INnOVAtIVE SEatING CHALlENGES

that may help or hinder student performance, as well as requiring the teacher to learn students’ names more quickly because they are sitting in new locations each day.

“I tried a seating chart at first and it was efficient –I did learn their names – but I didn’t learn anything about their personalities,” said Redmond, who has been teaching high school for 13 years. “I started doing the seating challenges about five years ago and I noticed that the students started to anticipate what the challenge would be each day. It wasn’t the same old routine every day and we got to know each other better. We learned more than just each other’s names. We also learned things about each other’s families and interests – things like that.”

The ultimate result, Redmond said, is the accelerated establishment of a classroom culture for the rest of the school year.

“It requires students – especially those who are very timid coming out of COVID – to come out of their comfort zones to negotiate these challenges,” Redmond said. “No one on a team should not know who the other people on their team are –and no one in a class should not know who their classmates are.”

After two weeks of daily challenges, Redmond issues the final instructions to “seat yourself where you will be most productive,” he said. “Generally, that works. Every class is different, but for the most part, they are able to find a spot and get to work and we settle into a seating arrangement for the year.”

Redmond shared his seating challenge method with colleagues over the summer at a district-wide professional development conference. In Redmond’s session, he presented the seating challenge to two separate groups of educators who he required to participate in several of the same challenges Redmond’s students engage in.

“We were with teachers from all over the district who didn’t know each other. They got to experience it as if they were students and understand what it would feel like for their students during the first week of school,” said Redmond. “I’ve heard from other teachers in the session who said they tried it in their own classrooms and liked it, so others in our district have adopted it.”