Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms pdfdrive com

The New York Times, she intentionally reserves empty spaces. When she taught a
lesson on the French artist Claude Monet, she wore a smock and a wide-
brimmed straw hat and talked to the children in the sort of European accent one
would expect to hear on such an occasion. After completing her speech, she
turned to a white-board and supplied it, The New York Times reported,
with key words that her twenty-seven young students remembered from
her talk. Then the children went to the room’s paint center, where they
went to work with cotton swabs.
Finally, it was time to adorn a blank wall. Mrs. Boydston filled it

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Finally, it was time to adorn a blank wall. Mrs. Boydston filled it
with artwork: the children’s Monets, not Claude’s. (Hoffman, 2014)
As teachers, we have a responsibility to have an answer ready as to why we do
counterintuitive things, such as keeping our classrooms simple. A colleague, a
parent, or a student might ask, why are your walls so (relatively) bare? But
instead of feeling attacked and embarrassed, we can calmly offer clear rationale.
Here are my reasons:
• I want the walls of my classroom to exude a sacred quality to the children.
When I say to my students, “I’m hoping that this work that you’re doing
will be displayed,” I want that to mean something special. I want them to
feel like it’s an honor to get something displayed in our classroom. If I’m
exhibiting a lack of discernment about what gets displayed, throwing
(almost) everything on the walls, such as hastily completed homework
assignments, the students get the opposite message. In my experience, they
care less about what gets shown.
• Time is our most precious commodity as teachers, and because the supply is
limited, I’ve chosen to restrict the amount of time I spend on something as
auxiliary as classroom displays. That doesn’t mean I don’t value it. It
simply means that I recognize that I have lots of competing responsibilities.
One way to limit the time I invest in affixing work to the walls is to involve
students. Even young children, in my experience, enjoy displaying their
own work in the classroom. There’s no reason, in my opinion, why a
teacher should be spending his or her time after school displaying the work
of students. Recruiting students to help in this way, during the school day,
saves us valuable time and promotes greater ownership of their learning.
• Displaying less stuff will, undoubtedly, put a greater emphasis on the few
items displayed on the wall. That’s a very good thing.
• Putting up less stuff will reduce the external stimuli in the classroom, and it
could, according to research, help the students to stay focused.
The decision to keep our classrooms uncluttered is something, in my
experience, that can ultimately save us time, facilitate higher-quality work, and
promote less distracted teaching and learning. And if you keep the learning
environment simple, I predict that when you stand in the middle of your
classroom and spin around, surveying its walls, you won’t feel overwhelmed or
shameful about the relative lack of stuff on display. You’ll feel, along with your
students, a sense of joy.

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