Here’s a riddle: 

What do Harry Wong, Robert Marzano, and Gray’s Anatomy have in common?

Procedures!

If you’ve spent any amount of time in education, it’s likely that you’ve heard of Harry Wong and his preeminent book The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher which was published in 1991. Wong’s premise is that teachers should take a proactive approach to classroom management by establishing policies and procedures during the first few days of school. Wong’s advice is sound even 30 years later, but today’s students are vastly different from those in 1991. Then, kids may have carried around Walkmans and a beeper, but today, our students come equipped with their smartphones and smart watches, their laptops and tablets, their airpods and VR goggles. Teachers, especially those who are new to the profession, need all the strategies when it comes to classroom management if we want to retain teachers. In 2018, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that more than 270,000 teachers will leave the profession each year between 2016 and 2026. Since poor classroom management skills often lead to teacher burnout, investing time into equipping teachers with real and practical classroom management strategies is crucial.

In the next few blog posts, I’ll cover the topic of classroom management. I’ll outline a strategy or two that teachers should consider when managing a classroom. For this particular post, I would like to consider what teachers can do before they even have students in the classroom. 

Preparing Your Classroom for Students

Think back to when you were first setting up the kitchen in your dorm room, apartment, or home. You look around to assess how many cabinets you have. You might have imagined the movements you would make as you prepared a meal, moving between the stove, oven, sink, and dishwasher. “Should the dishes go next to the sink or the oven?” “Which cabinet is best for my pots and pans?” “Where do I put my spices?” “What about my baking pans?” As you contemplate which cabinet is best suited for what, you imagine yourself reaching for a glass in the middle of the night or grabbing a spoon as you hurry to eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. Which orientation best serves you and your needs? 

The time we spend in the kitchen is much less in comparison to the time we spend in our classrooms. So, why do so many teachers simply throw a few posters on the wall, plug in a pencil sharpener, put their student desks into rows, and call it a day? Setting up your classroom should be as important and well-thought out as organizing your kitchen. This is, after all, a space you will share with several dozen growing minds. 

To start, you might consider the zones or areas in your room. In an elementary school room, you’ll probably find a rug near the board where direct instruction or read-alouds occur, a space with desks where students are expected to complete independent work, and a kidney shaped table where the teacher hosts small groups. This serves the purpose of an elementary classroom as the teacher will use these areas to transition their students through the various tasks for the day, but a typical secondary classroom hardly has enough room for all the student desks. If you’re a secondary teacher, you might be thinking, “I only have room for one area and that’s where the desks are.” Yes, I get that, but think about how traffic flows through your room. Think about the entrance, the teacher desk, the student desks, and the supply area as individual zones. How are you maximizing these spaces? 

Inevitably, there are elements to our classroom that we have to work around. For example, in my classroom, I have only one connection for my Promethean Board, so my desk with all of my cables must go in the front of the room near the board. I also don’t control my class sizes, and because I’m an extended impact teacher, I need to be able to accommodate at least 40 students in a class period. I can’t change the fact that I need to fit 40 student desks minimum. Think about your classroom. Where are your limitations? What do you have to work around? Draw a diagram and put an X through these spaces. You’ll have to get creative with them.

Now that you’ve identified the spaces in your room that are not flexible, you can consider where instruction will take place. Think about where you want to deliver mini-lessons or direct instruction. Will this be at your interactive panel or will you use a whiteboard? Do you have a podium that you will use or a stool you will sit on? In my classroom, I have my desk, podium, and Promethean board all within a few feet of one another. This makes it simple for me to locate materials, connect my document camera for modeling, or use the Promethean board to annotate. I can seamlessly transition between all of my teaching “tools” without interrupting the learning.

