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1. Ask the students to prioritise what supports their learning/ needs
2. Ask them to reflect on these and discuss - collect ideas!
3. Be responsive - make changes and reflect
4. Release the students to make decisions
*Build the environment for the students

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Click on 'open in new window'!

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Flexible seating helps students become better learners

September 2, 2019 | 4:32 PM

by Courtesy of Brandpoint

Have you seen a modern classroom with a variety of seating options that allow kids to sit, stand, wiggle and wobble as they engage in learning throughout the day?

If so, you are familiar with flexible seating, a leading educational trend in classrooms. Both teachers and students are finding this alternative to traditional rows of desks to better align with how kids move, learn and collaborate. This in turn helps teachers engage and educate students.

Wondering how flexible seating could help at your local schools? Here are the top benefits of flexible seating:

Choice

Students feel empowered by having some degree of choice and control over their environment. Flexible seating allows students to choose where they work and with whom. It also allows them to change their location and positions as needed, which teachers believe supports the development of higher-order thinking skills.
Physical health
Flexible seating allows children to wobble, rock, bounce, lean or stand, which increases oxygen flow to the brain, blood flow and core strength. Physical activity is linked to higher academic performance, better health and improved behaviour. An academic paper by Matthew T. Mahar titled "Effects of a Classroom-Based Programme on Physical Activity and On-Task Behaviour," found that simple in-class activities can boost performance. Studies suggest that children who participate in short bursts of physical activity within the classroom have more on-task behaviour, too.
Comfort
An uncomfortable student is a distracted and unproductive student. For example, picture a student who skipped or didn't have access to breakfast. As the countdown to lunch approaches, his or her growling stomach will make it impossible to concentrate on the teacher's voice. An uncomfortable chair can have the same effect. Flexible seating encourages students to find their best spot to stay calm, focused and productive.
Community
Traditional desks can make students territorial or possessive over their space and supplies. Flexible seating encourages students to share both seating spaces and supplies needed to complete educational tasks. Plus, it encourages them to take turns in different locations and with different seating options.
Collaboration
Flexible seating allows students to quickly and easily pair up, work in small groups or discuss educational topics as a whole class - without moving numerous heavy desks to establish eye contact. This encourages communication and collaboration to boost critical thinking and deeper understanding of educational materials.
Participation
A 2012 study from the University of Minnesota found that students participated 48% more in discussions in a classroom with collaborative group seating versus traditional lecture-style seating, and also improved their performance on standardised tests. This underscores the value of flexible seating and its ability to create a collaborative environment that boosts participation.
Communication
When introducing flexible seating, teachers must establish new classroom management tools. That includes creating a system to make seating choice fair and nondisruptive. It also requires introducing higher-order thinking skills, like problem-solving, and emotional skills, like conflict resolution. There's also much value in fostering turn-taking and patience, especially for a generation of kids immersed in immediate gratification.
Sensory input
Many flexible seating options stimulate students' sense of touch. This type of stimulation can help children focus and process information. Sensory input is especially helpful for students with ADHD, ADD and ASD.
Fun
Flexible seating helps make learning fun. Children look forward to where they will sit, and each day becomes a unique educational adventure. Teachers adopting a change to flexible seating can set a positive mindset that is infectious to students. - BPT

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Flexible seating helps students become better learners

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Flexible seating helps students become better learners September 2, 2019 | 4:32 PM by Courtesy of Brandpoint Have you seen a modern classroom with a variety of seating options that allow kids to sit, stand, wiggle and wobble as they engage in learning throughout the day?

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Top 10 Benefits of a Flexible-Seating Classroom

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Top 10 Benefits of a Flexible-Seating Classroom

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Physical health benefits!

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NZ focus

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By: Lauren Mehrbach and Chris Beingessner. This piece was originally published by Singapore American Schools

Last year, the SAS middle school worked with Fielding Nair International, an educational architecture firm, to renovate our sixth grade A-side team space to create a more flexible learning environment. This summer we are embarking on two more renovations, to 6B and 6C, to provide all of our students and faculty in sixth-grade access to a learning environment that is more flexible. As Jacobs and Alcocknote, "The most fundamental structures in our schools are often inhibitors to progress: our schedules, our physical spaces, the grouping patterns of learners, and the configuration of the personnel." [1] As we work to provide a more personalized learning experience for our students, we find that physical space is limiting our ability to do so. As most adults in our community were served well by a traditional classroom environment, parents may have some questions about why we'd make this change.

