001: How to create an Effective Classroom Learning Environment

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Aug 1

Written By Sarah Gilmore

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How our classrooms look is one of those aspects of teaching that a lot of teachers spend huge amounts of time, energy and money on, in an attempt to make their classrooms inviting spaces for kids to learn in. But is it actually time (and money) well spent? And if it is worth it...how do we do it well?

In this episode we take a deep dive into first the science behind displays, and then the more general learning environment and their impact on student learning.

We began by looking into displays, and came to realize that there are lots of different ways of thinking about displays. Firstly, we create displays for different purposes, and we do that for several different reasons.

Sometimes the purpose is just to create a warm, inviting, child-friendly environment, or ignite interest about a topic, like if you’ve ever decorated your classroom like a jungle for a unit on habitats, or put up snowflakes on the windows because it’s winter. Sometimes it might be to create a reference for children to use during classes, as with word walls, maths reference posters, or topic vocabulary.

We can break down our reasons for creating these displays in three ways.

Sometimes we make displays because we want to. For example, because we think it will look cool, and get our students excited about a topic, or because we have done our research and we know that a display like the one we are making will help our students in some way.
Sometimes we create displays because we have to, because we have been told to.Whether that means displaying topic vocabulary in more than one language, displaying programme-specific language, such as the Learner Profile Attributes for the IB, or school-specific display policies such as for behaviour.
Sometimes we create displays because we think we should. Somewhere along the way we pick up the idea that we ought to have certain information on display in our rooms, but we might struggle to say where we first heard that, or provide any hard evidence in support of those displays.

So what? For one thing, creating is an aspect of the job that many teachers get genuine pleasure out of - it can be fun, and it makes our working environment more attractive. And if we aren’t doing it because we personally enjoy it, it’s because we have been told to do it, or we think our students need it. So... what’s the problem?

Well, firstly, time in teaching is precious: we only have so much of it to give, and it’s important that we spend that time on the things that are going to benefit our students the most.

And, believe it or not, there is a lot of research out there to suggest that how and why we do displays, and how we design our classrooms really does matter when it comes to student attention, and supporting student learning.

The Research

When we are designing our classrooms, whether that’s the display boards, the furniture arrangement, or something else, most teachers are striving to create a positive, stimulating and personalized environment with the hope that students will be motivated to inquire and learn. But, if learning is our main goal, we need to think about student attention and the impact our classroom environment has on that. Student attention is vital for learning: the more time spent engaged in focusing on a task, the better the learning outcomes.

We all know that a child’s ability to attend and focus for an extended period of time develops as they grow, yet the way most school learning environments look, you would be forgiven for thinking it is the opposite! In early learning and primary/elementary schools, the design and atmosphere is often very busy, but as we move up into middle and high school rooms tend to become more “serious” and less colorful. In reality, our students would benefit more if it were the other way around.

An interesting piece of research called “Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning in Young Children: When Too Much of a Good Thing May Be Bad”, (Fischer, Godwin & Seltman 2014) illustrates this issue very clearly. In their study into the impact of displays and visual environment, a class of 24 kindergarteners were split into two groups, each of whom received 6 introductory science lessons. One group had their lessons in a very bare classroom, while the other group had theirs in a very highly decorated classroom. The students were observed during the lessons to watch for off-task behavior and “environmental distraction”, and they were tested after the lessons to see how much they had learned.

The results showed that the students in the sparsely decorated classroom were off-task much less, were significantly less distracted by the environment, and did better on the tests than the students who learned in the highly decorated classrooms. However, there were some caveats:

In the bare classroom, the students were less distracted by the walls, but they were more distracted by each other (although this still accounted for less total distraction than in the very decorated rooms)
Neither set of students did especially well in the tests - there was a 33% gain for the students in the bare room, and 18% for the students in the busy room, so it may be worth considering the quality of the teaching, or the lessons
More research by these same researchers has shown that students get used to highly decorated rooms quite quickly, with environmental distraction reducing by the 2nd week and although this research did not go longer than 3 weeks it is possible that distraction would go away entirely.

Nevertheless, the findings were fairly definitive in showing that highly decorated classrooms are distracting for young students, and that higher environmental distraction has a negative impact on learning.

If that’s the case, then we need to be discerning in what we choose to include in our classroom displays, and how we design those displays to capture student attention effectively, when we really need to.

