Flexible Seating Series Part 3

Hopefully by now some of you have read my posts about considering flexible seating and gathering flexible seating options. If you're new to flexible seating, you're probably asking, "yeah, so how do I do it?"

I know I've mentioned this before, but it's so important that I want to mention it again:

Flexible seating is about meeting your students' needs. I first implemented it because as I was teaching whole group lessons two years ago, I would look out at my class and notice that almost all of my boys were practically falling out of their seats because of their need to move. When given the choice to sit at their desks or lay on the floor during independent work time, one of them stayed at his desk and the rest of my class was on the floor. We expect so much from kids academically, I believe that it is essential to meet them where they are in terms of seating.

So if all you have is the furniture your classroom came with, start there. Allow students to sit or stand at their desk or sit or lay on the floor. If you have a few camp chairs, bring those in. If you teach in a rocking chair, let students use it for independent work time. Start small and build from there!

So last year I began the year with flexible seating in my classroom. I brought in an old sectional sofa, some yoga balls from Five Below, lots of pillows, and a chaise lounger. I also had my custodian lower one of my tables all the way to the ground for floor seating and I had a built in counter clear for standing spots. When the school year began, we went over various expectations and I tried my best to implement what I could with 24 seven and eight year olds. I also was 38 weeks pregnant on the first day of school, so I knew it would be difficult to implement with a long term (and pretty old school) sub about to take over my class.

Needless to say, when I returned it was painfully obvious that flexible seating wasn't quite meeting their needs. So we had class meetings. A LOT of class meetings. I used tools from a pretty incredible training I had been to the previous summer to gauge the thoughts of my kids about what was working and what wasn't working. After determining what wasn't working, we prioritized what needed changing because it didn't seem possible to change it all at once. After every work period we met and discussed our pluses (what worked well) and deltas (what needed improvement) and we wrote those down so that we could improve. After this extensive work, this is what we came up with:

Pretty phenomenal right? This was developed by a thoughtful group of 7 and 8 year olds. I am constantly reminded how brilliant my students are when put up to the task. Allowing them to work together to create these guidelines created buy-in. They could hold themselves and their classmates to standards and procedures that they set. They chose these procedures so that they would be as fair as possible. For example, they decided that choosing their seats at the end of the day was more fair because if you are tardy then you wouldn't get to pick your seat. 

So this is what it looked like in our room:

At the end of the day, after pack up the students sat on the carpet. We have a class list that we cycle through for all of our classroom jobs with various clothespins so I added a "First Pick" pin to the cycle. That person would choose their seat that I wrote on the chart (see mock chart below), then the next person chose, and the next, until we made it through the whole list. When they arrived in the morning, they knew exactly where to set up their stuff. If they were absent the day before, they could choose carpet or table because neither of those options have caps. 

I plan on implementing a similar method this year, but will definitely tweak it based on the needs of my students. My new grade level and the fact that I am departmentalized will bring a new challenge to flexible seating. However, I firmly believe that by presenting students with the task, they will deliver!