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How to Plan a Classroom Seating Arrangement

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How to Plan a Classroom Seating Arrangement

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This article discusses several common classroom seating arrangments and how they can be useful in a classroom and for different learning activities.

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Classroom Behavior Management: A Dozen Common Mistakes and What to Do 
Instead

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Classroom Behavior Management: A Dozen Common Mistakes and What to Do 
Instead

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This article discusses several common behavior problems teachers experience in the classroom. The author discusses mistakes for dealing with the behaviors and ways that might improve or help change the poor behavior. One thing the author stated was how close proximity can quickly improve behavior.

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Classroom Behavior Management: A Dozen Common Mistakes and What to Do Instead

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One of our primary responsibilities as teachers is to help our students learn. It is difficult for learning to take place in chaotic environments. Subsequently, we are challenged daily to create and maintain a positive, productive classroom atmosphere conducive to learning. On any given day, this can be quite a challenge.

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Approaches for Modifying the Physical Learning Environment

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Approaches for Modifying the Physical Learning Environment

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This is a research article on changing the learning environment. The author discusses considerations of desk arrangments. He observes his classroom in different seating arrangments to see how the students do. A lot of great information and observations.

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The Effect of Classroom Seating Arrangement on Learning Ability

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The Effect of Classroom Seating Arrangement on Learning Ability

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This article discusses the academic effect of seating arrangements with in a classroom. They research how the placement of a student directly impacts how well they do in class.

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 An Educator’s Guide to 
Classroom Management 

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 An Educator’s Guide to 
Classroom Management 

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This is a guide to clasroom management. It many aspects of classroom behavior and suggests and guides you through classroom management strategies. It discusses organization of the classroom and how this can help with mantaining classroom order.

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This is a research paper written about how seating arrangments affect students needs in several different ways. The author discusses academic needs, social needs and behavioral needs. It is interesting to read through her study and how it developed as she observed her students and herself.

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This article discusses the relationship between how seats are arrangment and how students behave. I found many great points in this article that pertain to my research. It discusses space, room arrangement and seating by gender.

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This article discusses the best practices of classrroom management. Discusses the importance of classroom arrangement and reasons why students behave the way they do.

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DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF SEATING ARRANGEMENTS ON DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF FIFTH GRADE STUDENTS DURING INDEPENDENT SEATWORK

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DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF SEATING ARRANGEMENTS ON DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF FIFTH GRADE STUDENTS DURING INDEPENDENT SEATWORK

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This article discusses the importance of seating arrangement and how it can be the most effective classroom management practice. The study collects data from a 5th grade classroom to measure disruptive behavior.

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Student seating is one of the easiest, most cost-effective classroom management tactics available to teachers. As an antecedent intervention, seating arrangements may help to minimize or eliminate problem behavior without the need for consequence interventions (e.g., differential reinforcement or punishment). For example, Krantz and Risley (1977) showed that simply seating students away from others was nearly as effective in increasing on-task behavior as the systematic use of differential reinforcement and delivery of tangible rewards. Wheldall and Lam (1987) found that on-task behavior doubled when students were seated individually rather than in groups.

Although research on seating arrangements suggests that students behave more appropriately when they sit individually (for a review, see Wannarka & Ruhl, 2008), the role of student choice on seat selection has not been investigated. Offering students choices seems to be ethically responsible and may be an important component of a comprehensive classroom management system ( Cosden, Gannon, & Haring, 1995; Dunlap et al., 1994). However, allowing students to choose their seats might occasion more or less disruptive behavior, depending on where the students are seated. Completing schoolwork is a potentially high-effort response with potentially low-rate and poor-quality reinforcers, which often are delayed. Schoolwork also is in competition with disruptive behavior, which is a potentially low-effort response that can gain immediate access to a high-quality reinforcer (i.e., peer attention). Thus, it might not be in the best interest of the student or teacher to allow students to choose their own seats or to sit in close proximity to each other during independent seatwork. The purpose of this research was to examine classroom disruptive behavior during student- versus teacher-selected seating arrangements in the context of group and individual seating arrangements during independent seatwork.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

depicts the rates of disruptive behavior emitted across conditions. During group seating when students chose seats, disruptive behavior ranged from 0.82 to 1.82 per minute ( M  =  1.31 per minute, SD  =  0.37) during the first phase and 0.8 to 1.0 per minute ( M  =  0.92 per minute, SD  =  0.07) in the second. When the teacher chose student seats, disruptive behavior ranged from 0.33 to 0.67 per minute ( M  =  0.44 per minute, SD  =  0.13) in the first phase and 0.40 to 0.58 per minute ( M  =  0.49 per minute, SD  =  0.08) in the second. During individual seating arrangements when the teacher chose students' seats, disruptive behavior ranged from 0.1 to 0.29 per minute ( M  =  0.21 per minute, SD  =  0.07) in the first phase and 0 to 0.33 per minute ( M  =  0.12 per minute, SD  =  0.13) in the second. When the students chose their seats, disruptive behavior ranged from 0.44 to 1.1 per minute ( M  =  0.65 per minute, SD  =  0.23) in the first phase and 0.4 to 0.6 per minute ( M  =  0.44, SD  =  0.08) in the second.

Within and across group and individual seating conditions, disruptive behavior occurred less often when the teacher selected the students' seats. In the group seating arrangement, disruptive behavior occurred on average more than twice as often during student seat selection ( M  =  1.12 per minute) than during teacher seat selection ( M  =  0.47 per minute). In the individual seating arrangement, disruptive behavior occurred on average more than three times as often during student seat selection ( M  =  0.55 per minute) than during teacher seat selection ( M  =  0.17 per minute).

