How often do you teach from the back of the classroom?

A little while ago, I put a fairly innocent post on LinkedIn asking one simple question: How often do you teach from the back of the classroom? There was no grand theory behind it. I wasn’t proposing a new teaching model, and I certainly wasn’t suggesting we all abandon the front of the classroom and permanently relocate to the back wall. It was simply something I had noticed through spending a lot of time in classrooms.

For some reason, the post took off. Almost 70,000 views and hundreds of comments later, it was clear that teachers had plenty to say about something as simple as where we stand when we teach. Some had been deliberately doing it for years, others had never really thought about it, and plenty had their own preferred position. The response made me think that perhaps there was a little more to this than my initial casual observation.

Maybe I hadn’t noticed because I’m a Drama teacher

For most of my teaching career, I have been a Drama teacher. When I started thinking about this more, I realised that might explain why I had never given much thought to the idea of a “front” of the classroom.

Drama teachers move around the space all the time. In many Drama rooms, there isn’t really a front. Students might be sitting in a circle in a black box, you might be working in a theatre or, as was the case at different points early in my career, simply finding an open space somewhere in the school because there wasn’t actually a Drama room.

Where you stand changes constantly depending on what is happening. Sometimes you’re watching from the side, sitting amongst the students, demonstrating something in the middle of the space or watching a performance from the back. You don’t really think about it because the space itself demands movement.

This year, however, I stepped out of the Drama classroom because I was needed in the Religious Education classroom. Suddenly I was teaching in a much more traditional space, with rows of tables, a whiteboard at the front and students with laptops in front of them when required. For perhaps the first time in my career, I started thinking more deliberately about where I was positioning myself during different parts of a lesson.

I’m seeing it in other classrooms too

At the same time, I’m spending a lot of time visiting classrooms and watching teachers teach. One thing I’m increasingly noticing is teachers using the whole classroom, rather than automatically returning to the traditional position at the front.

I’m seeing teachers deliver parts of lessons from the back of the room. I’m seeing teachers move to the side while students focus on information displayed on the whiteboard. I’m even seeing teachers sit in a spare chair amongst the students while another student presents at the front. In that moment, the teacher has almost deliberately joined the audience. The message is pretty clear: I’m not the focus right now. They are.

None of this is revolutionary. Teachers have moved around classrooms forever. But I started wondering whether there are some reasons we might be seeing more of it.

Maybe our classrooms have changed

One simple explanation might be the furniture. Many schools have introduced standing desks for teachers. They are often light, adjustable and much easier to move than the traditional teacher desk that seemed to weigh about the same as a small car. If your workspace can move with you, perhaps you naturally start using more of the room.

Technology has changed things too. Laptops are now part of everyday learning in most secondary classrooms, although exactly how much time students should spend on them is probably a blog for another day.

Teachers have always wanted visibility of what students are doing, but generative AI has added another layer. From the front of a classroom filled with laptops, you can see faces and the backs of laptop lids. Move to the back and suddenly you can see what is actually happening on those screens. That doesn’t mean standing behind students policing their laptops. It simply means that where we position ourselves changes the information available to us.

Then I caught myself doing it

Not long after noticing this in other teachers’ classrooms, I realised I was doing exactly the same thing with my Year 7 Religious Education class.

The students were completing an assessment where they were allowed to use their laptops. I wanted some visibility of what they were doing, so I picked up my laptop and moved to the back of the classroom. From there I could see the students and, importantly for that particular task, their screens.

They weren’t looking at the board and I wasn’t explicitly teaching at that point. My role had changed. I was monitoring their progress, answering questions and moving between students who needed assistance. The back of the room simply made more sense for what I was trying to do.

I also started becoming more conscious of where I positioned myself during other parts of the lesson. If I wanted students looking at me, I positioned myself accordingly. If I wanted them concentrating on something on the board, I could move away from it. Perhaps my years teaching Drama had made this instinctive. Being back in a traditional classroom simply made me notice it.

Apparently, there is a name for this

After the LinkedIn post generated so much discussion, I became curious about whether anyone had actually researched where teachers position themselves in classrooms. It turns out they have, and there is even a term for it: classroom proxemics.

