What's the beat seating management for a class?
In many classrooms around the world students sit in orderly rows.Sometimes,their chairs have little wooden palettes on one of the arms as surfaces to write on.Sometimes,the students will have desks in front of them.It is not unknown to find the chairs bolted to the floor.At the front of such classroom,frequently on a raised platform (so that all the students can see them ),stand the teachers.In contrast,there are other institutions where you can find students sitting in a large circle around the walls of the classroom.Or you many see small groups of them working in different parts of the room. Sometimes,they are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the teacher.Sometimes, it is not immediately obvious who the teacher is.
Clearly, we are seeing a number of different approaches in the different arrangements of chairs and tables and this raises a number of questions.Are schools which use a variety of seating plans progressive or merely modish,for example?Is there something intrinsically superior about rigid seating arrangements-or are such classroom the product of traditional orthodoxy?Is one kind of seating arrangement better than another?What are the advantages of each?The following discusses these various arrangements.
Orderly rows:when the students sit the rows in classroom,there are obvious advantages.It means that the teacher has a clear view of all the students and the students can all see the teacher-in whose direction they are facing.It makes lecturing easy,enabling the teacher to maintain eye contact with the people he or she is talking to.Is also makes discipline easier since it is more difficult to be disruptive when you are sitting in a row.If there are aisles in the classroom,the teacher can easily walk up and down making more personal contact with individual students and watching what they are doing.
Orderly rows imply teachers working with the whole class.Some activities are especially suited to this kind pf organisation:explaining a grammar point,watching a video,using the board,demonstrating text organisation on an overhead transparency which shows a paragraph,for example.It is also useful when students are involved in certain kinds of language practice(as we shall see in Chapter.6 )If all the students are focused on a task,the whole class gets the same messages.
When teachers are working with the whole class sitting in orderly rows,it is vitally important to make sure that they remain in contact with the students and that they keep everyone involved.So,if they are asking questions to the class,they must remember to ask students at the back, the quiet ones perhaps, rather than just the ones nearest them.They must move round so that they can see all the students ti gauge their reactions to what's going on.