Classroom Bouncing

Today my cooperating teacher loaned me out for the day. Her classes were all working on test prep today since my school is on the warning list for No Child Left Behind. All social studies teachers are supposed to bring their students to the computer lab at least once each semester to work on test prep activities. My teacher rolled her eyes but complied. As she pointed out, the low test scores here are not due to lack of test prep (the school actually received a plaque this year for having some of the highest ACT scores in Illinois) but a lack of student motivation. They find the extra testing for NCLB boring, useless, and a waste of time. Anyway, that's not the point of this blog.
By bouncing around classrooms today, I had the chance to observe several different uses of space and different teaching styles. The two favored classroom setups at my school are the U-shape and one where all of the desks face the same direction in rows but are spaced so that students are paired off (the front row would look like : -- -- -- ). The interesting thing about the U-shape is that teachers employed it differently. One teacher used a U where the seats were spread out. This limited student ability to talk to one another and forced them to concentrate on the teacher (which seems to defeat what I thought was the purpose of a U - class discussion). Another teacher used a close U. This allowed students to work easier in groups and facilitated discussion. The other shape I saw, with the desks paired off, was not, in my opinion, a good use of space. My cooperating teacher uses that shape, and she constantly struggles with chatting. I think that if you put the students in a shape like that, you are inviting them to chat with their neighbor. If you don't want chatting, don't shape your classroom like that. The one nice thing about that shape (with desks facing one direction) is that it facilitated lectures and movies. Most of the teachers I observed today made a point of telling me that when I teach I should be constantly changing what I'm doing. Watch part of a movie, lecture for a short time, hand out a worksheet, pair them off, etc. Never repeat the same activity for the entire period every single day. Sometimes, they said, it's necessary for time reasons to do one activity the whole time (if a movie is longer, if a lecture would lack coherence if cut up, or if you're running behind timewise), but you should the switch things up the next day. Through watching these various teachers operate and utilize the space they're given, I learned a lot about what to do (and what not to do!) when I teach.