The Journal of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children

Book Review (1)
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Mäkitalo-Siegl, K.; Zottmann, J.; Kaplan, F.; and Fischer, F. (Eds.)
(2010)
Book Review by Heinz Neber; and Sarah Sennebogen
The “classroom of the future“ will be more flexible, diverse, and interactive than the
traditional, almost completely teacher-regulated classroom with its fixed roles, few non-changing
settings, and a rigidly designed architecture. Getzels (1975) already emphasized in an earlier
publication on learning environments that the traditional classroom with its rectangular arrangement
of tables corresponds to a conception of learners as being non-intentional, cognitively “empty”,
without having their own questions, creative thoughts or self-initiated communication.
In the first chapter of the reviewed book, Schratzenstaller illustrates that the architectural
and instructional design of most classrooms still reflects these misleading assumptions about
learners. In classrooms that display the gap between the architecture of the 19th century and the
constructivist learning theory of today they may attain only restricted learning effects (e.g., nontransferable
inert factual knowledge). The potential of students, especially of gifted students, for
actively constructing deep and complex knowledge cannot be productively used in such
environments.
For transforming classrooms into environments (“spaces”) with active learners, this book
contributes a variety of solutions about recent developments in school architecture. Detailed
information is provided about available computer- and internet-based components, about intelligent
objects like interactive walls and desks that can be used by multiple users, as well as about
educational approaches that provide frameworks and procedures for implementing such
components and objects in meaningful ways.
These new approaches come along with a change in the role of the teacher from providing
knowledge to orchestrating the various activities and supporting the learning processes of the
students. Altogether, the twelve chapters of the book describe possibilities to establish school-life
transitions by transforming school-based learning environments into communities with intentionally
engaged and interactive learners who generate individual and community-related knowledge on
different levels.
Although this book does not focus exclusively on gifted learners, it is highly important for
realizing, and in particular for further developing gifted education. The “classroom of the future”
enables to design environments that are required to implement teaching models of the gifted (e.g. as
collected in Maker & Schiever, 2006; or recently presented by Vidergor, Harris & Yamin, 2012). The
developments and models proposed by the book under review contribute to the knowledge of
designing classrooms and schools with a larger diversity of students. Moreover, it illustrates how to
promote individual advancement within an increased spectrum of individual differences. This not
only provides new possibilities for integrating gifted and non-gifted students into the same
environment, but also offers much better opportunities for multidisciplinary learning or effectively
mixing a variety of instructional methods that have been considered as sharp contrasts in the past
(e.g. direct instruction versus discovery approaches like project- or problem-based learning).
Thereby not only the acquisition of meaningful disciplinary knowledge is promoted, but also of
competencies to self-generate this knowledge by the learners in more complex multi-media and
communicatively enriched environments.
Gifted and Talented International – 26(1), August, 2011; and 26(2), December, 2011. 165