How does a flexible learning environment relate to personalized learning?

"Flexible learning environments imply that the school adapts the use of resources such as staff, space, and time to best support personalization."[2] So, what does personalization mean at SAS? It's a combination of different structures, instructional strategies, and curricular approaches that allow a child to have access to what they need when they need it, to know what their next steps are in their learning, and to pursue areas of strength and interest. We use the terms flexible learning environments, customized pathways, and competency-based progressions to frame our understanding of the elements necessary to create a personalized experience for children.

What is a flexible learning environment?

When people think of a flexible learning environment, they often think only of the physical space. While it is true that the space is flexible in nature, there is much more to a flexible learning environment than just the physical floor plan or furniture choices. Modern flexible learning environments also address other elements of the learning environment such as how students are grouped during learning and how time might be used more flexibly during the day.

Flexible Physical Space

After the renovations, the sixth grade learning communities will have a flexibility that didn't exist in the prior layout. Teachers and students can still configure the space to work in an environment similar to a traditional classroom if that is what is best for teaching and learning. However, we also know that not all learning involves 22 students in a single room at chairs and tables.

The new learning communities feature additional flexibility, creating spaces for groups of different sizes. There are small breakout rooms throughout the space so groups of students can work collaboratively. Some examples of what might happen in the smaller breakout spaces include activities like book partnerships and literature circles, math explorations, independent work, or collaborative work on a group presentation. A teacher might also pull a group of students into a smaller breakout space to re-teach a concept or provide a lesson that extends the current concept for students who have already grasped it. There is also the ability to open the space to bring all students on a grade level team together for large group activities. Some examples of when the space would be opened up include visitors making whole group presentations to the students, or sharing learning celebrations with the community. Sixth-grade math teacher Kris Munden sums it up this way: "In a traditional classroom with four walls, you're restricted by those four walls. But here we don't just have four walls, we have a bunch of walls that can open and close, so we can make the space fit what we need, rather than the space dictating what we can do."

Flexible Time

There is much more to a flexible learning environment than the physical space. The flexibility extends to the use of time. All of our middle school core teams currently have the ability to flex their schedules and often do so. What do we mean by this? Each grade level has a block of time dedicated to our core program: English/Language Arts (ELA), math, science, social studies, and PE. Teams can reorganize that scheduled block in numerous ways to allow for different uses of the time. For example, they might revise the schedule, shortening classes, to create a block of time for a guest speaker or a home base activity. In sixth grade, they often use a schedule that shortens core blocks to create a flexible block of time after lunch. Students, with guidance from their teachers, identify what learning they want support in, and sign up for specific workshops to reinforce those skills during this block. Sometimes this might be remediation of a concept taught earlier in the day. Other times it will be an extension activity for students who have already grasped the concept from earlier in the day. At times, these blocks of time are also used to make explicit connections between the disciplines. Students may use this time to work on unit culminating projects that bring learning from multiple subjects together. These flexible blocks help students personalize their learning path, make connections across disciplines, and give them voice and choice in their learning.

Flexible Student Grouping

Traditionally, students are grouped together for a specific class at a specific time at the beginning of the year, and that grouping doesn't change. A student's classmates for ELA class, for example, remains static all year. However, this presumes that all students are the same, and need the exact same learning opportunities, at the exact same time. We know that all students are unique, and so this model has its limitations. Our teachers work closely together to plan for instruction based on student need. If a group of students needs extra time on a certain math concept, they are given that extra time during a flexible block, regardless of which math class they are scheduled into. Teachers examine students' formative work on a regular basis to identify what learning they need next. Students are then grouped and regrouped in response to that data. The research affirms this, as well: "Using data to frequently adapt student grouping strategies to student needs is a key aspect of personalization; it is yet another way that instructors can be responsive to student needs and allow students to take various paths through content."[3] Regardless of whether your child will be in a renovated space or not, teams of teachers across the middle school are finding ways to focus on flexible student grouping.

Does a flexible learning environment improve learning?

When teachers are working more collaboratively, they see connections across the skills and content from their specific courses. Our survey data shows that students working in the 6A space felt that their teachers knew what was going on in other classes, and the students were more likely to make connections between subjects than those not in a flexible learning environment. Interdisciplinary planning and conversations allow teachers to develop common language for skills that transcend subject areas. For example, writing a claim, supporting it with evidence, and using reasoning occurs in almost all subject areas, though not always in the exact same format. In a flexible learning environment, teachers more easily calibrate their language, and students make overt connections between subject area content and skills. While this may not show up explicitly in a standardized test result, students build their ability to see the world as inter-connected, which we know it is. In fact, the creation of disconnected subjects for schools goes back to 1892, when the National Education Association in New York "set public school institutions onto a pathway of discipline divisions."[4] Since we don't experience the world in discrete subjects, it makes sense that we set up opportunities so students won't either.

