How I Understand This Chapter:
The general idea in this chapter is that a super organized classroom where desks are all in neat rows and all learning is directed towards the front of the room is not conducive to student thinking. It promotes a more passive “I will receive the information” mentality in students, and also discourages intellectual messiness. The more organized and symmetrical the furniture is, the more students expect their actions and work to be perfect and ordered. While this may sound like a positive, Liljedahl suggests that when students believe this to be the expectation, they are less willing to think and take intellectual risks. If they must be perfect, then why ever take the chance to not be perfect?
It is strongly recommended that the classroom is “de-fronted”, meaning there is no single front of the room, such as a podium, single whiteboard, or overhead projector screen. Furniture, he argues, should be asymmetrical, with chairs facing different directions and not one single location. It makes sense when coupled with the idea that most of the time students are to be standing up in random groups of three while working at a whiteboard. If the teacher isn’t lecturing all of the time, there doesn’t really need to be a single point of focus.
Impactful Quotes (To Me):
“Thinking is messy. It requires a significant amount of risk taking, trial and error, and non-linear thinking. It turns out that in super organized classrooms, students don’t feel safe to get messy in these ways” (page 72)
“Furniture placement sends a message. What is important is that the message that is sent is commensurate with the activity that is intended. That is, a thinking classroom needs to be organized in such a way that says thinking, collaboration, and risk-taking are expected.” (page 73)
Most teachers don’t really have a choice as to what furniture they get in their classroom. For my first 12 years I had the same desks that were there when I got hired, and I put them in rows to maximize space. After a few years I arranged them in groups of 4, but still angled towards the front of the room. When the school was remodeled, we got money for some new furniture and I was able to order whiteboard tables for my classroom. Other than being supremely grateful for my amazing tables, I didn’t put much thought into how they were arranged. I definitely didn’t think about the message I was sending to my students by how I arranged the furniture. I always figured the types of lessons I did and class expectations set the tone more than the layout of the room.
How Did This Go For Me?
This was a very difficult strategy for me to implement for a few reasons. Firstly, the student furniture in my room consists of large whiteboard tables (which are awesome, btw) and adjustable chairs on wheels. While all of the furniture is pretty easy to move around, configuring 9 large tables in an asymmetrical way was not something my brain was capable of handling. Second, since I wasn’t fully invested in having every lesson be at the VNPS, I wasn’t willing to completely throw out the front of my room. Some of my lessons needed to be directed towards a single location, mainly because on the days in which I lacked the time or motivation to completely overhaul a lesson I was able to default to a lesson from prior years, which sometimes involved direct instruction. What I ended up with was the following layout:
Red is a thinking station on the wall
Blue is a student table
Yellow is my desk
Purple is the overhead projector screen.
My goal was to arrange the furniture in a way so that students could easily access the VNPS when needed, but also accommodate a direct lesson when necessary, as well as provide structure when students needed to take an assessment. It seemed to work well, but certainly still has a “front” of the room in which the tables are all facing.
One teaching practice I tried to implement was to wander around the room during instruction, writing examples on any of the VNPS in the room, which did de-front the room a little bit. Students knew that if I was talking, I was walking, and they got some good usage out of the swivel feature of the chairs.
One thing that Liljedahl talks about is that the furniture not be perfect, but also not be so chaotic that there is no structure at all. Being a very organized person myself (which my 13-year-old self cannot believe actually happened) I find it hard to let go of symmetrical, neat rows. I don’t really know why, I just don’t like it.
With the furniture that I have, I think there is only so much that I can do, and unless the students are at the VNPS 90% of the time, I figure this is a decent compromise until I am ready to fully implement these strategies every day.
Up next: Overall Impressions
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