Curriculum, learning and teaching Using classroom walls to create a thinking- rich environment Eoin Lenihan explains why our surroundings are so important PHOTO A 40 making it an interior decorating project, the results of which will be aesthetically pleasing but owned by the teacher and not by the students. It is common to see colourful decorations labelling student profiles, neat arrangements of grammar charts and mathematical rule posters that come free from company booksellers. It looks good to visiting parents; a principal or colleagues will see order, neatness and ‘things’ happening, and assume that this must be a good teacher. However, check back at Halloween or Easter and you are likely to find the exact same wall displays. According to the walls, students are still learning the same grammar and their student profile has not changed – as though they themselves have had no personal and social growth in the intervening months. In such instances, classrooms are aesthetic things only: they do not change and they do not support deeper learning and social growth. In Photo B, though there are no colourful displays and only minimal thought has been given to the whole aesthetic experience, the work is unmistakably that of the students and for that reason above any other, students liked this room more. Ideally, teachers should aim to have the walls of their Summer | Winter Take a look at Photo A and Photo B. Which Elementary classroom do you think is preferred by its students? You may be surprised to hear that the students of classroom B were happier with their room. I recently conducted a survey of student attitudes towards their school community in six schools in Ulm, Germany. I surveyed more than 600 students. One of the questions on the survey was simply “Do you like your classroom?” Students answered on a scale of 1 (Not at all), 2 (It is nothing special), 3 (It is quite nice) and 4 (I like it very much). The students of classroom A gave their classroom an average rating of 3.0 while the students of classroom B gave it an average rating of 3.2. Both sets of students felt that their room was ‘quite nice’ but, as you no doubt noticed, these two rooms are aesthetically quite different. The difference that emerges when these classrooms are considered, together with all the other classrooms studied, is that there tends to be two types of wall display in schools: the teacher-arranged room and the student-arranged room. In the former, the teacher will often invest a great deal of energy in ‘presenting’ the room at the start of the school year, | 2016