The students at St Monica's Primary School in Evatt take their assigned seats in time for their spelling lesson.
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The rectangular desks are lined up in rows facing the teacher at the front of the classroom. When the students are not at their desks, they sit on the floor on rows of coloured dots.
The traditional classroom setup is a key part of enabling the direct, explicit teaching favoured at the Catholic school.
Principal Lisa Harris said the school used to have open-plan classrooms with table groups before making the switch to the more traditional model in 2021.
"Structures [and] routines have been really, really important here at St Monica's," Mrs Harris said.
"Our students know that when the bell goes, they line up at the door. They enter the room. They put their things away. They sit down at their desk, if it's core instruction time, and they're ready to learn."
More schools are returning to the traditional classroom layout as experts call for an end to distracting and noisy open-plan classrooms.
Open-plan 'lunacy'
Open-plan classrooms - where two or more class groups are in one larger learning space - first became popular in the 1970s. The thinking was the relaxed setup would be less intimidating for students and enable teachers to work together as a team. Since then schools have dipped in and out of the open-plan setup.
The limited number of robust studies on open-plan classrooms have shown mixed results on academic performance.
One recent study in Victorian classrooms compared 7- to 10-year-old students' progress in reading when learning in an open-plan setting and compared to when the class was divided using a portable, sound-treated wall.
By simply closing the partition, the rate of reading fluency development doubled. When the students were in an open-plan environment, their reading fluency increased on average by 7.2 words per minute. When the partition was in place this increased to 14 words per minute.
The students who struggled with maintaining attention and speech perception were the worst affected by the noisy, open-plan spaces.
Professor of audiology Gary Rance, who led the study sponsored by the Victorian Deaf Education Institute, said he was surprised by the size of the effect.
"The only thing that we changed as part of this study was opening and closing an accordion door between between the two classes," Prof Rance said.
"If you consider there are so many other variables in children's lives that might affect their academic progress, just doing this one simple thing had quite a significant effect on their reading development."
He said the teachers sometimes were reluctant to return to the open-plan layout after experiencing the quieter classrooms.
COGlearn director Michael Roberts does not mince his words when asked his views on open-plan classrooms.
"It's just ludicrous. It's lunacy. And it's amazing that it ever became so prominent," he said.
"It's based on no research. It flies in the face of all that we know about attentional control and cognitive psychology and how we learn."
Mr Roberts and his wife, Toni Hatten-Roberts, worked with Catholic schools in Canberra Goulburn Archdiocese to help reconfigure schools to align with the science of learning.
He said if schools were predominately using teacher-led, explicit instruction - the method which is strongly backed by research - then classrooms should ideally have desks all facing one focal point in the room.
The teacher should be able to see all of the students' mouths to see if they were responding during the lesson.
There shouldn't be many dangling artworks or distracting displays near the focal point and square or rectangular desks were best in his view.
"There's this assumption, 'Let's have this really weird and wonderful design and all these odd-shaped desks and chairs'," he said.
"There's zero evidence that any of that has any positive impact and there's pretty good evidence that it has a negative impact, unfortunately. It's a lot of money down the drain.
"Most teachers that work in those big open-plan schools hate it and so do the kids because there's just too much going on."
Table groups could be distracting if students were facing their friends instead of the teacher. In rows, students could still talk to their partner or turn around to create groups of four.
Students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or other learning difficulties can be even more distracted in open-plan environments, Mr Roberts said. He does not believe so-called wobble chairs help these students.
"These ideas get trotted out ... across Australia and pretty much the Western world by people in education who don't know much about the essence of teaching and how the mind works and how our kids actually learn.
"They're looking for the latest fad. They're looking for the thing that's shiny and bright."
True flexibility
Grattan Institute's Jordana Hunter said there may be times when teachers wanted a larger space to bring classes together, but many schools did not have the option of creating enclosed classrooms.
"It's incredibly frustrating for a teacher to have done all of that work and then have their students highly distracted and their learning impacted on by open-plan classroom," Dr Hunter said.
"This is something that we just hear again and again from teachers."
She said governments should do an audit of school infrastructure and come up with architectural solutions to make classrooms truly flexible.
New public schools in the ACT are being designed with this flexibility in mind, Education Directorate senior executive David Matthews said.
The design specifications for schools got a major overhaul in 2016 with the aim of being future-proof. Margaret Hendry School in Gungahlin was the first school designed and built to these specifications.
The new schools built since then - Evelyn Scott School, Throsby School and Shirley Smith High School - have evolved based on feedback.
"The infrastructure at Margaret Hendry certainly was a departure from previous infrastructure we built and what it allowed is much more of that focus as well on the different types of learning, different pedagogical approaches," Mr Matthews said.
"So there is still the capacity in that environment to do direct instruction and there's still the capacity to do small group work and project-based work."
The new school designs - while all different - all have classrooms that are divided using sliding glass doors that can be opened or closed. Classrooms generally open onto into a central space that can be used for group work and projects.
Sound-absorbing features, such as carpet, ceiling tiles and pin boards, help to keep noise levels down.
"When we design these schools, we want to make sure that they are not following any educational fad, or not just built for a time in place, but that they can be reconfigured, repurposed and used appropriately by expert teachers to deliver high quality teaching and learning," Mr Matthews said.
But what about the other schools in Canberra that don't have the option to close a door between two or more classes? Mr Matthews said the directorate listened to feedback from principals and made adjustments to school campuses from time to time.
"I think it is important to say that teachers have been teaching and kids have been learning in those environments as in some cases for decades. So there is a lot of applied practice around how teachers are teaching in those environments," he said.
"Great teaching and learning ... can happen in a variety of environments, including more open environments."
At St Monica's, changing the layout of the environment has enhanced students' learning.
"We've had a huge influx of students from interstate and other local area schools and the first thing the parents say is, 'Oh my goodness, look how settled the children are'. And they've come from those big open-plan spaces ... on the curvy chairs and the beanbags and things like that. And [the parents] said to me, 'They just weren't learning'," Mrs Harris said.
"We saw the benefits of the explicit instruction, the direct instruction approach, high-impact teaching practices, and the setup of the classroom was really important for that."