Flexible seating,
flexible seating, flexible seating! If you didn’t read/say that ala Marcia,
Marcia, Marcia, then we can’t be friends… just kidding! But really flexible
seating is all the rage these days thanks to TopDog
Teaching’s Kayla Delzer. Her room setup is amazing, and having
watched her classroom (via social media) it’s clear to see that her little's
love the arrangement.
I just finished my
second year of teaching in SUCCESS, and my first year of using flexible
seating. SUCCESS is a self-contained life skills classroom. All of the children in my room are intellectually disabled along with a heap of other disabilities.
I sent Kayla a message before I took the alternative seating route. I
could see how it looked in a room of typically developing kids, but how would
my kids benefit from it. I asked Kayla her opinion on how it would work with my
kids, you know the kids that are two and three grade levels behind where their
age says they should be. How would my kids with oppositional defiance take to
it? Would my little's with Downs Syndrome be able to choose AND still do their
work? Would the other adults in my room even be open to this drastic change?
Her answer, “Absolutely. The biggest growth has been among my oppositional
defiant and EBD students.”
“There is power in choice
and the freedom to choose where to work.” There is power in choice… As soon as
I read those words, I knew I had to do it. All kids crave power. They want to
be in control. Giving them the power to choose how they work best was
empowering for me as their teacher.
With this new sense of
empowerment I went on quest to get flexible seating for my classroom. It
started with a Donors Choose project titled, “Alternative Seating for
Alternative Learning.” I asked for wobble stools, hokki stools, and floor pillows.
I wanted to make sure that had enough seating for EVERY student on those
choices. The reason: meltdowns. I wanted to give my students choices but I
needed to make sure those choices wouldn't cause chaos. So I opted to for
various color choices. My project was fully funded and by December we were on
our way to getting rid of the desks. Shortly after the seating started to
arrive, I wanted more. I started a project for standing desks. After that got
funded we made the move to remove all of the traditional desks in the room.
When the kids returned from winter break, we had tables, stools, floor pillows,
and standing desks.
Floor
cushions!!
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And
our first standing desk! (That is my kid modeling it!)
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But now what? We had
everything we needed to to create a wonderful, "free" learning
environment. But how could I implement this with most of my kiddos functioning
at a low cognitive level? How would I be able to get them to understand their
choice? I couldn't. I made a flip chart, a physical chart, and icons... But it
didn't really work. They weren't understanding the choices they were
making.
So we made the choices
for them, at first. We told them where to sit. After a few weeks we started to
notice which kiddos stayed on task and which ones didn't. We noticed that a
certain little worked much better at the standing desk (he didn't want to be at
the standing desk though). Once he figured out that he had to get his work
finished before he could sit, he became so much more productive, and he began
asking (with words!) to sit on the stools or the floor. By the end of the year
he was the fastest at completing his independent work. I also have a kiddo in a
wheel chair that uses a stander. Being in a stander is important for her to
help build that muscles in her legs.
It
wasn't until after the third time that we put her in the stander that we
realized that one of our standing desks was at just the right
height for her to work at!
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I'm still not entirely
sure that I have this flexible seating thing down. I do know that my kids made
amazing progress this year. Was it because of the flexible seating? I don't
know. But I do know that we started something amazing last year, and I'm excited
to make it even better next year.
