Learning environment refers to the diverse physical locations, contexts, and cultures in which students learn.
Since students may learn in various settings, such as outside-of-school locations and outdoor environments, the term is often used as a more accurate or preferred alternative to the classroom, which has more limited and traditional connotations—a room with rows of desks and a chalkboard, for example.
The term also encompasses the culture of a school or class—its presiding ethos and characteristics, including how individuals interact with and treat one another—as well as how teachers may organize an educational setting to facilitate learning.'
While an ideal learning environment is the one that provides you with the tools and opportunities to succeed, it balances the needs of every learner, meeting your own unique personal objectives. It is a place where those around you can support your endeavours without compromising their goals. Moreover, most importantly, it is a space that feels personally satisfying and scratches a particular need for you.
This post will discuss the characteristics of an ideal learning space or environment.
Positive Asset-Based Relationships
We cannot underestimate the importance of our relationship with students. It starts with getting to know them and building trusting relationships. From the beginning, our goal should be to know our students, identify their qualities and strengths in the form of assets and values, and reflect learners. Gathering information about students is an excellent way to build and strengthen teacher-student relationships and personalize their interactions. Greeting students as you see them is one such example of this relationship-building practice.
Students Have a Say in Matters That Concerns Them
Learners living in difficult situations are more likely to have a loss of control and feelings of helplessness. A good learning environment, here, means one which promotes empowerment by offering several opportunities for students capacity-building and confidence to speak up, address issues, take risks, and make decisions about what works for them. Welcoming students' voices and choices, allowing them to have their say, helps them participate in decisions that affect their learning.
Lessons Are Made Relevant By Relating the Curriculum with Students' Lives
An ideal learning environment works on developing lessons that meaningfully connect to students' experiences and encourage them to become emotionally invested in learning. For instance, linking literary characters and literature to students' personal lives, cultural, social, and world experiences; can validate students' strengths as well as interests.
Routines and Practices Have a Predictable Rhythm
Learning a schedule that uses routines and rituals are critical for alleviating the unpredictable nature of living with adversity. They help students reclaim normalcy and control by supporting a downshift from a fearful state to a calmer and more positive one. An example is a routine opening meeting to describe the day's schedule and discuss how students transition from one activity to another.
The students Ask the Questions
Asking many questions in the classroom may not make a student feel good, but it is very important to make the whole learning process effective as per researches conducted on the role of curiosity, which suggests that the learner enters the learning activity with little or no curiosity, in some cases. It foresees significant and meaningful interactions with media, texts and specific tasks. Most teachers require learners to ask questions from lessons and units. These questions may reflect little understanding of the content but also deter teachers from accepting it. Therefore, it is important to ask questions at elementary school or university to keep everything balanced.
Questions are Valued Over Answers
For effective learning, the questions are considered important to the answers because they open the mind and increase the thinking skills of a person or student. Questions can be valued more if the right questions guide them. Teachers can add money, creative curation, notes or anything for praise and motivation whenever possible during learning. You will see changes in your learning habits and outcomes.
Collection of Ideas
An efficient classroom makes it possible for learners to share ideas for reading, projects, lessons, tests etc. They are considered as the base of formal learning as they come from varied sources. All these learning methods come from a narrow path, which must be orientated towards a specific direction. There are many alternative sources, including the community, cultural and professional mentors, students, and content experts outside the education. There is an enormous shift in credibility.
A Variety of Learning Models are Used
Learning opportunities are endless, as some of the models include direct teaching, reverse classroom, online learning, peer-to-peer, mobile learning, research-based learning, school-to-school learning, project-based learning and many other things. It has been observed that none of the above options or methods can be incredibly tailored to the curriculum, content and diversity of learners in the classroom. Diversity for a highly effective class also has side effects that can improve your long-term capacity as a guardian or educator.
Classroom Learning 'Empties' Within a Connected Community
To make sense in the real world, it is not always important to recondition learning in a highly efficient learning environment, but it begins and ends with a connected community only. Since the onset, it is essential to reject planning on such kind of transfer where students can reflect on the Shakespeare edition and design for better understanding, as it can, on the other hand, distracts the minds of the learners.
Learning is Personalized Using Various Principles
The pupils' learning path is entirely on the shoulders of the teachers, or in other words, the teachers are entirely responsible for the pupils' level of learning. For this reason, individual learning has been introduced as an option. The responsibility of teachers is seen as the greatest challenge as it makes customization a coherent differentiation.
It can help maintain the response to whatever extent you plan for with different criteria by including reading level, assessments results, content readiness, the interest of the students and various other factors. Based on this, you can easily set your learning speed, thoroughness and entry points.
The assessment is authentic, enduring, never punitive and transparent
The learner's understanding can be enhanced by the attempt described as an evaluation. Teachers can easily separate the right thinkers from the right learners if students are obscure, unusual, clinical or fearsome. Generally, clinical ideas are closely related to the tone and emotions of the classroom and differ from the format of the test. It is important to analyze the real reasons for testing students who may be future opportunities for improvement. In such cases, where a student's scoring does not work, feedback is a good option.
Criteria for Success is Transparent and Balanced
In a highly efficient class, success does not need to find its way.
It does not depend entirely on evaluation results, participation, different individual factors and attitude. It can be merged significantly into a coherent framework that can make sense to colleagues, experts, and students.
Learning Habits are Constantly Moulded
There are certain learning habits like behaviour and good cognitive things that can be moulded easily. In addition, there are a few classic habits of the mind, including flexibility, curiosity, collaboration, persistence, priority, revision and creativity, which are considered good places to begin. These factors enable students to learn from indirect and observation sources and to learn less from didactic sources.
Constant Opportunities for Practice
It was noted that old ideas could be revisited, and old errors can be reflected. Complex and challenging ideas can be reevaluated from different angles. In addition, diverging concepts are mixed. To increase learning opportunities and demonstrate understanding of the content for students, the taxonomy has steadily increased and decreased.
Here are few videos for you to better understand an ideal learning environment.
References
https://www.ozassignments.com/characteristics-of-a-highly-effective-learning-learning-environment/
