Shared Space

An Extension of the Classroom

The Shared Space at Mustard Seed School has been repeatedly and publicly recognized for its success.  In 2001, a former faculty member, Dee Mingey, received a Christa McAuliffe Fellowship from the State of New Jersey in order to document the Mustard Seed Lower School Shared Space program and make its unique benefits accessible to other schools. Since then, schools have adopted the Shared Space strategy and extended its use and value to students up through Eighth Grade.  It has been a remarkable program that we are now stretching in new ways. Download the full manual.

Introduction

Friday, February 18, Hoboken, New Jersey -- Lana is busy painting a stegosaurus.  James and Carlos have just extracted a bone from section C-2 in the “archaeological dig” that their classmates had constructed from plastic sheets, hollow blocks, and topsoil earlier this week.  Next they will take the dinosaur bones and fragments to the “lab area” to make observations, use microscopes, and record their findings. Douglas and Claire are sculpting clay models of an apatosaurus, with human figures and natural surroundings built to scale. They are remembering the charts their classmates and teacher had assembled to help them imagine the size of the biggest dinosaurs. Energy bubbles throughout the Shared Space room as Second and Third Graders work together. Engaged in activities connected to thematic units, hammers are tapping, saws are singing, stories are being acted out, water is being poured, weighed, and measured, and observations are being carefully recorded. 

This scene repeats daily at Mustard Seed School, though the themes change from dinosaurs to notable Americans to sled dog races. Children plan, design, create, investigate, record, and reflect in this one vibrant space. Understanding expands as children manipulate their environment with careful guidelines from teachers. Children learn responsibility, respect for the ideas of others, the value of planning, and the power of their own creativity. 

Benefits of the Shared Space

The Shared Space strategy catches the attention of schools and educators because it makes substantial educational goals possible.

• Effective Academic Choice - Students become agents of their own learning and, as a result, learn more deeply and thoroughly.

•  Integrated Learning -  In the Shared Space, various academic disciplines are integrated in meaningful ways with challenging purposes.  Connections become understood and remembered.

• Engagement of Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles - Because students use varied and appropriate media to express their learning, their understandings become complex.  Still further, students with varied gifts and intelligences access knowledge in new ways and sense the enormous value of diverse skills and gifts.

• Cross - Age Groupings -  While working side by side, as well as collaboratively, children teach each other and learn from each other.  Students learn to express themselves effectively to older and younger audiences.

• Cooperative Learning - Each child experiences changing roles as they learn to contribute, lead, follow, record, question, and reflect with others while working towards common goals.

• Self-regulation - Students independently make short and long range plans, taking ownership of their learning, and pursuing personal interests.

• Extended Experiences - As students do all of the above every year from K - 5, they develop complex skills, varied proficiencies, and an integrated view of academics.   This prepares them more fully for the task of forming portfolios and presenting Academic exhibitions in grades 6-8, as well as many other complex academic tasks.

• Reflection and Self-Assessment - Opportunities for students to document their work, reflect upon its value, devise improvements, and carry out revisions and finishing touches are built into this program.  Students learn, first hand, the process of creating excellence.        

• Passion for Learning & Excellence - Excellence is seen in a finished product that shows abiding interest, research, reflection, a grappling with ideas, information, and expressive media.   Here, students enlarge their passion for learning with a passion for excellence.

• Imagination & Creative Thinking -   When a child is able to learn information and see new possibilities, they learn to make new worlds, solve human dilemmas, shape family life, and move flexibly and successfully into high school, their neighborhoods, and the world.  This is what we are made for - to be co-creators with God at work in the world.