How Guinness Was Good for Me (and My Teaching)

In the spirit of Teaching People, here's a practical guide to display. I hope it amounts to an example of how teachers use non-teachery things to inspire them...

Instead of leaving a comment in a book, visitors to The Guinness Storehouse, Dublin are asked to write their thoughts about their trip on circular cards not dissimilar to beer mats. 

Each card has a small hole punched into it. Once a card has been written on, it is placed on one of hundreds of little hooks protruding from a metallic display wall. 

The visitors’ comments are an attraction in themselves. At a glance, the wall resembles a birds-eye view of hundreds of pints of Guinness. We can see what they did there. 

It is three things to the writer: 1. an opportunity to reflect on their experience at the factory; 2. a chance to make a direct contribution to the visitor attraction; 3. an interaction that they are welcome to make.

It is three things to the reader: 1. a visually attractive stimulus; 2. an opportunity to reflect on others’ experiences; 3. an interaction that they are welcome to take advantage of.   

I appreciated the effort that had gone in to the wall, and it got me thinking about how I could incorporate the spirit of it in my teaching. Over time, this experience (as micro as it might have been) has contributed to ideas I have had around the display of students’ work. I became interested in how ‘display’ could become part of the learning in itself, not just a pretty way to cover a blank noticeboard.

I have never managed to replicate the metallic wall, but I have managed to facilitate some lovely post-it note murals, postcard charts, and wallpaper displays. For sure, they always come in handy on Open Evening, and they can be aesthetically pleasing (especially if you have one or two artistic students in your class). But covering wall space is not their raison d'être.

Now, when I embark on a big unit of work with a class, that often means that we’ll be producing an exhibit. This will be a collective effort, with me often acting as creative director (but not always, because there are times when giving that responsibility to a particular pupil will really help engage or motivate them). At the end of the unit of work, we’ll have our exhibit. Students will still have their own work and notes in their individual copybooks, but the exhibits becomes really useful resources in themselves.

They exist to give permanence to the evidence of pupils’ learning. They motivate students by giving them an added sense of purpose when completing tasks. What might have once been scribbled on a post-it note then thrown in the bin, or scrawled on a mini-whiteboard then wiped off, now becomes a feature of a larger text, which in turn becomes a resource for reflection and revision in much the same way as the visitors’ comments became the attraction in The Guinness Storehouse.

A wall of post-it notes, each column on, let’s say, a character from the class novel, accrued from a few plenary activities, looks great. But when pupils are encouraged to have a read of the walls at the beginning of the next lesson, it becomes a resource in itself.

It is an organic process; a dynamic approach to display.

I have found it has helped me with planning. When faced with the prospect of teaching a new topic to a class, thinking first about what needs to be next on the exhibit can give you a wee push, creatively. I find that playing this sleight of hand on myself can help prompt ideas and ways in to lessons that I may not have otherwise thought of.

The approach has worked best when I’ve told pupils the intention at the beginning of a new topic. (This started to work even better once I had a few previous examples to model to them). My preferred medium is lining paper - cheaper than wallpaper and a little bit lighter too, making it easier to stick to walls and noticeboards.

In an introductory lesson - let’s say you are about to embark on a class novel - you might encourage students to write key contextual information around a postcard of the novel’s front cover; you might give students a synopsis of the first chapter with a built-in cloze exercise; and maybe you will ask students to recall key dates from the contextual information on one of those trusty post-it notes for their plenary. You then stick all of that stuff on to the wallpaper - or ask the pupils to stick their own on.

And you know that arty student with the gel pens who likes to doodle drawings of Lennie and George in the margins of their book? Well you can show them how much you value their approach by cutting out those doodles and sticking them on to the wallpaper too. As I say, it can be very motivating for individual pupils. Rolling out the wallpaper at the beginning of the next lesson for a bit of theatrical re-capping always goes down well.

You’ll know it’s gone well when you can finish the topic, lay out the entire roll down the corridor floor, and invite pupils to take photos of it to later revise from.

It’s a timeline of their learning, and often - certainly in the case of a novel - a chronological record of the novel’s progression.

Don’t get me wrong, The Guinness Storehouse approach doesn’t always manifest itself on huge wallpaper displays like this. Sometimes it is simply a corner of the room decorated with pupils’ notes.

But I do think that turning the evidence of pupils’ learning into something longer lasting creates three things for them:

1. a visually attractive stimulus; 2. an opportunity to reflect on their classmates’ ideas; and 3. an interaction that they are welcome to take advantage of.   

Thanks for reading, and have a great St Patrick’s Day!

Jon