classroom setup and orientation for yoga session

05. CLASSROOM SETUP AND ORIENTATION
The physical shape and layout of the room will determine the ideal way to orient yourself and your students. Along with the safety concerns discussed below, your primary consideration should be your ability to easily see students—and their ability to see you.
If you are in a rectangular room, positioning yourself in the middle of a long wall will maximize visibility. Orienting the other way will create too much of a front-back orientation to the room, with newer or less secure students tending to take a spot toward the back and farthest from an open visual line to your demonstrations.
While some teachers prefer to have more experienced or proficient students in front as models, this can create a problem because some experienced students tend to show off in their practice, often in ill-informed and potentially dangerous ways, which many beginning students will interpret as the model of what to do.

1. CLASSROOM SETUP AND ORIENTATION

2. 05. CLASSROOM SETUP AND ORIENTATION The physical shape and layout of the room will determine the ideal way to orient yourself and your students. Along with the safety concerns discussed below, your primary consideration should be your ability to easily see students—and their ability to see you. If you are in a rectangular room, positioning yourself in the middle of a long wall will maximize visibility. Orienting the other way will create too much of a front-back orientation to the room, with newer or less secure students tending to take a spot toward the back and farthest from an open visual line to your demonstrations. While some teachers prefer to have more experienced or proficient students in front as models, this can create a problem because some experienced students tend to show off in their practice, often in ill-informed and potentially dangerous ways, which many beginning students will interpret as the model of what to do.

3. Meanwhile, the newer or relatively less proficient students will have greater difficulty observing your demonstrations. This is also why it is preferable to have taller students further to the sides or back of the room. For a variety of reasons, many students like to be in a particular place in the room. Students with special needs, including newer students, those with certain injuries, pregnancy, physical limitations, or greater balance challenges, are best set up next to a wall where they can more easily access the wall as a prop and should be given priority for those spaces. This might involve asking a regular or random student to give up his or her preferred space to accommodate the student with special needs. A few simple words of explanation usually make this an easy shift. Positioning your own mat away from the room's main entrance enables students to see you more easily when entering, thus allowing you to see and greet them more easily. This orientation also usually results in less distraction when students enter or leave the room during practice.

4. Bear in mind that once the class starts you will be moving around the room observing, cueing, and interacting with students. Anticipate that with some asanas or asana sequences you might ask students to turn sideways on their mat, thus facing in a different direction. As we will explore in the next chapter, the "front" of the room—the place where you generally first demonstrate an asana—will shift accordingly, with all the same considerations shifting along with you. In crowded classes, it is helpful to alternately stagger mats, creating more lateral space for students when they extend their arms out and less entanglement with their immediate neighbors when turned to the side and folding forward with arms overhead. Staggering works well whether the entire class is oriented toward the front of the room or toward each other in two long, opposing rows. The latter orientation works best in classes in which there is a set sequence that students repeat in each practice on their own, thus minimizing the extent of class-wide demonstrations of asanas. Some teachers prefer perfect lines of mats, military style, which creates order and clear, uniform angles; this setup allows them to more easily perceive alignment. Others prefer a more community-oriented energetic vibe by arranging students in a circle or semicircle without losing their ability to easily observe alignment.