Seating Charts and the Grammar of Schooling
In EdSurge, Kevin Behan, a product manager at GoGuardian (a for-profit software company creating programs for classroom management and other educational tasks) wrote an opinion piece (August 17, 2019) about the importance of seating charts. He (or EdSurge) titled the op-ed: “Create a Culture, Not a Classtoom: Why Seating Charts Matter.”
After all it is the beginning of another school year and one of the early tasks every teacher in the age-graded school is to determine where students will sit. Those decisions have to do with a mix of questions circulating in a teacher’s head: Where do I seat kids who I think need close supervision? Should I separate close friends? Or should I let students choose where to sit in the spirit of giving students agency?
The fact remains that it is the teacher who decides. Just as the teacher determined the arrangement of furniture in the room from rows of desks to horseshoe half-circles with tables facing one another across an empty space in the center–I could go on since there are many variations of these desk patterns but I won’t. Arranging furniture and seating students are important early decisions in establishing the teacher’s authority and ground rules for appropriate student behavior.
Thus, the classroom seating chart is one of the plethora of rules that govern the grammar of schooling embedded within the age-graded school. This larger framework of seeing teaching in public schools as part of a complex system of norms for both teachers and students does not appear in this op-ed.
Using the seating chart to fashion a classroom culture is surely useful advice. Yet not seeing how the age-graded school as an organization imposes boundaries and rules within which both teachers and students work misses the teacher’s limited autonomy–after all, no teacher is allowed to pick the students she has in her fourth grade classroom–that teachers do have. Teachers have constrained discretion in deciding how desks are arranged and CONTINUE READING: Seating Charts and the Grammar of Schooling | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice