Throughout the week, I have spent time observing the various room arrangements in my school. One of the most prominent observations was that there wasn't much of a variety. Built 50 years ago, Perry Hall High School is one of the oldest facilities in the county, and while it has received an addition to the building since then, many of the core classes are still being taught in the older building.
Having been built in the 1960s, the classrooms follow a "cookie-cutter" pattern---rectangular, two long windows, chalkboards in the front. Most classrooms are set up in either a standard formation, single rows of desks, or in pairs, facing forward. The teacher's desk can almost always be found in the upper left-hand corner at the front of the classroom. Being in an older building with cinder block walls and little to no chance of getting wi-fi, the location of the teacher's desk is restricted by the location of an ethernet jack. The major exception, however, is the science classroom. Science classrooms are much larger, equipped with labs, sinks, and windows along the back wall. These classrooms also have large tables perpendicular with the back of the classroom, rather than individual desks. And, interestingly, my classroom is an exception to the typical English classroom. I teach English in an old choral room. My classroom is large, with three tiers for seating. The desks are arranged in a U shape forming a semi-circle, but since the risers were originally intended for standing, they are not long enough for a desk and a chair. This means that my room requires the desk/chair combination seats, which are nearly impossible for some of my larger students to sit in comfortably. Occassionally I stumbled upon the unconventional classroom, with desks in one large circle or arranged in clusters, but in a building that hosts 2,300 students, I only saw four classrooms with unique arrangements.
In a secondary school setting, you rarely hear about learning centers or see the room set up into stations. Typically, students sit in rows and the teacher brings the work to them, rather than them moving to the work. However, an observer is still able to gather insights about the frequency of cooperative learning activities based on the room arrangement. The rooms set up into rows, but with paired desks, seem to indicate more cooperative learning activities. Two sets of paired desks can easily turn and make a table, as opposed to a room with long rows of desks with no spaces between them to manipulate different formations. The rooms with more defined and accessible traffic patterns indicate that the teacher might circulate through the room more often and that the students are free to move about the classroom for appropriate reasons (tissues, pencil sharpener, bathroom, etc.)
I didn't notice any significant changes to a room arrangement in order to accommodate for students with disabilities, but I spoke with some teachers about their methods to make these accommodations. All teachers said that they place students with special needs in the seats that comply with their IEP/504 plans--most often it is either in the front of the room with limited distractions or close to the door for mobility reasons. In my travels, I did not notice any classrooms with isolated desks turned away from the front of the room, although I know hat some teachers use that as a management strategy.
Few classrooms had more than one or two classroom computers. There are only 5 classrooms in the building with a class lab and two departments which own a mobile laptop cart. It seemed as though these computers were used often, perhaps everyday. There were papers on the tables by the computers, the chairs were spun around and not pushed in--all evidence that the kids had been at those computers earlier that day. There are also only 5 classrooms in the building with a Promethean/white board. Most rooms are equipped with a mounted television, LCD projector (about 1/2 mounted/1/2 not mounted), and an overhead projector). When the majority of classrooms have fewer than two student computers, it insinuates a lot more teacher-directed instruction on the internet or web 2.0 tools, than that put in the hands of the students.
Teachers could benefit from learning about the STAR sheet and its strategies for arranging classrooms to maximize teacher-student interaction. Teachers would be more conscientious about their room arrangements if they were aware of the implications research indicates it has on student achievement. Teachers would be more aware of checking the line of sight for each of their students. A staff development could be held allowing teachers to first rearrange classrooms for specific case studies and then continue into allowing teachers to redesign their own classroom's arrangement.
