When there is a new seating chart...

"Why do you give us a seating chart?" asked A, a ninth grade student yesterday. 

I told him it was to try to balance skills within a group. "You're very good at speaking, for example." I showed him his position in the new seating chart. 

"I'm hoping that your confidence in speaking will encourage these two people at your table to speak up more. And these two people at your table are really good at writing. They will be good models for you in writing practice." (He has told me he wants to work on writing.)

I like to tell students a day in advance, "You will have new seats tomorrow". I want to limit the number of curve balls I throw at students. Sometimes I want to surprise them with content, or an activity, but with classroom logistics, I want there to be few wild cards. 

So, how do students get comfortable with a new seat mate? 

Today we tried language maps. We did a whole class example with S. I had asked him during an independent vocab task, the starter, if he were willing to be the class example, and I asked him the questions ahead of time: 

1. What languages do you speak? 

2. Where did you learn them? 

3. Who did you learn them from, primarily?


He talked about learning Kinyarwanda, primarily from his mom. His dad was killed in the Rwandan genocide, and his mom lived in Uganda. They returned to Rwanda when he was very young. She learned Kinyarwanda in order to teach it to him.

These are not my students.

After we listened to S, everyone did their own version of the map, and had a partner conversation about it. Then we moved on. No one else spoke to the whole class, and they didn't write about their partner's answers. This activity was not about their connection with me, or with the entire class -- just their new partner.

It takes more prep work to use a student example for something like a language map. I could have made my own map on the board. But it is my goal to de-center my whiteness as often as possible, and I do that by insisting on using student experience and expertise as the model. 

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