Language classes require students to talk, like all the time. It’s a skill that I am still working on to be able to strike the perfect balance between getting them excited enough to talk about a given subject in the target language and knowing when to move on before they get too excited and resort to gabbing in English once they’ve tapped out their memorized vocabulary.

I’ve been sticking with trusty seating charts this year, but they’re feeling kind of…. stagnant and confining (Confession: I don’t like seating charts and I never really used seating charts in my past teaching experiences because I had about 10-12 students per class. Small classes made it super easy for me to learn everyone’s names within the first day or two and they weren’t too difficult to manage in either English or French). 

Now that I’m getting the hang of my teaching here, I’m starting to grow out of my trusty seating charts. I even had a strange wrinkle I wasn’t expecting early on: Once I switched up a seating chart, I noticed that students would only work with their seating group and not venture beyond their islands of comfort.

So how do you break students’ innate desire to gravitate towards the same people because they are in their comfort zones? 

Enter The Ongoing Conversations System (something I learned about from the Cult of Pedagogy blog):

The concept is simple: I have tricked students into thinking that There is no seating chart. Every day a student has to work with a new partner until he or she has filled out the entire chart. Once a student had worked with everyone else in the class, s/he may repeat working with a friend for a day or two before we go back through the list.

There is also a reflection component added to my non-seating chart: every day, students have to learn something new about their partner and they have to write about it – in French!

My hope is that students will become more comfortable talking with any and everyone in French and, of course – the most important part of all – that they are exposed to more ideas and opinions than they would have normally seen and heard by only working with a small handful of students in the class.

If you would like to edit a copy of this chart for your own classes, here is a view-only link to my chart. Bonus: I also printed out a laminated copy for myself that acts as a quick and easy way to track participation on any given day.

Here’s to more eye-opening experiences in the new semester!