You bet it does.
Separate your thinking about past practices from your thinking about the future. The dividing line between the two is educational accountability. In the past, educational achievement was the record of how well individual children learned. Some children achieved at a high level and others did not. General accountability in the past was teaching those who could achieve to achieve and letting their high test scores carry the rest of the class by pointing only at the class average. That was the past.
Present and future thinking demands that all children learn and that indicators of their learning are at increasingly higher levels of achievement. The past mean average now is just a statistic of diminished concern. The metric of interest is the qualitative indicator of competence that all children must achieve. To reach these now qualities, teachers must consider all aspects of instruction and learning. Who sits where is a strong contributor to future learning success.
In the past, seating arrangements typically were created to eliminate distraction. Talkers and inattentive children gravitated to the front corner desks of the class room or seats nearest to where the teacher usually sat. Corner desks diminished the number of children the talkers could distract. The seat nearest the teacher was a chair of intimidation. In each instance, the goal was to isolate the talkers and inattentive children in order to diminish their negative activity. This strategy seldom worked. More often than not this special attention only provided positive reinforcement by making their negative behaviors the focus of teacher attention.
Past thinking about seating was about classroom management. Seating alphabetically. Alternated seating by gender. Seating in rows by reading group or other ability groupings. Seating at random. Seating by student choice. In the past, seating was not about qualitative learning.
When I was a K-12 student in the last century, seats or desks were assigned on the first day of school and a desk in each class and classroom I attended was mine for the entire school year. It was the same for each of my classmates. Attendance was taken by noting empty seats. Papers were returned to students by the teacher who placed the papers on the assigned desks. Seating assignments made for good class room management. I was my desk and my desk was me and these were fixed in time.
Today, seating must be a manipulative for causing all children to learn complex and rigorous content and perform higher order problem solving tasks at an elevated and prescribed level. Seating assignments are a strategy for building multiple learning networks and each network is designed to scaffold student learning. Where children sit to engage in their learning activities should be flexible, shaped to the nature of the activity, and serve learning not management. Seating is grouping and regrouping according to changing learning designs.
Some activities lend themselves to children working at independent desks that can be pushed together for collaboration. Desks, however, are very limiting. Other activities make good use of a large table around which children can sit and share. Physically active learning may need more floor space with no seating – children sit on the floor if they need to sit. Hallways are good for this purpose. Quiet and contemplative activities may want floor pillows or soft seats. Where and how children sit or work must be an instructional consideration.
Who sits with whom? This instructional question is more important than where and how. The right mix of children can lead to learning success for all children just as the wrong mix can lead to very different and less successful learning results.
A good seating and grouping decision relies upon the teacher knowing the learning needs and learning style preferences of each child. Who is social and who is not. Who is a kinesthetic learner and who is verbal. Who needs space and who can tolerate close proximity to others. Who leads and who follows. Who is a divergent thinker and who is convergent. Grouping and regrouping using these and other variables allows the teacher to create the right heterogeneous “soup” for learning.
Mixing students heterogeneously calls for assignments that cause children to learn from each other. Seating or grouping paired with assignments that both exercise learning strengths and make children synergize these strengths can raise the productivity of each child in the group. Underachievers do learn from achievers when instructional strategies include metacognitive discussion in which collaborative processes are just as valuable as the conclusions reached. A seating or grouping assignment can turn a child’s talkative nature into a skill valued in oral presentations, a leader into a spokesperson, an introvert into a research specialist. And, the “democratic’ feeling associated with heterogeneous is reinforced when the outcomes of the group are greater than the individual outcomes of its members.
There also are many reasons for using homogeneous grouping. Proponents for children with special learning needs point to the need for children to work and associate with their educational peers. Children who are academically capable and gifted need to work with their capable and gifted peers. Children who are receiving prescribed instruction for special education, ELL or Title 1 needs profit from working with their peers. Parents can be very outspoken for homogeneous learning opportunities for their children. Grouping decisions, however, must remain the teacher’s and be made to promote learning success for all.
Research abounds on the values of homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping. The literature review in the following study provides a good summary. http://www.appstate.edu/~koppenhaverd/rcoe/s10/5710/q1/groupShannon.pdf
Manipulating group membership or seating dependent upon the learning objective is a valuable instructional tool. Fixed seating for classroom management purposes in counterproductive to the mandates for current and future educational accountability. A teacher who understands grouping for learning seldom employs a written seating chart. For class room management purposes, the best place to start a new class period is for children to sit where they ended the last class period. From that point, it is a new day for new learning.