Additionally, using flexible grouping and time allows students to be pushed further in their areas of strength and to get additional time and support in areas of challenge. A study by the Rand Corporation indicates "that compared to their peers, students in schools using personalized learning practices are making greater progress over the course of two school years, and that students who started out behind are now catching up to perform at or above national averages".[5]

How does a flexible learning environment increase teacher effectiveness?

We all have partnerships in our lives that increase our effectiveness-maybe it is a co-worker who helps us see things at work we might not otherwise see, or a spouse, who shares responsibility for parenting. Working closely with someone on a common goal (increasing performance at work, or raising children to be good humans) enhances our lives. We make better decisions and perform better when we have a partner, or team to support us. The same happens with teachers. When they are working more collaboratively together, the benefits are substantial. Teachers learn from each other and get more regular feedback on their instructional practices. The level of transparency in a more flexible environment encourages teachers to work at the highest level possible. Some say that the flexible environment ensures they bring their "A game" daily. The teachers feel a sense of collective responsibility for all students' learning.

Want to see it in action? You can get a glimpse of what our first middle school flexible learning environment is like here.

For more, see:

Stay in-the-know with all things EdTech and innovations in learning by signing up to receive the weekly Smart Update . This post includes mentions of a Getting Smart partner. For a full list of partners, affiliate organizations and all other disclosures, please see our . Partner page

[1] Jacobs, H. H., & Alcock, M. (2017). Bold moves for schools: How we create remarkable learning environments. Alexandria, VA, USA: ASCD.

[2] Wall, G. (2016). The Impact of Physical Design on Student Outcomes (New Zealand, Department of Education). Retrieved from https://www.education.govt.nz/assets/Documents/Primary-Secondary/Property/School-property-design/Flexible-learning-spaces/FLS-The-impact-of-physical-design-on-student-outcomes.pdf

[3] Pane, J., Steiner, E., Baird, M., & Hamilton, L. (2015). Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning. doi:10.7249/rr1365

[4] Jacobs, H. H., & Alcock, M. (2017). Bold moves for schools: How we create remarkable learning environments. Alexandria, VA, USA: ASCD.

[5] Pane, J., Steiner, E., Baird, M., & Hamilton, L. (2015). Continued Progress: Promising Evidence on Personalized Learning. doi:10.7249/rr1365

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By: Lauren Mehrbach and Chris Beingessner. This piece was originally published by Singapore American Schools Last year, the SAS middle school worked with Fielding Nair International, an educational architecture firm, to renovate our sixth grade A-side team space to create a more flexible learning environment.

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising

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There are plenty of studies that isolate the effects of light, acoustics, or air quality on learning. But the research on flexible classrooms is frustratingly scarce.

There are good reasons for the apparent lack of interest. Variables like natural light and acoustics lend themselves to single-factor experiments that can be conducted in a laboratory setting. Give subjects a task to complete in a room with ample windows, for example, and then administer the same test in a room without them.

But flexible classrooms are complex, living systems. One flexible space looks nothing like the next, and often dozens of children and one or more teachers operate within them, pushing and pulling furniture into novel configurations, dimming or turning up lights, and otherwise reshuffling things to suit an almost infinite variety of personal preferences. Studying flexible classrooms, it would seem, means circulating among real children.

Despite the challenges, an ambitious effort to study the design of lived-in classrooms, including looking at hard-to-define factors like flexibility, was completed in 2015 by the University of Salford, in the United Kingdom. Researchers put in the legwork, visiting 153 classrooms in 27 schools across the country-from small, remote village schools to much larger suburban buildings on the outskirts of metropolitan London. In the end, the effect of classroom design on academic performance was studied across 3,766 British children aged 5 to 11.

"We were trying to take a holistic perspective," explained Peter Barrett, the lead researcher and now an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. "In other words, we were trying to look at spaces as experienced by people. So this isn't just air quality, this isn't just temperature, or an effort to measure the factors separately. This is the whole lot together."

The Findings

The study looked at three dimensions of classroom design: naturalness (factors like light and temperature), stimulation (factors like color and visual complexity), and individualization (factors like flexibility and student ownership).

