Each student in Elizabeth DiFranco’s eighth-grade English language arts room at the Joseph Lee school has been assigned a number one through four at the beginning of class. As DiFranco faces the jumble of students seated at wheeled desks, she orders them into groups.
“If you’re a one, roll together, if you’re a two, roll together, if you’re a three roll together,” she says, as the students scoot their seats into clusters to begin group discussions. The movement looks a bit like bumper cars, but in less than a minute the clusters are well-formed.
“In a traditional classroom, you’ve have to get up and move through rows,” DiFranco tells reporters visiting her classroom. “They would be climbing over each other.”