I am writing this article on a wall. The wall is in a classroom I designed. Every wall in my classroom is covered with towering multicoloured glassboards - gold ones, terracotta, cerulean, blood-red, beige, lime and black.

All the desks interlock in an ouroboric coil that snakes around the room. On every surface - wall and desk - there is writ words and words and words: quotations, sententiae, model paragraphs, lines from poems, random words in Greek or Latin - and this article, so far.

For a long time when I first began teaching, all I wanted was a classroom of my own. But it was being without a classroom that gave me the chance to see the best that other classrooms had to offer. Having taught in schools that did not allocate classrooms to individual teachers, I developed…let’s call it a niche interest: I became obsessed with whiteboards.

Not Reformation-style whitewashed, non-marked boards that had been cleaned post-lesson. No, I was obsessed with Catholic-style ones: whiteboards with words, quotations, images etched by other teachers. In those nomadic days, I populated a photo album on my phone that I inventively called “Whiteboards”. I didn’t think I was onto anything pedagogical.

It was only after I was given a classroom of my own that the proverbial penny, having teetered on some axiomatic ledge for many years, dropped - and struck me, Newtonian fashion, upon the head.

The classroom gave off an air of sturdiness, of things tried and tested: four rows, a single whiteboard tucked (usefully) in a corner over the teacher’s desk. And that is how it would have stayed, had it not been for one student’s observation. It was while reading Dickens’ Hard Times that this pupil pointed out the resemblance between my classroom and that of Mr Gradgrind, the “educator” introduced in the novel. To see my classroom in this Dickensian light made it look suddenly tawdry, uninviting and bleak. By the end of the lesson, I was already planning a redesign, and before the week was out, I had arrived at a vision. My whiteboard obsession had grown into something quite spectacular.

Substance behind the style change

My new classroom was to be the opposite of the conventional one and be laudatory, inviting, enlightened, unconventional.

My idea was not completely new. The most interesting learning spaces I have come across are Eton College’s Tony Little Centre and The Space at Queen Anne’s School in Caversham. I adapted ideas from both.

Eton had a single writable wall; Queen Anne’s had two. I was going to make every wall surface writable.

I was also going to make sure my walls retained a patina of past lessons - my classroom would be a mnemonic space, a palace of memory. And I wasn’t going to have white walls - I would build in glass, plumping for the most garish and clashing hues to be placed side by side so that the wall space was quickly dividable.

Lastly, I asked for flippable desks that you could write on so students could present what they had written to the whole class.

Like when a friend turns up with a new style of haircut and you know something deeper is going on beneath the superficial change, so it was with this classroom redesign: I wanted to improve aspects of my teaching.

Needing a framework with which to conduct a study on the impact of the room, I found myself applying for a master’s in learning and teaching.

Soon after starting the MSc, I discovered that little research had been done on classroom design. But there was some hope: one very useful literature review, The Impact of School Environments (Higgins et al, 2005), demonstrates a causal link between design and learning, but argues that this relies on the design working in conjunction with teaching practice: without teacher buy-in, it won’t work.

Barrett et al’s 2015 study, The Impact of Classroom Design on Pupils’ Learning, is the only serious quantitative study I found. Using a regression analysis and surveying progress, it established that learning environments can account for 1.3 sub-levels of additional progress per year when pupils move from the least effective classrooms to the most.

Frustratingly, there was no actual term in the research for a classroom that uses its wall spaces as learning devices. But one does exist in the history of writing practice: parietal. So I termed my design a parietal classroom.

Shifting power dynamics

How, then, would I judge the impact of my room? I needed to design a study that was both qualitative and quantitative. The nature of what I was looking at for the MSc was improvement in the quality of discourse - a notoriously difficult area to measure.

I decided to focus on key stage 3 to make results comparable, looking at 40 students across two classes in Years 7 and 9. Using electronic surveys, interviews and lesson transcripts, I found students were overwhelmingly positive about the redesign.

The first thing the data uncovered was perceived changes in student behaviour: students were engaged in the composition of the space itself by writing their work onto the walls. Rarely did a sketched phallus materialise (the worst it got was a conspiratorial Illuminati triangle).

It prompted behavioural change in other ways, too, and not just from the students. The new classroom allows me to teach from any part of it. Having no teacher-student divide means no front, no back. Consequently, those hierarchies of power that are typical of normative classrooms - with control exerted strongly in the front and diminishing toward the back - do not occur in this classroom, and the data supports this.

Instead of an authorising centre-front where words emerge from the teacher’s whiteboard, text proliferates at the classroom’s edges, created by pupils. Because they want to write, lessons are smoother, while group work requires little preparation. And because the students’ work appears on the walls, in a sense, all work becomes a performance. Acting on this idea, the pupils improve their presentation skills and handwriting, but more importantly, they also develop a sense of audience and decorum.

The most interesting finding was discovering the thing that engaged pupils the most: incompleteness. What they were most interested in was what was half-hidden, rubbed off but still decipherable, words without definitions, quotations hinting at something big, clues. I now have no problem with mistiming lessons so that work is incomplete - the next class can finish it.

Justifying the cost

There has been interest from parents, schools, academics and industry in this initiative. Many parents have taken the research project as an indication of how serious the school is on pedagogy.

Outside of my school, a number of other teachers have visited, wanting to take ideas away. Interest from academia has come to focus on the practice of parietal writing, which was commonplace in the early modern era as a means of mnemonic reinforcement and moral edification. As such, an article on the room is included on a Folger Shakespeare Library syllabus on Elizabethan school settings.

From industry, speaking at the Bett education show has led me into discussion with number of educational furniture-design companies about scalability and new ideas (I’m thinking of targeting ceilings next). The total refit of my classroom - new tables, chairs, glassboards and the reorientation of the space - cost £13,500. Admittedly, it was expensive, but we were trying something that had not been done before in another school. I hope the return on investment has been good: primarily, I think students have learned more as a result of working in the classroom, simply by being more engaged than not; it’s a draw with parents; it has been used for school Inset days; and it has resulted in this research, which has led other classrooms in schools to be designed along parietal lines.

Alternatives exist - some cheaper and some more expensive - but when a typical classroom refit costs something in the region of £5,000-£10,000, there may be a case for trialling something more expensive, but which data suggests may improve students’ learning.

So if you are a teacher without your own classroom reading this, I envy you. By having no room of my own and looking longingly on the whiteboards of others, I found a research topic that, even in its obscurity, has proved to be worthwhile.

David Gibbons is an English teacher at Merchant Taylors’ School in Hertfordshire

This article originally appeared in the 22 March 2019 issue under the headline “The writing’s on the wall, desks, ceiling…”