alternative learning environments: the situation room
Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to love the bomb. Stanley Kubrick, director
The flipped classroom offers an opportunity to take advantage of group intelligence and apply it to real problems. To be successful, it requires a situation room. That room would immerse participants in relevant data, offer them tools to explore solutions and ramifications, and facilitate group activity. The institutional classroom in the hands of a very enterprising teacher might look a little like this, but the key to a situation room is the way it brings information together from vast and diverse perspectives: it is a cross-pollinating, collaborative environment that transgresses departmental boundaries. A situation room will tackle problems both immediate and historic: climate change, slavery, capitalism, border security, poverty. It may devote itself to one topic for a week or a semester or a year. Its goal is problem definition, research, analysis, brainstorming, proposed action, and possible results.
Notre Dame B011