As I write, I am reaching the end of a six-month social experiment that has given me a new perspective on wellbeing and teaching.

It began in early February. As for most in our profession, the second lockdown was proving particularly demanding. I was wrestling with online teaching (and, indeed, my own two small children) and being bombarded with technology at every turn. I was dreaming of emails, of yet another student accusation that I was “lagging” and of being haunted by tiny blank camera screens. Something had to give.

The answer, my lockdown crazed brain screamed, lay with minimalism.

Minimalism argues for a decluttering of our lives to facilitate a calmer, more organised way of living and working. The principles are based on ruthless prioritisation and the frequent clearing out of all that is unnecessary. Its supporters argue that it provides a calmer, less stressful life - in which time is used wisely and with more impact.

I have, for six months, been trying to apply these minimalistic principles to all aspects of my life. All forms of social media have been placed on a hiatus and completely ignored. My mobile phone is now app-free, and it has been growing a layer of dust in its new location in the spare room (much to my wife’s frequent displeasure).

I have cut down on most professional commitments, spent significantly less time looking at the news and I have worn the same clothes for six months (not true; that would be the end of the marriage.)

After six months of minimalistic living, am I now a walking Buddha - a vision of serenity who is at peace with all mankind and its unpredictability?

No, but I am, without doubt, less distracted, more focused and less emotionally volatile. Dare I whisper it: I am also happier.

What does this have to do with the new academic year? Now that I am digitally minimalistic and living a life that is much simpler, I want to take this experiment to the next level: what might a minimalistic teacher look like?

Being a minimalistic teacher

There have to be some positive lessons that we can learn, as teachers, as a result of the past 18 months of educating through a pandemic. The ubiquitous dialogue and controversy about teacher work-life balance is the most obvious point to start.

The reality is that, as a profession, we are much more inclined to maximalism than minimalism. For many reasons, we often drive ourselves to exhaustion in our noble efforts to ensure that young people reach their full potential. The retention and burnout rates in education speak for themselves: significant numbers of teachers work in a way that is unsustainable for their own health.

Is that work and time, however, all as impactful as we want it to be? Would applying some of the notions behind minimalism to our work in schools actually make us more effective rather than less so?

The lockdowns have enforced a minimalistic approach to life on many of us: packed calendars became, all of a sudden, alarmingly empty. While that has, of course, been challenging, the enforced streamlining has not come without its benefits. We are less frazzled, less exhausted and perhaps better versions of ourselves when we do find ourselves in company.

Alongside this, I’m sure I am not the only parent who is now more conscious of just how quickly time passes with young children - and how utterly wonderful and valuable that time is. We should never feel that we have to sacrifice that time because of the demands of teaching.

To be clear: in calling for minimalism to be applied to teaching, I am not advocating some sort of “lazy” teaching, a harkening back to the glory days of being a “guide on the side” in the classroom. Instead, I am arguing for a cool and dispassionate analysis of how we work in schools, and reflection on how we can do less but better.

What better place to start than our classroom environment itself?

The classroom

As an English teacher, I used to be a big fan of displays. I would spend hours lovingly curating a visual encapsulation of whatever literary adventure we were undertaking as a class. My display unveiling for To Kill a Mockingbird, while not resulting in the spontaneous round of applause that I had hoped for, definitely led to a few minutes of visual excitement.

After the initial five minutes of wonder, however, it was ruthlessly ignored, and grew worn, lined and yellow (depressingly mirroring its ageing designer).

How many hours do we spend as teachers on our classroom environments? By cramming them full of stuff and displays in every corner, do they really reflect the calm and clarity we are trying to encourage from young people?

A minimalistic purge of our classrooms in August is always a refreshing way to begin the year: aiming for utter ruthlessness, we can strip our classrooms to inspire organisation and tranquillity in whoever may enter them. We will also feel better in ourselves - renewed with the energy that a spring clean provides to our homes.

We can then transfer that minimalistic habit to the time stealer of all teachers: the PowerPoint presentation.

PowerPoint

The maxim about insanity that is often attributed to Albert Einstein - defining it as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - would be a provocative introduction to any teaching CPD. For many teachers, a lesson is incomplete unless it has a PowerPoint presentation attached to it. But in a secondary school, at least, young people’s eyes drift apathetically towards the projector screen as they enter the classroom.

