I guess the answer is ‘usually a bottom’ but bottoms are not what I’m writing about here, though they are probably significant because of course chairs are generally very important to us humans on a daily basis.
Chairs are of course also very important in classrooms.
Traditional classrooms tend to have tables and chairs – the tables are usually 600mm x 600mm and the chairs, well, they will vary but will often be pretty basic and not unlike chairs you might find in a doctor’s waiting room or possibly in someone’s kitchen.
These days however, with an emphasis on flexibility (or I prefer adaptability) in classrooms, you will more frequently encounter chairs that are on wheels and have a built in ‘pull-across’ table or tablet. Are these types of chairs useful?
Certainly they do allow you to re-configure a classroom full of students quite quickly (in theory), one minute in rows, then in a big semi-circle round the sides of the room and then in small groups. Or you coudl even get them to wheel themselves out int ot he corridor, close the classroom door and get some peace and quiet:-)
However these chair do throw up issues. These range from the difficulties sometimes encountered in sitting down in one, (without careering across the room) through to the ‘mess’ that a room can look in when you first arrive to an empty (of people) classroom. Academic staff often remark on the shock of coming to a room and finding the chairs totally all over the place. They complain that students all huddle in one corner of a room and that it therefore takes time to arrange your class into nice neat rows.
That of course leads me to the key point – don’t have chairs on wheels in a classroom (without proper tables) if you mainly want regular rows of students in front of you. Do however, have them if you want to facilitate small group work and hopefully collaborative learning activities. If you can cope with their downsides, they really do help to get group work going in between periods of teacher talk.
SMART Teaching 