A Creative Classroom Seating Strategy

Here’s an interesting seating plan that will help to deter the cliques that can plague students in the upper elementary grades, specifically grades four through six.  When the summer letter goes home welcoming students to your classroom, ask them to bring in a large pencil box/container that can hold all their small items, including pencils, rulers, crayons, pens, colored pencils, etc.  Arrange the desks in clusters of four and name each cluster according to the letters of the alphabet:  cluster A, cluster B, etc.  Fill each desk with all the necessary textbooks.  Designate a small storage area for each student where he/she can put all the materials that belong to them, including their notebooks, assignment booklets, consumable workbooks (the ones they write in and keep), and the pencil box with all their small items in it.

Every morning, as the students arrive, they should come to you (as the classroom teacher), and choose a cluster card from a small basket.  The cluster cards can be easily made from three by five cards with the letter of a cluster on each one (four of each, relating to the desks in each).  They should be folded and paper-clipped, so the students don’t know which cluster they’re choosing.  When they have chosen a card, the teacher should record the student’s name/cluster assignment.  The students then “move in” to any seat that is available within that cluster, by moving all their own materials from their storage area into the chosen desk.

The only down side to this approach is the time it takes to move in each morning and move out at dismissal time.  The up sides are numerous.  First, the classroom teacher will greet each student individually every morning.  It’s a good time to have a short chat, collect any homework or any notes from home, or to respond if the student seems concerned about anything.  Second, if there are any group activities that begin on that day, the group they will work in is the group they’re sitting with.  Third, the anguish that surrounds who sits where is suddenly gone.  Everyone sits everywhere and with everyone as each week progresses.  So every student gets the benefit of the smartest kid in the class and has to deal with the class clown or the difficult student one day or the next.  Also, students would get to know someone they might never have had the chance to know if a seat were assigned and would be theirs for weeks (or even months) on end.  Finally, as they move out, they have an opportunity to organize any loose papers, etc. as they move their own things into their storage area. 

A friend of mine actually tried this system in a grade five classroom, and told me emphatically that she would never go back to the traditional seating she had used in the past.  Her students were more tolerant and understanding of their classmates, and the specialists who worked with her classes year after year could really see the difference.