Students are the best source of information about what needs to change in our classrooms. Dillon advises us to ask them two questions. First, What’s new in the room? and second, What in this room supports your learning, and what gets in the way of it? Having students audit the room this way will help us see it differently.

“Students are going to start naming things that have been up in the classroom since the beginning of the year,” Dillon says. “When that happens, there’s a problem. All of that stuff just becomes visual noise, and it doesn’t do anything to aid the learning.”

And this shouldn’t happen just once: Dillon advises teachers to ask this question frequently, all year long. “Every two weeks,” he says, “I put it on my Google Calendar: Ask my students how the classroom is serving them.”