MATCHING SPACE TO INSTRUCTION
Teachers experience a wide variety of office arrangements when they confer with school principals. Some principals speak to teachers across a desk; some have the teacher’s chair next to the desk so that the conversation takes place across the corner of the desk. Other principals have their desk in a corner fac- ing a wall and turn their chair around to confer. Still others leave their desk and confer with teachers around a coffee table where two or three chairs are set. Each of those arrangements sends a different message about authority and uses physical setting to set the climate for the kind of interaction the principal
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desires. In the same way, teachers’ arrangements of classroom space send mes- sages about their image of the learner and the kind of learning they intend. Jacob Getzels (as cited in Lewis, 1979) has associated four such images with four different patterns of classroom space.
First, he ties the “empty learner” image to the rectangular room arrangement: “In these classroom designs, which were the standard in the early 1900s and continue to be the most prevalent today, the teacher’s function is to fill the learn- ers with knowledge. Hence all desks face front in evenly spaced rows toward the front of the class and the source of knowledge, the teacher and his or her desk” (Getzels as cited in Lewis, 1979, pp. 155–156). Getzels next connects the image of the “active learner” to the square room arrangement: “In these rooms furni- ture is movable, arrangements are changed, the teacher’s desk joins those of the children and the learner becomes the center” (as cited in Lewis, 1979, p. 156).
Getzels’s third model is the “social learner” and the circular classroom: “Learn- ing was perceived as occurring through interpersonal actions and reactions” (as cited in Lewis, 1979, p. 156). It is the shape that many affective education programs use today. One commercial affective education curriculum guide even calls its program “The Magic Circle.” The final model is the “stimulus seeking learner” and the open classroom: “Where learning centers, communally owned furniture, private study spaces, and public areas replace classrooms, halls, and traditional school furniture. The learner is seen as a problem finding and stimu- lus seeking organism” (Getzels as cited in Lewis, 1979, p. 156).
Learners are, of course, all of these things. It is appropriate that students should sometimes be good receivers of information, sometimes active learners within teacher-planned tasks, sometimes heavily involved with each other in discus- sion, and sometimes shapers of their own activities. No one of these physical environments is the best; they are simply different and support different forms of learning appropriate to a particular lesson’s goal.
Teachers can change space arrangements quite quickly for different purposes. One high school teacher we know sometimes has four different arrangements for four successive periods. The changes are made easily and quickly because the students know the basic formats and do all the moving of desks in one or two minutes, usually between classes. The teacher spends time at the beginning of the year explaining these formats to the students and doing a bit of practice arranging them, so the students can set up quickly from then on.
On one day we observed, the first class (seniors) started with desks in rows for a recitation and presentation lesson on Russian short stories. The second class (juniors) quickly rearranged the desks into clusters of six and began “committee
Teachers’ arrangements of classroom space send messages about their image of the learner and the kind of learning they intend.
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work,” cooperative teamwork on planning and preparing analyses of various American playwrights’ works. The teacher signaled the format as students were entering the room, asking the first few students to set up for committees as they came in. Others then joined in. The third class (sophomores), again on signal, quickly put the desks in a large circle around the perimeter of the room for a discussion of a class book-writing project involving elementary school children in a neighboring school. As a class, they were going to make some de- cisions and lay out a schedule for the project. The next period, a new class (also sophomores) had a drill and practice lesson analyzing themes for variety in sentence pattern. Their desks were arranged, as you may have guessed, facing the teacher. Some basic arrangements lend themselves more easily to this kind of flexibility. For example, “Mr. Orr’s grade five class sat at individual desks placed around the perimeter of the room [perhaps facing the wall]. The open area at the center of the room was used for more of the formal instruction and for small group activities” (Winne & Marx, 1982, p. 496). This type of arrange- ment gives students some privacy and insulation from visual distraction when they are doing individual work. For a class meeting or total group instruction, all they have to do is turn their chairs around and they’re in a circle. They can go to tables in the middle for small-group work, either with a teacher or in cooperative groups.