Classroom proxemics looks at the way teachers and students use physical space and how this interacts with teaching and learning. Martinez-Maldonado and colleagues (2020), for example, tracked teachers’ positions during lessons and explored how this information could help teachers reflect on their practice. What I particularly liked was that the research didn’t attempt to identify one ideal place for a teacher to stand. Teacher positioning needs to be understood in relation to what is actually happening in the lesson.

In other words, there isn’t a magic X somewhere on the classroom floor where great teaching happens. Where we position ourselves should depend on what we are trying to achieve.

Sometimes the front is exactly where you should be

This isn’t an argument against teaching from the front. There are plenty of times when front and centre is exactly where I want to be. If I’m explicitly teaching a new concept, modelling a process, giving important instructions or checking for understanding, I want students looking at me. I want to scan the room, see faces and make it very clear where students’ attention should be.

There are also practical considerations. Some students may need to see the teacher clearly to support their hearing, including students who rely on lip reading. Others may need to be able to see a demonstration or the board without obstruction. Where we stand needs to take account of the students in front of us, not just our own preference.

The question isn’t whether we should stop teaching from the front. It is whether the front needs to be our default position for every part of every lesson.

Who do you actually want students looking at?

This is probably the aspect of teacher positioning that I have started thinking about most. If a student is presenting at the front of the classroom, where should I be? Standing at the front beside them probably isn’t helping. Sitting amongst the other students immediately changes who has the room’s attention.

The same applies to information on the board. We might display a worked example, diagram or piece of text and then stand directly beside it while explaining it. Because we are the teacher, students will naturally continue looking at us. Sometimes that is exactly what we want. At other times, we actually want their attention on what we have displayed.

Moving somewhere else can subtly change the message from look at me to look at this.

Different positions show you different things

The comparison I made in my original LinkedIn post was with a sports coach. A coach doesn’t watch everything from exactly the same position. They might be on the boundary during the game, while another member of the coaching team watches from an elevated coaches’ box because that perspective allows them to see patterns that are much harder to identify from ground level.

The game hasn’t changed. Their view of it has.

I wonder whether classrooms are much the same. From the front, I can see students’ faces particularly well. From the back, I can see their screens when that matters. Moving around during independent practice allows me to see work that students might never put their hand up to show me. Sitting beside a student can create a very different conversation from one conducted across the classroom.

Different positions give us different information, and that information can influence what we do next.

Movement can have a purpose

Research also suggests that teacher movement and proximity can create different opportunities for interaction with students. This doesn’t mean teachers should spend 50 minutes continuously doing laps of the classroom. There is nothing particularly educational about getting your steps up before lunchtime.

The more useful idea is that movement can be purposeful. Moving around during independent practice might help you notice a misconception early. Moving closer to a group allows you to listen without necessarily interrupting. Simply standing near a student can sometimes redirect them without stopping the lesson, while moving away can give students the independence to work something out themselves.

Where we stand changes what we can see, but it can also change what students do.

So, where should you stand?

After thinking about this far more than I expected when I wrote that original LinkedIn post, I still don’t think there is a correct answer. Sometimes front and centre is exactly where we need to be. At other times, we might be better positioned beside a student, sitting amongst the class, circulating around the room, standing off to the side or even teaching from the back.

Perhaps the better question isn’t where should teachers stand? It is why am I standing here?

There probably isn’t a best place to stand in a classroom, but there might be a best place to stand for what you’re trying to achieve at that particular moment.

For most of my career as a Drama teacher, I probably did this without ever thinking about it. It took stepping into a more traditional classroom, watching other teachers and then seeing the response to one fairly innocent LinkedIn post for me to actually stop and notice it.

So, next time you’re teaching, take a moment to notice where you’re standing and why.

You might be surprised by what you see when you move somewhere else.

Martinez-Maldonado, R., Schulte, J., Echeverria, V., Gopalan, Y., & Shum, S. B. (2020). Where is the teacher? Digital analytics for classroom proxemics. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 36(5), 741–762. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12444