Welcome to Edutopia Radio. This is School of Practice, where we share what works inside real classrooms. I'm Kristin Leong, an editor at Edutopia, and I'm also a former middle school teacher. When I was in the classroom, I was never a big fan of having all my students in neat front-facing rows that made teaching feel like being on stage all day.
So I turned my students' desks to face each other. In real life, I reminded them, they weren't going to have someone standing in front of them all the time telling them what to do. Today, we're gonna meet a veteran teacher who also broke with classroom layout traditions. I think oftentimes seating sort of gets overlooked, and I'm not sure exactly how I stumbled on this, but once I did, it's like I wasn't going back.
Jay Schauer's classroom layout became kind of famous among Edutopia's community after Jay wrote an article about what he calls L-shaped groupings. Before he retired from teaching in 2024, Jay used this layout for a decade in his high school science and math classes in Oregon. And when he mentored other teachers in his district, Jay saw how it could also work across subjects.
Today, Jay will break down exactly how to use this layout for collaboration. There was a lot of peer coaching going on and they're sharing ideas that you really wanted everybody to get. He'll also explain how this layout works in concert with a very specific approach to assigned seating that he also developed, and how you can adapt it for testing tiny rooms and more.
But before Jay joins us, I want you to be able to picture his classroom. You ready? Imagine this: Jay's teacher desk is at the front and center of the room, and the students' desks are all grouped into L shapes. Each L seats four students—one on the short leg and three people on the longer leg. There are nine Ls arranged around the classroom, all facing into the center, including two Ls on either side of Jay's desk, and that layout easily fits 36 students.
But Jay says it can also work for fewer students or as many as 41. If you need visuals, don't worry. There are photos and diagrams of Jay's layout in his article on our website at www.edutopia.org. Just follow the link in our episode notes. Okay, let's get into it. Okay, Jay, we're here today talking about your famous L groupings in your classroom.
Now, in my conversations with other innovative teachers, I sometimes hear that the creative solutions and strategies that they're trying in their classrooms are inspired by their own experiences as students. What do you remember about classroom layouts when you were a kid in school? Oh, that is so long ago that it's a little hard to remember.
I do remember a lot of the traditional, like desks in rows and, you know, if you were at the front, you got a good view. And if you were in the back, you had five heads between you and the teacher, and sometimes that was a good thing, and sometimes that made it really hard to learn. And now jumping forward in time to your early years as a teacher, tell us about the other kinds of desk layouts you tried before you arrived at the L groupings.
Like a lot of people, it really depended, you know, you walked into the classroom that you were assigned to or sharing with somebody or whatever, and it's like, "Okay, what furniture do I have to work with?" And especially early on, you're so busy thinking about the lessons that you're doing and how you're gonna connect with students that it's like, "Well, the chairs are in
Rows and columns and so that's how they're gonna stay." Or: "I've got lab tables 'cause it's a science room and you know, they're fixed to the floor, so this is how it's gonna stay." Then the other thing I'd see, and I tried this too, was like a great big U where you'd have everybody sitting around the room, and you could do things in the middle of the room.
I think those were probably the most common ones that I saw or tried. I definitely tried the U a lot when I was a teacher. I was a fan. I was a fan of the U. But what I'm hearing you say is that you can shake off old habits and rethink your desk and room configurations, just as you might rework your lesson plans.
Now, Jay, I'm curious to ask, what would you say is the biggest problem that the L grouping solved for you? It gets really hard as an instructor to navigate that space, to get to people with the chairs and desks in rows and columns. So you're often answering questions from a distance. The L'S really made proximity simple, so I could stand in the crux of an L and be next to all four students in that particular L and so it's really easy to keep people's attention, and it's much harder for them to hide as well.
The other part that I found it really useful for, it really helped students shift from one mode of instruction to another. It was easy for everybody to see the front of the room. If I had some instructions, I needed to go over a demo or there was some rich video clip or somebody was bringing up work that we're gonna take a look at how they solved it. But also immediately then to go, "All right, now within your group, go ahead and discuss some particular piece to try to make sense of it, or solve this problem on your own.
Compare it with each other and see what you have." Let's pause here. So, Jay's layout essentially turned his whole classroom into a highly flexible configuration where students could more easily see and hear instruction. It also allows them to easily pivot to group work for deeper learning, but there's an extra layer to Jay's seeding strategy.