The big insight? Optimizing all of these physical characteristics of primary classrooms improved academic performance in reading, writing, and mathematics by 16 percent. The personalization of classrooms-including flexibility, which Barrett defined as "student choice within the space"-accounted for a full quarter of that improvement.

Another way to look at it: When isolated from other measured factors, classroom flexibility is about as important as air quality, light, or temperature in boosting academic outcomes.
Katherine Madden
Barrett's team singled out the effectiveness of learning zones-"a reading area, a wet area, usually a carpet area for whole-class activity, tables usually in blocks of four or six"-and made special note of unique classroom shapes, which seem to allow for easier partitioning of the space. But the study doesn't prescribe fixed solutions, setting out loose guidelines instead. When I described American flexible classrooms, which are even more individualized than their British counterparts, Barrett agreed that the Salford findings applied.

A few insights surprised even the researchers. Flexible, welcoming spaces had a startlingly large effect on learning in math- 73 percent of the students' progress that was attributed to classroom design was traced back to flexibility and student ownership. The reasons are a mystery, but Barrett and his team hazarded a guess: Academic subjects that provoke anxiety-in math, that's a known issue -are better addressed in classrooms that feel comfortable and familiar to students.

And some of the air quality data came as a shock. Despite a 2015 Harvard study that showed steady declines in higher-order thinking when carbon dioxide levels exceed 500 parts per million-the gas is a by-product of human breathing, for those who've forgotten their biology-the researchers consistently recorded levels over six times that high in a classroom they observed. That's alarming-and fixable.

"If air quality is OK at the start of the class, it won't be by the end unless you do something," according to Barrett. "It's an absolute fact. So you have to open a window or a door. But you have to do something."

Form, Function, and Flexibility

So will lugging new furniture into your room improve student outcomes? Do Hokki stools and throw pillows drive up test scores?

The answer is no.

Barrett thinks it's the old dictum that form follows function at work: Flexible classrooms are successful because they go hand in hand with a change in pedagogy. That conclusion never fails to emerge in teacher-led discussions on Edutopia. Flexible spaces, educators agree, alter the fundamental dynamics of teaching and learning, giving students more control and responsibility, improving academic engagement, and undermining the typical face-forward orientation of the traditional learning environment.

In other words, it's not the inert fact of the furniture itself-the new couch in the center of the room or the standing desk near the window-but the dynamic use of the space by the teacher and students that pays, in the end. Changing the layout of your classroom will almost certainly have no impact at all-if you don't change your teaching too.

The takeaway: Flexibility, combined with characteristics like acoustics and air quality, has a real impact on student achievement. If used properly, flexible classrooms produce better academic outcomes among primary school children than more traditional, static classroom designs.

The author of this article is the chief content officer at Edutopia. You can follow him on Twitter @smerrill777.

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Flexible Classrooms: Research Is Scarce, But Promising

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An ambitious study of 153 classrooms in the United Kingdom provides the best evidence that flexible spaces can boost academic performance.

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What is a flexible learning environment? e-Learning TKI, NZ.

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What is a flexible learning environment? e-Learning TKI, NZ.

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What is a flexible learning environment?

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Stephen Collis – Sydney Centre for Innovation in Learning

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Flexible learning spaces: how infrastructure can support innovative learning

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Flexible learning spaces: how infrastructure can support innovative learning

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Flexible learning spaces: how infrastructure can support innovative learning

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The principles of both the NZ Curriculum and Innovative Learning Environments can and should be present in traditional classrooms. However, both are enabled and can be enhanced in flexible learning spaces with collaborative teaching. Meeting the needs of learners requires a range of teaching approaches, a range of spaces and the highest quality resources.

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The impact of physical design on student outcomes

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The impact of physical design on student outcomes

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NZ Ministry of Education

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Modern Learning Environmentss: That’s just a classroom with a beanbag isn’t it?

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Modern Learning Environmentss: That’s just a classroom with a beanbag isn’t it?

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CORE Education's Mark Osborne discusses that the first step to considering modern learning environments is to start with learning. If we consider our school's vision for students, then identify the teaching strategies and environments that will help us make that vision a reality, it is a good solid first step.

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CORE innovative learning environment (ILE) matrix

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CORE innovative learning environment (ILE) matrix

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Secondary teacher makes changes to the learning environment:

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Secondary teacher makes changes to the learning environment:

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Innovative learning spaces research study

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Innovative learning spaces research study