Switching Seats

My students always had to ask me when they could change seats, then wait another week before I actually changed them. I treated it as an inconvenience, a waste of class time. Plus, it messed up my system for distributing papers.

But changing students’ seats is beneficial, and there is a good time to do it. Instead of waiting for the end of a grading period, change your seating chart each time you begin a new chapter or unit. There’s actually a good reason for it, beyond placating students who complain that they want to sit somewhere else, which just happens to be where their best friend is sitting.

Episodic Memory
Much of our long-term memory is episodic. The brain stores time/place memories in the hippocampus, and when information—the content of your course—is attached to those episodic memories, it is easier for the brain to store and recall. When we think about important events in our lives, we almost always return to a physical setting. Third grade in the seat by the window—watched the balloon I got for my birthday sail into the sky because my mother, who was cleaning, accidentally let it slip out the door. Mid-afternoon sitting in the corner of the bench beside the front windows of my high school—discovered Holden Caulfield narrative voice in Catcher in the Rye. Recalling those places helps us recall the events or information we associate with them.

So the idea behind changing seats at the beginning of each unit is this: we create mental bullet points each time our students move. Slope, first seat by the door. Parabolas, near the windows next to the girl who ate erasers. Scatter plots, right in the middle of the room surrounded by people I don’t really know. Those dividing lines—those mental bullet points—can help students scan more efficiently and effectively through the mass of information they received in your class. It won’t make them smarter, but it might help them recall content just a little bit better.

Source: Mindful Instruction: Using Brain Research to Differentiate Classroom Instruction. North Carolina Teacher Academy. Morrisvile, NC, 2009-2010.

4 Responses to “Switching Seats”

  1. Sara Dunham says:

    I always change seats at the beginning of each new six weeks, but changing every time there is a new chapter or unit makes sense when you talk about creating mental bullet points. This is something I am definitely going to incorporate in my classroom this semester!

  2. Brenda says:

    I like it and see the rationale.

  3. miller says:

    cool stuff. i remember this from psych and can totally relate

  4. Christy Twiddy says:

    Very Interesting!
    Thanks for the information.