A room for students

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Tina Maples’ language arts classroom is a square room with eight tables in the center. She explains that the tables are "set up for small groups of students to work together on group projects or to conference together on writing projects." The arrangement is functional in a strict sense, but it also works to enhance instruction in a way that might be less obvious. "It’s an arrangement that some students of mine put together last year to kind of look artistic and also to keep the classroom unity, yet also have the groups able to separate themselves." It is important that the classroom be appealing to students.

When students take a break and begin to move freely around the classroom, it is obvious that they feel comfortable, relaxed and confident here. Two students begin an informal conversation with Maples about a book they read recently; others file writing in their portfolios or check for make-up work; still others gather around the tables and talk easily. Maples has achieved this atmosphere by working to build community among her students, allowing students to arrange the furniture in a way that is appealing to them, and by making everything in the classroom accessible. The confidence students gain from being in this classroom will help them become more comfortable with themselves as readers, writers and members of an academic community.

Helping students feel that they belong

Maples is always working to help her students feel at home in their classroom. She doesn’t do this just because she likes her students and wants them to feel comfortable, although it is obvious that she does. She does it because she has found that it helps them achieve academically. All the Language Arts classes at McDougle are structured around the writing/reading workshop principle. (You can read more about this at http://www.middleweb.com/.) Eighth-grade Language Arts involves expanding students’ writing skills to include abstract tasks such as literary analysis and research writing, but it also involves sharing their writing with each other. This is often a new experience for them. "Probably half my kids each year haven’t shown their writing to a peer and gotten really specific ideas about what’s working and what’s not," Maples explains. "It’s really nerve-wracking, so I think the more comfortable they can be, the more they can see of themselves in the room, and the more they know each other," the easier this process becomes for them.

So far this year, the students seem to feel comfortable. The first set of peer conferences were better this year than they have ever been. Maples attributes this partially to community building activities the class did at the beginning of the year. Covering the back wall of the classroom are silhouettes of each student in the class, each with a quotation below it. "This was called the ‘Words of Wisdom’ center. They had a partner and they traced each others’ heads and picked a quotation that dealt with respect or community."

The students worked together in the two other centers, as well. One was called "Photographing Perspectives." For this project, students brought a picture from home. They wrote two paragraphs about their picture and shared them with their classmates. In the first paragraph, they described the picture as if they had never seen it before, and in the second paragraph they described what was really going on in the picture. The last center was a grammar review that also encouraged the students to express themselves creatively.

Student access to materials

Another way Maples helps students feel that they belong in this classroom is by arranging books, informational handouts, and materials so that students can access them easily. The front bulletin board has manila folders attached to it like pockets. In each pocket are reading lists and information sheets for the students to take whenever they want them. Students can find the reading list for the eighth-grade book club, the Alpha-Beta Book club. They can find the reading list for Battle of the Books, a competitive book club team that is open to students in all grades. They can also take a list of classic books or a list that was generated by last year’s eighth graders, called the "Read for Yourself" list. There are also handouts with information about Maples’ class website, as well as extra weekly plan sheets and instruction sheets for journal entries. Maples also posts the title and author of the book she is currently reading, showing that she is open to discuss it with students.

Along the wall under the white board are dictionaries and other writing aids, also accessible to students. "There is also a crate of student work samples from years past, so if a kid wants to see what a writing project might look like, they could see that there." Art and class supplies are also readily available in labeled drawers. Students are allowed to get anything they need, including paper and pencil for class. Maples says she usually has plenty of pencils until the semester break and then her supply starts to run out. One solution to this problem is to ask parents who are willing to send a large package of pencils at the beginning of the year. This can alleviate some of the stress that results when students arrive without pencils to class.

Maples has converted the cabinets above the countertop to her class library. The students can check these books out. The cabinets are labelled "Short Stuff" for short stories and poetry and "Novels" for general fiction. This placement of the books is a result of trial and error. Maples remembers, "I used to keep them on that bookshelf (over by her desk), but it’s too tall for most kids — actually, it’s too tall for me. So, I’ve moved them here and on reading days, I open up the cabinets."

