My teaching philosophy has engagement as a core principle. I want my students to interact with each other as well as with me. In fact, engagement is encouraged at the university where I teach. However, I've noticed that most of the classrooms where I teach are set up in rows, perfect grids, where all the desks face the front. If the idea of engagement is for students to interact with each other, the row-based classroom set-up seems to work against this. The entire arrangement suggests that students should listen to the teacher as the ultimate authority rather than learning to listen to each other.
I realize that space is at a premium and that many of these rooms need to fit around 40 desks in them, but I wonder where the issue of how classroom space should be organized really lies. Is it with teachers who continue to employ a lecture-based model, is it with a custodial staff who sets up the classroom the way that they remember learning or for ease of cleaning, or is it with administration who wants the classroom space to hold as many students as possible? Or is even some combination of all of these?
When I taught junior high, I experimented with several different arrangements. The double horseshoe (or U-shaped) was nice (two rows of chairs configured into a U-shape where the opening faced the chalkboard--yeah, it was that long ago that we didn't have white boards yet). And our new Classroom Building (CB) has employed this shape for some of the larger lecture rooms with fixed tables and chairs. I also used a modified row system where I divided the room in half and had the rows on the right-side of the room turn to face the ones on the left-side of the room and vice-versa. So it was still rows, but at least students were looking at each other instead of at me.
Now that I teach college, my favorite rooms to teach in are the computer labs in the Liberal Arts (LA) building. This has a single U-shape composed of 6 tables with enough chairs with wheels to seat 20 people. My second favorite rooms are ones with tables (rooms in the library and the Woodbury Business [WB]). Even though the chairs still face the front, at least two, and sometimes three students, have to sit next to each other, so they don't seem as isolated from each other as when they are sitting in their own individual desks. Plus, it seems to be easier for them to work in small groups because they can quickly turn their chairs around to talk to people behind them, if necessary.
When I'm not in those rooms, figuring out how how to adapt the row-based rooms into something that matches my teaching style is always a little difficult. I would love to just move the desks into a circle or a double-horseshoe, pods (small clusters of 4-6 tables), or the divided room where the desks face each other. The issue is how to do any of these arrangements when I change rooms throughout the class day and often have only a few minutes to get to class from a previous class. I shall brainstorm potential solutions in a future blog. For today, I am just struck by the irony of a classroom space that so clearly says "don't engage" at a university that clearly values engagement. One of my goals this semester is to figure out a way to align my classroom space so that it aligns with the value of engagement.
