooms every year at the other two sites.”
Dill-Varga, her teachers and her staff have been keeping in touch with Jakes through an app called “Padlet” which lets them share notes and videos detailing, for example, what is going right or wrong in the new classrooms, or just moments of accomplishment like when the students of a second grade class completely rearranged their room in under 60 seconds. Jakes also returned in April for an in-person review of the project.
San Juan principal Ethan Stokes said the new classrooms represent a philosophical shift in how the district approaches teaching and learning.
“Teachers have different activities that require different kinds of spaces and opportunities for students to interact with one another,” he said. “We are figuring out ways to support that intelligently. It’s a much more student-centered approach that many schools have been slow to adopt.”
Dill-Varga said students responded very well to the new classrooms and that many were surprised the district would spend so much on them.
“I think the yield from this is only positive,” she said. “They feel invested in, they feel taken care of. I think the reputation of this school is already on an upward trajectory and I think the classrooms are a physical representation of what we have tried to achieve here.”
Dill-Varga gave BenitoLink a tour of the three Aromas School classrooms, accompanied by principal Heather Howell. She also gave BenitoLink a tour of the three San Juan School classrooms, accompanied by principal Ethan Stokes. BenitoLink will also be visiting Anzar High School in the near future.
Aromas School
Kim Wilson’s fifth-grade mathematics classroom
“Kim has been doing what is called ‘building thinking classrooms,’” Dill-Varga said. “It’s a model in which the kids are up and about and working in groups; exploring math tasks, talking and collaborating with each other.”
All of the desks are on wheels and can be easily moved into different configurations, quickly changing, for example, from small groups to full-class setups, which Wilson said gives the students more ownership of the space. The chairs are designed to allow the child to comfortably sit in them five different ways, and the armrests can be used almost like small desks. Some of the chairs and tables can also be adjusted to different heights.
Large whiteboards attached to the walls are a standard feature in all the new classrooms.
“Studies show that if they are standing, their brains are working better,” Wilson said. “So instead of sitting all day long, they can get up and work. Everybody gets a chance to show what they think, and it improves performance.”
The students can also detach the boards and bring them back to their desks to continue working while seated.
“I really like the chair designs,” said Avery Thomas, 10. “Everything is a lot cleaner and neat, and I also like the colors. I also really like how we have the whiteboard, which allows us to work with each other.”
Adrienne Salamida’s TK and kindergarten classroom
Salamida’s room features a colorful rug, padded modular chairs and flat lily-pad-like “dots” in half the room and serpentine modular desks and chairs in the other. The kids move fluidly from area to area depending on the type of lesson or activity the teacher has planned.
“This week we’re working on science,” Salamida said. “We have a lot of science going on, so we have cooperative groups. Last week, it was more of an independent working week. And so we had most students facing towards us. But they definitely move around.”
The chairs on the rug are called ‘soft seating,’ and the modular nature of the units makes it easy for the students to move them wherever they want and set them up as individual chairs or short couches. If a child does not want soft seating or a dot, they can sit on the floor.
“I see them more comfortable,” she said. “I see them engaging with other students and not just the students that are directly around them. It’s really encouraging them to work together and work cooperatively. They help each other more.”
Leslie Rayburn sixth grade science classroom
“Leslie does a lot with whiteboards,” Dill-Varga said. “We found out she did not have enough space on them for how she wanted to use them, so we had to get more. It was us learning how the kids would work with them.”
The classroom is fitted out with tall science tables with cubbies underneath and tall chairs on wheels.
“It gives them movement so they can slide around and see the teacher as she’s teaching,” Dill-Varga said. “They have the adaptability to fit what the learning needs are at that point in time.”
Rayburn said before the new furniture arrived, she often found it too much of a bother to move desks into more useful configurations.
“It would take like five minutes, and the kids would get crazy when we try to move,” she said. “So I just leave it rather than shift it around. But these desks and chairs make it very streamlined. And the kids have told me how clean they think it looks.”
San Juan School
Kim Soto’s resource specialist program room
Intended for students from kindergarten through eighth grade who qualify for special education, this classroom is geared toward more individualized instruction.
“There is a need for furniture of different sizes and for different needs,” Stokes said. “There is, deliberately, not a lot of color because we didn’t want to overload these kids. This is kind of a home base for kids who maybe are just needing a moment.”
According to Dill-Varga, the soft seats scattered around the room and a huge bean bag chair are also deliberate choices.
“They are here for the kids who need to feel embraced or cozy,” she said. “There are also chairs that wobble because kids sometimes need to move a bit.”
The room also features large blocks that can be moved and interlocked in a variety of ways to make chairs, play structures or tables. However, it lacks some of the details seen at the Aromas School, such as new flooring.
“We didn’t do any major construction on the room itself,” Dill-Varga said. “We did not want to put a lot of money into something that is just going to be torn down.”
Tanya Good’s dual instruction classroom
There are various desk styles in Good’s room, intended as a way of testing them to see what works best for creating different spaces.
“This classroom is the best example of why you do a furniture pilot,” Stokes said. “It became clear pretty quickly that the serpentine desks, called ‘thumbprint desks,’ are much more versatile than the triangular desks. You can put them together in about 25 different ways.”
The whiteboards in Good’s class are on wheels, allowing students to move them into different areas of the class for work or presentations. She also has a video camera above her desk which projects onto a large screen in the front of the class, allowing her to better illustrate what she is teaching.
Good’s class is the one that was rearranged in the video uploaded to the Padlet, and she said that being able to change up the class helps keep the students engaged.
“I think that there’s something about the autonomy of your own learning space that makes it exciting for students to learn,” Good said. “They also have a lot of freedom to choose how they want to make their own learning space which has been really freeing for them.”
Alan Samuels’ language arts and social science classroom
Stokes said Samuels was on the leading edge in the school’s classroom design even before the district started this experiment.
“He was already kind of embracing this flexibility,” Stokes said. “He was already moving his furniture around to do different things. He just took what he had and made it work.”
The classroom features a modular oval couch as well as desks and chairs of different heights. Samuels said that the mobility of the furniture allows him to quickly change from one teaching technique to another.
“Right now they are annotating a text they are listening to,” Samuels said. “Then we will do a Socratic seminar where the kids will do short responses. This new furniture makes the transition possible because everything is more flexible.”
To make the change happen, the class was able to form a circle of desks around the couch in a matter of minutes, completely transforming the space from students focused on the TV screen showing the reading to sitting face-to-face.
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