Organizing Seating In Classroom. How Do You Like It?

[mamer 0]

There are many different ways teachers can organize seating in classroom to suite their teaching and make their students comfortable and at ease with the activities.Some seating arrangements are good for dynamic interactive activities and others are good for individual work.Imagine that you are a student. Which arrangement would you be more comfortable with as a student?Or you are a teacher teaching a group o say 18 adult students.Which arrangement would you be more comfortable with as a teacher?I'm interested to know your opinion on that matter.

Edited February 4, 2013 by velma
Link removed since it was pointing to a webhosting site (see edit history)

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Figure 3, for sure. It's the best one because it allows everyone to have partners (4 per group) for helping one another. The downside to this is that because of how those desks are situated, it's harder for some students to see the teacher, but the general principle is the same: grouping together allows students to learn from each other and in process strengthen their knowledge of the subjects.

[k_nitin_r 8]

The image from the original post has been removed so I am not really sure of the ideas that wre suggested, but I have a few ideas of my own. The traditional classroom sitting has pretty much the same seating arrangement as somebody who would attend a concert or an opera, minus the balconies. With all the seats facing forward, there is the best chance of fitting as many people as possible within the confines of a room in a reasonably organized manner. The next best thing would be to position the seats around the instructor such that there is about a 120 degree field of view for the instructor of the class and the students in the front-row face the instructor instead of having the students turn to look at the instructor and possibly result in neck fatigue or cramps. Finally, a couple of round tables within the classroom and chairs surrounding each of the tables is a great environment for collaborative work. It is difficult to adapt to different modes of teaching because of the time required to shift a group between different layouts or classrooms, so perhaps it would help if the classrooms were determined based on the contents of a session, and the sessions are planned such that minimal changes to the layout are required.BTW, has anyone else used an overhead projector for transparencies? Those may be going the way of the dinosaur, but there are so many of them still in existence and the classroom layout has to be planned in a manner that those overhead projectors can be used because no matter where an instructor stands, he or she would be blocking the view of the material for at least some of the students, unless the instructor is standing right at the back of the class with the projector, in which case the layout would have to ensure that the distance between the front and the rear of the classroom is not too much to cause the image of the overhead projector to go past the floor and the ceiling.Modern classrooms typically have a ceiling-mounted projector and projects the image from a computer so the instructor can sit in a corner of the room and convey instructions while using visual aids to illustrate or point, or put up slides of bullet points to help in delivering the content.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

The image from the original post has been removed so I am not really sure of the ideas that wre suggested, but I have a few ideas of my own. The traditional classroom sitting has pretty much the same seating arrangement as somebody who would attend a concert or an opera, minus the balconies. With all the seats facing forward, there is the best chance of fitting as many people as possible within the confines of a room in a reasonably organized manner. The next best thing would be to position the seats around the instructor such that there is about a 120 degree field of view for the instructor of the class and the students in the front-row face the instructor instead of having the students turn to look at the instructor and possibly result in neck fatigue or cramps. Finally, a couple of round tables within the classroom and chairs surrounding each of the tables is a great environment for collaborative work. It is difficult to adapt to different modes of teaching because of the time required to shift a group between different layouts or classrooms, so perhaps it would help if the classrooms were determined based on the contents of a session, and the sessions are planned such that minimal changes to the layout are required.
BTW, has anyone else used an overhead projector for transparencies? Those may be going the way of the dinosaur, but there are so many of them still in existence and the classroom layout has to be planned in a manner that those overhead projectors can be used because no matter where an instructor stands, he or she would be blocking the view of the material for at least some of the students, unless the instructor is standing right at the back of the class with the projector, in which case the layout would have to ensure that the distance between the front and the rear of the classroom is not too much to cause the image of the overhead projector to go past the floor and the ceiling.

Modern classrooms typically have a ceiling-mounted projector and projects the image from a computer so the instructor can sit in a corner of the room and convey instructions while using visual aids to illustrate or point, or put up slides of bullet points to help in delivering the content.

In my recent classes overheads were no longer used, however there is a "newer" system out that consists of a touch-screen (with pen for writing) and a projector (or 2-3 depending) to display the contents on the wall. Most of the classes also had a type of camera attached so you could slide things under it and show them on the walls as well (for writing, demonstrations, etc.).

So overheads aren't "gone," per se, but they have evolved!