What are the different sitting arrangements?

In many classrooms around the world, students sit in orderly rows. In some institutions, we can find students sitting in a large circle around the walls of the classroom. Or you may see small groups of them working in different parts of the room. Sometimes, they are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the teacher. Sometimes, it is not immediately obvious who the teacher is. Clearly, we are seeing a number of different approaches in the arrangements of the chairs and tables in the classrooms. Some of arrangements are briefly discussed below:

1. Orderly Rows:
   When the students sit in rows in classrooms, there are obvious advantages. It means that the teacher has a clear view of all the students and the students can all see the teacher in whose direction they are facing. It makes lecturing easy, enabling the teacher to maintain eye contact with the people he or she is talking to. It also makes discipline easier since it is more difficult to be disruptive when you are sitting in a row. If there are aisles in the classroom, the teacher can easily walk up and down making more personal contact with individual students and watching what they are doing.
   Orderly rows imply teachers working with the whole class. Some activities are specially suited to this kind of organization: explaining a grammar point, watching a video, using the board, demonstrating text organization on an overhead transparency which shows a paragraph, for example. It is also useful when students are involved in certain kinds of language practice. If all the students are focused on a task, the whole class gets the same messages.
   When teachers are working with the whole class sitting in orderly rows, it is vitally important to make sure that they remain in contact with the students and that they keep everyone involved. So, if they are asking questions to the class, they must remember to ask students at the back, the quiet ones perhaps, rather than just the ones nearest them. They must move round so that they fcan see all the students to gauge their reactions to what's going on.
   One trick that many teachers use is to keep their studentss guessing, Especially where teachers need to aks individual students questions, it is important that they shoould not do so in order, student after student, line by line. That way, the procedure becomes very tedious and the students know when they are going to be asked and, once this has happened, that they are going to be asked again. It is much better to ask students from all parts of the room in apparently random order. It keeps everyone on their toes.
   In many classrooms of the world, teachers are faced with classes of anywhere between 40 and 200 students at a time. In such circumstances, orderly rows may well be the best or only solution.
2. Circles and horseshoes:
   In smaller classes, many teachers and students prefer circles or horseshoes. In a horseshoe, the teacher will probably be at the open end of the arrangement since that may well be where the board, overhead projector and/or tape recorder are situated. In a circle, the teacher's position, where the board is situated, is less dominating.
   Classes which are arranged in a circle make quite a strong statement about what the teacher and the students believe in. With all the people in the room sitting in a circle, there is a far greater feeling of equality than when the teacher stays out at the front. This may not be quite so true of the horseshoe shape where the teacher is often located in a central position, but even here the teacher has a much greater opportunity to get close to the students.
   If, therefore, teachers believe in lowering the barriers between themselves and their students, this kind of seating arrangement will help. There are other advantages too, chief among which is the fact that all the students can see each other. In an 'orderly row' classroom, you have to turn round away from the teacher if you want to make eye contact with someone behind you. In a circle or a horseshoe, no such disruption is necessary. The classroom is thus a more intimate place and the potential for students to share feelings and information through talking, eye contact or expressive body movements is far greater.
3. Separate Tables:
   Even circles and horseshoes seem rather informal compared to classes where students are seated in small groups at individual tables. In such classrooms, you might see the teacher walking around checking the students' work and helping out if they are having difficulties.
   When students sit in small groups at individual tables, the atmosphere in the class is much less hierarchical than in other arrangements. It is much easier for the teacher to work at one table while the others get on with their own work. It feels less like teacher and students and more like responsible adults getting on with the business of learning.
   However, this arrangement is not without its own problems. In the first place, students may not always want to be with the same colleagues: indeed, their preferences may change over time. Secondly, it makes 'whole-class' teaching more difficult, since the students are more diffuse and separated.
   The way students sit says a lot about the style of the teacher or the institution where the lessons take place. Many teachers would like to rearrange their classes so that they are not always faced with rows and rows of bored faces. Even where this is physically impossible in terms of furniture, for example teachers can use different groupings.
   
   
   Cited From: How to Teach English (2005) by Jeremy Harmer 
   
   
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