By Dr. Fred Jones

When you watch natural teachers in an elementary school classroom, you typically see students working while the teacher strolls among them in a most unremarkable fashion. Only after you watch a lot of classrooms and note the differences between the effective teachers and the ineffective teachers does the importance of this strolling become clear: The most important factor that governs the likelihood of students goofing off in your classroom is their physical distance from your body. You remember from your own school days: When the teacher was standing next to you, you cooled it. But, when the teacher was on the far side of the room, you talked to your neighbors.

The most basic technique for managing the behavior of a group is called "working the crowd." Natural teachers instinctively do this. They use proximity as an instrument of management. They know that either you work the crowd or the crowd works you.

This article will help you learn how to set up your classroom to best work the crowd and keep your students engaged.

Find the zones of proximity

Imagine walking among your students. Picture three zones of proximity surrounding your body in concentric circles. We'll use the colors of a traffic light — red, yellow, and green — to represent these three zones.

• The red zone is nearest to you. Red means stop. Students in the red zone cool it.
• Outside of the red zone is the yellow zone. Yellow signals caution. In the yellow zone, students cool it as long as you are facing in their direction.
• Beyond the yellow zone lies the green zone — green as in go. When students in the green zone look up to see that you are on the far side of the room or your back is turned, particularly if you are preoccupied, it is goof-off time.

Disrupt the disruptions

When you are working the crowd, two or three steps will switch a student from the green zone to the yellow zone or from the yellow zone to the red zone. Thus, through mobility, you are constantly disrupting the students' impulse to disrupt.

Of course, neither you nor the students monitor your proximity at a conscious level. Rather, it is subconscious, on the edge of awareness. Only when you watch previously well-behaved students in the classroom of a teacher who does not exploit proximity do you come to appreciate the importance of working the crowd.

Clear a path

Once the importance of mobility and proximity become clear, the next logical step is to make working the crowd as easy for yourself as possible. Are there any obstacles that might make working the crowd difficult? Look around a typical classroom, and you'll see a whole room full of obstacles. The biggest impediment to working the crowd is typically the arrangement of the furniture.

Arrange the furniture to make working the crowd as easy for yourself as possible. Carefully analyze space, distance, and movement.

First, get your desk away from its traditional location in the front of the classroom. Why? Because it costs you almost eight feet of proximity with every student in the classroom. Next, bring the students forward so that you can write on the board and then turn to talk comfortably to the students in the front row.

Where should your desk go? Most teachers just shove it into the corner so that they can conveniently lay things on it. Other teachers place it in the back of the room.

Try these sample arrangements

The most important feature of room arrangement is not where the furniture goes, but, rather, where the furniture does not go. The objective of room arrangement is to create walkways. You want to be able to get from any student to any other student with the fewest steps.

For example, the following diagram shows four rows running from side to side with eight students per row. Imagine yourself working the crowd during Guided Practice as you supervise students' work. What's the shortest distance you can walk that will allow you to read the work of every student in the classroom? It's indicated by the red line in the diagram. We'll call this pattern of movement an interior loop.

You may want to have students work together in small groups, as in cooperative learning or committee work. The following diagram shows a room arrangement in which students are working in groups of four. They may be seated at large tables, or they may have pushed their desks together. As you can see, this room arrangement looks very different from the previous diagram. However, when you start working the crowd, you will find your interior loop soon enough.

Make room for learning

As you set up your own classroom, remember: Both room arrangement and mobility are means to an end. The objective of room arrangement is proximity. If you already have proximity — for example, primary teachers might have all the proximity they need while sitting on the carpet and reading to students at their feet — you needn't go any further.

Keep in mind the basic principles outlined in this article, and you'll be able to arrange your own classroom in a way that is best for you.

About the author   Dr. Fred Jones received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA, specializing in work with schools and families, and has pioneered research in classroom management in both regular and special education classrooms. The nonadversarial management procedures that Dr. Jones has developed are presented in his books Positive Classroom Discipline and Positive Classroom Instruction. His most recent book, Tools for Teaching, offers an updated description of classroom management in which prevention of discipline problems and training children to be responsible put discipline management in a positive, affirming context.