The Research to Practice Gap
As a special educator, I struggled to find truly effective ways to support my students. I joined professional organizations, but didn’t have the time to sift through journals or navigate lengthy resource pages. I attended required professional development, yet it wasn’t always engaging—or useful.
Welcome to The Research to Practice Gap, a podcast created to bridge exactly that divide. Each month, I sit down with a researcher in the field of education to translate research into practical, evidence-based strategies and activities you can use in your classroom right away.
The Research to Practice Gap
Less is More: Designing Classrooms That Support Attention and Executive Function
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
This episode explores how classroom design impacts students’ attention, regulation, and learning. Dr. Laura Foster shares research-backed strategies for creating more intentional, less visually overwhelming spaces—and how small shifts in the environment can better support all learners.
Resources for Teachers
Heavily Decorated Classrooms Disrupt Attention and Learning In Young Children
Building Design for Learning with Willam Browning and James Determan
How to Use Mini Anchor Chart Flipbooks to Save Space and Time in Your Classroom
Structured and Accessible Classrooms to Support Independence
National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector
Research Articles & Background
An Introduction to the Theory of Embodied Cognition
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Tennessee's Voluntary Pre-K Program
Fisher, A. V., Godwin, K. E., & Seltman, H. (2014). Visual environment, attention allocation, and learning in young children: When too much of a good thing may be bad. Psychological science, 25(7), 1362-1370.
Foster, L. K. (2025). Early Childhood Classroom Design: Integrating Montessori Principles with Neuroeducational Research. Journal of Montessori Research, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.17161/jomr.v11i2.24130
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of environmental psychology, 15(3), 169-182.
Price, J., & Romualdez, A. M. (2025). ‘It just feels unnatural being here’: Autistic secondary school students’ experiences of sensory sensitivities in the school environment. Autism, 29(9), 2228-2238.
Valentine, C. (2023). Architectural allostatic overloading: exploring a connection between architectural form and allostatic overloading. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(9), 5637.
Artwork and logo by The Interior Gaze
Welcome to the Research to Practice Gap, a podcast that bridges the divide between research and classroom practice. I'm Dr. Helen Flores, and each episode I sit down with an expert whose work informs education and translate their insights into practical, evidence-based strategies you can use in your classroom right away. Today with me I have Laura Foster. Laura is an educator and educational leader with nearly 20 years of experience across public, nonprofit, and independent schools. She holds a background in linguistics and cognitive science from Pomona College, a Montessori teaching credential, and a master's in educational leadership from University of Kentucky. She currently teaches first grade in Washington, D.C. and serves as affiliate faculty at Loyola University Maryland Center for Montessori Education. Laura is also a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins School of Education, where her research focuses on how classroom environments shape attention, regulation, and executive function. Her work bridges Montessori and conventional settings with a focus on small, intentional classroom shifts that better support diverse learners. Welcome. Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here. All right, so we'll kick it off with question number one. In one or two sentences, what problem in education does your research aim to address?
SPEAKER_00Well, classrooms are often designed kind of based on tradition, how things have always been done, or on aesthetics and teacher preference, but not on evidence. And so my research looks at how the physical environment shapes students' attention, regulation, and learning, and how we can design classrooms more intentionally to support all learners.
SPEAKER_01That's so interesting, Laura. I remember as a teacher, I had various administrations. We taught self-contained autism spectrum disorders and emotional behavioral disorders. And I had some that were very in tune with the needs of my students and would tell me, like, you know, it's fine if there's very little on your walls, it's fine how you set up the room, and other administrators that were very concerned about the impression that my classroom was making. And we had a theme of each year, and it had to be decorated and we had to change boards. And I don't think at any point, other than when I was in an ASD classroom, right? And our furniture was very intentional for the layout of the students as visual learners. I don't think once I have ever, I ever thought about real intention behind my classroom and how I set it up.
SPEAKER_00And not only that you didn't necessarily think of it, but you had no preparation for it. It wasn't part of your teacher preparation. It wasn't part of the coursework that you had done up to that point, probably.