On a shelf near the class libarary is a set of literary textbooks. These are used only sometimes, but can be useful. "Because of the workshop principle, we don’t use text books, but they do have very handy clips of poetry and short stories and explanations of literary terms."

Sharing a classroom

Looking around the room, it is hard not to notice all the Spanish materials. There are posters, a bulletin board, and a second agenda written entirely in Spanish. At the beginning of the seventh period Language Arts class, there is a little bit of chaos. The Spanish teacher is collecting her materials and putting them on a cart, which she wheels over to the front of the classroom. Maples and her students don’t seem to be bothered by this, however. Maples moves the overhead to the center of the room and gets ready for class, all while carrying on a spirited conversation with several students. After this momentary rush of activity, the students settle in and class begins.

Despite the fact that she seems to handle it perfectly, Maples does admit to that sharing a classroom is sometimes difficult. For one thing, it makes it less convenient to move the furniture around to accommodate specific classroom activities such as seminars. But this year is better than last year. She remembers that there were "Latin classes in the morning and then I taught for two classes and then there was a learning lab and then I taught for two classes, so there were three teachers in the classroom and there was just no way to keep moving it and putting it back together." But even though this year is better, she still has to make room for another teacher. As a result, she doesn’t move furniture for activities as much as she’d like to.

The other difficulty with sharing a room is that a teacher often can’t work in the classroom when the students aren’t there. This can be important for setting up activities and organizing materials. Again, last year was difficult, since Maples had almost no time in the room while it was empty, but she says, "This year, I’m very lucky to have two class periods when the classroom is free, so I’ve been working in here rather than in the teacher’s office, because there is a computer here that I can use and it’s my classroom. It makes it so that I need to leave the classroom fewer times (during class) to find stuff that’s in my office, because most of my office stuff is here."

Seating students

Maples makes sure that students sit and work in diverse groups.

Maples does not think it is best for students to sit exactly where they want to. She has an excellent way to help them find seats away from their friends.

I’m actually kind of sneaky about that. The first day of school, I let them sit where they want to, and of course they sit with their friends, which is fine, it’s only a 20 min. period, but they’re eighth graders and they’re very talkative, so I can’t really let them stay there.

So, the second day of school, I have this seating chart game that I play. And there are sets of cards, the large rectangular tables, four cards, the smaller one is two and for the circular table it’s three, and they’re color-coded. And they’re all dealing with literature, so one set of cards might be Shakespearean characters, another set might be newspapers, another one magazines, another with authors, or whatever. And I mix them up so that I walk around the room and give each kid a card, so that at every table, no two kids have the same kind of card. And then they have to jump up and find all their partners and sit down at type of table that that card tells them to sit down at…so, now I’ve mixed them up. And I’m like ‘Hi! These are your new seats!’

This game seems to work really well for Maples. And, of course, she isn’t totally inflexible. She tells students, "If you really think you’re just going to maim the person next to you, or you can’t see the board, talk to me after class and we’ll work it out."

Sometimes, after a few weeks in the new arrangement, Maples has to adjust the seating arrangement. She says that she "just rearranged seats for two of my classes because it wasn’t working. They were way too boisterous." When reevaluating where students should sit, Maples reserves the two tables in the center of the room "for kids who need a little help focusing or who need a smaller group situation."

Maples separates kids from their friends in part to keep the classroom quiet, but also to encourage them to work with new people. She actually encourages students to interact with one another, which of course involves talking. But she wants them to interact with people outside their social group, and she wants to be able to get to know them as individuals, not as members of a cluster of people. She explains, "if I mix them up, they meet somebody new, they do centers with somebody new." This is something she talks about explicitly with her students. "We talk about getting to know somebody outside of your group — outside of your normal social group." She tells her students, "that way, four weeks into the school year, I have a better idea of who you are, where you are in terms of abilities and who you might work best with and then I can start making good decisions about where to put you, more deliberate decisions."

