Take a Seat

Someone once told me that students who sit in the back on the left will always be the most difficult. She said these “back left corner students” were there because they were the most cynical.

Since I ususally teach in a classroom with 3 large, round tables, this doesn’t exactly translate well, and yet I have thought that I have noticed a pattern. Or maybe not. I have never really studied it, but I can so clearly remember the faces of some of my most challenging students, and they did sit in more or less the same chairs! And one terrible semester in a fixed row, computer lab classroom, I spent most of my time trying to engage the bad boy back row and tear their attention from the computer screens.
So I decided to do a little research instead of finishing an assessment report. It really is interesting when you think about learning spaces, as we are trying to do here. Most of the studies I saw address the traditional classroom set up. IF you want a quick, non-scientific take on this, try this recently published interactive site .

Of course, there is lots of actual, serious literature on this topic, and I plan to look in the educause ebook on learning space to see if this topic comes up. At the January ELI conference, there seemed to be growing concensus that a room should have no true front or back, and that students at moveable tables , facing one another, get the message they will be collaborating! Members of the Maricopa system even seem to believe that if you change the space, you effect change in learning without doing any other intervention with the teacher! Hmmm. Might put faculty developers out of a job!
One of the more unusual takes on this issue was an article that appeared in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. They talk about people trying to manage what impression they make on others, and the choosing of seats as a way of doing that.

“…BIRGing (Basking In Reflected Glory) has shown that
people attempt to influence how they are evaluated by
associating themselves with things that are successful
(e.g., Cialdini et al., 1976). The manipulation of salience
may be another impression management technique in
which people exploit some distinct bias characterizing
person perception. Our findings suggest that people
deliberately vary their position in social contexts to take
advantage of the basic tendency to evaluate targets dif-
ferently when they are salient than when are not.”

I take this to mean that I have to be careful–some of those back row cynics may actually be open-minded, engaged students just waiting for a reason to come to the front and BIRG of the other engaged students!

Meanwhile, who are you BIRGing (of?) (with?)