ABSTRACT
Classroom displays Displays in classrooms can be used as a teaching tool for students in which key questions are asked and students are asked to interact with them. This might be ideas such as a progress wall (students move their name up a ladder identifying their progress in skills or knowledge) or placing Post-it notes on a display in answer to key questions. Again, photographs of student answers can be taken on a regular basis and added to the class display to indicate overall class progress. When using displays in a more traditional manner to show students’ work, Ron Berger in An Ethic of Excellence (2003) suggests that the type of student work that is displayed should only be the best that a student can create. There is more you can read in his book about how presentations of students’ work can be delivered to an audience at the end of a year or a term which summarises their journey of drafting, redrafting to creating pieces of excellent work that demonstrate their level of understanding and competency. Putting posters up around a classroom or key phrases that students must engage with during a lesson can be a popular interactive method too. For example, an A3 poster with the word ‘Nouns’ on the top of it, or ‘Verbs’. These are displayed around a room and students with Post-it notes (student initials on the top) are asked to write down a noun or verb that they know. All students use one colour Post-it note for this activity. As the plenary of the lesson, all students are asked to visit each poster and put down an example of a more complex type noun or verb that they have learned about within the lesson in a different coloured Post-it note, again with student initials in the corner. You can then take a photograph of these posters at the end of the lesson and refer to
them at the start of the next lesson to demonstrate the learning that took place during one lesson and how as a class they are now going to build on that pace of learning. This demonstrates setting high expectations but also progress in lessons as again these types of photos can form part of your ‘student portfolio’ for each class, which I have discussed in Chapter 6. A ‘washing line’ is also a type of display that is quite common in English classrooms as it allows key words and definitions of terms such as alliteration, personification, enjambment to be displayed across the middle of the room as each piece of paper is clipped to the ‘washing line’. An alternative could be to use quick response (QR) codes on wall displays in order to encourage students to visit websites from their mobile phones or other devices that are relevant to a text that they might be studying. There are many websites that will generate QR codes for you free of charge if you provide the URL address. This builds on the concept of using displays to add curiosity for students as a tool to encourage them to learn more about a text or a poem that is being displayed. Advertising uses this technique all the time, explaining a key idea or concept on an advert but using the QR codes displayed on the adverts for customers to learn more about their product. Using electronic devices to gain information is a key part of every teenager’s life and there is an argument that educational displays in schools should start to engage in that process too even if the QR code takes them to the English Department’s revision section on the school website.
