Seating arrangements in a classroom may have never crossed your mind, but it certainly is an important topic me.

In my tenth period world studies class with CHS teacher Kevin Christie, I sit with a table of fairly respectful and intelligent people, but we don’t work well together.

I have trouble working with this specific tablegroup because we all seem to want to work alone and there is not push from any of us to work as a group.

When I brought up the issue to Christie he said that perhaps it would help to assign students roles, for example having one student be the presenter, another a researcher, one a scribe, and so on.

Perhaps assigning roles like this would help students come out of their shells a bit and work as a group rather that trying to do it all alone.

Christie says he noticed a sufficient increase in student productivity after he re-arranged the placement of students.

In Joel Mckee’s class, I am again placed with students I do not work well with; I feel I end up doing most of the work while others just sit back and relax.

McKee says he believes students will feel more motivated to work with people in a group and he feels that they do better in a group than on their own but I have not found this to be true for me.

When people work in a group they can just sit back while others do the work for them.   

They don’t have to do the work so they don’t.

Often times in groups I’ve been in there is not enough stuff for everyone to be doing something so people don’t contribute to the group.

Instead, I have found though that the people in my group work well and pairs and on our own.

There is one person who doesn’t seem to ever really contribute, and with some students teachers can’t do much to change that.

I think teachers and students should work together to find arrangements that meet each student’s specific needs in a classroom environment.

Perhaps teachers could present a survey to each class asking students how they work best and pair them up based on the data collected.

Regardless the approach teachers take on this, I  believe seating arrangements are important parts of a classroom environment.