I was teaching for 16 years. By the end of my teaching career I was a skilled classroom manager with minimal student behaviour issue, allowing me to focus on teaching rather than crowd control, an important tool in my teacher armoury was a class seating planner.
When I first started teaching I got slaughtered! The students were all over me and most lessons were spent dealing with behaviour rather than educating children – it was horrible! After my first 3 months I decided to start using seating plans and the positive impact of this decision was astounding and I continued using them with all of my classes for the next 16 years.
So why did seating plans have such a big impact on behaviour?
- Your classroom is your kingdom and you need to make sure you clearly convey that you are in charge. By using a seating chart and ensuring students sit where you want then you are asserting your authority the minute they enter the classroom.
- By thinking carefully about how students interact with each other and positioning them accordingly you can minimise disruption between students and create a calm learning environment.
- If you add data such as SEN, Reading Age, Target grade onto your seating plan then you can see at a glance the needs and abilities of your pupils. Once of the best ways to deal with behaviour in the classroom is to make sure that work is set at the correct level; too easy and pupils get bored, to hard and they get frustrated which often leads to poor behaviour.
How can Class Charts help as a class seating planner?
Class Charts is MADE for seating plans – just add your students to a class and start dragging and dropping. You can position your students based on your professional knowledge of them or use our shuffle feature to automatically position them for effective differentiation or group work.
You can also setup seating charts for additional rooms you may teach classes in and Class Charts will store a separate seating chart for each room.
Class Charts links up with SIMS, Integris, CMIS, Powerschool & more. For more information get a free online demo here.