Coupled with erasable pens, mini whiteboards are simple and effective learning tools. They allow students to record and share their thinking, and teachers to instantly check pupils’ understanding.
✔ Increased student engagement - All students are able and required to present a response.
✔ Improved accuracy of assessment - You can get more responses from more students more quickly.
✔ Instant feedback - You can provide instant verbal feedback to students.
✔ Multiple response formats - Students can respond with words, numbers, symbols, colours etc.
✔ Improved misconception detection - Scanning the boards can allow teachers to quickly spot common misconceptions.
✔ Encourage risk taking - Students can erase and refine answers before showing them.
✔ Facilitate pair or group work - Boards can be used by multiple students to collate thoughts or arrive at agreed answers.
Click the grey boxes to view the content
There are benefits to including mini-whiteboard use within your planning considerations. Planning when you check understanding and anticipating the common misconceptions and resulting feedback will help with the effectiveness of the assessment and the flow of the lesson.
There are benefits to formally agreeing how students will use the whiteboards. Standardising the font size and colour will aid with consistency and also your visibility of students' responses. Typical guidance is to fill the whole board and to write in blue or black.
It is also beneficial to standardise the way that students reveal their answers. Allowing the students to show their work when they are ready leads to students raising their boards at different times, moderating their answers because of their peers and makes visibility and feedback more difficult. Common guidance is that students hide their answers until the end of a "3-2-1 Show me" verbal countdown from the teacher. It is also important to be clear about what happens to the board whilst in the air (no wobbling) and how long they remain on show (long enough to check understanding and identify common misunderstandings).
Effective whiteboard assessment relies on the accurate use of the students' responses and of course this relies on the teacher being able to view all responses. Ensure that at the end of the countdown you are positioned within the classroom so you can see all boards and that they remain in view long enough for you to check understanding and identify common misconceptions.
Once all boards are raised and visible you can start to assess the student's understanding. This is where the already established protocols of response and reveal format will pay off and enable you to make accurate assessments. It is also where the identification of possible misconceptions during the planning process will help you quickly assess the whole class.
Once responses are on show you have the opportunity to provide instant feedback to individual students and the class as whole. Feedback can be prompts to enable the students to refresh or improve their answer or extension questions to add further challenge.
Reviewing the boards will enable you to check the understanding of the class and identify any common misunderstandings. This information can then be used to either make changes to the current lesson or used in the planing process of future lessons. It may be that during the "You Do" phase of the learning you uncover common errors which you can then unpick and explain by returning to "I Do" or "We Do" before moving back to a practice phase.
✗ Not having boards readily available and functional - Each class should have a designated set of well maintained boards, pens and erasers.
✗ Getting them out on special occasions - Boards should be a standard piece of classroom equipment for every student.
✗ Not modelling the effective use of the boards - Students need to know the specifics of what to write, how big to write, when to show, how to show etc.
✗ Not using the data - Teachers need to actually use the results of whiteboard work to check understanding, provide feedback and re-shape the lesson(s) if required.
