On Flexible Seating, Concrete Sequential Thinking and Conceptual Understanding

Do you ever have one of those great ideas that just falls short?

I took the opportunity to bring my students into the organization and thinking about our new classroom this year. I teach five classes across three grade levels, so I couldn't quite figure out how to have the students design the entire space from scratch. Instead, I organized my best thinking about flexible seating and created spaces that I thought would match specific aspects of the reading and writing workshop.

As a provocation to the year, I asked my students the questions in the image above. They slowly and quietly toured the room and noticed the small tweaks from last year's class. They answered the the question about what was missing thoughtfully:

"Maybe some plants? They calm me down when I'm reading."

"Could we organize the books into similar groups?"

"Maybe a place to store our notebooks so you can look at them when we finish?"

The third question I asked was a tough one for them. I did have one student, I'll call him Adam, who tried his best to answer it. He volunteered the following idea: "These tables are organized in a weird way. If you're working there, you can't see the teacher and the board where lessons are projected." I challenged him to tell me which of the three questions his idea was answering. Realizing his evaluative language pulled the idea away from the first question he promised to rephrase his thinking.

A bit of wait time and he confessed that he was still unsure of how to change his idea to match the questions. The bell rang, and as students headed to lunch, the class promised to continue the discussion later. Adam remained behind, wanting to continue talking. In full disclosure, he is a naturally curious student and he wanted to understand how his idea fit into my vision of class. He is also a fairly consistent concrete sequential thinker, like many middle school students.

I asked him to join me in the space he was talking about in the hope that being in the space would change our thinking. It looks like this.

Adam sat down in one of the six outside edge chairs and again re-iterated how he wouldn't be able to see the board if he was sitting there. I asked, "What else might you be doing in this space?"

He responded again with concrete sequential thinking. "I really don't know, I couldn't see the board from here, so I don't know what I would be doing."

I asked him where else he could be sitting. He responded by signaling all of the other chairs on the outside. When I asked him where else he could be sitting, I responded to his confused stare by telling him there were three more possible answers. He hesitantly replied that he could sit in what he called the "teacher chair." I let him off the hook and offered on top of the tables and under the tables as the other possible answers. A smile of understanding and a shared laugh indicated that he was beginning to shift out of concrete thinking.

"Now that you're thinking about all the different spots where you could sit, what might students be doing here if they weren't meant to be looking at the board?" As soon as he mumbled the words discussing with the teacher, I knew we were getting close.

"Now, what would a discussion in this space look like?" I asked. Without difficulty, he talked to me about the back and forth nature of discussion that might happen at this table. Knowing we were very close to reaching my goal of connecting different types of learning to spaces, I asked Adam to look at the table next to us. It was a hexagonal table like this one:

A huge A-HA spread across his face as he excitedly began describing a discussion that didn't have a teacher or a leader. "It would be more equal," he said.

The great irony of this entire realization is the fact that Adam would not have been able to come to conceptual understanding without the flexible seating. He had to be in the space in order to change the way he thought. Flexible seating is much more than a pretty or comfortable space. It's more than giving students a choice of where to sit. It changes thinking.

I thought I'd get the final word as I encouraged him to think of learning as more than a teacher in the front of the room and students in desks working. I told him that it's almost the year 2020 and the model of education has looked like that for over 150 years.

The last word was his though, as he turned to me and said, "But it shouldn't."

It shouldn't indeed.