The following changes have been made to the conference programme:
Peter Riegler
Cultures shape spatial environments and get shaped by them. The lecture hall can be viewed as being shaped by an educational culture of considering information transfer as paramount while at the same time fostering this culture. The spatial environment has been termed the third educator, with the instructor and the fellow students being the other two educators.
The supportive role of the spatial environment and, hence, the third educator, receives special attention in Student Centered Activating Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) where students are seated at group tables. This arrangement removes spatial barriers to students’ interaction and collaboration which are typical for traditional classrooms. Moreover the spatial arrangement signals to the students that cooperation and co-construction of knowledge is essential in this class. It also signals that the instructor is not the central resource for learning since in a SCALE-UP room there is no front anymore.
The spatial environment also signals messages to the instructor. Taking the proverb of the third educator literally, teaching in such an environment will be conceptualized as co-teaching with this third educator (as well as with the second – the students) in this contribution. This notion also best describes the instructor’s experience. This contribution reports on the shifts observed and experienced in an automata theory class which moved to a SCALE-UP environment after having been taught in a traditional lecture hall for years. The implementation of SCALE-UP could be characterized as mild. It basically added the spatial arrangement characteristic for SCALE-UP to a class regularly being taught in a Just-in-Time-Teaching setting. Other features characteristic for SCALE-UP such as arranging fixed group membership and supporting group reflection have not been implemented.
SCALE-UP has recently gained considerable popularity and has proven to be effective for student learning. This contribution will add another data point to these findings. It draws on available data such as class attendance, performance on formative assessment tasks and exams, and student feedback to the instructor as well as the instructors’ experiences. These data consistently show an increase in student learning with the strongest effect being a considerable decrease of the failure rate and a statistically significant increase of the attendance rate. Given the rather mild implementation of SCALE-UP in this class it can be concluded that a mere (but deliberate) change of the spatial setting can contribute noticeably to the learning of both students and instructors.