You'll hear him explain it in a moment, but first I wanna offer some context. In addition to the L groupings, Jay assigned seats for every student in his class. To do that, he looked at each student's academic background, what math or science classes had they already taken, what were their grades in those classes, their overall GPA, things like that.
Then he identified students who were likely to be very fluent in his subject area, and also those who are probably going to be pretty solid, and then the students who might need more support. Jay made sure that each L grouping had an equal mix of these students. His intention was to make all of the L's more or less balanced, but he does admit that relying on grades doesn't fully capture students' abilities.
If you want more details, Jay wrote a separate article about his assigned seating strategy for Edutopia. That link is also in our show notes. Okay. Let's get back to the conversation with Jay. You used assigned seating, and you had a very specific strategy for how you did those assignments. How did you come up with this approach?
That wasn't initially something I did. That was something that, as I was using the L's, I realized, "Well, this group's never doing well and this group's doing really well," and that's not what I'm trying to get out of all the students in my classroom. Everybody's supposed to be learning. So each group was very heterogeneous and so my most likely to struggle academic student,
They were gonna be sandwiched between two relatively strong academic students who could help them. And you know, some people it's like, "Well, I don't want my kid to have to teach other kids." It's like, well, they're not. They're doing their work, and in the discussions other kids are learning as well.
And so the repetition that it takes to learn new material, the processing so that you actually have to communicate that to others, was another piece of that. It's time for a break. When we come back, Jay will tell us how to adapt his L groupings for testing, tiny rooms, and more. And we'll talk about a third strategy that Jay uses for peer-to-peer learning in his classes.
He calls it cross-pollination. Be right back.
Okay, Jay, take us into your classroom. Can you give us an example of how you balanced instruction and collaboration as you moved around these L's? I'd be greeting students at the door usually, and there'd be something up on the board for them to start, and then oftentimes there'd be some direct instruction.
Probably one of the easiest one I'd give an example of marine mammals in a marine biology elective class. And it's like, so this very first unit on your own, everybody you see if you can come up with five or six characteristics you think make mammals, mammals. So everybody in their L's, doing this on their own.
And then it's like, "Okay, now within your L, go ahead and see what you have. You can add to your list. You can star things that you all agreed on, cross out things that you realize, it's like, 'Oh yeah, that's not a really good example or a characteristic.'" And then now we're gonna cross-pollinate. If you're in seat two of the L rotate clockwise, or if you're in seat four of the L, rotate counterclockwise.
Right now we've got all these new groups. Go ahead and share your ideas. And so if there's one or two like rare ideas out there, they start getting trickled through the crowd and we might do one or two rotations and then go back, compare. And so in doing so, you're getting contributions from a lot of people.
You're getting repetition right away. And so when it actually came time to generate these traits, then I could strategically call on various seats. And it's like, "Okay, so take another minute to wrap it up. Whoever's in seat three, you're gonna be the one sharing out something. Just be ready to go." And so there was always this warm calling kind of thing where it's like we've had that repetition and then I could fine-tune things.
So there's a lot of scaffolding built into this. We will get back to our conversation in a moment, but first I wanna take a minute to unpack the new strategy that Jay just explained. Basically, he'd rotate some of his students into other L groupings for collaborative work to get them sharing their ideas more widely and learning from each other.
If you're thinking this reminds you of Elliot Aronson's jigsaw method, you're not wrong. That's an approach to collaborative learning where students work in groups and each student is responsible for teaching other group members one chunk of a larger topic. Research shows jigsaw groups lead to deeper learning and a greater sense of belonging for students.
Now getting back to Jay, he had a very specific way of labeling his seats with numbers and then rotating students into different groupings, and we don't have time to go into all of those details here, but if you're curious to learn more and actually wanna see a diagram of how this works, all of this is explained in Jay's Edutopia article about his assigned seating strategy.
You know where to find the link. Now back to our conversation. Okay, Jay, so your students are in their L's talking about marine mammals. Where are you in the room and what are you looking and listening for as students are working together? That's where it's easy to circulate and you just kind of listen and you get an idea.
