Exercise 2: The teacher’s approach to pace-based seating arrangements

Duration: 60 minutes

The goal of this exercise: to show how the teacher consciously and unconsciously shapes school belonging and what is the role of the teacher in uniting and dividing the collective.

Materials: A documentary film about Jane Elliott’s “Blue eyes/Brown eyes” experiment: A Class Divided
 

Teaching methods:

• discussion
• teamwork
• individual work
• writing
• critical analysis of the text

Instruction for teacher:

• Before you start, be ready to face any possible incidents that could go wrong while discussing this topic.
• Get ready for a discussion about a very sensitive topic. Ensure your thorough knowledge of the ethical aspects and conditions of a respectful discussion as well as creating and maintaining an inclusive environment.
• Read the introduction to exercise 2.
• Read story no 2.
• Ask your students the questions to elicit their reflections on this topic (see Questions to elicit student reflections).
• Create a space for student questions and discussion. You may collect questions that students may ask and write them down on a flipchart to be discussed together.
• Summarizing discussion – Try to cover all students’ points of view in brief regarding the issue. Then filter through the main arguments in detail and identify key points.
• Evaluation of exercise – Ask the students to write feedback on the exercise on a piece of paper. As they leave the classroom, they can put their pieces of paper signed or anonymously into the feedback box. Written feedback is part of the system of teacher-student communication (Nicol 2010). Constructive feed¬back is an important ele¬ment of every dis¬cus¬sion in education, and it can provide effective information for learning and teaching. Students can provide feedback to the teacher on the topic. What did they like about the exercise? What did they not like? What did the teacher do to help students feel safe and comfortable during this exercise? What improvements can the teacher make? What would they do differently if they were teaching the class? Students can take approximately 10 minutes to write feedback.

Introduction to Exercise 2

Picture a school class in which a teacher has divided the collective into two groups. The first group consists of students with blue eyes, the second consists of students with brown eyes. The students with blue eyes are treated better by the teacher than the brown-eyed students (see story 2). This exercise is inspired by Jane Elliott’s “Blue eyes/Brown eyes” experiment. This experiment was conducted to determine how children learn bias and prejudice. The experiment is currently considered unethical, although some diversity training exercises have been inspired by this experiment (see Stewart et al. 2003).

Story 2

The teacher prepared a seating arrangement for a class in such a way that it is based on students’ eye color. The teacher placed the children with blue eyes in front of the classroom. In contrast, the children with brown eyes were made to sit in the back. The students with blue eyes are treated better by the teacher than the brown-eyed students.

Questions to elicit student reflections

• Discuss the pros and cons of this particular seating arrangement and discuss judging people based on eye color.
• Do you think the arrangement helps to form “two classes within a class” or two groups of students?
• Discuss whether a seating arrangement created this way could contribute to establishing power dominance among the students.
• Do you think the arrangement also affects the school climate, which in turn reflects the teacher’s communication and teaching procedures, his or her preferences and expectations in respect of students, student participation, and the overall ethos of the school?
• Is the teacher’s approach associated with the so-called “Pygmalion effect” (Rosenthal and Jacobson 1968)? This is a term designating the phenomenon whereby teachers influence the learning performance of students with their ideas, expectations, and attitudes relating to students 
• Discuss different learning needs and styles as well as supporting engagement.