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"Growth is not about the genius you possess - it's about the character you develop." Adam Grant

Beautiful Environments Are Important For Children’s Learning


by Bridgitte Alomes


I've been taking a deeper look into how physical learning environments affect children’s development and learning outcomes. This research was specifically conducted to help people who work with schools gain valuable insights into what creates learning environments that encourage all students to collaborate, develop critical thinking skills, and achieve their highest potential.


Researchers communicated with well over a thousand teachers in the US about their experience of how learning environments affect their student outcomes – The conclusion: “Teachers across the country overwhelmingly agree that creative learning spaces play an important role in student engagement,” said Melissa Pelletier, MDR education research editor and an author of the study.


According to the educators who participated, the features that were most important for classroom learning were:

  • Accommodating different learning styles
  • Incorporating technology
  • Allowing for movement and “less sedentary behavior”
  • Manipulating lighting
  • Incorporating outside views and natural light


I find one of the missing pieces when educators discuss their ideal classroom, is the importance of beauty and the effect it can have on children. Having a beautiful, or at least an aesthetically pleasing learning environment is much more important than it being ‘nice to have’.


Students having a beautiful, welcoming environment to attend each day fosters a sense of safety and desire to be there. It can raise their expectations, self-esteem, and connection to others, which in turn often leads to greater focus, engagement, and enjoyment. For many children, entering a classroom that’s been intentionally designed sends the message that they matter, are valued and can potentially encourage and empower them to take ownership of their own learning.


In addition, consider how much time children spend in learning environments, think of the messages students receive and the meaning they create from those environments almost daily. It “will reflect the educator’s philosophy, values, and beliefs about children and learning through either deliberate design or lackadaisical overlook. It provides messages to all those who enter—children, parents, and staff. Is this a place where I am welcomed and where my physical, social, and intellectual needs will be met? Is this an environment where I am seen as worthwhile and competent? Do I passively receive information in this environment, or am I actively engaging in constructing knowledge? Does someone think I am special enough to provide a beautiful environment for my benefit?”


There has been considerable research into how environments affect humans generally, and the bottom line is they “affect our moods, ability to form relationships, effectiveness in work or play—even our health. In addition, the early childhood group environment has a very crucial role in children’s learning and development. Young children are in the process of rapid brain development. In the early years, the brain develops more synapses or connections than it can use. Those that are used by the child form strong connections, while the synapses that are not used are pruned away. Children’s experiences help to make this determination.”


So what does a beautiful environment actually mean? While beauty may often be subjective, beauty from a design perspective is described as “the melding of functionality and aesthetics in just the right proportions to achieve the desired result. When successful, design allows for participation in meaningful action, conveying to the participant an understanding of his or her place in the world…it opens up a clearing for the individual’s experience of purpose."  The desired result when talking about learning environments is creating a space where children feel safe, welcome and honored so they can reach a deep level of learning. 


The aspiration for educators to have more physical space within their classroom is easy to understand but almost impossible to achieve in terms of increasing the actual floor area. Effective use of space can be simple to implement. The same pieces of furniture can be used more effectively. They can be placed around the wall of the classroom or pushed together to create smaller more intimate collaborative areas. Another intentional action that creates the feeling of a more open space is decluttering frequently, ideally by both educators and students. This alone can immediately create an environment that feels more spacious and is more conducive for focused engaged learning.


Exploring this research, along with my own experiences witnessing the incredibly positive effects that intentionally created, beautiful environments can have on students and educators, there is undoubtedly a strong case to be made as to why beauty should be made a priority in all spaces intentionally designed for learning and collaboration. These simple actions, along with a focus on creating aesthetically inspiring spaces, can potentially lead to engaged, focused students and better learning outcomes for all.


Understanding the Importance of the Environment

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Establishing Reciprocal Relationships with Families


  1. Embrace the primary role of families in children’s development and learning. Recognize and acknowledge family members based on how families define their members and their roles. Seek to learn about and honor each family’s child-rearing values, languages (including dialects), and culture. Gather information about the hopes and expectations families have for their children’s behavior, learning, and development so that you can support their goals.
  2. Uphold every family’s right to make decisions for and with their children. If a family’s desire appears to conflict with your professional knowledge or presents an ethical dilemma, work with the family to learn more, identify common goals, and strive to establish mutually acceptable strategies.
  3. Be curious, making time to learn about the families with whom you work. This includes learning about their languages, customs, activities, values, and beliefs so you can provide a culturally and linguistically responsive and sustaining learning environment. It requires intentionally reaching out to families who, for a range of reasons, may not initiate or respond to traditional approaches (e.g., paper and pencil/electronic surveys, invitations to open houses, parent–teacher conferences) to interact with educators.
  4. Maintain consistently high expectations for family involvement, being open to multiple and varied forms of engagement and providing intentional and responsive supports. Ask families how they would like to be involved and what supports may be helpful. Families may face challenges (e.g., fear due to immigration status, less flexibility during the workday, child care or transportation issues) that may require a variety of approaches to building engagement. Recognize that it is your responsibility as an educator to connect with families successfully so that you can provide the most culturally and linguistically sustaining learning environment for each child.
  5. Communicate the value of multilingualism to all families. All children benefit from the social and cognitive advantages of multilingualism and multiliteracy. Make sure families of emergent bilinguals understand the academic benefits and the significance of supporting their child’s home language as English is introduced through the early childhood program, to ensure their children develop into fully bilingual and bi-literate adults.


