Silly question, right? Who hasn’t?
At some point I realized I could manage about nine conversations at a time, not thirty-five. I had large classes in a small town middle school. And I just couldn’t keep up with tracking the ideas of thirty-five students in real time all at once. But when I put them in groups of four, I could circulate and follow the story at each table. My overwhelm decreased, and teaching became as manageable as a wait section in a restaurant on a Saturday night. I could circulate and attend to the learning at nine tables rather than scurrying from person to person, providing help and redirecting.
Collaborative learning doesn’t “just happen.” I had to convince students that they’d benefit from working together. Lucky for me, a teacher down the hall taught me about “Desk Olympics” which provided a competition between classes for which class could form groups of four the fastest. By the time groups had managed to move their tables together, they were interdependent. In a small way they knew they had people they could count on.
Desk Olympics went a long way towards expanding students’ ideas of who they wanted to work with. Moving desks interrupted status dynamics established by other school activities. Often the most thoughtful desk mover got to show their problem solving prowess in ways that paper and pencil had obscured.
Later, I learned to have students interview each other every time they got new seats. The better they knew one another, the more they could support each other. That way, I could manage nine tables with creative efficiency rather than endure the overwhelm of so many minds and bodies and brain hijack that came with it.