SPEAKER_01Right. No, absolutely. And what first drew you to this line of research? Was there a classroom moment that sparked it?
SPEAKER_00During my Montessori training, I was essentially told to create like a minimalist classroom with almost nothing on the walls. And this is very common in Montessori. The idea that was expressed to me is that it supports attention, but that was pretty much all the information that I was given at the time. And you see in Montessori classrooms, and even in the very specific details of the materials, they have a quality called the isolation of difficulty. And so, for instance, if you're learning that A makes the sound ah, you're simply going to have a sandpaper letter A for a child to stroke and say ah while they're doing it. You're not also going to have an image of an apple or a little cartoon of somebody. Everything is very simple visually in the Montessori classroom. And at the time it felt intuitive and it aligned to many of the readings I had done as a cognitive science major in college. But then I got into the field, into real life schools. And I had a bunch of different experiences. I taught at a college-affiliated lab preschool in Southern California. I worked at a Head Start school in Appalachia. I worked at a public elementary school in the Mississippi Delta, and then Montessori schools in Kentucky and Washington, D.C. And now I'm in a traditional independent school in Washington, D.C. And across all of these settings, I really noticed that teachers use faith in markedly different ways in their classrooms. And that kind of depended on the philosophy of the program, the curriculum of the program, the context of the school, future preferences, and as you were saying, systems of assessment and administrators. So as a doctoral student at Hopkins, the curiosity kind of turned into a research question. Is there evidence that classroom design makes a difference at all? And what I found is that it isn't just a question in education, it spans multiple disciplines. And so my literature review, the first kind of big project I've done for Hopkins, has looked at architecture, neuroscience, environmental design, psychology, and cognitive science. And all of these different fields are asking in different ways how space shapes human behavior. And when you synthesize all that work, kind of a clear picture emerges. And that picture is that the physical environment is a powerful force in shaping how students attend, regulate, and learn. These are the factors that kind of keep coming forth from the literature.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that's so interesting. I'm really excited to dive into this, Laura. Who should care most about this research? Teachers, administrators, educators, policymakers, and why?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's a little bit of everybody, but certainly teachers, right? Because this is their day-to-day life with children. Administrators should know as well because the systems that they use to assess teachers are in part driving what teachers put into their rooms. And then teacher educators certainly, you know, I believe that this should be part of teacher training and teacher education. Most teachers are given classrooms right from day one. But outside of really specific pedagogies like Montessori or Waldorf, very few education programs include information about the importance of the classroom in shaping neuroeducational factors and how to really leverage space for learning. And so I kind of think the big issue is that we're not systematically preparing educators to use the classrooms that they're walking into.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and we talk a lot about universal design for learning and access and procedures. Where is where are my pencils? What are my procedures around kids getting up and and furniture and maybe grouping of students and setting it up? But absolutely, I've I haven't, like you were saying, never trained on any of these other areas that are that are really important.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think in in Montessori that often in teacher training, it is said, and certainly it was something that Maria Montessori herself observed, like the importance of the beauty of the classroom, and she wrote about. But I think what my work can offer to Montessorians is like the neuroeducational research kind of behind the practice. And what it offers to non-Montessorians is kind of a bit of a shift or a micro adaptation that can be made in a conventional setting that um supports learning.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. So, for listeners who aren't familiar with this line of research, what are two to three key findings or important facts?
SPEAKER_00Okay, so kind of to discuss this, we have to get like a little bit into the literature and studies that have been done. So Anna Fisher and Carrie Godwin have done a series of experiments over a decade where they have manipulated classroom environments and then tracked using eye trackers, visual attention, on and off task behavior, and then content retention. And they have shown again and again in laboratory settings and in actual classrooms that the more visually dense the classroom, the more disruptions you have to attention, the more dysregulated behavior you have, and the you have less content retention in those classrooms. And kind of a pushback of their work has sometimes been like, yeah, but children habituate to the environments that they're in. Like they strengthen their salience determination, they figure out what's important and they kind of habituate to it. So they did a study in a school and they actually found that the children did not show indications of habituation and that the classroom became more visually dense over the course of the experiment.
