In my last post I mentioned my despair at the focus and training teachers received on classroom management. It is largely non existent. Classroom management is so important it should be thought of as a core curriculum area for teachers to master.
Setting your room up is an integral part of being an effective teacher and managing your room. Unfortunately too much time, money, thought and energy are devoted to room decoration. A theme, pretty colours, fancy fonts and lovely labels don’t influence the learning in your room. The article, ‘Visual “Noise”, Distractibility, and Classroom Design’ by Lucy Erickson is a great place to start if you are looking for some clarity on this.
Very few teachers deliberately set their room up for learning. Many think they do, but they don’t. Setting up a classroom and having to defend what you have done should be a part of all teacher training. Not just on a piece of paper, not on software, but in an actual room with furniture.
If you are in a school now you should be able to explain, in some depth, how your room set up prioritises learning. Leaders in schools should be able to guide teachers to look carefully at what they do and why they do it. Your classroom should allow you to leverage effective teaching practice.
Tom Bennett talks about ten principles that underpin classroom management. One that teachers struggle to accept is ‘your room, your rules’. In my opinion this applies to you setting your room up. Remember that you are the expert where learning is concerned.
Students need to see what being successful looks like, they need the opportunity to talk, they need the chance to wrestle with the struggle of working independently, they need feedback and time to do something about it. This has to happen every lesson.
Your room has to be set up to let all of this occur.
Classrooms in Victoria at a primary school level usually resemble a square or rectangle. I use the word resemble because there are some ridiculous architect notions that exist in schools. Be wary of anything promoted as flexible, innovative or catering for a range of learning styles. Having said that there is a remarkable similarity in how classrooms are set up.
The majority come with a large whiteboard on a wall, storage for student bags and many have a teacher office or small withdrawal area.
After that teachers are usually left to juggle:
Floor space
Chairs and tables for students
Tub trolley for student materials
Classroom library
Television
Frequently used maths equipment
Everyday equipment storage for items such as mini whiteboards, markers and rulers
Display areas (usually literacy and maths)
Floor space, chairs and tables are the ones that really matter.
How you set your room up will be dictated by the positioning of the whiteboard. It is used for every lesson, it is where students check your exemplars, where you do your modelling, where you introduce and review vocabulary for the lesson, probably where you record success criteria and where student attention is often directed during a lesson. It is why there is an open floor area at the front of most classrooms.
Setting up a floor area for students to sit is overwhelmingly the first priority chosen by teachers if asked. However having a floor area and deliberately planning for the space you need are not the same thing.
Usually the floor area provided for a class is poorly thought about and provided and as a result the area is too small to be effective.
You need a space where:
You have proximity to all students when they sit as a whole group
One student can easily move to the whiteboard to demonstrate or share
The whole group can sit in a circle or oval
Small groups can face each other and you can move between them easily
The whole group can sit comfortably with a whiteboard or workbook in front of them
You can include a teacher chair
If seating isn’t the first priority it is always second. Teachers on the whole set up two, three or four tables creating a group.
I am not saying don’t do this. But I do hear as a familiar complaint from teachers that their class is noisy, chatty or easily distracted. If you set up tables as groups, whether intentionally or not, then you are asking students to socialise. If tables are set up as groups you must have strong routines and expectations that you have taught around independent work. I have always found option four useful when teaching this behaviour.
You should strongly consider options other than grouping if you have provided the floor space actually required. These three use less floor area than the above and work equally well for effective teaching even if you don’t use floor space.
I am saying think about the purpose you need the tables to provide most of the time. Most of the time because while flexibility is an alluring word it is rare for tables to be moved once in place.
The answer to that thought should be for students to engage in some independent work, perhaps to think-pair-share, for the teacher to check on how successful students are and to give feedback to individual students as they practise the new learning for a lesson.
Your seating needs to:
Help delineate your floor space
Let you move to all tables looking at student work within 60 seconds
Allow for independent work
Be accessible to students quickly and safely
Allow you to give feedback without distraction
Provide transition pathways to the floor and any materials or equipment used regularly
Let students focus towards or move back to the whiteboard, television or anchor charts quickly and comfortably
This is what your room might look like at this point.
You can see there is room for all of the other items on my original list, including a well stocked classroom library. There is even room for a teacher desk. Unless you have to though a teacher desk should never be in a classroom. If you have to it should be at the back of the room against a wall. I see a lot of teacher desks in rooms that also have an office area. I am yet to hear anyone defend that decision based on effective teaching and student learning.