A study out of UC Berkeley titled “A Toolkit for Managing User Attention in Peripheral Displays” (Matthews, Dey, Mankoff, Carter and Rattenbury 2004) discussed that at any given moment, humans are monitoring a variety of information within the environment, some of which is through peripheral displays. Peripheral displays are defined as allowing a person to be aware of information while they are attending to some other primary task or activity. In this study, the type of peripheral display in question was the digital type, and it wasn’t look specifically at classroom applications - more like digital bus stop displays or news tickers - but its findings are relevant for our discussion, since we use a lot of peripheral displays within a classroom, arguably especially at the primary/elementary level.

The study which discussed three characteristics of peripheral displays that can be manipulated by designers (in this case us as teachers) to control the attention required of users or student:

Abstraction
Notification levels
Transitions

Transitions are more relevant to digital displays, and so we don’t consider them relevant to this topic, but abstraction and notification levels very much are.

Abstraction is the process of accurately reducing information so that it is easier to read “at a glance” than the raw input. Abstraction enables lower-attention consumption of information. So, displaying only the main points/facts will help students monitor the information without giving the display their full attention. This is helpful within the classroom because displays are a point of reference for students when needed. If the display is overbearing it will most likely not get used or draw more student attention than is intended. Abstract (pictorial) displays are a better aid to recall, compared to literal (textual) displays.

Notification level refer to differences in information importance. Higher notification levels correspond to more critical data and are displayed in a way that grabs the user’s attention. Lower notification levels correspond to non-critical data and are typically displayed in a way that does not attract attention, but allows a user to monitor a display occasionally or peripherally. Within the classroom, if we have information on display that is important for the student to know (change in schedule, important visitor, intended learning for a lesson) then we need to grab the students attention to notify the students that “this is important” or you run the risk of it just blending into periphery.

The Conclusion

So, how do we do that? How can we create displays in a way that grabs that attention for important things, but in a classroom environment that doesn’t overwhelm and distract students from their learning?

Barret, Davies, Zhang and Barrett from Salford University in the UK published “The impact of classroom design on pupils' learning: final results of a holistic, multi-level analysis” in 2015, along with a much more accessible summary report called “Clever Classrooms” - you can access it in its entirety by clicking the image on the right. This was a study that took place over 3 years, of 153 classrooms in 27 very diverse schools, collecting performance statistics for the pupils studying in those spaces. What they found was really interesting:

Firstly, they confirm that learning environments matter a lot to student outcomes, with the ability to “boost learning progress in primary school pupils by up to 16 % in a single year”
Secondly, that school design matters much less than they expected. What really makes the difference are the individual classrooms within that school. This is good news for teachers because it means that even if you think the school building is horrible in some way, you have the control to create an effective learning environment within your own room, for little to no money.
Finally, they identified three design principles, that they call the “SIN Design Principles” that have the greatest impact on student learning:
- Stimulation, which refers to an appropriate amount of complexity and colour in the space accounts for about a ¼ of the effect on learning
- Individualization, which refers to student ownership and flexibility in the space, which is again about a ¼
- And the biggest one, Naturalness, referring mainly to light, air quality and temperature, which accounts for the remaining ½ of impact on learning

What to do in your classroom

The Clever Classrooms summary report presents design recommendations for both school designers and classroom teachers and offers really sensible, actionable recommendations for how to find that sweet-spot middle ground in creating a classroom that is neither too bare, nor too busy for students to learn in well.

The SIN Design Principles in Action - Naturalness

Naturalness accounts for 50% of the effect of the environment on learning, and Clever Classrooms identifies five key aspects:

Light: We need light to learn

Keep windows clear of displays (especially those pointing outside), and furniture
Use natural light over artificial light whenever possible
Use a high powered projector if possible, and situate it carefully so that it works as well as possible without needing to close the blinds.

If your room is too bright and the sunshine causes uncomfortable glare:

Use blinds to reduce glare when necessary, but it would be preferable to have exterior shading that still allows natural light to come in.
If possible (i.e. you are on the ground floor and planting is a possibility) ask for plants and shrubs to be planted outside south facing windows

Air Quality: Fresh air is good

Open the window once per lesson for fresh air to release the many unwanted or distracting smells 20-30 children will produce.
Keep windows clear of obstructions to make opening them easy
Install a CO2 meter to make air quality visible to you and students. CO2 is widely recognized as an indicator of ventilation rates, and raised CO2 levels in the International Space Station resulted in lowered cognitive function for astronauts! Ok, that’s a sealed metal tube in a vacuum…. but still, open the window.

