LD resource room setup

How old are your students? What subjects will you teach in your room? Will everyone be working on the same subject/materials? Will all nine be in your room at one time? Are they all the same age?

An idea: Set up your instructional areas first and then see where your desk best fits…

I should be specfic….I’m a high school LD resource…..from what I undrstand there will be tutoring combined with som instruction. I have not got my roster yet but it looks like a caseload of 21-25 students in all three blocks. I’m just unsure about physical set up of room to best benefit students. Thanks for your response. My lack of experience is made up for by my enthusiasum.

If students will be working on different subjects and it is more a study hall environment, I like smaller tables of 4 students. You’ll need to shift between groups. If all students working on different subjects, then I like individual desks. If all working on same subject/materials and you will be doing lots of modeling on the blackboard/white board, seat students facing it—either in groups/clusters or at tables. Do you want students to collaborate? Will this be individual work? (These are questions you ask yourself when deciding how to set it up.)

The reason you don’t know how to set your room is because you don’t yet know what and how you will instruct or what is your population. (I like a combinations of tables and desks so I’m ready for anything!)

Harry Wong suggests a straight row/isles arrangement for the first day. If you don’t have rooster or time to consider what your instructional needs will be, just go with that and rearrange on day two.

Enthusiasm will carry one a very long way!

Good luck!

I’ve got some ideas & resources over on my site (www.resourceroom.net) — though class arrangement isn’t one of ‘em.
ATtitude was *huge* for my high schoolers. Anything I could do that was JUST LIKE REGULAR ED scored major points. So we were in standard issue rows. I issued the regular texts and used them creatively, and used the same curriculum but modified it so they weren’t just reading the book and guessing answers at the back.
Grades were (surprisingly to me) important to my guys. So I opened each class with a 10’ drill question (for Geography it would be a question from the WOrld Atlas about wherever we were studying — find 5 capes in South America, 10 rivers in Brazil, whatever).
Do NOT expect background knowledge. One of the biggest favors you can do is to provide it (things like knowing what the continents are and the difference between a country and a county and a continent, or the difference between an example and a definition).
My kiddos all failed my first tests. I was “teaching” but htey weren’t learning. Learn from the mistakes you will make — don’t let them get you down (or eat you up :-)) I learned to give *lots* of quizzes,e arly and often. TOld ‘em Tuesday that there would be a quiz every Wednesday including tomorrow, and that the question would be “What do we celebrate on the fourth of July?” (had a college kiddo last year who really didn’t know… something about freedom, from what? um…. was it the end of slavery?) So even though memorizing dates is so utterly out of fashioin, I made sure these guys (this was a History class) knew when teh Civil War was, knew about when teh INdustrial Revolution was (and what it was… that “Revolution” meant big change so it could be a war, or it could be… and what the “civil” in “civil war” meant…) — lots of questions about “what happened first, the invention of the automobile or the War of 1812?”
And getting them dramatizing impressment was fun :)

A personal thought — I HATE the teacher’s desk in the back of the room. As far as I’m concerned, it means that you are breathing down the backs of the students’ necks so you can watch them every second but they can’t watch you. Jail warden, anyone?
It also means that you see yourself as a supervisor in a factory and not a communicator — a communicator greets people face to face.
I taught evening classes in a school where this was the standard classroom setup in every room I saw — a middle school in a middle-class area, but with terrible discipline and vandalism and theft and garbage/insect problems. My personal opinion is that if you treat kids as criminals who have to be spied on from the back, that’s how they will react. (Of course, it’s not a good idea to suddenly jump to the other extreme either, as you’d get a natural overreaction.)
The advice of making the classroom as much like other classrooms as possible is very good. Kids respect rows as the setup for academic work. You can also have tables on the other side of the room for projects.
By the way, when I was taking education classes it was considered a wonderul thing to have the kids move desks around and rearrange the classroom for different activities. My personal experience is that this wastes huge amounts of time, often leaving almost nothing for teaching or learning, a deliberate goal of some students. Moving from the academic part of the room to the project part of the room has worked better for me.

If your room is like mine, you will have very little “room” to work with. My room is more of a triangle than a square or rectangle, so the best place for my desk is at the back of the room - I’m never able to use it while my students are there anyway.
Placement of desks depends on the situation. I use a lot of cooperative group work, so I traded out my desks for tables. This way students can work together, and I can sit down with them.
Always leave out a quiet place in the room for students who need an environment with little distractions. I have a quiet desk next to my files.