A REVIEW OF SEATING ARRANGEMENTS TOWARDS THE 21st CENTURY CLASSROOM APPROACH IN SCHOOLS

Abstract

This article articulates a framework suitable to use when making a decision about student seating arrangement in the classroom at school level as a research aim. The decision makers should establish what are the potential types of seating arrangement? Then evaluate them in terms of its contribution, significance, and impact to the student learning development. The problem of a seating arrangement is usually related to the seating student position selection that is usually decided by teachers or students that can freely choose their own seating. There are three (3) objectives covered in this article; objective 1: to justify the main factors influencing classroom seating arrangement at school building, objective 2: to identify the common patterns of seating arrangement applied for school level and objective 3; to determine the best practice of seating arrangement for 21st century classroom approach at school building. The article articulates a theory of seating arrangement in reference to five (5) common forms of seat arrangement, namely Traditional (columns and rows), Cluster, U-shaped, Stadium, and Runaway. The performance of students might drop especially weak students who are sitting at the back of the classroom if the students are not judiciously arranged. Thus, seating arrangements should be set properly to ensure optimal quality of learning in a classroom. The technique of comparative analysis was used in this study. The findings had shown that cluster seating arrangement is relevant with the 21st century learning approach, which provides more availability of collaborative learning, where it contributes to student-centred learning in a classroom.

Building capacity for inclusive teaching

“…The teaching profession must continually develop creative new ways of working with others (Florian and Sprat, 2013 [175]).…”

The influence of classroom seating arrangement on children’s cognitive processes in primary school: the role of individual variables

“…Alternatively, the student-centered approach allows students to work together and usually corresponds to the aggregation of desks (i.e., clusters). Both traditional seating in single desks and teacher-centered approaches are the globally dominant approaches (Blackmore, Bateman, Loughlin, O’Mara, & Loughlin, 2011 ), despite the fact that, in recent years, arrangement in clusters is becoming more frequent and preferred by teachers (Gremmen, van den Berg, Segers, & Cillessen, 2016 ), providing a good basis for cooperative learning and other student-centered approaches (Norazman, Ismail, Ja’afar, Khoiry, & Ani, 2019 ).…”

“…This result is in line with previous studies that showed better functioning in creative tasks when working and interacting in groups (Milliken et al, 2003;Paulus & Yang, 2000), although in this case, children were required to solve individual tasks in a clustered disposition. However, cluster arrangement is related to cooperative learning and other student-centered approaches in the school daily life (Norazman et al, 2019), so less alone students could symbolically perceive the situation as a "group work", benefiting from Fig. 4 Moderation graph describing the effect of seating arrangement on the theory of mind (ordinate), based on children's loneliness as rated by peers (abscissa); children with a loneliness score higher than 0.71 were significantly affected by the manipulation.…”

The influence of classroom seating arrangement on children’s cognitive processes in primary school: The role of individual variables

“…Alternatively, the studentcentered approach allows students to work together and usually corresponds to the aggregation of desks (i.e., clusters). Both traditional seating in rows and columns and teacher-centered approaches are the globally dominant approaches (Blackmore, Bateman, Loughlin, O'Mara and Aranda 2011), despite the fact that, in recent years, arrangement in clusters is becoming more frequent and preferred by teachers (Gremmen, van den Berg, Segers and Cillessen 2016), providing a good basis for cooperative learning and other student-centered approaches (Norazman, Ismail, Ja'afar, Khoiry and Ani 2019).…”

“…This result is in line with previous studies that showed better functioning in creative tasks when working and interacting in groups (Milliken et al 2003;Paulus and Yang 2000), although in this case, children were required to solve individual tasks in a clustered disposition. However, cluster arrangement is related to cooperative learning and other student-centered approaches in the school daily life (Norazman et al, 2019), so less alone students could symbolically perceive the situation as a "group work", bene ting from its positive consequences on a creative task. This result suggests that the mere physical proximity can lead to the bene ts that group work provides for creative thinking.…”