Temperature: Go for Goldilocks

If you have control of a thermostat for your room, aim for “cool but comfortable”
If the sun makes your room too hot, use your blinds and open the window

Sound: Kids need to be able to hear you easily, and not be distracted by unwanted noise

If your room is echoey, soft furnishings, such as a rug, can help with this.
Consider draping fabric on the ceiling if your room is really hard sounding
Rubber feet on moveable furniture, like chairs, reduces unwanted internal noise
If you have a room that is rectangular, and you are teaching students who are sitting at their desks, consider laying it out so that the “front” is the long side of the rectangle, so as many students are as close to you as possible.

Individualization

Individualization relies on two main factors and one secondary factor.

Flexibility: Provide a variety of learning spaces

Break-out spaces are important for students.
Think about creating well-defined learning zones:
- These are most important for younger students, so the younger the student, the more zones you should plan for.
- Think here about things like a reading corner, carpet area for direct teaching, individual desk spaces, group desk spaces etc
- Older students need fewer zones, but that’s still not just one zone.
If you have the choice, lower height furniture is helpful for opening up more space for different wall displays to define those various zones .

Ownership: Help students feel the learning space is theirs.

You can help to create that sense of ownership by making your classroom unique and distinctive from other classrooms, through

Pupil-created displays of work
Personalization, through named lockers, drawers etc

A secondary, or less important factor, is Connection.

Try your best to keep corridors clear for easy circulation between classes and other areas of the school.
Try to also create displays outside the classrooms, to break that boundary of classroom and beyond.
Some schools they studied used their corridors as library spaces, which is a nice idea of a way to connect learning and students beyond the classroom.

Stimulation

An appropriate level of stimulation is achieved by thinking about two main factors.

Complexity: Lively but not chaotic

As scary as it sounds, you need to be aiming to keep 20-50% of your walls clear of displays
Keep windows clear as much as possible.
- Try to avoid the temptation to stick paper snowflakes and blossoms, or dried autumn leaves to the windows, especially when they point outside. This just reduces light and creates unhelpful and unnecessary distraction.
Some classrooms have complexity inherent in their designs, for example if they have an interesting floor-plan. These classrooms need and should have less complexity in the displays. A standard, box-shaped classroom will benefit from more display complexity, but still keeping at least 20% of wall space clear

Color: Goldilocks Part 2

With color, we are aiming for a mid-level of stimulation: not too bright, but also not too bare.
Some things can’t be changed, such as the wall color, so start there. If your room is already very brightly colored, go easy on introducing more color elsewhere, like in your displays or soft furnishings. If your classroom is plain white, you can use more color in your displays to raise the stimulation level.
The aim is to increase stimulation against a muted background, or calm the feel if it is already rather bright.” Clever Classrooms p.37

Think about where you teach

While classroom displays and environment is important, the area of the classroom that you teach from (whether that be direct instruction space, reading table area or other small group instruction space) is also something to think about.

A study out of Durham University titled “Classroom Displays—Attraction or Distraction? Evidence of Impact on Attention and Learning From Children With and Without Autism” (Hanley, Khairat, Taylor, Wilson, Cole-Fletcher and Riby, 2017) used eye-tracking techniques and video based lessons to explore precisely how classroom displays influenced children’s attention and subsequent learning performance.

It was determined that all children spend more time looking at the background displays and not the teacher when there is a high quantity of displays in the background. The study then went on to say that high quantity of visual displays had a much greater effect for children with autism spectrum disorder.

So, clearing the area behind you when you are teaching from a stationary location in the classroom is an effective way to prioritise student attention. If you’re following the Clever Classroom recommendation about “zoning”, you can take this on board by thinking about where in your room you plan to have your direct instruction zone/s and make sure that area is free from distracting displays.

We can be sure that the way we design our classrooms does have an impact on how effective they are as learning environments for our students. We think it’s heartening to hear that

a) less is more, and

b) what you do in your classroom is more important than what your school is like!

Click to open and download this resource as a PDF file

Thank you for reading and listening, and we hope you have enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to download our printable resource from this episode to use during school discussions.

We would also love to hear from you about learning environments in your school. How does your classroom measure up to the recommendations in the research we have featured in this episode? Are you thinking of making any changes, or need some ideas from other teachers?

Reach out to us in the comments, or on our social media to get tips, advice and support from your colleagues around the world.

Sarah & Katierose