Dear Susan: I have some flexible seating available for my students. Do you have any suggestions on how to manage it when it becomes more of a distraction for the other students?
A: Implementing flexible seating can be a great way to help students refocus their energy and concentrate on the lesson being taught. If you have just a section of the classroom designated as a flexible area, it can be a nice change of perspective for students. And with the addition of unique seating like exercise balls, cushions, or rockers, students can release pent-up energy and focus on the lesson.
However flexible seating needs to be designed with a goal in mind so that students’ energies are directed in the way you want them to be. For example, a section of the class that is set up as a collaboration area – say, with a small table surrounded by cushions or stools where the students face each other – is great for independent study or group activities. It may not be the best setup if you want students to pay attention to you during a direct teaching session, however.
Dianna Radcliff, a 5th-grade ELA teacher, turned her entire classroom into a flexible seating space and says that she has very few problems keeping students engaged. Her suggestions for doing this successfully work just as well with classrooms that are part traditional, part-flexible seating.
- Visualize the end goal of the flexible seating arrangement. Is it to go along with a trend or to facilitate a genuinely student-centered environment?
- Research similar flexible seating arrangements by other teachers and ask questions about how and when the seating is used and what to do when the seating arrangement is disruptive to others.
- Allow kids to help make the rules about who gets to sit in the flexible seating area and when.
- Make modifications when needed, such as when a new student joins the class, an IEP student needs an accommodation, a new school year begins, and so on.
- Evaluate whether the flexible seating is working and decide whether to continue it.
What if the students are still arguing over who gets the flexible seating, are being disruptive, or even worse, damaging the seating after the rules are made? You’ll need to remove that seating and remind students of the rules temporarily.
The blog Tame the Classroom discusses this problem and teacher solutions in a real-life classroom.
“First, a student poked a hole in one of our stability balls on a day that I had a substitute teacher. … We had a funeral for the stability ball and replaced it with a chair. I was very stern in reminding the students that our stability balls cost money. They also realized that was one less option that they could choose from.”
When students were rushing to be first to the classroom’s Hokki Stools during transitions, the teacher temporarily brought back assigned seating. “I encouraged them to use the time that they were banned from exercising their choice to choose a seat to think about our rules.” Having students take the consequences for their poor choices is a vital and necessary part of their moral development and maturity.
Flexible seating in higher grades can be problematic as well. Kayse Morris found that her eighth-grade students didn’t follow the rules about rotating their seating each day, and worse, they didn’t listen to her lecture. Many of them slept in class, tucked into sofa cushions out of sight. Some cheated on tests.
For Morris, the distractions caused by flexible seating outweighed the benefits to the students, and she decided to return to a traditional seating arrangement. But you don’t have to completely abandon the idea: Take a look at the current setup, write down what is working and what isn’t working, and consider whether you need to simply enforce the rules or revamp the layout of the flexible seating section. Sometimes, it’s about finding the balance between traditional seating time and flexible seating time. Also, know your students. Teens and couches in the classroom probably won’t work out most of the time.
Image credit: Kayla Dornfeld
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