Most of my classes do not have formal seating charts, the students sit in the same places every day but they are self-assigned seats. I always start out this way and tell the kids they can continue with this method as long as they get their work done and "don't give me a headache every day" (yes, I actually say that to them, it's middle school, it works). This year my fifth and seventh hours couldn't handle this approach and pushed the number of student-induced headaches past the acceptable limit, thus earning themselves a seating chart (again, yes--I actually tell them they earned a seating chart, it is the result of their behavior, not mine). When the marking period break rolled around a few weeks ago they began begging to be allowed to choose their seats again. My answer was, "I love you but I know you and I am not that stupid." I did promise to give them new seats though. As I sat agonizing over the puzzle that this process is it occured to me how very unfair the situation was: I was essentially being punished multiple times for their bad behavior. First I had to put up with it, then I had to deal with it and finally I had to spend way too much time trying to find the magical arrangement of seats that would enhance the level of peace and productivity in my classroom. It was about the third time my head thunked against the desk in frustration that brilliance was knocked loose from the deep recesses of my devious middle school teacher brain.
Random team generators! They are all over the internet, free, and easy to use. Type in the names, tell it how many groups to make, push a button and voila!: groups (my classroom has a table groups set-up). I have been successfully using this method to pick partners and groups for activities for awhile and it works. The kids accept it as a fair and unbiased method and when they do start to whine I just tell them, "Don't blame me, blame the computer, it picked the groups, not me." The vast majority of the time they stop whining and go back to work. With nothing else working for me, I figured it was worth a shot and tried it. Less than five headache-free minutes later I had new seating charts for both classes.
The next day the kids came in and I told them they were getting new seats. They immediately started begging to sit by one person and not by another, complaining and generally being middle school students. I stopped them, told them how I'd assigned the seats and gave them my take it up with the computer line. There were a few remaining grumbles but mostly the comments were along the lines of "I guess that's fair then". I did tell them they could choose any chair at the table I assigned and warned that if I had to move their seat again I'd also be contacting their parents. It's been a few weeks and peace still generally reigns throughout the room. Whenever someone starts to complain I just remind them again, "Hey, I didn't pick these seats, the computer did" and send them back to their seat. Of course I never told them how many times I pushed the "generate" button to get new groups... ;)