Fixing the swing room

Last week I wrote about the swing room, the space in our school shared by so many teachers that none of us was taking responsibility for the room. As a starting point I spoke to other teachers about coming up with a better seating plan. The teacher in there a bit more than me agreed that something could be done. But we didn’t seem to have time to work out the details.

Nine days ago I arrived in the swing room first period, and decide that my geometry students might be good industrial designers. I gave them the parameters:

Seats could be in rows, or horseshoes, but not in groups. Teachers should be able to walk between students to get to any individual student. The back board should, if possible, be opened up. Both front boards (not just the center one) should be in good line of sight for all students. They could not remove seats from the room, but we only needed 29 active seats. They could also suggest moving unneeded furniture out of the room. Heavy furniture could not be stored against the side walls.

Before
(dashes are desks, rectangle front left is teachers desk, X is a structural pillar, Boards are to its left and right, and in the back right, obscured by equipment. PCs are along the back wall. 1 box is roughly 2 feet square)
Click for after —>

Before and After

I broke them into teams, and told them they had 15 minutes. (I gave them 20). Then I reviewed the plans. Two teams had modified horseshoes. One was broken in the center, with an interior horizontal row. The other didn’t have the break, but the interior was a secondary horseshoe.

I instructed them to combine the first design with the second inerior, and build it. Along the way a student decided to move two desks front and center so that I would have a table (I do not use the teacher’s desk at all) and a place to leave hand-outs and receive hand-ins, and where other teachers could place projectors.

Extra desks were left facing the right wall. A teacher can easily maneuver to face any student desk. The back board is partially clear (no one is using it, but we could put up announcements).

So they built it. I worked to get books delivered to appropriate other rooms, and to discard old papers. Over the course of the day I consulted with every other teacher that shares the room. We are keeping it.