Inspiring Spaces in the College of Education’s DeGarmo Hall

By Tommy Navickas

This article and photo originally appeared in Illinois State University News and are reprinted with permission.

For several years, the College of Education has prioritized the redesign of classrooms and computer labs to reflect the flexible learning needs of aspiring educators and their future students.

The first reimagined collaborative space was Studio Teach. The third-floor, approximately 2,000-square-foot area overlooks the University’s Quad. It features dozens of flexible seating options, stations where multiple students can connect to a single monitor, SMART Boards, a 3D printer, an educational gaming area, a writeable white board partition, multiple wall-mounted monitors, and an array of technology available for checkout.

Storage areas on DeGarmo’s garden level have also been converted to classroom spaces with several interactive monitors that can be controlled individually or together through a single source. In addition, several classroom spaces in DeGarmo have been remodeled with a few more to come this fall. They too incorporate flexible seating and cutting-edge educational technologies.

The Richard L. Benson Flexible Learning Space was created with the help of funding by the alumnus for which it was named.

It’s a shift in mindset reflective of the evolving state of PreK–12 learning environments across

Member Voices: Accelerating First-Year Teachers’ Impact in Schools

By Tommy Navickas

This article originally appeared on the Illinois State University news site. It is reposted here with permission. The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.

Last fall semester, Blake Slutz ’15 was among Illinois State University’s 47 special education graduates. He and his fellow new alumni all passed the edTPA test during their student teaching semesters. Their success was not isolated. Across the university’s entire education program, the largest in the state, 99% of teacher candidates passed the assessment. Illinois State’s performance far exceeded the national average of 85%.