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What to expect:
5 min read
This week we answer the age old question - does a seating plan actually change anything? Well, of course it does, but it’s the why and the how that matter. Here’s what you’ll learn today:
Tech Talk: The seating plan to end all seating plans
Surplus Scoop: Prime Day is nuts
Brainy Bits: Horseshoe crabs are cool
Tech Talk
Where to sit, where to sit…
The Problem:
With summer vacation coming to a quiet end for many schools over the coming weeks (sorry for the reminder), one of the first things many teachers do is design their classroom seating plan. And then we redo it about 6 more times before we’re happy with it.
Nearly every teacher has their own method to this design madness. With every classroom having different students and different needs, this actually makes a lot of sense. Some use Excel sheets, some use chart paper, and some even use sticky notes on a constant rotation.
But as behavior and academic patterns start to show themselves mid-year, changing these plans becomes difficult for not just you, but your students as well.
The Solution:
Mega Seating Plan has been is a staple in many classrooms around the world for a few years now. For those unfamiliar, in just a few clicks you can have a custom seating plan for your students that you can drag around, access and keep track of key learning metrics, and design the chart of your dreams. But here’s where team sticky notes doesn’t stand a chance - AI.
Depending on how connected your school/district allows the app to be, it can integrate directly with your school’s management systems, meaning it can take behavior and academics into account and design the best seating plan instantly (woah).
Scary? Yes. But you as the teacher can always override its choices. If your school won’t allow that level of connection, using Excel you can generate a CSV sheet with the student information needed and load it into the app. This of course takes some extra steps, but still results in a neat, data-driven approach to seating plans.
But for those schools that do allow a full connection - you’re in for quite the treat.
YOUR classroom:
Since this tool takes into account so much more than just where a student sits, it can actually impact the academic success rate of your learners and save you time as teachers spend roughly 6.5 hours on seating plan design per year.
Mega Seating Plan can also operate as a behavior management tool without any school integration, should that be your only use case for it (fair warning - quite a few extra steps for this).
Mega Seating Plan is a little bit free. Teacher’s can make one basic seating plan without spending a dime, but there will be ads and less features.
For about $2/month, you’ll unlock a majority of the features. And for the decision makers reading this, their school-wide plan with all forms of SIS integrations works out to about $10 per teacher per year.
Have you struggled with seating plans in the past? Hit reply and let us know your best method for tackling this!
Surplus Scoop
Here’s our weekly roundup of interesting education stories from around the world. Click each link to learn more:
160 students and 30 desks - what Zambia’s unexpected problem can teach us
This doctor is advocating for a complete screen ban - is there a health risk?
Brainy Bits
Horseshoe vs. Small Group vs. Pairs
The Study:
All this focus on seating plans - but does it actually impact student learning? For a deceptively simple question, we had to stretch back to a 2020 study for the answer.
To do so, Rogers (2020) looked at 23 fourth grade students at a US elementary school. In this school, students spend a majority of their day in the same seat - and so where they sit matters greatly. Three seating layouts were tested amongst the same students.
The class spent at least two weeks in either a small group, horseshoe, or pairs-only seating arrangement. Where they sat in these arrangements was always chosen at random.
Data was collected via surveys, participation experiments, and observations twice per week, leaving us with a mixed methods approach.
The Results:
Of these three, horseshoe formation was the most effective - but why? Well, each seating plan has a T zone where students perform best. This tends to be in the front-center of a traditional room. With the horseshoe shape, this places all students in the same proximity to their teacher, while still allowing for partner work.
Surprisingly, small group formations resulted in the least amount of participation due to an increased number of distractions. Data wise, the horseshoe yielded up to 70% more participation amongst students. For academic success, (this was a small amount of experiment time so take it with a grain of salt) scores increased by 8% when compared with the other two arrangements.
Students were also surveyed on their preferred arrangement via a questionnaire, but yielded similar preferences for all three methods.
YOUR Classroom?
Not every classroom is going to have the physical means to accommodate a horseshoe plan. Also, this is education - every batch of students you get is going to be different, so not every class will respond the same. It is still a great place to start!
If possible, start your year this way, and as much as we love apps that organize student’s based on prior data, if you don’t have access to it, simply assign the order at random.
If your learners are anything like the ones in this study, they won’t have a preference either way, but you’ll know you’ve just created the potential for a hyper-engaged environment.
Ever try the horseshoe method? Did it work for you?
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References
Tech Talk:
Mega Seating Plan. (2024). Tired of clunky seating plan templates? Retrieved from https://www.seatingplan.com/
Brainy Bits:
Rogers, K. (2020). The Effects of Classroom Seating Layouts on Participation and Assessment Performance in a Fourth Grade Classroom. Journal of Learning Spaces, 9(1). Retrieved from https://libjournal.uncg.edu/jls/article/view/1866
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