Handouts are available at the end of the transcript.

Video Transcript

Hi Science Teachers,

Welcome to Science Teacher Summer School, Episode 1.

I’m Kent Lui, and something you may not know about me is I used to ballroom dance competitively and I was pretty good – I wasn’t pro, but I did win a few local competitions. Now, let’s get to work.

What’s your favourite time of the school year? I have two: the end of the school year – for obvious reasons, it’s vacation – and the beginning. The beginning is when kids are excited to get to know their classmates and their lab partner. And, it’s also when they’re still sitting nicely and working quietly at their desks. It’s kind of like the new car smell of the school year.

During the last term, I asked, how might I keep that “beginning-of-the-course” feeling throughout the term so that students regularly feel excitement about being in a new seat and working with a different classmate.

The solution? I did something a former science department head, a quick shout out to Mr. Jamie Stewart, used to do with his class. I randomized the student seating plan every week. It sounds simple, but the results have been awesome.

Every Monday morning, after the students were settled in their seats, I project their seating plan on the screen, hit reset and randomize. And, new seating plan.

After a few rounds of randomizing seats, the kids kind of expected it. And, I think they liked that they’d be somewhere different.

If you don’t have an attendance program that randomizes seating plans, you could do the same thing on Google Sheets. After you create a seating plan, highlight the cells you want to randomize – in this case, all the seats. Then, right click and choose randomize range. There you go: new seating plan. If you’re looking for a seating plan template for Google Sheets, you can find this one on my webpage.

Now, I know some teachers don’t like to change seating plans frequently because they want students to get comfortable and get to know their lab partner. And, from a teacher’s perspective, it also helps me learn names faster. But, consider some of the benefits. Students don’t have to feel like they’re stuck with their lab partner – especially if they don’t get along. Students have equal opportunity to work with other students. It’s good practice for future life, where we can’t just work with those we get along with all the time. And, frequent and regular seating plan changes actually caused me to find more ways to build community and learn names. For example, every Monday morning, after I scrambled the seating plans, I had students share with their new lab partner something they learned over the weekend. I called it, what did you do over the weekend and what did you learn from doing that thing you did? Students shared something with each other and the class. And, over the course of a term, we learned that most students didn’t get enough sleep, cookie monster has a name, and a student in my class was making a killing selling sneakers on Instagram. It was a fun way for students to get to know each other and for me to reinforce that learning takes place outside the classroom too.

Lastly, changing seating plans also forced me to plan at least one lab experiment per week. This was so that students would work at least once with someone new. This also helped me re-evaluate my teaching practice as a whole – but, more on that in future episodes

That’s all the time we have for this episode. Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about the skill my students use the most in science class: CER. You don’t want to miss it.

See you again soon. And, remember to science everywhere everyday.

Resources

Handout(s): Google Sheets Seating Plan Template

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