Effective Seating Arrangements to Maximize Teaching and Learning.

Some facilitators deliberately ask learners to sit in specific seats for whole class work, such as listening to the teacher explaining something.

This arrangement may be:

Alphabetical order of surname or first name.
Age or height.
Recent test scores.
Gender (all the boys on one side, all the girls on the other; or girl/boy, girl/boy).
Good and naughty (the naughtier you are, the closer you are to the front).

Some of these ways don’t creatively match up people for specific reasons, such as those who might work well together or who might support each other.

The techniques in this article suggest some ways that the facilitators can arrange people within the whole class.

For making arrangements useful when working in pairs and groups and keeping pair work and group work interesting.

If left to choose for themselves, many learners will always sit in the same place every lesson.

Most of us do it when we enter a classroom.

Some seats feel comfortable, safer, more suitable, more like ‘ours’.

Even experienced facilitators who briefly return to the learner’s role on refresher training courses find that they quickly establish their own place in a room.

When we are the teacher with a class of learners, we have to decide how much we go with the natural unfolding of things or how much we intervene to reshape the room and events to achieve what we hope will be a better result.

Learners might well show reluctance or unhappiness at being asked to change to a different place, but it’s worth taking the risk.

Part of the job of teaching is helping people discover things that they didn’t know they wanted.

When learners meet and talk with new people, there may be surprising new learning.

The extra effort and initial discomfort may be more than counterbalanced by other pleasant and surprising results.

Nevertheless, some seating layouts may prove not to work at all.

As a facilitator you need to remain alert to genuine unhappiness, people who simply do not get on together and groupings that do not gel.

Here are some ideas for organizing learners in different ways for different purposes.

All of these require the teacher to proactively make the organization happen.

This may be at the beginning of class or at one or more points later in the lesson.

Mixed nationalities / language groups

You may decide to deliberately place students from different language groups next to each other or more importantly, make sure that learners who speak the same language do not sit together.

Language support

You can sit stronger learners next to weaker ones in order that the former can help the latter.
This can work well for short periods of time, but may be unfairly demanding on the stronger learners if done over a long time and could be embarrassing for the weaker ones.
Contrastingly, you can group learners by language level.
Sitting stronger learners next to each other and weaker learners together.
This allows you to offer different tasks, or variations on the same task, to different learners.
Make sure that any differentiated arrangement you make does not visibly separate or pick out the weaker learners in any way that could be embarrassing or uncomfortable.

Friendships

Wherever they sat when they came into the room very often reflects friendships, but is also typically quite random people sit wherever there is a remaining space.
You may want to engineer things a little more, deliberately placing people that you know like each other close together.

Learner-planned seating

Ask your learners to plan who sits where.
This task could be done in groups where each group has a blank plan of the desks and seats.
Each group’s arrangement could then be used for a lesson (or a week) and then the next group’s plan and so on.
You will need to check that there is no deliberate unkindness involved, e.g. placing learners who don’t like each other together.
You may want to allow some time (e.g. after the lesson) when students can feed back to you if they are uncomfortable with any future lesson’s seating plan.

Getting students quickly into the right places

This is an efficient way of getting students to quickly sit in the place you want them to be in.
Draw a plan showing classroom seat position.
Photocopy it a few times for future use and different classes.
On one copy, write the names of the students on each desk, indicating where they should sit.
Pin this up on the wall outside the room or just inside the door.
Train your students to look at this plan as they arrive and go straight to their seat.
It will be chaos the first time you try it, but persevere it gets better when they have done it a few times.

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