Classroom Map Considerations

A seating chart is one thing: where each student sits within a classroom structure. A classroom map is a much more important consideration: how do you arrange the furniture in your classroom to best facilitate learning? 

I've had desks, tables, comfy chairs, a couch, a desktop computer lab, Chromebooks, and everything in between in my classroom.

I've really come to two conclusions:

1. Less is always more.
2. Intentional use of furniture is always more than less.
   

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Click the image above to take a digital tour of my classroom, complete with justifications of its Spartan aesthetic.

1) Include Places for Privacy

There will always be times in the classroom where single students or small groups need a bit of privacy to focus. Whether one of your co workers sends in a few students to finish up an important test, or one of your students can’t hack it at the gallery walk you had planned without misbehaving so you need a place to dole out your well-established consequences, or a really sad girl just needs a bit of privacy to mourn over the loss of -whatever- a small area that affords students privacy is a very useful tool to include into a classroom map.  When creating private locations in your room, make sure that the sight lines are blocked enough to prevent students from easily seeing each other, while still open enough for you to see around them. An easy way to achieve this is with chest-height bookshelves or filing cabinets, which hide seated students from other seated students while still allowing everyone to be seen from a standing position.

2) Include Space for Student Work

The two most popular bulletin boards in my room are the student quote board, and the absurd rules board. On the student quoteboard, I place fantastic quotes that I overhear students say, such as “Violence answers everything but my phone calls,” “Go ahead and shave your arms, never be afraid of who you are,” and “Jimmy, why didn’t you save that money and buy something useful, like a horse?” Needless to say, students crowd around that board while ignoring the blackboard with today’s agenda on it. The most popular board by far is the Absurd Rules board. Each time I need to say something ridiculous to students, I record it as a rule on my Absurd Rules board. Fan favorites include “No sticking your size three down anyone’s throat,” “Your butt cheeks are NOT antonyms,” “Destroy is NOT a jeopardy topic,” and “No impersonating a British person who fell into the mud.” Kids want to see kids reflected in the classroom. It’s not a place to be designed for you. It’s a place to be designed for THEM.
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3) Clear Sight Lines are Imperative

If students can hide, they will hide. If students can get away with disreputable behavior, they will get away with disreputable behavior. Clear sightlines from every location to every location are imperative to run a classroom. You might need to manipulate hidden corners of your classroom out of the mix by filling them with your filing cabinets. You may need to adjust your desk’s location to face the entire room instead of the window, like you could do if you were a fancy office worker. Ideally, your setup will allow you to see everything, while purposely including blind spots to keep trouble students apart, offer students private work areas when they need it, allow multiple activities to occur simultaneously, and generally break up the space to use it to its maximal extent. An easy rule of thumb is to ensure that when you’re standing, you can see everything, and from where students are sitting, they can only see what you want them to see.
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4) Avoid Hiding Spots

Hiding spots are very different than private work areas. Private work areas might be created by using a bookshelf to create a little visual separation between where your desks are set up, and where your group table is set up. Hiding spots, on the other hand, are small places behind file cabinets where students can throw their books, garbage, and depending on the day, maybe their entire bodies behind. Furthermore, private work areas are designated and designed specifically for work. Hiding places usually happen by accident and allow students to pursue the temptation of a midday nap. Easy mistakes early teachers make include forgetting that when a door is propped open, it might create a hiding spot behind it. They also sometimes forget that locations that are open and visible when you’re standing in front of the class teaching, or at any of your cooperative learning groups helping, might be as hidden as the dark side of the moon when you’re sitting at your desk correcting papers during homeroom or your study hall period. Even a particularly tall or heavy student can provide a shady hiding spot for a small student who’s assigned to sit behind. Big hair is also something to watch out for. I once had a student with the most magnificent afro I’ve ever seen. Entire colonies of third graders could easily have napped behind him without any teacher being the wiser. The easiest way to manage hiding spots, of course, is to always be on the move watching your students. Then, even if they find a hiding spot, and students are capable of finding a hiding spot in an empty, white, fluorescently lit room at high noon, their hiding spot will soon disappear when your vantage point changes.
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"Hiding" is hard when materials are a rubric and student work exemplar (paper taped to the table) and a Chromebook locked to a Form with a clever manipulation of the "quiz" settings.

