CLASSROOM DESK ARRANGEMENTS: ROWS, CLUSTERS OR U SHAPE?

There are a several critical teaching behaviours that affect student behaviour. One of the most important is how a teacher plans the physical classroom environment. When I was studying Education at University, in Australia, it was pretty much an accepted fact that an arrangement that suited collaborative group work for our students was best, and therefore clusters or groups of tables was preferred. Not surprisingly, given that collaborative workers is one of the IB Learner Profile attributes there is an emphasis on group work and therefore a classroom arrangement of groups or clusters would be the most effective. Though, critics point out that half the students are not facing the board and some researchers have found that sitting around tables, children find it harder to concentrate, often have their backs to teachers and waste more time chatting – misusing as much as a quarter of the lesson.

However, traditional teachers prefer the more classic rows, this makes it easier for them to control the students and they can be certain that all students are paying attention to the front of the class. A 20-year study by Professor Nigel Hastings of Nottingham Trent University, has confirmed that pupils who sit in groups are at a massive disadvantage compared to those who face the blackboard. Some of his analysis of the research findings has shown that youngsters whose desks are arranged in old-style rows work up to twice as hard. Which is generally a good thing for classrooms that rely on a teacher centred model of learning but not so great for student inquiry.

However, other studies such as one by Rosenfield published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that their results confirm their hypotheses that students seated in circles engage in significantly more on-task behavior than those in rows and that students seated in clusters engage in more on-task behavior than those in rows but less than those in circles. But they also acknowledged that students’ behavior varied significantly across student types, as one would expect.

Essentially, it boils down to a combination of teaching styles, students’ learning styles and the type of activity being conducted at the time. Being flexible is paramount, a concern that teachers may have is that regularly rearranging desk arrangements may cause disruption and noise at the start of a class. But this does not have to be the case, in practice classroom desk arrangement changes can usually be completed in around one minute once the students are used to the concept.

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