Gerald Ajam

“Flexible furniture creates flexible learning”

Movable tables make regrouping cheaper. A routine is what makes it happen.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All the claims I’m unconvinced byImplementation

Usually said

“Flexible furniture creates flexible learning”

The shift

From: The room changes the teaching

To: The room lowers a cost. A routine spends it.

More precisely

Movable furniture lowers the cost of changing activity, and learning changes when that affordance is paired with a routine that uses it.

In short

Furniture that moves makes group work cheaper to set up, and cheaper things happen more often. That part is true. The rest depends on whether anyone has a reason and a routine to move it. Without one, the new room behaves like the old one.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. The strongest formulation

    Fixed rows make some forms of learning expensive. Furniture that moves lowers the cost of group work, discussion and changing activity, so more of it happens.

  2. Why it is attractive

    Furniture is visible, purchasable and finished on a date. It lets an organisation show change in a way a new routine cannot.

  3. Where it holds

    It holds where teachers already want to regroup and the old room was the obstacle. There, lowering the cost of moving does change what happens.

    Where it breaks

    It breaks when the routine is missing. A room of movable tables that is never reconfigured is a conventional room with a higher price tag, and participation rules shape who talks far more than chairs do.

  4. What evidence matters

    Barrett et al. (2015), the Clever Classrooms study, associate basic environmental factors such as light, air quality and temperature with pupil progress. Evidence that any fashionable configuration outperforms a well-run conventional room is much thinner, and novelty and volunteer enthusiasm confound most refurbishment studies. What matters is observed change in activity, sustained after the first term.

  5. So, more precisely

    Movable furniture lowers the cost of changing activity, and learning changes when that affordance is paired with a routine that uses it.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

Movable furniture lowers the cost of changing activity1, and learning changes when that affordance2 is paired with a routine that uses it3.

  1. Lowers the cost of changing activity

    Makes it quicker and less disruptive to go from whole-class teaching to groups and back. The furniture removes an obstacle. It does not supply a reason.

  2. Affordance

    What an environment makes easy or obvious to do. A table on wheels affords regrouping. Nobody has to take it up.

  3. A routine that uses it

    An agreed, practised way of rearranging the room for a purpose, taught to the learners, so it takes seconds and happens as a matter of course.

What it changes in practice

  • Plan the routines, and the teaching they serve, before choosing the furniture.
  • Fix the basics first: light, air, temperature and sightlines.
  • Judge a refurbishment by observed change in activity a term or more later. The opening photographs only show furniture.

A case, in general terms

A school refits two classrooms with movable tables. In the first, the teacher already runs group tasks and now spends two minutes less on each changeover. In the second, the tables stay in rows all year because nothing about the lessons changed. Same furniture, same cost. Only one room got the benefit, and the difference was the routine.

Singapore