Brittany's Classroom Management Kit

The first facet of designing your classroom is the age and number of your students. Knowing about the age of your students can inform you of what design style to take. You wouldn’t decorate a High School room with colorful letters and craft-like things just like you wouldn’t put complicated posters of the human body in a Kindergarten room. Thusly, considering the age of your students into your design of the classroom is a common facet of arranging your room.

 

The second facet of designing your classroom is to lower possible ways students can be distracted. One of the points of the classroom environment is to facilitate focus for the students so having brightly colored posters and distracting images can hinder that process. Although it alright to have posters in one’s room, it behooves educators to consider where those posters are going. Consider the front of the classroom, where students focus much of the time. That would not be an ideal place to put a poster, which could only hinder instructional focus.

 

The third facet of classroom design is the use of space, a teacher must evaluate the furniture they have and the space they’ll need. Again, students will be spending hours in your classroom per work, so the idea of personal space for such a long time is something to consider. Dr. Tom McIntyre, a former teacher of special needs students, broke down the space issue as such,“Now consider an average school room. It’s 30 by 30, or 900 square feet. Divide that space by 30 kids, and you get 30 square feet per pupil…when it’s unfurnished. Consider too the space near the door that can’t be used for occupancy. Then figure that the teacher usually hogs a lot of space up front. The result? Each student has a space of 18 square feet for 6 hours. That’s about the size of two telephone booths. “To spend hours of the day in room after room where our personal space is hindered can breed for irritable and nasty attitudes. Now, the room size itself isn’t something that be changed, but when designing the classroom it’s an aspect to consider for comfort reasons as well as enabling easy access for the teacher to their students.

 

Speaking of ease of movement, that’s the fourth component to consider in designing one’s classroom environment. A teacher’s greatest tool of classroom management can be their very presence – especially in middle and high schools. Dr. Fred Jones says that, “The most basic factor that governs the likelihood of students goofing off in your classroom is their physical distance from your body. You remember. When the teacher was standing next to you, you cooled it, but when the teacher was on the far side of the room, you talked to your neighbors.” And this is the truth of the matter for students across the board, a conditioned reaction to a teacher’s presence. So, when designing a classroom make sure that it is organized in such a way that you, the teacher, have mobility and can see the student’s desk or laptop screens from just about any where. The trick of designing for proximity control is to allow for walkways that lessen the steps a teacher has to take in reaching a student. I saw this play out at Farmington’s Mount Blue High School, where since the back of the room was cleared of debris and right behind the student, I could monitor their use of the computers and also gauge where they were on an assignment. Therefore, it is critical that classroom designs consider the ease of movement into them.

 

The fifth facet to consider in designing the look of a classroom is the placement of desks, both the teacher and the student. The student’s desks should be set up in a manner that reflects the core of one’s classroom. For example, the two main setups are rows or clusters. Row seating for students can promote attentions to individual work, a study finding that students were focused individually 82% of the time in rows and only 62% of the time were they focused on individual tasks while in clusters. However, if one wishes to have a discussion, group-based classroom then clusters work to that end rather well. So, the placement of student desk depends on one’s preferences and what particular outcomes they wish to have. As for the teacher’s desk, most sources recommend not having it at the front of the room because it limits space to monitor students. Some teachers use the desk as a symbol of power, some use it as a storage place, and some others use it as a place to collect student’s work. Either way, a desk’s position in the room must only consider the room’s space and the teacher’s desired function for the desk.

 

The last facet to consider in designing a classroom is the placement of materials or technology that students frequently use. The key tool to consider when dealing with technology is the placement of electrical outlets, which teachers have little control over, but having an extension chord with multiple outlets at the end might be one way to aid with that. The reason this is so important, at least to some, is that I observed students at Farmington’s Mt. Blue High School plugging their laptops in to an outlet and being forced to sit at the front of the class on the floor. This made it difficult for the students to focus on the lesson and was distracting to other students. In terms of technology and materials placement, consider how accessible an area is for students and if the area has a lot of space to deal with possible congestion of students all scrambling for something to use.

 

Overall, the design of a classroom should reflect what the teacher values in behavior and in terms of type of learning, because whatever you do had will be observed as such. Also, teachers shouldn’t be afraid to change their room around while they experiment nor should they be afraid to peek into their colleague’s room to see how it’s set up for ideas.