How to be a minimalist teacher

The new school year arrives with a flurry of activity: resources to prepare, PowerPoints to write, new classroom displays to create. By the time students arrive we are slumped in the corner, already exhausted.

Do we pause long enough to question the efficiency of all this activity? Do we consider what impact doing less might have on young people’s learning?

Minimalism involves the deliberate and frequent rejection of all that is unnecessary: an essential practice in seeking to find ways to thrive in the impossibly busy life of a teacher. Using some of the principles of minimalism has certainly helped my work in school have more impact, and enabled a calmer and more reflective professional life.

The minimalist classroom

The classroom is a teacher’s arena; it projects powerful subliminal messages to the young people in it. Its make-up will, in part, influence their responses to our teaching and their motivation in our subjects.

One of the issues in the modern classroom is the ubiquity of stuff that dominates every spare inch. Resources, workbooks, equipment and increasingly elaborate visual displays all vie for limited space. Inevitably, this results in an environment that is distracting, loud, and that can easily become disorganised. Not the best mix when trying to inspire the calm and focus of 30 boisterous adolescents.

There is also the impact of all this additional stuff on our own emotions in the classroom: is it feeding any anxious thoughts we might have about our jobs? Would a more streamlined approach help us to feel less stressed, and aid our clarity of thought in the environment in which we spend an inordinate amount of our time?

We may believe that our classrooms are organised and project clarity, but are we secretly teacher magpies? Take 15 minutes to look at your room from a renewed perspective and think: what image am I projecting? How much of the environment is helpful to enable young people to learn and concentrate?

We all know the wonderful lightness of spirit we experience after doing a spring clean. This image of renewal and serenity should be kept in mind to encourage a minimalist review of your classroom. Be ruthless: what isn’t having a transferable impact on students’ ability to learn?

The best place to start is to tackle the clutter: what is lurking in corners of the room that can be removed? When was the last time it was used? What are the pieces of paper that can be scanned and saved to that wonderful de-cluttering enabler: the trusty memory stick? Once you have adopted this purging mindset, apply it to the equipment and to the dusty posters: are they enabling learning, or a distraction?

Some of us don’t have the pleasure of ownership of our own rooms. Here, it is about travelling light with the bare essentials and seeking to encourage colleagues to see the value of adopting the minimalist attitude. Once we model the way and highlight the impact on our students, our colleagues will embrace the less-is-more approach.

The minimalist planner

Once we’ve adopted a streamlined mindset to our environment, ruthlessness filters through into all aspects of our teaching. Minimalist planning is not about laziness: it is about efficiency. It seeks to refine the content of lessons to cut out waffle, gimmicks and activities that are not directly correlated to its focus. Time should instead be invested in planning for efficient direct instruction, challenging questions, and deliberate practice for students.

The minimalist planner rejects elaborate PowerPoints and the addictive call of the time-thieving photocopier. Instead, they will look at ways to harness memory tools to plan for retaining skills over the long-term: focusing more on the big picture and working backwards.

There will be fewer activities, but real clarity about learning that is covered in depth. As Peps Mccrae highlights in the excellent Lean Lesson Planning, “what is the least that needs to happen for my students to make progress towards their next learning milestone?”

The minimalist marker

A revolution is starting in the marking wars; an understanding that, in reality, less is more when it comes to written feedback. Rather than repetitive comments, minimalist marking involves reflecting on impact and action – only what will move learning forward. Reducing our time puts the onus on where it should be: what students use the marking for.

The minimalist marker also adopts one of the principles of Shaun Allison and Andy Tharby’s Making Every Lesson Count, using time to write, share and deconstruct model answers with students. The result is an improved understanding of what excellence looks like in our subjects.

Sustain the habit

We may glow with joy as we look around our sparse and organised classrooms, reflect on our capacity to manage our time more efficiently and generate real learning progress with young people. But sustaining this new minimalist habit is challenging. I have found that a 10-minute daily investment in de-cluttering maintains the clarity of a classroom. In the face of management workbook reviews and learning walks, let the quality of the work in students’ workbooks and the calm focus that radiates from your classroom answer any scepticism.

In the face of stress and exhaustion, this year should be one in which we do not think about how much we are doing, but about how efficiently we are doing it. Embracing a minimalist attitude might well be the best place to start.

Jamie Thom is an English teacher. He blogs at www.teachergratitude.co.uk and tweets @teachgratitude1. His book Slow Teaching will be out in early 2018.

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