Remarkably, the rather excellent Teach Secondary magazine haven’t yet seen through me and are still running my half-baked ramblings. Here’s this month’s pale offering.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a teacher in possession of a large roomful of children must be in want of a carefully crafted seating plan. Secondary schools have normalised the idea that children should sit in the same seat every lesson. Seating plans may be a great way to learn students’ names, keep order and establish routine, but they may be undermining children’s ability learn.
Ideally, we want our students to go off into the world and flourish; transferring all the fascinating stuff we’ve taught them to new and exciting contexts. In practice it’s impossible to know whether this actually happens so we tend to settle for transfer from the context of the classroom to the context of the exam hall. This is harder than you might imagine. Memory is context dependent. We tie the acquisition of new ideas to what we already know in visual and emotional contexts.
The context in which we first encounter an idea creates contextual cues. They are the visual and autobiographical memory on which we hang new ideas. Psychologists have run experiments that show playing particular genres of music or inducing particular emotional states and then testing participants in conditions which either share or don’t share those conditions to demonstrate the power of contextual cues in increasing retention. This would be great if we could exactly recreate the conditions in which we learned when taking a test, however, we struggle to transfer what we know into different contexts where cues are absent.
But by varying the conditions in which we learn maybe we can break our dependence on context cues? Smith, Bjork and Glendale’s 1978 paper, “Environmental context and human memory” was probably the first attempt to explore how this might be done. They gave participants a list of words to learn and had them study either in the same room twice or in two separate rooms (one a cluttered basement, the other a windowed office.) Three hours later, the students were bundled into a third ‘neutral room’ and asked to recall as many of the words as they could. Those who studied in the same room managed an average of 16 out of 40 whereas those who studied in two different rooms recalled 24 words. The experiment “showed strong recall improvements with variation of environmental contexts.” This has become known as the ‘variation effect’ and since then there have been many other studies, which have further investigated and built on this research.
The implication for schools is clear: if we want students to perform at their best in the exam hall, we should vary the conditions in which they are taught. Ideally, every lesson might take place in a new room to prevent memories being tied to specific contexts, but this would be both impractical and annoying. Perhaps we could timetable each lesson in a given week in a different classroom, but this would be only slightly less problematic. As an individual teacher it seems there’s little you can do with this information unless you can persuade the chap next door to swap with you now and again.
One workable solution is to vary seating plans as much as possible. A few years ago I became aware of a very strange and as far as I know, unresearched phenomena. If I taught a lesson where students knew something in that chair, they would not necessarily know it in this chair. Simply asking students to move seats in the middle of a lesson was enough to disrupt their ability to recall something. Memory can be more brittle and fragile than I would have thought possible. If a student spends a term or a year seating in the same seat every lesson then they will see the same things every lesson. And, if they sit next to the same students each lesson they we become used to a particular emotional context. It’s not too great a stretch to say that students will become dependent on those strong visual and emotional cues. If learning is tied to these cues when the ties are severed, the learning often seems to unravel.
So I started experimenting with moving students about and giving them a greater variety of sight lines. They also experienced different emotional responses to being seated next to different students, thus creating greater and less stable range of contextual cues. And guess what? Their ability to transfer what they’d learned within the classroom improved. Now, I would, of course, hesitate to make a mountain out of this molehill, but this does seem worthy of further investigation.
My tentative advice is not to throw away your seating plans, but to have more of them. It might seem inefficient to have a different plan for each class each lesson, but maybe you could design a plan where each students moves two seat to their left (or something similar) every lesson. If you’re prepared to put up with some short-term disruption for a long-term gain, the pay-off might be that students learn more.
I enjoyed that. I teach in the Sixth Form and last year got frustrated with the poor habits many pupils learned largely from their social groupings within the class. This year I have taken more responsibility for seating and have enjoyed experimenting with pupils drawing a number out of a hat at the start of every lesson as they enter the room. The number directs them to a group or a seat. They’re responding well although I expect that, at this stage, for some it may cause anxiety. Hopefully the anxiety will be replaced by the curiosity at how each lesson will be a different experience with a slightly different dynamic. Your write up was a nice affirmation that my experiment may actually be quite a good thing.
That made me think …. think lots of teachers forget the “plan” bit, having a rational for what they are doing. As Bart says curiosity and different dynamics have got to be a good thing. Would it be OK to print this out and share with my staff (I do a Monday Morning Mail Drop of the article I have found most interesting form the previous week)?
You’re most welcome: be my guest 🙂
For what it is worth one idea I had was to ask my top set Year 10 to sit next to a different person every lesson which meant they both moved around the classroom and worked with different people. I did it more as a social experiment rather than a learning one, but I think it did have the learning benefits you mention.
It was easy enough to manage requiring simply a class list stuck into the book which they ticked off those with whom they sat. Might have slowed the start of lessons, but not detrimentally.
Not suggesting it as a panacea, but it was interesting and, now I’ve reminded myself of it, I might do it again!
At the risk of advertising I swear by Idoceo as an app with SIMs for quickly creating and adapting seating plans. Once set up on an iPad, often with a photo of the pupil you can move them around easily by sliding them with a finger but also keep a record of previous seating plans if necessary. This makes it far easier to do whilst still learning names as you go along and ensuring everyone has a try in different places.
It was also brilliant for emailing whole classes as a reminder ( one click) or getting a parental email with one click so you can say how brilliant a student was and fire it off during the lesson. Random praise, as we know, goes a long way but there is never time to do it.
Had the same idea as David of random seating and solved it by having student cards. At the start of the year each student gets a 5″ by 3″ card to put their name on. Each lesson simply shuffle and allocate seating. Some notes:
1. Any special needs can be handled with a couple of key seats (eg: students that need to be near the teacher, near the board) and allocate these first.
2. Group activities is the person next to you. For science experiments this is great as a lot of time was wasted with friends want groups, “can we be a three or four?” Etc.
3. Students write goals on the back, they see them every day so begin to work on them. Once finished tick off and move on to the next goal. I’ve found this becomes more powerful with SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timely).
4. Students enjoy decorating their cards, creating little works of art. This is useful doodling helping some students to focus on the discussion rather than chatting with friends, well monitored it can really help some students.
Just a thought.