Introduction

Not so very long ago, establishing an “instructional environment” meant ensuring a comfortable classroom temperature or arranging desks so that natural light traveled over the students’ left shoulders and perhaps even placing a green plant or a poetry anthology on each teacher’s desk. Things have changed. As Tway (1991) indicated in her chapter in the Handbook on Research in Teaching the English Language Arts (Flood, Jensen, Lapp, & Squire), the classroom environment is an instructional tool, and “…can be set up in such a way that it issues… invitation[s] to learning” (p. 427). Although the physical environment of the classrooms has lost none of its importance, teachers and researchers have broadened their notions of instructional environments and now consider the social, psychological, technical, spatial, aesthetic, management (and still other) aspects of teaching and learning both inside and outside of traditional schooling.