Seating, Group Work, and Volume in ELA Workshop

This year, I began seating students in pods so we could better implement turn-and-talk opportunities during our mini-lessons (rather than asking questions and having students raise hands and answer individually). A couple years ago, I tried having students choose the classroom arrangement. We have had a few exercises where we had students work in their “pods”: reading and responding to short articles, locating examples of literary elements in a text, and working through a sample standardized test.

My classroom set-up with pods at the start of the 2019-2020 school year.

However, while the turn-and-talk is generally working (as I find best how to facilitate and teach that procedure), the short group work activities have been met with less success.

THE CHALLENGES

I have found a handful of challenges with pod seating:

1.     Off-Topic Chatter During Mini-Lessons. There tends to be more chatter among groups during our 15 to 20 minutes of mini-lessons. This is where we provide some moments of turn-and-talk, but otherwise these may be lectures or modeling from us teachers. Facing one another brings the natural temptations to chat.

2.     Failure to Work Together. Some groups (since we assigned seats) do not work together well (different approaches, work habits, personalities, etc.). We have not had anyone intentionally disrupting groups, but some groups have naturally come together while others end up working fully independently. The purpose of any of our group work assignments is to begin talking through process, not just completing work.

3.     Volume Levels During Workshop. My co-teacher and I have struggled to find the best balance of talking and work during workshop. Since we do not assign homework (except for assignments not completed during workshop over a handful of days), readers-writers workshop is a time to establish, maintain, and demonstrate learning. We have begun reflecting on work habits, but my process in this is still in its infancy so I haven’t seen the pay-offs quite yet. With students naturally facing one another (unless they shift to our other seating options around the room—papasan chairs, a kitchen table, a futon), noise can more easily bubble up. Silence for 45 minutes of workshop seems oppressive to me, but we need to find a balance between silence and some noise/discussion/breaks.

I like the option for students to have others nearby, but much of our work is individual. We are working to increase student interaction (including our community circles), but we are definitely not a project-based classroom.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS

I don’t have answers, but I do have some options:

1.     Work Habit Reminders. I plan to more consistently reference our work habits—both to the whole class and to individuals. We will be journaling on our work habits once a week (I plan for Fridays) and also mentioning them in our e-mails home every two weeks or so.

2.     Student Self-Selection of Groups. When we have extended group work (beyond turn-and-talk during lectures), I would like to have students self-select groups. This may open up other concerns (and my co-teacher and I can still shift some self-selections in rare cases), but this may result in students working together who have a relationship or who are not self-conscious of those around them. In our current forced groups, some students may feel uncomfortable around certain peers. Our work in community circles (and Monte Syrie’s Smiles and Frowns) will aim to build new student relationships that may result in changing groups throughout the semester.

3.     Rules for Volume in Readers-Writers Workshop. With our exploration of a whole-class novel during Week 2 of school following by viewing a film to analyze, we have not fully gotten into a habit of our workshop this semester yet. However, once we do, I think we will ask for some portions of the workshop to be silent, while others will allow for some noise. Transition to workshop can offer some time to chat (since students may have been mostly quiet in the preceding mini-lesson). Then, 15 to 20 minutes of silence my be appropriate, following by some time to talk and work after. This, of course, will need to be edited per class—some students (and classes) can talk and work at the same time, while others cannot. I have to be able to create a plan, implement it, and be willing to adjust. I just do not think I can be comfortable with 45 minutes of silent work.

4.     Survey Students. As I typed this blog post, I realized I should take it to the students. I need to develop a quick survey to ask their input: how do students think our class should be run to best provide an atmosphere where they can work and learn? This is now a priority to develop this week, and I will work to administer the survey by the end of this week.

I do believe greater student interaction is my best course of action, but I admit that I held onto seating students in rows for the first decade of my career. The change is a challenge, but I’m always up for a challenge—thus the title of this blog: “we must be strong in will / to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”