A Versatile Seating Arrangement That Really Works

“Seating arrangements, both the furniture and the students in that seating, are an often-overlooked part of teaching practices,” says retired high school teacher Jay Schauer. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about lesson plannings, transitions, making connections, and yet we do the same thing that we did for years and years and years, which is just, ‘Well, here’s how the furniture is, find a place to sit.’”

After teaching in a variety of schools and classrooms, Schauer was intimately aware of the limitations of traditional seating arrangements (desks in rows, circles, blocks). They all had benefits—and drawbacks. Some arrangements worked great for direct instruction; others for group work. He needed something that worked for both. Somewhere in his teaching journey, he heard about arranging desks into an L shape and decided on a whim to try it out. In his room, he had 18 two-person tables. This allowed him to create nine Ls (with four students at each L).

A light bulb went off. The new arrangement instantly reduced the number of people between him and any given student. “So as students were working, I could move much more freely,” he recalls. “I could actually stand in the corner of the L and be immediately adjacent to all four students in that L. I could drop down and be at eye level with any one of them.” As students worked, he could circulate, listening in on their work, and take the time to check in on students and build rapport. The benefits for students were immediately obvious as well. The Ls  reduced classroom management issues right off the bat. “One of the advantages of the Ls is kids are keeping each other on task,” he says. Schauer was hooked.

But it would take one more big change before Schauer started seeing dramatic academic results. After a year or two of using the Ls, Schauer was still letting kids sit where they wanted to sit—despite his recognition that letting students choose their own seats seldom benefited all students. “The students who got to sit where they wanted to sit were the students who had a lot of status or the students who were bullies,” he says. “And the students who didn’t get where they wanted to sit were the kids who were late or didn’t know people.” Furthermore, he recognized that students’ decisions about where to sit were driven by “their undeveloped frontal lobe”—i.e., social, not academic, reasons.

And so he decided to design his own groupings, with the goal of making each L academically diverse. Digging into students’ previous years’ grades, he placed his most successful students in seats 2 and 4 of each L, students with average academic performance in seat 1, and students who struggled academically in seat 3 (between two successful students). Because each L was academically similar to every other L, when Schauer rotated students to different Ls for certain activities, the academic makeup of each L stayed the same.

The combination of L-shaped seating along with these new assigned seats resulted in measurable academic gains. When Schauer compared that year’s class with the previous year, he says, “we started getting more consistent success in early units.” High-performing students continued to do well (some even did better)—but most important, students who had previously struggled saw improvement.

He credits much of this success to the peer teaching that the Ls encouraged, especially when combined with strategic seating. Struggling students got help from successful peers, and successful students reinforced their knowledge by teaching it to others.

From that point on, L-shaped seating was the default setup in Schauer’s room. “But there were times where it wasn’t the perfect thing,” he admits. On quiz days, students moved the tables back to their forward-facing positions. On board game days, they turned the tables back into blocks. “So it’s not that they are set in stone,” he says. “They’re flexible when you need them to be flexible.”

Schauer also recognizes that certain room shapes and types of furniture make it impossible to adopt L-shaped seating. In that case, he still recommends strategic grouping, with the goal of placing students in heterogeneous clusters.  ”Even if you can’t do the Ls,” he says, “you can still think strategically about how you sit the students in that furniture, and in doing so, you can apply some of the things that I did with the Ls.”

Schauer wrote about the benefits of this versatile seating arrangement in the Edutopia article, “A Desk Layout Alternative to Rows and Circles,” along with a follow-up specifically on his ideas about intentional groupings in “A Strategic Approach to Seating Arrangements in High School.” He also appeared on the School of Practice podcast episode, “A Flexible Seating Arrangement That Teachers Love.”