Move seats, bodies, and minds

Both my husband and I keep educational blogs. He takes "edublogging" more seriously. In fact, at our school he is known as the blog guru. Because of his blogging reputation, I do visit watsoncommon from time to time to revel in his postings. I was really intrigued by one of his more recent posts about classroom design. Before coming to Punahou, we both taught in a public middle school for four years, helping us to understand the implications of making small changes in the structure of a class. He speaks to these design and instructional changes in the following excerpt:

...what I learned as a first-year teacher is that students at this level (in my case, first semester freshman) need to transition often to remain engaged, even if it's just breaking the same activity into several parts). First, we continued a small group activity from the previous class, which involved creating an Inspiration web of direct quotes from the story "Powder" and the inferences, observations, assumptions, questions, and connections that accompany them. These were posted as forum topics on our class Ning. Next, the students transitioned to solo work. We don't have private offices so we simply turned the desks to face out (we normally sit in a circle of desks). I also allowed them to plug in headphones and listen to music. The assignment was to read each group web, and build on the ideas in the forum, including a new direct quote that relates. What I saw was: every single screen at once and total engagement. Lastly, we moved from the formal, directed, solo work to the floor space in the middle for a more casual slide show I had put together about a man I met in Costa Rica who showed me the power of story. End of class.
As a follow-up, I posted a forum question about how the students liked the arrangement and asking them what other ideas they have for classroom design.

For the past couple of days I have been observing different classes. From my observations two simple strategies seem to be extremely effective:
1. Break up the class into small, diverse activities that require the kids to demonstrate their learning.
2. MOVE the desks, MOVE the bodies, MOVE the brain. Kids need transitions, change, and movement.