Color. Color everywhere. Not a blank wall. Positivity is oozing off of the walls in this classroom. Positive reminders. Rewards. Encouragements. Everywhere you look, some colorful decoration in this classroom is reminding students to be the best version of themselves. From a reward system for doing nice things, to a reminder that the students can be anyone that they want to be, there is no shortage of positive feedback in this room. It’s amazing to see that good skills and self-esteem are attempting to be built up in children this young, but my question is; Is decorating a classroom like this actually effective for their development or does it make no difference whatsoever?
The first scholarly article that I read was titled Bad Signs and written by Alfie Kohn. I thought that this article was interesting because it was posted in an academic journal, however it read like an opinion piece. It talked about decorations in classrooms that are meant to be inspirational and promote a positive classroom environment. While it didn’t specifically mention any of the posters in my Head-start classroom, I found that it took on an interesting aspect to positive decorations in classrooms. I got two things out of this article. The first thing is that when teachers have posters hung up that say things such as “Only positive attitudes beyond this point”, it says to the students that their mental health doesn’t necessarily matter. If you ask me, that’s a bit extreme. However, I do see where the author is going with this train of thought. Maybe a student is having a bad day and just can’t find the energy to have a positive attitude. Maybe they’re just sad. They should feel safe enough in their classroom to show that and not have to fake a positive attitude. On the other hand, just because a classroom has a poster like that hung up, it doesn’t mean that children are automatically going to feel like they have to fake a positive attitude. It’s all about how the teacher makes them feel. If the teacher makes them feel safe, they will feel free to be themselves.
The second thing that I got out of this article is that instead of generalized inspirational posters being hung up in the classroom, the students’ artwork and projects should be displayed. Generalized inspirational posters tend to cause unrealistic expectations to be placed upon students, such as, “You’re going to be valedictorian.” or “You’re going to get into an Ivy League school.” Not to mention, there’s nothing personal about these posters. The classroom environment should show that the teacher knows her students. It should not feature posters that you could find plastered in every workplace all across America.
I honestly couldn’t find another scholarly article that relates to my question. I’m really bummed because I’m really interested in this topic and I would love to know if there has ever been any research done on it. If there isn’t any research done on it, I would love to do some myself. My research study would consist of eight classrooms. Four of them would have positive posters all over their classroom. Four of them would have nothing. The teachers would implement a curriculum based on positively processing emotions. The study would go on for a month. At the end of the month I would see if the emotional development and self-esteem of the students in the classrooms with the positive posters was any different than the classrooms without it. This way I would be able to figure out whether posters make any difference or if it is all in the teaching. However, I don’t think that I would ever be able to get an accurate representation because there’s always going to be the variable of the teachers. Maybe some teachers don’t like the idea of teaching about emotions so they just decide they won’t do it. Maybe some teachers attempt to teach about emotions, but they always have an angry disposition that makes the kids feel unsafe. There would be no way to make sure that every teacher is acting the exact same every second of everyday because that would be crazy.
For now I suppose that I will just have to speculate as to if the use of positive posters matters or not. I would love to hear your opinions about it though, so feel free to leave your comments down below!