Keep it simple, teacher

As the school year opens, some teachers are spending hours making their classrooms colorful, creative, confusing and distracting," writes Daniel Buck. "Pinterest" classrooms "look like 30-gallon bags full of confetti, crepe paper, and Elmer’s glue exploded in the center." The bulletin boards, posters, arts and crafts projects and decorations are overwhelming.

Children were more distracted and learned less when “walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed,” according to one study. "Another study found students less able to complete cognitively demanding tasks in 'high load visual environments',” Buck writes.

Seating affects students' distraction levels too, he writes. Sifting from tables to rows doubles on-task behavior and decreases disruptions, one study found. A recent review of eight studies seating students in rows improves behavior "with disruptive students benefiting the most.”

"Student attention should be directed towards the front where instruction occurs — not to their friends or a collage of posters and crepe paper," Buck writes.

Underneath the pull toward an over-decorated classroom is a prioritizing of engagement, activity, or even fun, not learning. This same tendency then manifests in classroom activities that prioritize glitter, glue, and razzmatazz over academic work.

Buck suggests hanging "a framed painting from history, an author’s portrait, or the Declaration of Independence. Showcase the best student work on a bulletin board. Create word walls or useful anchor charts." But don't go full Liberace in the classroom.

Don't waste time making colorful posters to hang on the walls, writes Jennifer Haber in her advice for new teachers on The Real Classroom.

When she switched from teaching fifth grade to middle school, she moved the desks into rows so students wouldn't face other. "Students focused better," she writes. "They listened better and spent less time watching each other and more time paying attention to what we were doing."

Keep classrooms simple -- but not easy -- writes Blake Harvard, the Effortful Educator. Some of that comes from predictable rules and expectations and consistent routines, but he also believes the classroom must be "organized and tidy." What's posted on the wall or the board should serve an instructional purpose. Otherwise, it's just visual clutter.

"The classroom’s predictability, consistency, organization and tidiness, allows both the teacher and students to simply focus on what is important for learning; the presentation, the content, the questioning, the discussion, et cetera, Harvard writes.