After I set up my teacher space, I think about how I want my student space organized. I consider where my student desks will go and how they are arranged. Will you put desks into groups, or do you want them in rows? Will you put some into rows and some into groups? If you choose to put them in groups, how many groups will you have? How many desks will go in each group? If you have rows, how will you determine who sits in the back row, farthest away from the instructional space? Because I have so many desks, I have 5 groupings of desks and 1 straight row. Some of my groupings have 8 desks, but some only have 6 (Fig. 5 below). Ideally, I would have groups of 4, but I don’t have the space to make that happen. The row of desks that I have is due to the fact that I don’t have space for another grouping. I had to get creative with my arrangement. The row of desks is reserved only for my largest classes; my freshman and AP Lang. students only sit in the row if I specifically ask them to. My favorite desk orientation is to have a variety of groups, pairs, and rows (Fig. 1 below). In the past, I’ve had 3 groupings of 4 desks, 4 pairs of desks, and 2 rows of 3 desks. I liked this arrangement because I could easily assign group and partner work and have students pull the single desks up to a group or partner pair, but I could also move students who needed to be away from distractions into the rows of single desks. I highly recommend considering whether having a variety of desk groupings will work for you and your students. Figuring out which style of student seating worked for me took several years; my first year as a teacher, I changed up the orientation nearly every week. It definitely kept kids on their toes. 

Once you’ve decided on an arrangement and you’ve placed your desks, take the time to sit in every single one. I know this sounds tedious. Straight up, it absolutely is, but I have found sometimes that the view from the student perspective isn’t what I thought it would be when I placed the desk. Your students should be able to easily see the instructional area. I’d be lying if I said that students in my classroom don’t have their back to me sometimes because they absolutely do, but when I’m giving instruction, students can scoot their chairs or turn their heads and see the board in every single seat in my room. I know because I’ve sat in all of them and tried it myself.

After arranging your student desks, think about how traffic will flow through your room. Imagine yourself as a student who needs to pick up materials for the lesson, get to their seat, have space to work, etc. As I walk my classroom imagining how I want my students to move in the space, I consider my routines and procedures. I know that students will need a clear path to pick up supplies for the day. I also know that students will need easy access to the book shelf as independent reading is a focus in my room. In my classroom, I have shelving along one side wall. On the top of these shelves, I keep crates where students can store their journals. Students know each day after they enter they should immediately go to the crates. I’ve kept a clear path at the back of the room that leads from the entrance to the crates and another at the front of the room that students can use to exit the crate area. I’ve done this to reduce the amount of traffic jams that occur. Sure, they still happen, but by being intentional about how I want my students to move in the space, I’ve proactively eliminated some of the issues that could arise.

The last space I think about when setting up my classroom is where my bookshelves will go. In my ideal classroom, I would have a reading corner with a rug and bean bags in order to invite students to peruse my shelves at their leisure, but since I don’t live in la la land, I just have my bookshelf at the entrance of my classroom. Students are expected to come to class with an independent reading book which, of course, doesn’t always happen in actuality. For this reason, I’ve made the bookshelf the first thing students have to pass by in my classroom. If they don’t have a book, they stop at the bookshelf before they ever consider going to the crate to pick up their journals or sitting at their desk. I realize that not every classroom has a bookshelf, but if you do, consider how much access you want your students to have to it. I’m not too worried about my books “walking away” so I give my students full access to the bookshelves, but if that isn’t you, consider where you will place your bookshelves to communicate to students that they need to ask for permission before checking out a book.

Thinking through the various zones in your room and how you want students to use the space will reduce the amount of interruptions you have in your day. Imagine how many times I would have to stop if students didn’t know where to find paper or extra pencils in my classroom. Imagine how many arguments I’d have if there wasn’t a protocol for picking up journals from the crates. Imagine how many distractions would occur if students couldn’t see the board or me when I’m delivering direct instruction. I know that by being intentional with my space I’ve saved myself time and energy in the long run.

I challenge you to walk your classroom and consider how functional it is. Think about the common interruptions you face from students each day. Can rearranging your room reduce or eliminate some of those interruptions? Do students know how to use the space? Is your space well-thought out? Are your student desks arranged in a way that promotes learning and engagement? 

Exit Ticket: 

What is one area or zone in your classroom that you have a difficult time with? My most challenging space is my teacher desk and all the connections that I have to have; the plug in for my ethernet cable is in a less than ideal spot, so I had to push my desk away from the wall further than I would like which results in wasted space. In an average sized classroom with 41 student desks, I can’t afford to waste any space. I’ve tried to find a solution, but I’m still working on it. I’d love to know what your challenges are. Share in the comments below.