Classroom designing: What a challenge

If we think about how a city should be design in order to be balanced, we automatically believe that we have to mix bad neighbourhood with bad neighbourhood and that will be it. As Jane Jacobs says in her article “The death and life of great American cities” “When two or more such hostile islands are juxtaposed the result is called “a balanced neighbourhood” (page 1) People think that to create a balance, the only thing that you need is to mix what is not working, but the only consequence of that are more bad neighbourhood.

This also happen in a classroom. Teachers commonly believe that if they sit one girl and one boy together they will not misbehaved, and they will have the control of the class.
Malcolm Gladwell in his article “Designing for working” explains the importance of organizing an office. He says that the distance between people is important when you want your workers to communicate. The ones who sit near talk more that the one who sit far away.

I believe those points can also be used to design a classroom. I have some rules when we talk about class organization. First of all it is important that the students feel comfortable with their classroom; it has to be well illuminated and well ventilate. The student’s desks have to be in a position in which everyone can look to the teacher and to the white board with no problem. An important thing for me is to decorate the class in order to get their attention. You can play with colours, pictures, etc.

In my opinion those are the basic principle in order to have a comfortable classroom and an appropriate environment to teach.