Mini-whiteboards: start from the back (inspired by Matt Swain)

More tips from Craig Barton

Video transcript

hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now we’ve spoken a lot about mini whiteboard use on tips for teachers by the likes of adam boxer and i’ve shared an idea that i got from danny quinn about whiteboard routines but in this video i just want to share a really quick tip that i just think is so so powerful right so when you use mini whiteboards one problem i found is it can be quite visually overwhelming for the teacher you say three two one show me your whiteboard and all of a sudden you’re hit with a c of 25 white boards and you’re like whoa okay and you’re trying to check every one trying to get a sense of whole class understanding so that then you can respond so how do you solve this problem well one way of course is you say to the kids okay let’s hold them up one at a time but there’s two problems with that one it’s going to take flipping ages and two there’s a chance that once the kids have started to look at someone else’s answer before they’ve shown their own they do a quick cheeky rub it out and change it and so on and you get this by a sample what’s the solution well step forward matt swain i saw this on twitter and i thought that is obvious and brilliant so feel free to just pause the video and read matt’s matt’s tweet so the key to this is this staggered approach so you say three two one back row show me all your white boards okay put them down okay three two one middle row put them down three two one front row and that’s provided a useful sequence of diagrams there so we can see exactly what’s going on now this of course solves or certainly reduces this t this visual overload problem that we may suffer from as a teacher but it doesn’t cause that other problem that i alluded to because of course the kids in the middle row on the front row unless they physically turn around they can’t see what the row behind them have shown so you don’t get you buy a sample you get to take in much more data as a teacher and i just think it’s brilliant it really kind of supercharges mini whiteboard use so what do you think of that i absolutely love that one comment how you might use it if you found that useful like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and visit tipsforteachers.co.uk for more tips like this thanks for watching