SPEAKER_01Wow. As a teacher who I'm not very artsy, I love to hear this because it's very affirming when people told me your spring bulletin board isn't up. And I was like, yeah, because I can't handle it personally. So this is very affirming to me because I do think, you know, I've been out of the classroom now for about six years, but I remember being on Instagram and it was just full of these teachers who had spent hundreds, thousands of dollars there the whole summer, picking out their room in these beautiful, but I imagine overstimulating, visually dense environments. And obviously thinking that, you know, one, I'm sure they enjoyed doing it, but two, thinking about what it would bring to their classroom and how it would encourage students. So it's interesting to think about that too, how we can make our classrooms homey and welcoming without it all of that other stuff.
SPEAKER_00Certainly, certainly. And no one wants to diminish like the love that teachers have for their students and that, you know, they want to make a nice space because they're going to be there as well. And so I think there are some good practices to make that space. Another important aspect of the work is the concept of attention restoration theory, which came from Rachel and Stephen Kaplan in the 80s. And that is the idea that when you have natural elements like plants, natural light, sunlight, these kinds of things, your attention kind of resets. And so there are two architects, William Browning and Jim Determan, that have been going into schools and kind of redesigning them to have these biophilic views. And biophilic just means love of nature. And so sometimes it's real plants, natural sunlight, sometimes then blocked views, open views, and sometimes just patterns related to nature. And they have found that children in these spaces decreased their stress, improved their test scores. And kind of a surprise finding is that there was also more teacher retention. Wow, the spaces were more biophilic. Yeah, because everybody just feels calmer in those spaces.
SPEAKER_01I worked in a school that was an open plan school designed in the 70s. We had very few windows in the entire building. It was uh I looking back, I can see how that felt stressful for me too. I um I was sort of in this pod, almost like a cubicle, and there was no natural light in the classroom. And I I it's nice hearing you say because I immediately thought, oh, well, unless an architect's gonna come rebuild my classroom, but even just nature, if they're uh plants or patterns of nature.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's interesting that you brought up open classrooms and open schools. That has been something that has kind of come up in the research that I've reviewed. And what's really interesting is that the spaces tend not to be used as designed by the architects because pedagogy, traditional pedagogy, does not use space in that way. And so it's a combination of both things, how the environment is set up and then the pedagogy that the teacher is using and their methods. And so what I found when I read about open class schools is that a lot of times teachers would then box back in their group because they needed kind of like a teacher-centered delivery of instruction.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's exactly what the school did. They installed at some point these huge like sliding partitions. So my classroom was closed off again, but by sliding partitions, not even a real door or anything like that. Right. It was odd. Which is it's like the worst of all possible worlds, right?
SPEAKER_00Because then you don't have any sunlight and it gets louder because you don't have any actual walls.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It was odd. And is there anything else that you wanted to add about the key findings or important facts?
SPEAKER_00Well, I just wanted to add that in addition to the things I mentioned, currently, there is a lot of research coming out about neurodiversity and sensory processing and how that impacts classrooms. And so, especially researchers who are looking at ADHD, autism, trauma experiences, chronic stress related to poverty or racism, and giftedness with overexcitabilities. All students who are having kind of intersections with these aspects of neurodiversity can experience a classroom in a very intense way. And so when you're talking about universal design for learning, I certainly think like the sensory elements of the classroom should be taken into consideration.
SPEAKER_01This is so interesting, Laura. And I love that it's cross-topic. We get really pigeonholed, probably in every different area, not just education. But I love that you've looked into all these different areas and how important because this sounds like it's something pretty novel to the field of education and research. I'm so grateful you're doing this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thank you. What's odd is that it's it's novel in education, but it's absolutely not in like hospitality. If you think about like going to a wellness spa or a fancy restaurant or a nice hotel, these are all things that these spaces have already been using. And hospitals have been using a lot of biophilic elements as well.
