The children in Ms. Brown’s class, and in some others at Marine Elementary School and additional schools nearby, are using a type of adjustable-height school desk, allowing pupils to stand while they work, that Ms. Brown designed with the help of a local ergonomic furniture company two years ago. The stand-up desk’s popularity with children and teachers spread by word of mouth from this small town to schools in Wisconsin, across the St. Croix River. Now orders for the desks are being filled for districts from North Carolina to California.

The kids, of course, love it, and seem to be more productive, the measure of which is being taking by a University of Minnesota study of the project. And not only the students benefit: teachers stopping to help a student no longer have to lean way over to get down to the level of a low desk.

Teachers in Minnesota and Wisconsin say they know from experience that the desks help give children the flexibility they need to expend energy and, at the same time, focus better on their work rather than focusing on how to keep still.

Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.

“We can’t say for sure that this has an impact on those two things, but we’re hypothesizing that they may,” said Beth A. Lewis of the School of Kinesiology, or movement science, at the University of Minnesota. “I think we’re so used to the traditional classroom it’s taken a while for people to start thinking outside the box. I think it’s just a matter of breaking the mold.”

What’s so beautiful about this is that it’s a very simple idea that should have been obvious many years ago, but it took one person working in the education trenches to figure it out and make it happen. So how many other “simple” and “obvious” ideas are still out there, right under our noses, waiting to be “discovered”? That’s what’s most exciting, the sheer possibility that work like this opens up. Great job, Ms. Brown!