Accommodating Group Work

Twenty some-odd people, twenty some-odd laptops, and furniture make any laptop classroom cramped, especially if group work is a prominent feature of class time. In classrooms with movable desks, part of classroom culture becomes re-arranging the room before the laptops are powered up. This daily redecoration isn’t necessary in a classroom equipped with group tables, but other problems emerge. If the table is too wide, group members find it difficult to talk to each other across the table and above the laptop screens; students usually compensate for distance with volume, and the din of multiple groups compensating for distance can disturb other classrooms. If the table is not wide enough, the physical intimacy of group work can be uncomfortable for many. “Making do” is usually the only option, and several strategies help students learn to make the furniture and the technology fit their communicative needs:

(1) Intentionally violate the original set-up of the classroom. Turn all the desks to face the wall—creating a panopticon—for a day, arrange four desks in a pinwheel fashion (touching on two sides), or put desks front-to-front in pairs. Then, facilitate a discussion on how the arrangement affected them during the class period. Follow-up by “giving them permission” to make the furniture accommodate their preferences so long as such arrangements do not compromise students’ ability to see the screen/board or overtake another groups’ space. Repeating this exercise at midsemester encourages students to remember that furniture is just furniture—if they haven’t already transferred this lesson from dorm life into classroom life.

(2) Make the screens disappear. Using the advanced tab in the power settings options from the control panel, have students change the function labelled When I Close the Lid of My Portable Computer, setting it to the Do Nothing option. Of all the tricks of laptop classrooms, this lid-shut option is the most powerful for instructors and for students. In the early stages of drafting, careful attention to surface-level concerns stymies attention to a writer's global argument. One way of combating this tendency is to have students read their thesis statements, shut the lids of their laptops, and talk through the rest of the composition with their groupmates. By closing the screens, students are forced to address each other as opposed to multitasking (on-task or off-task). After discussing the composition, students can raise their screens, and the laptop awaits their next command: It is not sleeping, hibernating, or otherwise offline. The lid-shut option helps combat the “we’ve got them, so they might as well be open” tendency; it gives people the opportunity to decide when the screen should be up and when it should be down.

(3) Give up. In her feedback on an early draft of this article, Beth Hewett reminded me that most students could generally care less about how furniture affects their work: They just do their work. Anybody who can do homework on a laptop in a crowded coffee shop while intermittently talking to friends online, on cell phones, and in person (friends who are also doing homework) sees no point in rearranging furniture for ergonomic comfort much less pedagogical sensibilities. The convenience of portable technologies seems to override a thousand other inconveniences (which means the best jobs of the future lie in repetitive injury treatment!).

Yet, even as I suggest giving up the desire to create a material space that fits your own vision of a productive class environment, I wonder what kinds of social relationships make furniture invisible. In my experience, new laptop owners, introverts, and minority students (i.e., students who find salient one or more aspects of their identities that aren’t salient in the same ways for their peers) desire a more rigid understanding of personal space, group space, and class space; they use furniture, backpacks, and stuff to create boundaries of protection. So, if you do give up, watch what happens and ask why it happened in just that way with those students.