SPEAKER_01So let's move into the what teachers can do. What are two to three practices or strategies they could try in their classroom, going from, I guess, any type of building, but a traditional classroom and implementing this?
SPEAKER_00The easy way to describe it is subtract, organize, add. So first, subtract things from the walls. What you have on the walls doesn't necessarily need to be up there. So sometimes you'll have a curriculum that requires anchor charts or mapping of certain things. But for instance, if you're using a literacy curriculum that requires anchor charts be up, those images in the anchor chart could be made into a bookmark. And the bookmark could be given to a child, right? And then they have it in their book so they can reference the material they need when they need it. It's not something that's up all the time, but it's there for them exactly when they need it. So that's that's the subtract part. The second part is organize. Once those things are taken down, organize what is in your room and organize it in a way that it is accessible and structured to support independence. Independent choice making is one of the most powerful tools for developing executive function. And so you want to think about how you can create a space that allows for that choice making and that independence, gathering the supplies that needed to be gathered to complete a task and then putting things away and moving on to the next task at the child's pace. And then third, I would say simple biophilic twos. So this is where you bring in your natural elements. This is where you bring in some plants where you maybe look at your rug and you think, do I need all the letters of the alphabet on my rug? Or would the simple wheat and sage rug do here? You know? So that is kind of the three things to put together. And then as you're looking as you're at your space, just a guiding question can be is this space supporting focused or is it competing with it? Wow.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I'm thinking of all the things I either had in my classroom or it was suggested I put up, right? So even outside of just the decorations, I remember I had like uh data for data chats work that they had done, word wall. I taught elementary, right? So definitely my anchor charts were all over the place. I had a science word wall, a math word wall. I had alphabet letters. And I remember, I don't even know if I was taught this or it was just, you know, the way things are done, but it's like, oh, that will help because there are all of these things around that they could lean on and use.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. It's a misapplication of a dual coding theory that children need to like see and hear things to learn them. And they do and they can, but that doesn't have to remain up all the time because the cost of it remaining up all the time is greater than having the material when they need it. And so some things that I have done as well as an elementary school teacher are just create a writing folder. So all the words that we're learning in science, all of the words that were that would be on a word wall, those vocabulary are present and available to the child when they are writing, and they are the ones able to access it. I worked with a teacher who had these really cool frames that you could put different artwork into. And so, you know, sometimes you have classroom jobs in in your class. And so she had a job that was art curator, and a child would choose different, you know, work samples or things that children had done and put them in these frames. And so it was reflecting the work of the students, you know, it was a student-centered space, but done so in a way that like highlighted the work, not lost it because there was so much visual competition. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01And thinking too about print-rich classrooms for Head Start or dual language, if you are subtracting the majority of it, is that still something that would be okay or recommended to have up?
SPEAKER_00That's a good question. I mean, I think in my perspective from what I'm working on, I think that the print richness is beneficial because the child is attending to it. And the child is having difficulty attending when their visual field is full. And so, you know, the studies I mentioned before from Fisher and Godwin would have a teacher reading a book to children, and then they would measure how much content was retained in these different um conditions, and more content is retained when the visual field is less dense. And that has to do with encoding. Like the very first step of learning is encoding new information. And so if you want to boost encoding and be sure children are getting it in the first place, you want that rich print to be in front of them and you don't want to be competing against it. That makes so much sense.
SPEAKER_01I love it because it's it seems so obvious now that you're talking about it. So I I really I appreciate you talking about it. Do you have any more concrete examples of ways that you've seen this done really well?
SPEAKER_00I mean, it you know, certainly Montessori classrooms do it very well. And if anybody wants to visit a Montessori classroom, you can see it in action. But there are also like wonderful videos by both the American Montessori Society and Association of Montessori International, where you can find videos of Montessori classrooms and kind of see how this works. I think also something to consider is that when you're working with very young children, they are going to want to touch and feel and engage with the things that are colorful. And so you want to make the things that you want them to do colorful and available, not things on the wall that they shouldn't be touching.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's interesting too, because I think that, at least my experience with secondary school, this is just sort of something that happens. A lot of middle school classrooms are a lot more bare than elementary school classes.
