In a normal classroom in Shillong, this kind of classroom arrangement is hardly found. What one would find if one enters a classroom in Shillong is the traditional seating arrangement in which the students are made to sit in three or four columns and the teacher would be stationed in front of the whole class. With the large number of students present in the classroom, the teacher hardly walks around the class to supervise the students’ work. As a result, the students are left to fend for themselves and the weaker and discrete students are left at the mercy of their friends.
The above picture shows a different but not very new seating arrangement in a classroom. What is new in the picture is the fact that older students are seen working together in a circle while they seated themselves on the floor. This kind of seating arrangement could be seen amongst children when they are playing games like fixing a puzzle or when they are trying to find an insect in the garden.
This kind of seating arrangement the students are seen working together as they have a particular task to complete. This way of working together does not allow the students to sit idle while the others work at it to finish the work for the whole group. This particular setting is found in a cooperative classroom in which all the students in the group work together cooperatively. It allows the students to express any difficulty that they might have in the completion of the task. Moreover, it allows the students to learn from one another and they do not have to rely on bookish knowledge which they could accomplish by rote learning. Thus, “Learning by Doing” comes to take its place here.
