Cut the Cute

There’s a word sometimes used in education that needs to be replaced.

This word doesn’t describe students’ effort, their creativity, their curiosity or their determination. It doesn’t acknowledge a child’s perseverance, bravery or growth.

Instead, the word cute describes how the speaker, usually an adult, feels about a child’s work. It’s an opinion based on an expectation about children and what they should be and be creating, and there’s a problem with that.

Throughout my time both as a teacher and as a mother, I’ve often heard the work of children described using this four letter word. Hand turkeys are cute. Rainbow bulletin boards are cute. TPT handouts are cute. Themed classrooms are cute. The problem with this is that none of these descriptions have anything to do with the most important people in the classroom, your students.

When designing a class space, the focus needs to be 100% on the child. There are tons of teachers beginning a new school year whose priority is whether their class looks insta-worthy rather than whether their students can really see themselves in the space. With all due respect, teaching isn’t about you.

Classroom Design

Let’s talk first about the physical space. Classrooms need to reflect the students in the space. “But, how can I do that if I don’t know who my students are and they haven’t even come in yet?” The answer is really simple. The answer, actually IS simple. Simplicity. A classroom needs very little for students to enter and begin building community, as should be done in the first few weeks. Have tables. Have chairs. Have a whiteboard and some markers. Have crayons, paper and pencils. Beyond that, the work of creating a classroom should rest almost entirely on the students building it.

A classroom pre-determined to be themed around anything is not child-centered, it’s an attempt for a teacher to create a cute space that they hope their kids will like. Maybe the intention is good. But what if they don’t like it? What if it doesn’t resonate with them? What happens to the 1, 2, 3, 4 or more students who aren’t into rainbows, space, emojis or the ocean? What about the rest who accept it, but had no part in designing the space? When you begin to think about the reasons for pre-designing a classroom before your students enter, the more you’ll find yourself justifying decisions you’re making for yourself. It may be easier, in some ways, to set up your bulletin boards before students arrive. It may feel productive to design an adorable rug area with a blue sky, clouds and 747s that reads “REACH FOR THE SKY!” But there’s another problem with all of this hoopla.

When working in an inclusive space, all of your students need to be of equal priority even for small decisions. Students with certain disabilities can have a particularly difficult time in a learning environment that is overstimulating. Bright colors, countless posters and cutesy bulletin boards can become overwhelming distractions and sensory triggers. They may seem cute, but it’s been found that students in heavily decorated classrooms spend more time off-task than those in classrooms with those distractions removed. In our classroom, we leave up any anchor charts that are currently in use for the unit. We “house” our posters on the back wall, organized by content area for easy searching, and we move them back and forth to the front board as we use them throughout the day. This helps to keep our rug area clear and helps students focus on only the lesson at hand.

On a variety of levels, the attempt to create a classroom of cute, even when well-intentioned to welcome students, does not benefit students as you may hope.

Work Products

As an inquiry-based teacher, I try as often as I can to encourage students to share their learning in ways that highlight and utilize their strengths. It’s an area I’m always improving, especially in finding the balance of offering students options for products to share their learning while leaving room for student ideas and creativity.

But there’s one thing that I’m proud that I stray away from, the dreaded student project designed to be cute. You may know the drill. Maybe a holiday is coming up or maybe you’re in the middle of a study on a particular animal. Students are given instructions, handed materials and are told, step by step, how to create a pre-determined product. Everyone makes a paper plate elephant. Every child gets cotton balls to make a snowman, and each step is meticulously described to students so that their product looks like the model made by their teacher.

My daughter recently came home from her summer camp with a paper bee. When I asked how she figured out how to make the stripes, her response was “they gave me the stuff and told me how to do it.” Although I’ll concede to a slight benefit of learning to follow step by step directions with this method, especially for very young children, the message being sent to children with this type of activity is clear. “Your work should be just like mine. It needs to meet certain standards. Your creativity is not needed here.”

In comparison, my daughters and I recently visited family in Florida and spent hours exploring the Pensacola Mess Hall. My daughters were enthralled by the simple, yet calculated space that encouraged them to explore with an open mind. There was a station with open ended materials for a ball run. There was a magnet table, microscopes and insect specimen, a water table, fans, mirrors and pipe-cleaners. The space is a dream for a teacher/mom whose focus is on their children’s imagination, cognitive flexibility and perseverance, not how cute their work products are.

Instead of pre-determined projects, we can offer options to children. It’s common practice in inclusive classrooms to differentiate the materials/means of creating and the actual product being made. If your class is learning about elephants, students could build a clay model, create a powerpoint presentation, paint a picture, create a collage from magazines, write an all-about book, etc etc etc. We want to encourage work products that value and highlight a students’ strengths, including their creativity, imagination, attention to detail, ingenuity and problem-solving. Unless you are teaching a highly specialized skill that all of your students need to simultaneously learn, there’s little reason why your students need to be completing the same product with the same steps.

Feedback

After students have completed an activity, whether purely academic or community driven, make sure that your feedback focuses on what’s most important. Remember Billy Madison and his blue duck? While in first grade, Billy Madison’s class was (presumably) asked to draw a duck. Billy’s teacher approaches Billy to see that, despite all of his peers coloring their ducks yellow, Billy has colored his blue. “I drew the duck blue because I’ve never seen a blue duck before and, to be honest with you, I wanted to see a blue duck.” Is the picture cute? Yes. Is it adorable? Sure. But Billy found a way to use his imagination to create something that he wanted to experience. Feedback for your students should always focus on the strengths that they’ve demonstrated in this particular activity. Creativity, ingenuity, flexibility, determination, attention to detail… all of these pieces of feedback will provide students with confidence that acknowledges and validates the work that they’ve done, rather than whether they’ve created something to your liking. (For the record, Ms. Lippy tells Billy that he created an “excellent duck.”

As we all begin another school year together, one maybe slightly more “back to normal” than the last, remember to keep your students at the center of your work. Designing your classroom, creating flexible and interactive community building activities and providing feedback that focuses on your students’ personal strengths and attributes will contribute to a class of learners who value perseverance, individuality and creativity.