When I moved up north from sunny FLA in 2007 I made a big decision about the geography of my classroom. In my last school I had seats arranged in groups of 3 or four, I referred to them as pods and my students selected their pod mates. They usually stayed with the same group all year long and built up some real team identities centered around their pod. When I moved to my new school in 2010 I had two large conference style tables brought to my room and had students sitting in big groups of 10 each. Typically, students stayed at one of the two tables all year long, but there was a little bit of movement at times. In 2015 I moved those tables out and got moveable desks and I am back to my sets of 4 seats. However, this year I am using visibly random grouping (using Flippity and happy with it) to shake things up and encourage more of a sense of collaboration across a larger group of their classmates. I begin each week with a new seating arrangement. I have been pretty happy with most of this evolution and I am convinced that these arrangements have increased student communication over the years. However, I saw Susan Cain’s TED Talk not too long ago where she talked about introverts and the impact of all of this collaborative time on their learning and their comfort. Since seeing that talk I have had a bit of an internal struggle about how to try to compensate for the fact that not everyone wants to talk as they learn. Not everyone is comfortable thinking out loud before they have come to some sort of a clean conclusion. Not everyone thinks at the same pace. Luckily for me, Brian Miller (@TheMillerMath) wrote a blog post that has come to the rescue for me with ideas about how to address some of these fears. Brian wrote about a great idea for balancing the principles at hand that seem to be in competition with each other. His post is over at http://www.mrmillermath.com/2017/01/30/alone-time-in-a-collaborative-classroom/ and I strongly encourage you to read it if you have been thinking about some of these conflicts.
Our school is moving to a new schedule next year where we will have five class meetings in each seven school day stretch with one class at 90 minutes and the other four meeting for 50 minutes. I think that these longer spans of time together (currently, the majority of our class times are 45 with a handful of 40 and a handful of 50 based on assembly schedules, etc.) will work beautifully with the ideas that Brian laid out. I am on the fence about the nature of how I want to deal with the earbud/headphone question. I like the idea that Brian has but I am not sure about endorsing any type of paid music services explicitly with my students. I know that almost all of my students come equipped with earbuds and mobile devices everyday (probably a higher percentage than those that come equipped with a writing device to class each day!) so that is not a hurdle at all. I have announced a group quiz for next Wednesday and I know that I want to have at least one day before then where I explicitly have ‘alone time’ for thoughts before reconvening our pod conversations. I am debating whether I need to physically separate seats for this alone time or whether that is too much time and interruption. I’ll be writing about how it goes.