Observe, Document, and Assess Children’s Learning and Development

  1. Recognize the potential of your own culture and background affecting your judgment when observing, documenting, and assessing children’s behavior, learning, or development. Approach a child’s confusing or challenging behavior as an opportunity for inquiry. Consider whether these may be behaviors that work well for the child’s own home or community context but differ or conflict with your family culture and/or the culture of your setting. How can you adapt your own expectations and learning environment to incorporate each child’s cultural way of being? Also, consider the societal and structural perspectives: How might poverty, trauma, inequities, and other adverse conditions affect how children negotiate and respond to their world? How can you help each child build resilience?
  2. Use authentic assessments that seek to identify children’s strengths and provide a well-rounded picture of development. For children whose first language is not English, conduct assessments in as many of the children’s home languages as possible. If you are required to use an assessment tool that has not been established as reliable or valid for the characteristics of a given child, recognize the limitations of the findings and strive to make sure they are not used as a key factor in high-stakes decisions.
  3. Focus on strengths. Develop the skill to observe a child’s environment from the child’s perspective. Seek to change what you can about your own behaviors to support that child instead of expecting the child to change first. Recognize that it is often easier to focus on what a child isn’t doing compared with peers than it is to see what that child can do in a given context (or could do with support).


 The Executive Skill Lending Library


 The rapid rate of development during early childhood provides adults with an important window of opportunity to scaffold executive skills in young children.

Executive skills are crucial building blocks for school readiness, academic and social success, even more so than early literacy or math. These skills begin developing shortly after birth, and require nearly two decades of caring, attuned relationships and prefrontal lobe lending from adults.

Research shows that the rate of executive skill development increases significantly from birth to three years of age, and advances even more dramatically from three to five years of age. The rate of development slows significantly after age six, but continues steadily through age 25 (Weintraub, Dikmen, Heaton, Tulsky, Zelazo, Bauer, Carlozzi, Slotkin, Blitz, Wallner-Allen, Fox, Beaumont, Mungas, Richler, Deocampo, Anderson, Manly, Borosh, Havlick & Gershon). The rapid rate of development during early childhood provides a critical window of opportunity for executive skill scaffolding. 

Children’s challenging behavior communicates to adults that the child does not feel safe, does not feel connected, and/or needs help with a missing or emerging executive skill: attention, time management, organization, prioritization, working memory, impulse control/emotional regulation, flexibility, empathy, metacognition, goal persistence/achievement and task initiation. 

The Executive Skill Lending Library for Infants and Toddlers provides developmentally appropriate examples of specific ways to help children with each executive skill. To use the Executive Skill Library effectively, adults must follow the ABC process:

Access your executive state through active calming.

Be willing to perceive children’s misbehavior as communication or a call for help.

Coach new skills as necessary.

The Executive Skill Lending Library for Infants and Toddlers will help you determine which interventions are most likely to be helpful in scaffolding the development of essential skills for our youngest children.



 Four Elements of Connection



 All learning begins with connection! Connections on the outside (with other people) actually create and strengthen neural connections within the brain.

Eye contact, presence, touch and a playful setting are the four core components required to truly connect with others. Learn how to provide all four essential elements (and why) with this helpful guide.


Connection Require Four Critical Elements

  1. Eye Contact - Get down on the child’s level to achieve eye contact for a brief moment. When eyes meet, a wireless connection is created between the orbital frontal areas of the prefrontal lobes. From this connection, we download inner states into one another. The eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to key brain structures for empathy and matching emotions. As soon as you have eye contact, download calm, “There you are. You’re safe. Breathe with me. You can handle this.” “Mirror neurons ensure the moment someone sees an emotion on your face, they will at once sense the same feeling within themselves.” -Daniel Stern
  2. Presence - Being present in the moment means your mind and body are in the same place. Your mind is free from chatter. You are still enough to see the beauty in the child. Presence is about acceptance as we join together to share the same moment. The present moment is where joy lies. Relax into it. 
  3. Touch - Touch is the only sense we cannot live without. The skin and brain are made up of the same embryonic tissue. The skin is the outside layer of the brain. Touch creates a hormone that is essential to neural functioning and learning. If we want smart, happy kids, then we need to provide more appropriate, caring touch. 
  4. Playfulness - Playfulness helps build bonds and creates a biochemistry in the brain for dopamine. Dopamine says, “Pay attention, stay focused.” Playful situations strengthen the dopamine system, increase attention spans and boost social development. 

Weekly Task Checklists Lead to Successful Classrooms!

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A teacher's vitality or capacity to be vital, present, positive, and deeply engaged and connected to her/his children and students is not a fixed, indelible condition, but a state that ebbs and flows and grows within the context of the teaching life. Stepping Stone School is committed to a program of professional development devoted explicitly to nourishing the inner and external life or core dimensions that are increasingly important for our educators on their journey.
-Rhonda Paver
The Educator Vitality Journey is a program designed to help our teachers to make a daily, conscious effort to be positive, self-aware, passionate, and fully engaged in their roles, while deepening their understanding of their true potential.