Ever feel skeptical that classroom furniture can have a big impact on how your students learn? While it’s not exactly a scientific study, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette has an insightful interview with the director of the new animated Star Wars movie, Dave Filoni. Among other things, he remembers and appreciates how his first grade teacher had an easel ready for him to draw on when he finished his in-class assignments. It was his first memory of feeling support for his artistic instincts and helped serve as an inspiration for his career.

It just goes to show that any easel, whether it’s an artist’s easel or a teacher easel, can provide a strong incentive for kids to learn by promoting creativity. The unique designs often combine the best elements of white boards and bulletin boards and can make a teacher easel an ideal place to teach students to read, write and draw. Many of today’s models have paper hooks that can turn your teacher easel into a big flipchart for drawing, writing, and penmanship lessons, while others feature chalkboard and white board surfaces for more traditional applications where teachers and students can show what they know. There are even mobile teacher easels with rolling casters and storage compartments for props, supplies and other items teachers need to keep their lessons going and their students engaged. Overall, the flexible format of a teacher easel can often enable educators to mix their own writing with storybooks, pictures, postings and graphics for a truly multi-faceted learning experience that has students using every part of their brain.

Educational easels have certainly come a long way since the days when a young Dave Filoni doodled in his first grade classroom. And at the rate technology has grown in the past couple decades, could a teacher easel with an interactive whiteboard be too far away? Until then, today’s teacher easels can do more than enough to inspire a new generation of artists and leaders.