Standing up to the task

Abby Brown has been a teacher at Marine Elementary School in Marine on St. Croix for 20 years, so she's seen her share of fidgeting, and snoozing, and "when will it be recess?" eye-rolling. It's hard for a kid to be still, yet for -- what, centuries? -- we've made sitting still a prerequisite for getting an education.

Then a few years ago, Brown learned that the Mayo Clinic was exploring a "chairless school" to encourage movement and fight obesity. While not ready to go quite that far, Brown began thinking of ways to change her classroom and use kids' natural inclination to move to their advantage.

With the aid of imagination, experience, foundation grants and a small office furniture company in Centuria, Wis., Brown came up with what she calls a stand-up workstation, but what officially is called the AlphaBetter standing desk.

Now her students can stand or perch on a stool throughout the day. A swinging footrest fulfills the impulse to fidget, which seems to improve their ability to focus.

"Seems" is the operative word right now, but Brown and others are seeking certainty for a range of outcomes that might flow from simply having students stand up while learning.

Brown has a grant from the Education Minnesota Foundation to study the relationship between movement and academic achievement. Beth Lewis of the University of Minnesota's School of Kinesiology is tracking students' movement to determine how many more calories are burned by those at stand-up desks than at traditional desks. She hopes to have results by the end of this school year. "It's really a new area of research," she said.

Future studies may track how the desks help students with attention deficit disorder, or ease the age-old issue of maintaining discipline.

Sixth-grader Raissa Rottach already has noticed one change: "It's made my handwriting better," she said. She likes feeling as if she has more room "and you don't have to sit all stuffy."