Maples takes her school’s mission statement seriously when she decides where students should sit. The mission statement says that students "learn best when they collaborate within diverse groups." At each table, she tries to create a diverse group of learners. She finds that "they tend to scaffold each other pretty well."

Building responsibility

Maples, along with her colleagues, is helping students learn to take more responsibility for their academic lives. She points to three items in the room that help make this happen. The first is the agenda board. "All of the teachers on this team put together what are they are doing in class today and what the homework is." Maples believes this is useful for students because she finds it useful herself. "I look for it now when I go to a meeting or a workshop because it helps me pace out my energy level." She says it also helps keep her on schedule while she is teaching.

There is also a large poster that Maples calls the "homework sheet." It lists all the core classes for every day of the week. It is filled in and during the last period of the day, the teacher goes over the day’s homework with her class. Maples notes another good thing about the homework sheet, that "it’s a great thing to tell parents." When they ask "How do they know what their homework is?" Teachers can answer, "Well, every day we do that."

Specifically for Language Arts, students get a plan sheet at the beginning of each week. It lists homework and assignments, as well as reminders for upcoming projects or parts of projects that might be due. Maples thinks this is really helpful since her students are so busy. "The kids here are really busy — they’re involved in school sports and rec. sports, and their religious communities and their music communities." So she talks to them at the beginning of the year about how they can use the weekly plan sheet to take responsibility for their work. She tells them, " If you know you’re going to be busy on Tuesday night, here it is, you can go ahead and get ready ahead of time." These things are all part of helping students get ready for high school. Maples says that these things "help them become even more responsible and independent."

On the back wall of the classroom is an another area that helps students become more responsible for their own work: crates with folders for each students’ daily work. If a student is absent, Maples puts her make-up work in her folder so that she is responsible for finding it when she returns to school. There is also a filing cabinet where each student has a writing portfolio. "That’s where every finished piece of writing goes. At the end of the year, they will put together a final portfolio and do two reflection pieces on their growth as a reader and their growth as a writer. That gets collected together to take home to parents — it’s usually something the kids enjoy."

Constant improvement

Although Maples classroom seems perfectly arranged to help students learn, she is still always looking for ways to make things better. She often asks her students for feedback about classroom activities. "I have them write in their journals from time to time to tell me about how an activity went or what they thought, you know, just to keep tweaking."

For example, at the beginning of the year, after the students had completed all three community-building centers, they each wrote a review of them. She asked them what they liked most and what was helpful to them. She found out that the students thought the centers were a success. "They got really great reviews — a lot of kids were saying, ‘I got to learn about other people’s families.’ and ‘It was fun to work with a partner.’ or ‘These things worked, these things didn’t.’ I think that helped."

Not only is she unafraid to ask for feedback from students, Maples is not afraid to try new things. The literature seminar in seventh period was such an experiment. Instead of moving the chairs into a circle, she invited students to sit in a circle on the floor. She thought this would be a better use of time. She thought, "Why make the kids move the desks out and then back in again, when we can be a little closer to each other and just go ahead and jump right into the talk."

But she doesn’t know if she’ll do the literature seminar again. She worries that the students weren’t comfortable, "I think they liked the seminar, but I don’t think they liked sitting on the floor. I think it’s nice in a way, because it’s different, but every kid was like ‘Oh, I was SO cramped.’" As usual, she is thoughtful. She had her reasons for trying out the floor arrangement. She says it was "better than sitting in the chairs, because that feels so distant and the chairs are kind of uncomfortable without a table in front of them." Again, she will ask the students what they thought and then she will make her decision. "I’ll probably survey some kids and get some quick feedback."

Maples is always thinking about what she does in her classroom. She uses every aspect of room arrangement to help her students feel more comfortable, and that in turn helps them become more comfortable with literature and with writing.