255: Before You Decorate Your Classroom, Here's a Better Idea

The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast

Jennifer Gonzalez

Education, Teaching, Instruction, Classroommanagement, Educationreform

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2025

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

If the thought of decorating your classroom fills you with anxiety, or if you're just ready to try something different, I have good stuff for you. In this episode, educator and author Tom Rademacher shares two simple activities he did at the beginning of every school year to get to know his students AND fill the walls of his classroom with beautiful, personal, meaningful student products: The One Word Wall and the What You Bring project.

Thanks to Alpaca and the EVERFI for sponsoring this episode.

To read Tom's guest post and find links to his books, visit cultofpedagogy.com/classroom-decor-one-word. If you do these projects with your students, share photos on social media with the hashtag #onewordwall so we can see!

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 255 of the Cult of Pedigogy podcast. In this episode,
0:06.4	we're going to talk about a different approach to decorating your classroom that puts students at the center.
0:27.3	Starting a new school year gives every teacher a clean slate.
0:32.9	The chance to design and decorate a classroom space that feels good is conducive to learning and gets everyone excited about the year to come.
0:36.6	Some teachers take on this task with incredible energy and
0:39.5	creativity while others feel like they're not quite up to it. What I have for you in this episode
0:45.4	is something that might actually speak to both ends of that spectrum, the teachers who go all in
0:51.2	on classroom decor and the ones who dread it.
0:54.9	Two activities you can do in the first few days of school that will help you and your students
0:58.8	get to know each other while also filling the walls of your classroom with unique stuff
1:03.5	made by your students.
1:06.1	These activities, the One Word Wall and the What You Bring Bring project will definitely help those who don't really
1:12.1	love their own approach to classroom decoration, but they're also worth considering for those
1:17.5	whose rooms are Pinterest perfect. Because even though those classrooms are beautiful, they don't
1:23.3	necessarily reflect the students in them. Many times they're more of a reflection of the teacher.
1:29.4	So no matter what your approach is to classroom decor, today's episode should offer a couple of
1:34.6	ideas you might want to incorporate. The activities are coming from my guest Tom Radamacher.
1:41.0	Tom is a former middle school English teacher, the 2014 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, and the author of several books on teaching and parenting.
1:49.0	He developed these activities when he was in the classroom as a way to get to know his students and to solve the problem he describes as being awful at just about anything that counts as decorating. The activities gave him and his
2:02.5	students a beautiful classroom to call home. His students felt so much ownership of the room
2:07.9	that they'd often bring friends in from other classes to look at what they'd hung on the wall.
2:13.7	And even years after leaving Radamacher's class, they'd come back to see what the new classes had put up.
	...

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