Flexible Seating: The Jury is Out…or is it?
Julia Grover-Barrey OTR/L
Founder of In-Tuned®
A few years back when my youngest daughter entered 3rd grade, we dropped off classroom supplies and met the teacher. The teacher was very enthusiastic about having planned out and equipped her classroom with a flexible seating arrangement. Love seats, bean bag chairs, exercise balls, large cushions, big stuffed animals, as well as an array of traditional chairs and desks in novel patterns placed around the perimeter of the room.
The teacher’s enthusiasm was contagious, and I congratulated her on her vision, initiative and hard work. I am still in awe when I think back to that day.
My thoughts went something like this:
“Man, she must have classroom management superpowers.”
“What a brave thing to attempt.”
“I hope she knows what she’s doing.”
“Crazy.”
As a parent, an educator, a therapist working with children with special needs and having worked in many schools I had wide ranging opinions on this but, I kept them to myself all that year.
What works for one child, doesn’t necessarily work for an entire classroom. The level of teaching experience and classroom management skills required to make this model successful goes up exponentially compared to traditional seating models.
Flexible seating arrangements work when there is a well thought out plan devised by a team of relevant professionals and then executed by a very experienced and effective teacher. Without this combination the behaviors the teacher was expecting to squelch may ramp up and the level of attention and production from students may drop way down.
Flexible seating arrangements tend to accommodate the problem-based learning model better than traditional curriculum-based models. Problem-based learning environments lean towards being more dynamic in movement, emphasize hands on learning with tangible projects accomplished in teams…thus necessitating more flexibility in the way students are seated.
I bring this up at the beginning of the school year to make us all (teachers, parents, therapists) think about how children are seated in the classroom and what we need to pay attention to for them to get the most out of their day while perched on a chair, since obviously I don’t think flexible seating is the answer in most situations.
No cost suggestion(s):
Make sure the chair height and depth allow the student’s heels to fully weight bear on the floor. Upright seated posture is essential for maintaining attention and focus throughout the day and if we cannot direct our weight from our heels to knees, knees to sit bones, sit bones through the spine, spine to the top of the head, we are not providing the base of support most students need. So before providing a ball chair, kneeling chair, bean bag chair we must make sure the actual desk chair is appropriately fit to the student.
Pay close attention to how student’s with attention deficiency, behavioral health issues and developmental delay, etc. are sitting in their seats assuming the chair is an appropriate fit for them. Student’s with an immature nervous system need hands on help with priming their heels and sit bones to weight bear, and keep their spine extended. All of this helps the eyes stay focused and attentive through proprioceptive feedback from our skeleton, muscles and inner ear. No equipment necessary, just a set of encouraging hands.
Some students have developmental blocks to archetypal movement and sitting in a chair with hips flexed, encourages retained reflexes to kick in impairing the use of their hands. As a result, some students prefer to stand beside their chair. Telling them to sit down puts this particular student in a bind. They cannot use their hands effectively when they are in a seated position. These students should be permitted to stand at their desk. A row of desks in the back row of the room, is a great alternative to a full-on flexible seating arrangement for the entire classroom. There just needs to be room to move the chair away from the desk and I suggest using a colorful mat to stand on provide some boundaries.
Sometimes the best solutions don’t have a lot of moving parts.
All my best for a fantastic school year.
Julia