Do you know where it's hard to hide from a teacher? In plain sight. Allow students to work in clear, open spaces, and even laying down with friends is easily monitored.

5) Eschew Clutter

My social studies teacher, (the teammate that I work with, not any of the teachers who taught me) and most social studies teachers, have good reason to keep a wealth of documents, books, movies, CDs, and primary sources in their classrooms. When studying history, those documents help a lot, and I understand. There are some other applications for keeping lots of paper or objects in a classroom (like an art classroom keeping old student projects as examples and non-examples of good work.) 

Most classrooms, though, are filled with too much stuff. There are piles everywhere in most rooms. Piles of old workbooks. Piles of student work that hasn’t been passed back. Piles of gym clothes students leave by accident. Piles of old computers or encyclopedias. Boxes of whatever you ordered three years ago before the budget got cut. A few broken desks that are labeled ‘remove’ that the janitor hasn’t got to yet. You get the point. Get rid of clutter. It distracts students by giving them something to look at and mess around with instead of paying attention to your lesson. It’s really hard for students to fidget with the useless objects all over your room when there aren’t any objects in your room.

What I thought was a clutter-free classroom three years ago.

A truly clutter-free classroom.

​Actual clutter also creates visual clutter, making it easier for students to get away with random badness, because when you look out at a cluttered classroom, you see a scene akin to a page from a Where’s Waldo book. If your eyes can’t immediately focus on the glow of a cellular phone from under a desk, you have too much stuff. If you’re not sure what’s in a drawer, just throw it all in the recycling bin. If you’re not sure when they taught Tom Sawyer but there are still 120 copies of the book in your classroom, take it down to your school’s library or book room. If there are three disconnected computers waiting to be hooked up, or if they’re outdated and waiting to be cleared off to the computer afterlife, make the necessary calls, and get them out of your classroom immediately. Clutter makes managing a classroom harder. Get rid of it.

6) Avoid Personal Decorations

My mom got a little upset at this recommendation, because her classroom was decorated beautifully, and some of the decorations were pictures from family trips, or our old stuffed animals, and other sundries. To clear up any anger ahead of time, personal decorations are ok IF THEY SERVE AN ACADEMIC PURPOSE AS WELL. For example, my mom’s pictures were from our family trips across the country. Many of the locations depicted in the pictures were studied in the third grade westward expansion unit, so the pictures, while personal, were also academic tools to establish the setting of a history unit.
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I built this CO2 car to compete with my students many years ago. It's still on my desk, wearing the dings and dents it earned winning third fastest on the team.

Similarly, don’t hang up a picture of your favorite rapper, unless one of their songs outlines a classroom behavioral expectation, and you share the lyrics with your students, and use the poster as a constant reminder to refer to the lyrics attached. Plus, students generally don’t want to see what you like. They want to see themselves reflected in your classroom. I’ve established my entire back wall as an ‘awesome student work’ zone. There is so much beautiful, original artwork back there, and because it looks like students made it, the kids ask about it all the time, and look at it closely. Whenever they ask, it’s a great teaching tool because I can share who made it, how many years ago, and I can bring up how great work affects real people for years after it’s made. It all goes right back to creating authentic assessment. When kids notice good work created by the assignments in your classroom and are impressed by it, they will be more likely to create that level of work themselves. Real art made by famous artists will never affect students as much as the decent artwork that their older sister, or cousin, or father created.
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One of "my" proudest pieces of artwork. Aaaaaaaaangelo Zappie drew it. The fact that a student created it makes it authentic.