Setting up Your Classroom for Engagement

I never mastered the art of passing out papers to students at the beginning of class. Counting the correct number of sheets for a group of students while talking and walking was always a challenge — not to mention the dreaded “teacher finger lick” I’d often have to use to separate pages.

To avoid this, I created a supply station that students passed as they entered the classroom. I put the handouts for the day’s activities on the table along with golf pencils (which students despised and only took if they really needed), tissues, hand sanitizer, and staplers. Students were forced to be responsible for their learning as soon as they walked through the door — and I avoided a challenging first few minutes of class.

The start of the school year is a great time to set up your classroom in a way that works for you and increases student engagement. But before you rearrange desks or slide a heavy cabinet across the floor, identify your goals for your classroom setup. Maybe you want to create a space for students to provide peer-to-peer feedback? Or maybe a comfy, quiet reading nook is the best addition to your classroom? Try our Designing Your Space resource to help spark some ideas.

Some of my other favorite ways to facilitate student engagement include:

• Flexible seating — This can include everything from yoga balls to funky chairs and couches. But it can also be as simple as setting desks up in pairs on days where students work with a partner, or a U-shape to facilitate whole class discussions.
• Stations — Grouping desks in sets of four to six provides students with an opportunity to practice different skills or explore specific content at different stations. In one of my favorite activities, students rotate through different stations to model the transcription and translation of a gene.
• Collaboration and small group instruction space — Find a corner in your classroom or a space off to the side for a table with some stools. Or put extra desks across from each other in a row to create a large table. This can be a space where you can hold small group instruction or where students can collaborate and provide peer-to-peer feedback.
• Personalized walls — Don’t forget about your walls! Use giant Post-It sticky notes and colorful markers to add some personalized posters to your classroom. Create and display anchor charts, the unit’s essential questions, co-created rubrics, and classroom expectations. Get students involved in the process by having them make posters highlighting their work with content and skills. My students made posters summarizing their experimental data, comparing plant and animal cells, and even outlining the steps in balancing chemical reactions.

Keep in mind that you may also need to reconfigure your classroom so it works for a particular unit. While we were studying cells, my students frequently needed heavy and cumbersome microscopes. To avoid having to get them out every day, I turned my collaboration area into a microscope station.

Whatever you choose, be sure to reflect on the effectiveness of your changes and make updates as needed. And check out some of our other free resources for more ideas on getting the year off to a great start.