It's like, "Okay, here's the common misconception." Like my classroom, I had nine L's. And it's like, okay, six of these L's all have this misconception, and so we need to make sure that that's something that I'm gonna clear up. And again, the nice piece about the L is you can stand in one corner and just kinda listen aand if somebody's
Starting to drift a little bit off task, or it's like just the proximity of being there instead of having them hiding in the last row in the back of the really crowded room. And then there would be times where, especially some of your students that are a little more hesitant to contribute, you could say, "Hey, I overheard you talk about this one.
That's a really good idea. Are you okay if I call on you to share that one?" I love this strategy around warm calling. I used this all the time when I was a middle school teacher. I think it really sets students up for success in being able to participate in class discussions, but I have to ask. Our off-topic conversations a problem?
I'm especially thinking about those elbows where the two arms of the L's come together. How did you discourage off-topic socializing? Never easy. Although part of it is by doing the strategic seating, you often didn't have friends sitting next to friends to start, which is what you'd get simply by choice seating and again, that's something where proximity sometimes took care of that.
These are great details about how L groupings worked in your class. I'd love to shift now and talk about adapting your strategies for other classrooms and types of work. Let's start with testing and individualized work. It's not a problem for individualized work. You have your space, you just happen to have somebody next to you.
When I had a major AP final exam, I'd rearrange the room. I had two-person lab tables. I would just pivot one edge of the L, and now instead of having them adjacent, they'd be stacked one in front of the other. So now I suddenly have four rows. Now I know you've said the strategy and layout work well across grade levels and subjects, but I know there are going to be teachers listening that are like, "My room is
Teeny tiny." What advice do you have to give to adapt L groupings for a very small classroom? I had some that tried this. The way they handled it is the seats that were on the outside literally went up to the wall. I mean, you had just enough room to get into your seats. That's where it definitely gets challenging, and sometimes you literally can't do it.
Now, before we wrap up, I have to ask you an important question. How did you know this strategy was working? What were you looking for specifically? The biggest thing, like I taught stats, I work with a lot of data, was the students that were performing the highest in previous versions of seeding and mixing things up, or not mixing things up, they kept doing well and maybe did a little bit better, but the students that didn't do as well historically did better.
I saw that the standard deviation in my performance shrank without bringing down the mean. Okay. Jay, you have an opportunity here to speak directly to teachers. If a teacher out there wants to try out this layout, what's the best way to get started? Is there a good first step? Do it at a natural transition.
You know, do it at a semester, do it at the end of a unit, or whatever, so you don't add this weird disruption and you can communicate to the students: "Here's why we're doing what we're doing." You know, some of 'em won't like it, but at least they'll know that it's not just like. There's no thought behind this.
There's a lot of thought behind this. Jay, thanks so much for being with us here on the show. My pleasure. It's a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and I found a lot of value in it over the years and hope it benefits others as well.
Here are three things I'm taking away from this conversation. One L groupings aren't the only way to configure your classroom, but they tend to improve classroom communication dramatically. For one thing, they give teachers the ability to listen in, provide feedback, and disseminate the best ideas as they develop.
They also give students direct access to both the teacher and peers. Plus, it makes shifting between learning modes from direct instruction to independent work to group work a lot easier. Two, regardless of the seating configuration you choose, assigned seats are probably still a good idea. It's also important to think about the distribution of skills in student groups and to rotate students periodically to expose everyone to more ideas.
Three, even if L-shaped desks aren't right for you, that's okay. The biggest thing I'm taking away from my conversation with Jay is not actually a specific layout, but a call the think about seating as another tool for learning. Intentional use of seeding like Jays can deepen learning, improve knowledge sharing and retention, and strengthen your class community.
Special thanks to our guest, Jay Schauer. Jay taught science and math at Wilsonville High School in Oregon. He retired in 2024 after teaching for 41 years. And if you wanna learn more about Jay's L groupings and assigned seating strategy, check out both of his articles on our website at www.edutopia.org. You'll find links to both articles in our episode notes.
What teaching dilemmas are keeping you up at night? We wanna hear from you. Send us your stories, ideas, and questions, and let us know what you'd like us to cover in future episodes. Our email is podcasts@edutopia.org. If you liked this episode, follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss an episode.
And please tell a colleague about the show. This episode was produced by Anne Noyes Saini and edited by me. Our engineer is Doug Keely, and our supervising editors are Sarah Gonser and Steve Merrill. Special thanks to Youki Terada. I'm Kristin Leong. We'll see you again soon.