Student Contributor: S. Shier
Decluttering your classroom is getting all of your stacks of papers and items around the classroom that are not being used put away to where they are out of the students’ sight. It is used to make your classroom look more organized and give your students less distractions when trying to focus during class time.
Decluttering your classroom is a great way to keep your room looking clean and organized and will help you and your student’s minds to stay organized and focused as well. With less distractions around the classroom, the students can stay attentive to the lesson being taught and gives them less reasons for a wandering eye. Decluttering your classroom can also ease that environmental sensory overload that comes with too many things around the classroom. In my experiences, I felt more at ease when I walked into a decluttered classroom because I felt that if a classroom was disorganized or messy that my brain felt the same way. With that said, when decluttering your classroom, you want to make sure you are not only decluttering for yourself as a teacher, but that the space you are creating is going to always be for your students. You want to keep in mind how they will see the classroom, what spaces in the room are for them, and how you can incorporate the individuality of your students into the new spaces you are creating by decluttering.
I placed this tool in the preventative phase of management because the look of a classroom is going to be the first thing your students take in when they enter before you ever start teaching them. This tool prevents those students who get easily distracted by things in classroom from constantly finding things to be distracted by. It can relate to the supportive phase in that it supports the idea of staying focused during class which, in turn, keeps the student from needing to go into the corrective phase. I thought this tool could connect with the collaborative and teacher directed theories because it is the teacher who is decluttering the classroom, but they could also get the students involved to come up with ideas on how to do that so the students feel as though they are always a part of their classroom.
More Information –
Tool Source: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/8-tips-and-tricks-redesign-your-classroom