The probability that intervals with disruption were preceded by disruptive behavior or contained multiple disruptive behaviors was .47 during the group seating condition when students selected their own seats; it was .20 when the teacher selected the students' seats. When students were sitting in rows and students selected their own seats, the probability that disruptive behavior was preceded by disruptive behavior or contained multiple disruptive behaviors was .10; when the teacher selected the students' seats, it was .05. Anecdotally, it appeared that when one student in the group emitted a target behavior, other students in the group were likely to respond. Disruptive behavior during group seating tended to be clustered. When students were seated in rows, disruptive behavior tended to be isolated. That is, the disruptive behavior of one student did not usually evoke as much disruptive behavior from other students.

Our results are consistent with those of most studies on group versus individual seating arrangements and suggest that teachers may manage inappropriate behavior more effectively during independent seatwork by seating their students in rows. Further, our results suggest that providing students with choices for seating may not produce the positive outcomes demonstrated in other studies on task or reinforcer choice ( Cosden et al., 1995; Dunlap et al., 1994). In fact, providing choices in this study resulted in increases in disruptive behavior in both group and individual seating arrangements. However, if one considers the results from a matching law perspective and seating a student next to any individual student as the opportunities for reinforcement, then the two seat-selection procedures should produce different results. When students self-select seating, it is likely that they choose to sit next to other students who will interact socially. Thus, the self-selection arrangement may set the occasion for more dense reinforcement and higher quality reinforcement for disruptive behavior than appropriate behavior. Our results are consistent with previous research on the matching law in applied settings. For example, Borrero and Vollmer (2002) showed that the proportional rate of problem behavior relative to appropriate behavior approximately matched the proportional rate of reinforcement for problem behavior for three participants during functional analyses. Further, Borrero et al. (2007) demonstrated that vocal responses and eye contact roughly matched the rates of reinforcement for those behaviors during small-group discussions in a college class.

Despite the potential to explain our results in the context of the matching law, procedural refinements would be necessary to draw firm conclusions. Taking preintervention data on the frequency of reinforced talking or touching by students would help to establish true rates of reinforcement that could be plotted to investigate matching during subsequent student seating manipulations. Further, like many studies on choice, the consequence of the choice was confounded with choice making. It is not clear if similar results would have been obtained if the seat assignments during the teacher selection condition were yoked to those in the previous student selection condition.

We also caution that our sample may not be representative of a typical group of fifth graders. We conducted the study in a private school with a mostly homogeneous group of students who were relatively well behaved. Future research should test the generality of these findings with more diverse populations. Further, our results did not show meaningful differences in the amount or quality of completed work during the different seating conditions (these data are available from the corresponding author). However, the work we chose seemed relatively easy, in that most of the students completed all assignments with high accuracy during most of the sessions. Although research suggests that independent practice activities should be at a student's instructional level (90% accuracy) and not at frustration level (below 90% accuracy) ( Blevins, 2001), introducing more difficult schoolwork within the seating and choice arrangements may produce different results with regard to work completion and accuracy.

The limitations notwithstanding, our data support the use of teacher-assigned seating arrangements and provide further support for seating students in rows for independent seatwork. Such arrangements may prevent problem behaviors and allow teachers to spend more time teaching and facilitating learning.

REFERENCES

Blevins W. Building fluency: Lessons and strategies for reading success. New York: Scholastic Professional Books; 2001.

Borrero J.C, Crisolo S.S, Tu Q, Rieland W.A, Ross N.A, Francisco M.T, et al. An application of the matching law to social dynamics. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 2007;40:589-601. [PMC free article]

Borrero J.C, Vollmer T.R. An application of the matching law to severe problem behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 2002;35:13-27. [PMC free article]

Cosden M, Gannon C, Haring T.G. Teacher-control versus student-control over choice of task and reinforcement for students with severe behavior problems. Journal of Behavioral Education. 1995;5:11-27.

Dunlap G, dePerczel M, Clarke S, Wilson D, Wright S, White R, et al. Choice making to promote adaptive behavior for students with emotional and behavioral challenges. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 1994;27:505-518. [PMC free article]

Krantz P.J, Risley T.R. Behavioral ecology in the classroom. In: O'Leary D.K, O'Leary S.G, editors. Classroom management: The successful use of behavior modification (rev. ed., pp. 349-366) New York: Pergamon; 1977. (Eds.)

Wannarka R, Ruhl K. Seating arrangements that promote positive academic and behavioural outcomes: A review of empirical research. Support for Learning. 2008;23:89-93.

Wheldall K, Lam Y. Rows versus tables: II. The effects of two classroom seating arrangements on classroom disruption rate, on-task behaviour and teacher behaviour in three special school classes. Educational Psychology. 1987;7:303-312.

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DIFFERENTIAL EFFECTS OF SEATING ARRANGEMENTS ON DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOR OF FIFTH GRADE STUDENTS DURING INDEPENDENT SEATWORK

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Student seating is one of the easiest, most cost-effective classroom management tactics available to teachers. As an antecedent intervention, seating arrangements may help to minimize or eliminate problem behavior without the need for consequence interventions (e.g., differential reinforcement or punishment).

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Changing Behaviors
by Changing the
Classroom Environment

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Changing Behaviors
by Changing the
Classroom Environment

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This article discusses how environmental modifications aid in preventing disruptive behavior. It discusses how classroom spaces can be modified in several ways because on how students are behaving. The article goes on to follow a teacher to collect data about the behavior of her students behavior and what types of disruptive behaviors are occuring, After observing they discuss what types of environmental modifications might help her.