Arrange Seating and Formation Views for the Class in Front of You

A seating plan is useful only when it matches the class in front of you. Sometimes you need pairs for discussion, several teams for a project, or a clear view of where learners should sit. ClassSpark keeps this work inside the live student-card board, so the teacher can arrange the class without moving to a separate planning document.

Start from the live roster

Open Teams from the ClassSpark controls. The normal board is the source: it already reflects the selected class, its current roster, and the student-card display chosen for that class. Creating a formation does not create a second roster or rewrite student records. It saves an arrangement made from the students and guests available in the session.

See the ClassSpark live-class workspace.

Create a formation with meaningful teams

Choose New or Edit, give the arrangement a useful name, and select a team count from two through ten. Each team has a name and a teacher-owned colour that can be changed directly in its board header. The editor also supports explicit empty positions. Dragging is limited to this editing view, where student cards and open slots can be placed deliberately.

The editor uses team columns rather than pretending every arrangement will fit one screen. A long class scrolls vertically, while many teams can scroll horizontally. Student monsters, photos, names, and point chips keep the readable size calculated for the normal roster instead of being squeezed into tiny cards. The toolbar remains outside the scrolling area, so the teacher can still save or close the arrangement.

1. Open Teams and choose a saved arrangement or start a new one.
2. Set the arrangement name and choose between two and ten teams.
3. Edit each team name and colour in the board header.
4. Move students and leave empty positions where the physical room needs them.
5. Save, then choose the view that matches the activity.

Explore connected classroom-management routines.

Choose View, Play, Edit, or Delete deliberately

Selecting a saved formation opens it in View mode. View and Play with teams preserve the normal roster card dimensions, then reorder the saved slots so same-colour teammates stay near one another along a serpentine path across row boundaries. Edit returns to the team-column grid. Delete is a separate action and asks for confirmation, reducing the risk of removing a reusable plan by accident.

If a saved-formation request fails, ClassSpark shows an error with a retry action rather than claiming that no arrangements exist. This distinction matters during a lesson: an empty list and a failed load are not the same instruction to the teacher.

Return to Default when the activity changes

Default removes the active formation view and restores the roster's selected sort order. Closing the Teams panel with its X also clears an unsaved edit before returning to the normal board. Formation Edit temporarily hides active timer, dice, coin, noise, or picker cards; leaving Edit restores those active classroom tools instead of silently closing them.

Guests can participate in formations for their exact ClassSpark session, but they do not become academic students or gain gradebook, attendance, parent, or Student Affairs records. The arrangement is a teacher-facing classroom view, not a claim about complete Admin or Team Leader analytics.

Used well, a saved formation makes transitions faster while keeping the teacher in control. Prepare a pair layout, a project-team layout, or a room-specific plan, then switch views as the lesson changes. The class data stays in its proper records; the formation simply presents the live roster in a more useful spatial order.

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