Seating plans, transitions and managing the minutiae of social interaction

Using Seating Plans Effectively

Seating plans are an essential part of effective behaviour management.

The classroom is a social space.

This gives rise to social interaction.

Learners interact differently with different peers.

You need to plan the seating in your classroom, so it maximises learners’ focus on learning.

This means thinking carefully about who will sit where and why, and what you will do if your initial seating plan proves unsuccessful.

Here are some things to avoid, to aim for, and to think about.

Things to Avoid

Groups of friends sitting together
Learners sitting in inaccessible places who need more teacher support
Learners prone to talking or behaving poorly grouped together
Learners prone to talking or behaving poorly sat near the back (or away from the teacher)

Things to Aim For

Having a clear rationale behind the placement of all learners
Being prepared to make changes if the seating plan does not work out as expected
Grouping learners who intuition tells you will work well together
Seating learners who will need support (including those who may need regular support with their behaviour) near the front and on the end of rows, so you can easily access them
Minimising the opportunity for learners to distract one another (for example, by avoiding eye-lines that may lead to off-topic conversations)

Things to Think About

Learner eye-lines: Who can see who and are they likely to interact poorly with them?
Teacher eye-lines: Who can you easily see? Can you see everybody in the class?
Table layout: Do you want rows, a horseshoe, pods or something else? How will your layout help or hinder behaviour management?
Access: Can you easily access the learners who are most likely to need your help?

Your seating plan is a powerful tool for managing social dynamics in your classroom.

You can use it to set the tone for your lessons and to promote the learning-focussed culture you want.

Thinking carefully about the layout of your seating plan means thinking carefully about how to use it to support positive behaviour management.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the role of transitions in managing behaviour effectively.

Transitions – The Secret Magic of Classroom Management

These are the moments when the lesson moves from one thing to another – when you make a transition.

For example, we might make a transition from a starter activity to a teacher explanation of the main activity, followed by another transition to learners engaging in the main activity.

Transitions are an inevitable feature of all lessons.

However, they can disrupt the flow of learning and, of course, they offer a space in which learners might start to go off-topic.

As such, it is worth thinking about transitions during the planning process.

First, you should look to minimise transitions.

If you create a lesson containing lots of transitions, you make your life more difficult.

At each transition you will have to manage the disruption of the lesson flow and exert energy keeping learners focussed.

Fewer transitions means fewer breaks in learning.

It also means less time devoted to managing those breaks.

Second, you should think about how you will glide over transitions, minimising any negative impact they might have.

This means identifying ways in which you can hide or cover up transitions.

They will still be there, underneath the surface, but learners will not be aware of them.

For example, an unhidden transition might involve the teacher ending an activity and then spending thirty seconds changing their PowerPoint slides over and handing out a set of resources.

In this situation, learners see the transition and may take it as an opportunity to start talking about what they did at the weekend (or something similar!).

To hide such a transition, we could freeze the board five minutes earlier, have the next PowerPoint slide up and ready, and place the resources face down on learners’ desks before the first activity ends.

This means we can then move the lesson on with barely a sense that we are transitioning from one section to another.

These are simple techniques yet extremely effective.

Attend to them during your planning and then, while you are teaching, always stay five to ten minutes ahead of your learners, so that you can manage the transitions as efficiently as possible.

This will almost certainly have a positive impact on your behaviour management.

Using Activities That Minimise Interactions

Having looked at seating plans and transitions, another part of lesson planning that can be helpful when it comes to behaviour management is planning activities that minimise interactions.

If we have a class where behaviour management is difficult and disruption a frequent occurrence, it is often worth adapting our planning to stop problems developing well in advance.

Asking learners to work together – in groups or pairs – means ceding a degree of control over what is happening in the classroom.

Often, this is an excellent thing to do; it is a great approach to learning that regularly yields fantastic results.

However, if you are struggling to get the kind of behaviour you want, then it usually stops being the best option to choose.

This is because it undermines your wider attempts to gain control of the atmosphere in the room.

Instead of helping you to do this, it gives learners the freedom to continue in the negative behaviour patterns they have developed.

A better alternative in the short-term is to think about activities that minimise rather than promote interactions.

While this might be antagonistic to your wider beliefs about teaching, the fact remains that group work, and other such activities, are only effective if learners can be relied on to behave in a positive, learning-focussed manner while they take part in them.

Our priority is to first get the classroom culture we want.

We can then use this to facilitate a varied and engaging approach to teaching and learning.

Activities that minimise interactions include:

Individual writing
Answering a series of questions independently
Reading (either standalone or with a set of related questions)
Teacher-led discussion (in which the teacher speaks and then chooses one learner at a time to add to the discussion)
Teacher talk
Making notes
Creating individual products such as mind-maps, leaflets or guides
Using a textbook
Watching and making notes on a video (perhaps supplemented by a listening frame)

In all these cases, the activity serves to direct learners away from interaction and towards the learning.

This allows the teacher to exert control, to convey the message that learning is our focus above all else, and to reinforce the norms of interaction they want, as opposed to the norms under which learners were previously operating.

Planning these types of activities will help you to regain control over a class whose behaviour is other than how you want it.

Over time, you can slowly reintroduce other types of activities and judge the extent to which learners can deal positively with these.

An additional benefit is that if you have a selection of activities that minimise interactions stored away, you can call on these mid-lesson, should the need ever arise.

So, for example, if a group work activity goes pear-shaped, you can swiftly amend your lesson plan and ask learners to write up their thoughts individually.

This allows you to temper the atmosphere that has developed and to redirect learners back to focussing on learning.