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I love having choice in where we get to sit. I like to sit at the high top tables to do group work, but on the floor when I read. - Khloe

I like to sit alone sometimes to help me concentrate and the high single desk is great for that! - Bobby

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It's been a journey to endeavor into flexible seating, and I've learned that it really empowers my students to be responsible and make good choices on their own, rather than the adults making them for them! - Mrs. Williams

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What is the best classroom design for WO classrooms to make them fun, functional, and flexible for the way 3rd-5th graders like to learn?

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To kickoff this PBL, our entry event really began on the first day of school with our new pilot furniture! For the first time, I let students choose where they sit each day, rather than assigning seats. For the first 2 weeks of school, they had to "try out" each type of seat, by sitting somewhere new every day.

Additionally, when we officially launched the PBL, I let gave them total control to rearrange the room how they thought would work best. They really did a great job! For example, they moved the mailboxes and drawers with books/supplies in the open space near the door so that they would be less crowded. We love this project!

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We used our creative DNA results to make new teams for this project. We learned we don't have any natural presenters! This became an area of growth to focus on for the whole class.

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When we got back from our trip, we had hundreds of ideas, so we used the Idea Quota to see how many we could write down in 8 minutes!

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A lot of our ideas were ones that seemed obvious, but a few started to breakthrough into new ideas so we were on the right track.

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We took all of our ideas (from open seating 24/7 to assigned seats changing in the morning and afternoon and grouped them into categories. This helped us to land on our solution, which is HOME BASE seating (and specific storage spaces for our materials).

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We gathered around the "fire" to talk about everything we went through in this project. In the end, we learned that flexible seating is wonderful, but it has to come with guidelines and parameters in order to meet everyone's academic and social emotional needs.

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Unfortunately, before the end of our project we learned that WO had already picked a different furniture company, but that didn't stop us from presenting our ideas to our principal. In the end, based on their feedback, my classroom is keeping our pilot furntiture for next year AND they have designed the space!

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Students had a LOT to say about what bothers them about how classrooms are usually setup. The biggest trend was that they don't like that their seats, especially if they are really well behaved, they didn't like being stuck next to someone they had to work hard to ignore if behaviors were distracting.

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To begin our investigation, we used the Need to Know protocol to list everything we'd need to ask as we planned for the flexible seating setup for WO classrooms. They thought about number of students in an average class, types of seating that is available, and the needs of the content and curriculum being taught (partner work, group work, etc.)

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Students used empathy maps to think about different people's perspectives on how classrooms are setup, especially the seating.

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This was the COOLEST experience! Our class had to opportunity to go to Steelcase in Grand Rapids and learn from actual design engineers. They toured the facility, tested out all different kinds of furniture and learned about the design process by testing out different paper airplane prototypes.

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Both at Steelcase and back in our classroom, we played around with prototyping. We learned how to do this by trying to make paper airplanes that would fly from the barrier to the table. At school, I let the students move our current furniture into several variations before they decided on the one that they liked best.

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Students drew sketches of their top 8 ideas, one per minute with this protocol. They had some really creative ones!