Hello! This is Danah Hashem, and thanks for joining me for today’s episode of Prose and Context. In this episode, I’d like to spend some time talking about flexible seating: what it is, how I’ve seen it work. All that good stuff.
So, for those of you who are unfamiliar, flexible seating is a movement or a classroom strategy where teachers set up their classrooms with a variety of seating options, all of which differ in some way or another from the traditional desk-facing-the-teacher situation. This can include beanbags, couches, rocking chairs, all sorts of things. It often features large tables for collaboration instead of desks, nooks for independent work, or lap desks for mobile work. And all of that seating is arranged in different zones or areas, some are set up to facilitate group work, some for individual work, large discussions, all different types of scholarly work.
The idea behind flexible seating is that each day, students come into class and make a decision about where and how they should learn that day. This is a way of differentiating your classroom to allow for different kinds of students, different learning styles, physical ability levels, personality types - all sorts of individual differences that our students come to class with on a daily basis.
A lot of the ideology behind this idea comes from an article by Teresa Strong-Wilson and Julia Ellis that explores the classroom environment as a type of teacher itself. So traditionally and historically, we usually consider parents and then educators as any child’s 2 main teachers, so you’ve got the parent and the educator, but Strong-Wilson and Ellis explore the environment as a third teacher from which our students gather information and construct knowledge. So this is essentially what flexible seating is about. It’s about leveraging our classroom environments to help students get the most out of our time with them.
So every teacher implements flexible seating differently, but what this looks like for my classroom is that I have a big selection of traditional desks, actually, if we’re being honest, more than I would ideally like to have, but those traditional desks are arranged in a U-shape, but I also in a far corner in the back have a small kitchen table with 4 chairs around it next to a bookshelf with a light. And then off to the side in a different corner, I have a carpeted space with beanbags, some floor pillows, and a large coffee table in the middle. And then throughout the room, I have scattered rocking chairs and papasan chairs with lap desks. And when students come into my classroom on the first day of school, I explain to them that they can sit wherever they want so long as they practice making smart choices for themselves.
This means that they have to come into class each day, self-assess their status and energy level, inventory what they know about how they learn, decide what tasks they have ahead of them that class, and then choose a seat that accommodates all those factors. So they have to take all of that into account and then make a choice based on those factors. If partway through class, they realize that they’ve miscalculated or they need to adjust, they can get up at any time without asking and find a new learning situation for themselves. No questions asked. They also should be aware that one learning choice may not be the right one for every single class. So some days might be a desk day where you come in and you think, “ok I really should be at a desk today,” for whatever reasons. And then another day you might come in and think “ah, I’m just gonna grab a blanket, curl up on the beanbag with a pillow,” and that could be what’s right for the student for that day. They have to come in and make that choice every single class session.
So most teachers who are new to Flexible Seating come in hot with the main question, which is ‘does this not create total chaos in class?’ I had the same question myself, but, surprisingly,