Monotony and repetitiveness signal the death of student engagement, so there is definitely a case for rethinking our reliance on PowerPoint and applying some minimalist thinking to our use of it.

It could be a fascinating experiment to teach without PowerPoint slides for periods of time, and assess the results in terms of managing our time and our students’ learning. We can also then apply this to the PowerPoint’s time-stealing cousin, the photocopier. Is the time spent producing and photocopying that beautiful resource really going to have an impact on the learning of young people in our classrooms?

And that clarity of thinking needs to be applied to all the time we spend as teachers: is what I am spending my time doing going to help the learning of young people in my lessons?

Remote learning, while clearly having some positives in terms of improving technological use, has, overall, added to some of my scepticism about technology in teaching. A PowerPoint presentation pales in comparison to the presence of an engaging and dynamic teacher. Our dispositions - and the passion we have - are what get young people excited about learning.

And these require no additional preparation or exciting image, whatsoever.

Classroom dialogue

Before you turn the page in disgust, I am not going to argue against teacher talk in our classrooms. Common sense dictates, however, that giving serious reflection to how we speak in our lessons is vital for classroom teachers.

I have found that since returning full time to the classroom after the lockdowns, young people’s attention spans have understandably needed serious retraining. Embracing some minimalistic communication principles can play a big role in helping them to sustain their focus and engagement levels.

This means that instead of fillers dominating our conversation (um, this being my own personal communication demon), we aim to leave more pauses and silence, to allow young people to process information. It means that we slow down the pace at which we speak, ensuring that young people really lean in to listen.

Yes, it might mean we talk less, but it might also mean we talk more purposefully in our classrooms. By communicating minimalistically, we start to recognise how often we ramble or feel the need to add a narrative to every aspect of classroom life.

By reflecting carefully on these habits and aiming to simplify our classroom talk, we might just find that we don’t have to collapse into bed exhausted at an embarrassingly early hour every evening. Even better: the clarity and purposefulness in our classrooms might improve.

That minimalistic dialogue can then spread to other areas that require communication in school life: meetings could become shorter and more productive, email can be used as sparingly as possible to prevent interruptions, and time can instead be used to focus on what really matters: teaching and learning.

Feedback

We know how vital feedback is, but we are also deeply conscious of how much time providing feedback to young people demands. I know I have been guilty in the past of writing streams of information to young people in their jotters - most of which has gone completely ignored.

Minimalistic feedback, however, could drive forward the clarity of young people’s understanding about how to improve in our lessons.

I have found that short, clear verbal feedback can improve a young person’s understanding so much quicker than anything that is written in a workbook. Using time when young people are working independently in lessons to circulate and provide verbal feedback helps to foster more positive relationships as well as better understanding in our lessons.

“Do you understand?” is a phrase that minimalistic teachers need to quickly abandon - it can never really serve any learning purpose other than prompting a muffled “yes” response. Reframing this to “what do you understand?” puts the ownership of the feedback on the young person and asks them to demonstrate their understanding.

This idea that the effort should be on the part of the young person should encompass all feedback, which should be easily actionable.

Making changes and forming new habits, as any of us who have failed gloriously in sticking with new year’s resolutions know, is challenging. The reality is that it is also much easier to overcomplicate things than to simplify them. As one aphorism has it, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

That rings particularly true in the classroom - amazing practitioners make the complex art of teaching simple and clear.

For those of us who aspire to those levels, the intention to minimalise and simplify at the start of a new school year could be a hugely positive one. All habit building starts with small incremental steps, so picking one area that you know could benefit from minimalistic principles and going from there could be an excellent place to start.

This minimalistic revolution in teaching in Scotland, therefore, has the potential to not only improve wellbeing and teacher motivation but also give us the joy of refining and developing what we care so much about: the quality of what happens in our classrooms.

Jamie Thom is a teacher of English and an author, based in Scotland. He is host of podcast The Well Teacher and tweets @teachgratitude1

This article originally appeared in the 27 August 2021 issue under the headline “Minimal effort, maximum results”