Classroom arrangements impact how children learn and play together. Learning and development are optimized when the classroom environment offers nurturance and ample opportunities for exploration, play, and learning that are matched to a child’s needs and interests. Early childhood environments must be furnished and arranged to meet children’s developmental needs, including space for periods of movement or autonomous exploration and quiet areas for rest, indoor and outdoor spaces. Materials and equipment must be carefully selected to ensure safety and promote high quality learning experiences for children with a wide range of developmental abilities, needs, and interests.
Coaches should help teachers understand strategies that promote learning, such as stimulating curiosity, encouraging exploration, learning through play, and challenging children to work just beyond their current knowledge level. Setting goals for a teacher will help you plan in a targeted and purposeful way. One way to visual display how to improve the classroom environment is to provide the teacher with pictures, or video examples of what a planful, playful, and purposeful classroom looks like.
You may consider using the following competencies to improve classroom environments teaching:
- The coach creates and sustains a safe learning environment that encourages experimentation with new ideas, reflection on practices, and questioning
- The coach provides positive encouragement to motivate the practitioner to try new strategies and/or practices or persist when implementation challenges arise
- The coach supports the practitioner with articulating specific action steps (e.g., lesson adaptation) that are in alignment with their reflections on or conclusions about events and interactions
Mentoring Prompts
These prompts are designed to focus on the learning environment.
- “What do you notice about the basic arrangement of the classroom?”
- “What are some things you noticed in the exemplar, that align with your classroom environment? What are some things you need to change?”
- “Are there clearly defined areas for variable groupings?”
- “What are the traffic patterns for children and adults in this room?”
- “How do your centers support a wide range of developmental abilities, needs, and interests?”