Open classroom

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An open classroom is a student-centered classroom design format popular in the United States in the 1970s. In its most extreme form, entire schools were built without walls, which made teaching loudly disruptive. It has been largely abandoned and discredited, and students in schools which were built with no walls usually see it as a deficit.

Today, classrooms that are physically open are rare, as many schools that were built when the idea of open education was translated by educational bureaucracy to mean "without walls" have long since put up partitions. However, in many places, the open philosophy as an instructional technique continues to thrive, though it is frequently not labeled as such. In schools where open education was not a top-down initiative, but a bottom-up phenomenon, they met with success. Piedmont Open/IB Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina, for example, was started as one of the original two magnet middle schools in Charlotte in the 1970's. While the other magnet (a "traditional" school) has closed, Piedmont is still functioning as a modified open school thirty years later, all the time housed in a traditional physical plant.

Open schools that last must keep an informed parent and student body and especially a committed faculty. If one places a traditional teacher into an open environment, success is elusive. The lack of structure, physical (walls) or pedagogical (choice), can readily be blamed. Conversely, a committed open teacher with a supportive administration can create an open classroom in any school setting. Teachers who today require student input in the process of deciding how to master a given topic are indeed running open classrooms, whether or not they use the "open" label.