Seating and movement

This is an assignment I had to do for class. I describe the seating arrangement in my mentor's classroom, the way she moves throughout the classroom, and the educational implications of this arrangement.

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My mentor teacher has a cavernous room. But fully 1/3 of it remains unused because it shares a wall with the cafeteria and the noise would make learning all but impossible, so she only uses the front of the room. Even so, there is quite a bit of noise from the cafeteria for much of her teaching day.

There are two parallel lines of chairs, one along the wall next to the door, the other about two feet in front of it, following the diagonal line of the wall. These two lines make up one side of a triangle. Three more parallel lines of chairs going diagonally in the other direction are the second side. The third side of the triangle is the front wall with the blackboard, and there is a very large triangular open space in the middle of the room. The teacher's desk is tucked away behind the line of chairs along the diagonal wall, in the space leading off to the darkened, unused part of the room. Three large windows are almost entirely painted over, so virtually no sunlight reaches the classroom.

I find this seating arrangement unconducive to just about all of my mentor's goals. She wants the students to work individually most of the time, either on journals, worksheets or doing independent reading, and yet they are crammed tightly and regimentally together in a rather large space. The students are literally shunted off to the sides, leaving a gap in the center in which the teacher rarely takes up position. The teacher wants them to share their journal entries aloud with each other; but because of the large open space in the middle of the classroom, it is very difficult for anyone on one side of the triangle to hear someone speaking on the other side of it. Many students go up to the blackboard to share instead of speaking from their seats, but even then the apex of the triangle is about 20 feet away so unless the person sharing is speaking loudly and distinctly there is not much chance of everyone understanding what is being said. In addition, a significant portion of the students - those who are near the bottom of the triangle, formed by the blackboard - cannot see most of what has been written on the board from their seats.

The seating arrangement works against the most important goal of teaching, which is increasing the amount of time students spend concentrating on their work. This time on task comes in spurts that can be measured in seconds before another conversation breaks out somewhere in the room. The chairs are much too close together, inviting small-scale conversations. In one of the classes, there's a girl who I almost only see from the back of her head because she spends pretty much the entire 4-period English block turned around talking to the girls behind her.

My mentor told me that the students had originally been assigned seats in order for her to be able to learn their names. Now she occasionally tries to "break up groups" who are constantly talking, but because the whole class stays together pretty much for the entire day it doesn't seem to matter who is sitting next to whom - there's always something more interesting going on with one's fellow students than the work that has been assigned. The teacher also allows students to get up whenever they need to sharpen a pencil, get a tissue or sanitize their hands. This leads to students strolling casually across the open triangle and making comments or entering into conversation with other groups while everyone is supposed to be working.

The teacher spends most of her time behind the perimeter of the triangle, far from her desk. When she is giving directions she will sometimes come into the open space, but not often - and she does not stay there for long. She almost never moves between the seats because there is not enough room; she is a heavy-set woman and only someone much more slender could negotiate the space. When she is sitting at her desk and writing a referral for a student, a procedure that takes about 3-4 minutes and one which she has done at least once every time I have been in her classroom, it is as if she has disappeared because her desk is outside the communal classroom space. If she comes into the triangle at all, she is usually standing at the apex, near her desk, and speaking from there. I tend to sit close to her desk, since that is the only vantage point from which I can see most of the students and the blackboard as well; but my mentor writes on the blackboard first thing in the morning, before the students arrive, and does not change anything on the board for the entire day. There is no functioning technology of any kind in the classroom, with the exception of the electric pencil sharpener and the loudspeaker.

This may sound harsh, but the message that this whole arrangement communicates is that the teacher doesn't want to be with the students, and there is nothing for them to learn. It is hard to imagine how instructor and students can engage productively with each other in this classroom setup.

However, because there are more than 30 students in the class and so much of the room is unusable, coming up with an adequate seating arrangement is difficult. Contrary to what would normally be my impulse, which is to be the "guide on the side" rather than the "sage on the stage," I would probably put my desk in front of the blackboard and have three concentric arcs of student chairs around it. I would set the chairs up with enough space between them so that I can walk up to anyone in the room in less than two seconds if I am leaning on the front of my desk, and I would make it a point at the beginning of the term to say that a walk-through space between desks has to be maintained. I would also try to stagger the chairs so that I can see everyone in the class from my desk, although this might not be possible.

The real question would be whether I could keep the chairs far enough away from each other to discourage side conversations and still have room for everyone in the class. Because these are ninth graders and they are just learning what it means to have an in-depth discussion - or at least they are supposed to be learning that - it is probably not such a bad thing if they have to direct their comments tp me and then I bounce the comments back outward to the rest of the class. I would prefer that they engage each other, and in fact they are doing so in the classes I observe - it's just that most of this engagement is completely unrelated to their education.