Tom Bennetts Guide to seating plans

Every teacher should have a seating plan: it serves two very useful purposes:
1. It enables you to learn their names quickly and efficiently. If they sit where
they want, youll have no reference point other than your memory with
which to connect names to faces.
2. It breaks up friendship groups and focuses the pupils on the idea that the
point of the lesson is to learn, not to socialise with their mates and catch
up on the latest gossip.
So these two purposes (name learning and behaviour management) are best
served by having a seating plan.
What happens if you DONT have a seating plan?
Naturally, most children will sit with people they want to talk to; the ones they
get along best with. While thats lovely for them, its dynamite to your lesson,
because the temptation to chat when you want them to listen will be greattoo
great to resist for most. Also, it allows them to bunch up into groups that can
conspire against other groups. In other words, it emphasises the social aspect of
the lesson at the expense of the learning aspect.
Another danger is that the keen, hard working kids will drift to the front, and
thelets call them the less keen will be drawn to the back as if by an enormous
magnet that only attracts the seven deadly vices. Thats not necessarily the
optimal educational demographic, as they undoubtedly say in the DfE.
Making a plan. Before you teach a class for the first time, design your seating
plan. Even if you dont know them at all, you can randomise the arrangement by
choosing an alphabetical order; or by arranging in alternate gender; or by any
other sequence that introduces an element of chance, like the worlds most
boring casino. For Gods sake, dont put all the boys on one side and all the girls
on the other, unless youre trying to
engineer a brave new world.
Top Tips

Separate trouble makers by row

AND column
Mix up gender
Mix up ability
Keep the hard nuts near to you
Insist on the seating plan- dont give
in to Please!

Along with this file, Ive included a simple

Word document with a grid and some table
shapes (warning: its not very high tech.

You think YOUR seating plan is hard?

But it doesnt need to be). You could use this as the basis of your own seating
plan:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Copy and paste/ delete tables if you need more/ less

Go to landscape/ portrait view for long/ tall classroom sizes.
Expand/ diminish the tables to suit taste
There are lots of shapes you can add to the grid: simply click on Insert
on the tabs at the top
5. You could laminate the sheet and write on it using wipeable marker. Or
write, then laminate for permanence
6. Or you could photocopy and shrink the sheet so that it can be stuck in
your planner.
7. For cover lessons you could photocopy the seating plan and give it to the
covering teacher, so they know where everyone should be.
Or you can sketch it yourself. Or use computer aided design. Go nuts. Just have a
seating plan.
Tom