SPEAKER_00And Fisher and Godwin say in their study, why do we insist on putting the youngest children with the least developed attentional systems in the most distracting classrooms? It's really a misunderstanding of more is more. It's not.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You have mentioned already, you know, about different grade levels, content areas, and student populations. Is there anything else you want to talk about about where this research might be especially impactful?
SPEAKER_00It is especially impactful for the younger students, for students who are still developing their attentional systems and still working on their sensory integration. Some big things that came up in the research that I think about all the time now are embodied cognition and allostatic load. Embodied cognition is the idea that you're not just learning with your brain. Your brain is not separate from your body. You learn with your body. And this is something we know about young children. Um, but I see it all the time now in classrooms. And then the other concept is allostatic load, and that's the physiological and psychological stress that just accumulates. And we all have different thresholds for that allostatic load. And when it gets too high, you get a lot of dysregulation. And so I'm thinking about ways that I can bring down allostatic load so I can get really nice focus and concentration and calm in my classroom. And interestingly, there's a project called Student Speak. It's a project of Harvard. They interview high school students about like what they would really like in a school, what they really want their classrooms to be. And interestingly, I found that the high school students said they wanted their classrooms and their school to be calm. A lot of times, elementary teachers may think like this should be. Joyful and colorful and bright and big. And I certainly don't want to diminish anybody's joy, but I think that calm is really powerful, especially for students who are sensitive and already have a pretty low allostatic load threshold.
SPEAKER_01And especially too with the amount of stress and focus we have on high-stakes testing now in schools. We're putting so much on little kids that anything we can do to limit that to the sensory input we're giving them would be amazing. And I feel like this is an easy win to take stuff off your walls.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I do, I agree with you. And I think you're probably familiar with the study that came out from the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K program. Um, it was a longitudinal study by Vanderbilt. And they've been studying these children who participated in the free pre-K program. Actually, each iteration is finding more and more negative effects from it. Yeah. And the discussion, the researchers posit that the push for academic work and rote memorization of numerals and letters is a missed opportunity where preschool could instead be really developing some of the strong skills that undergrad executive functions. So this could be time spent developing sustained attention and working memory and being able to make a choice and complete a task. And so if we're really serious about attention and regulation, then this work has something to contribute to that. Absolutely. That's really interesting.
SPEAKER_01So wrapping up, uh, how has your own thinking as a researcher educator changed because of this work?
SPEAKER_00Two different things. I'm looking a lot more at students as reacting to situations rather than behavioral issues being internal to the student. So it's it's a reaction to space or systems or things like that. And then how do we how do we support that? So I think that shift in my teacher brain has been really important to stepping into some of the more difficult behaviors. Something else I think about all the time is, and it is not new, it is old, Pablo Friere's concept of the banking model of education and just how pervasive it is. I can give you a very specific example. The school that I'm working at has adopted a popular math curriculum, which shall remain nameless. And part of the curriculum is that there is an entire wall of display of different math concepts, and the display changes each month. And there are multiple pieces that are called workouts. And so each piece changes each day, and this workout is supposed to um help the children develop mathematical understanding over time. It's called interleaving, which is a good idea. But the way the curriculum is written, the person doing the workout, doing all the changes, is the teacher. And the children are are merely watching. And so immediately I was like, no, no, no, no, no. This is going to be a student responsibility. And so I think a lot about connecting back to that banking system. I think about in classrooms who's doing the work. Is it the teacher and the child is listening, or is the child doing the work and the teacher's there to support? And the structure of the classroom connects to that as well.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. I love thinking about how to make it more student-centered as well. I even struggle with that as a professor for pre-service teachers. Sometimes I'm like, I just want to give them the answer to what I need them to know and what I want them to get from this. And I need to stop doing that. I need to model what I want them to do with their kids studying next in this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a great question. So at Hopkins, you do three projects. One of them is like the really involved literature review, which is what I have accomplished. And then the second project is an application of that literature review. And so I created a website that has all of this information. It has short videos, so busy teachers can just watch the short videos and get everything they need. But it also has all of the research that I've done with references and everything, and then links to contemporary scholars. So you can go as deep or as um shallow as you would like to go on the website, depending on your time. And now I'm just beginning my third project, which I'm really excited about. So when I looked for research about how and why teachers make the decisions they make about what to put in their classroom, I found three studies. Three whole studies. Three whole studies. There are lots of studies asking like what is an ideal classroom or just going into a teacher's classroom and observing what they have, but actually asking teachers the how and why is very limited in research. And so what I am doing is a collaborative action research at the school where I teach. So I'm working with traditional teachers in a traditional setting and interviewing them about their understanding of space, how they've come to their beliefs, and also the factors that play into how they design their space. And then we are coming together as a collective to have four different collaborative sessions. They may or may not make changes to their classrooms. That's up to them. And then at the end, I'll interview them again about their spaces.
SPEAKER_01Wow. I can't wait wait to read that. Because it is, it's, I think it's just something that that's a given, right? My area of focus is special education. That's the teacher education program that I work in. And so when I teach the low incidence course about students with severe disabilities, we talk a lot about the space, but other than that, we don't talk about it at all. I don't think.
SPEAKER_00And and Montessori is the complete opposite. You are talking about space all the time because the curriculum is a living physical thing. So it's it's it's just such a huge difference.
SPEAKER_01It is. I do see, I'm in South Florida and I have seen an increase in Montessori schools down here. A couple districts are sort of piloting public Montessori schools, and there is an entire Montessori charter that is gaining some footing down here. So because before that, it was just Montessori private school at whatever cost they were asking for, and mostly pre-K too. Right. So it will be interesting to see if the conversation does change over time with that influx. Wow, because I'm thinking, how do we get this out there? Because again, this feels like such an easy thing for teachers to do that could make a huge difference.
SPEAKER_00Right, right, right. And um, my website is www.designed for. And it has like all this information for free. I'm not selling anything, like it's just it's knowledge out there. And it also includes a policy brief. So teachers can share the policy brief with teacher educators. They could share it with administrators or district leaders so this information can get out there because it's important that it is research and information and not a curricula to buy, right? It's not a product. And I think that what has gotten us into the situation we're in with these super dense walls is um is consumerism and commercial products that um districts are are buying.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I'll absolutely in the show notes for this link that website, link the articles you're talking about so people can get more information on this. I guess that's sort of answered where educators can go to learn more about your work as well. I don't know if there's anything else that you really wanted to share.
SPEAKER_00I I really think that it would be lovely if in pre-service training, when conversations take place about what has been called classroom management, but I really love the concept of like classroom culture when those conversations are taking place about classroom culture to really consider how the physical space impacts the attention and the regulation of young children because it's a powerful tool and it takes the ownership of that outside of the little bodies and puts it into the space. And I think that that just creates so much more possibility for young children.
SPEAKER_01I love that, Laura. I am absolutely going to pitch that to my dean. Thank you. Is I mean, is there anything else that that you want to add?
SPEAKER_00I just welcome people to reach out. And you talked about um public Montessori. There is a huge, healthy, growing, wonderful network of public Montessori. You can check out their work at um the National Center of Montessori in the public sector. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Flores. It was so nice to sit and talk with you today. Yes, you too.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for listening to the Research to Practice Gap. If this episode challenged your thinking or gave you something practical to try, share it with a fellow educator. You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook at the Research to PracticeGap and subscribe anywhere you listen to your podcast so you never miss an episode. If you have any questions, feedback, or would like to be a patron on the podcast, you can reach out to us at research to practicepod at gmail.com. Research doesn't change classrooms, educators do. Until next time, I keep reflecting, I keep questioning, and keep reading.