Mini-whiteboards - Tips for Teachers Top 5s

Listen to the audio on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

The five tips are:

Consider getting A3 mini-whiteboards
Make use of both sides of the mini-whiteboard
Control the flow of information
Question students who show you a blank board
Use mini-whiteboards to help check book work

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Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton and welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about effective mini whiteboard use. Just as a reminder, this is available both as an audio podcast and also was a video. And if you want to access either medium just have a look either in the podcast show notes or in the video description or on tips for teachers and you’ll find links to both so you can share it with your colleagues however you choose. Right mini whiteboards a controversial topic for for some teachers, their regular users. And a lot of the things I say may be deemed as obvious. For other teachers. You may be many whiteboard sceptics or perhaps mini whiteboard dabblers, and maybe there’ll be something useful for you in here. Let’s see. And now I should say that in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I share 22 ideas to improve the use of mini whiteboards. In this video and podcast, I’ve chosen my favourite five of those, so hopefully they’ll be useful to you.

So tip number one fairly standard when I’m lucky enough to visit classrooms is to see either a four mini whiteboards or even a five mini whiteboards. I’ll tell you why. If you’ve never tried an a three, one, your life will never be the same again. They’re flippin brilliant. And two reasons why a three whiteboards are good, students can either write more on them, and hence they become much more versatile, they’re more suited in maths for solving more complex problems or in subjects where students write a lot more students can obviously fit more on the board. Or students can write bigger on them, which makes your job when you use them for checking for a whole class understanding much easier. So if you’ve never tried a three before, and perhaps you’re about to order some new ones, or you can convince the person who holds all the cash, just try get a set of a three, you will never look back, I promise you.

Tip number two, this is one of my favourites, this, you know, make use of both sides of the mini whiteboard most mini whiteboards that you’ve got have blank on both sides, or maybe a little bit right and on one of the sides use both of them. What often happens is that students do all their writing and working out on one side of the mini whiteboard. So here’s an example here. Imagine I’ve asked students to expand those double brackets they’ve done their work in out, but they’ve also put their answer. Now when they hold that up, and imagine there’s 30 kids holding up, it’s very difficult for me as the teacher to pick out that answer amidst all the working out. Whereas if instead if I say to students do your work out on one side, then write your final answer nice and big on the other side, students can then hold up the side with the final answer on my check for understanding is there much more simple for me? And then if I then choose to ask a student to articulate why they think the answer is this, they can then use the other side to talk me through they’re working. So working out or notes on one side, the final answer on the other side that they hold on makes a big, big difference.

Tip number three, I really liked this one as well control the flow of information. If you’ve got 25 or 30 students in your class and you say three to one, hold up the board, show me the answers. Visually, it’s very overwhelming to take in all that information, particularly in the kind of five seconds we normally allow ourselves to do it. But if you control the flow of information, it’s much more simple as a teacher to take in what the students are showing you and pick out useful things. So if you’ve got your desks arranged in rows, I say to my students, okay, back row, have your boards three to one, show me your answers. I can then spend a few seconds scanning the background, as I say, That’s okay boards now middle row, have you bought three to one? Show me your answer. So I control the flow of information. Of course, the same thing is going to work. However your room set out if it’s a horseshoe start on the left and the centre then the right, and so on and so forth, but controlling the flow of information, asking one portion of your class to show you them put their boards down and the next portion, I just find I can I can pick out much more interesting answers and get a much better feel of my classes on the standing that way.

Tip number four, the notorious blank board. If you say three to one, show me your answers and a student holds up a blackboard it tells you nothing. Is that due to a lack of understanding? Or is it due to a lack of effort you need to know so whenever you then do your subsequent questioning, question the students who hold up the blank boards first and find out why. Tom, why haven’t you put anything on your board? If Tom says he doesn’t know? Well, then you can use all extra strategies and we’ll talk about these in a subsequent video you can say to tumble What do you know what you can go around the class and say, Okay, Michael, what do you think Emma? What do you think is so now back to you, Tom? Which of those answers do you think is the correct emoji, so on and so on. But the bottom line is, you want it to be effortful. You want the students to notice that if you ever put a blank board, that’s not the end of the story, you’re going to come to them and so on. And if they realise that actually, it’s a lot more hassle to put up a blank board and then be faced with a barrage of questioning, you’re going to filter out straightaway whether it is due to a lack of effort or a lack of understanding, and if in fact it is due to a lack of Understanding you can then help that student out. So questions students who hold up the Blackboard first, and kind of follow up ideas to this as well. You can say to students look, if you don’t know, don’t just put a blank board, either write me down, why don’t you know it? What’s confusing you? Or perhaps write me a question that you’d like to ask me, or write me something that you do know on there, you just want the students to get some information down because a blank board tells you nothing. And the more you start questioning students who have blank boards, and the more you start supporting them with things that they should put down instead, if they’re stuck, the more useful information you’re gonna get.

Final one, I think this is my favourite. Now if I had to pick one, I use mini whiteboards to help chequebook work. Now, certainly maths as a maths teacher, the majority of the work my students do is in their books. The problem with that is it makes it quite difficult to do a whole class check for understanding because students work is tied to their books, and the students kind of hold up their books, the writing is too small, and so on and so forth. So what I do instead is I use the mini whiteboard to help support this. So I’ll give you an example. So this is a classic kind of do now that you might do in maths last last and last topic last term last year. Imagine students are working their way through this, they do it in their books at the start of the lesson. And then you want to get a sense of whole class understanding for that. A second question, a regular polygon has 12 sides, what’s the size of one of the exterior angles? Now what typically happens, certainly my classroom for many years, is I’d say, Erica, what did you get for that question? At Tom, what do you get for that question? The problem with that is I’m only sampling one or two students, I want to get whole class understanding, but the works tied in their books. So what I do instead is they do the due now in their book. And then at the end, they say right, I’m gonna go through the answers now. And can you all write down nice and big? Not the work? And just the answer nice and big? Can you write the answer to that second question, all the students do it three to one, show me. And then I can get a sense of whole class understanding, as opposed to sampling just one or two students that I can say clean your board. Okay. Now, let’s do question three, I only ever do one check for understanding a per per board session, just so it’s nice and clear. And I can take in that information. This works as well, I should say when students are practising. So imagine students have been working through an exercise 10 questions to a question something like that. And you want to do whole class understanding, just pick out a pivotal question. Let’s say it’s question five, and say to the class, right, I’m about to go through the answers. And what you all on your boards, just write me down your final answer to Question five, hover it three to one, show me. And then you can make that decision faced with some reliable evidence whether you need to go through that question or whether we can just move on to something more complex, and so on. But getting book work onto the board in terms of the final answer, I think just works so so well.

So there’s five tips for improving mini whiteboard use. The usual thing I asked teachers to do here is to think which of those you already do you don’t need to worry about doing any more? But are there any of those that you either don’t do or you think you could do a bit better that you find interesting, can you when can you build those into your practice.

And if you found that useful, just a reminder, there’s 22 tips. We’re just scratching the surface here of mini whiteboard, use all available in my tips for teachers book. And also if you had to tip city you start coding UK, you might find for other things that you’ll find useful. And there’s my tips for teachers podcast where I interview guests from the wonderful world of education share tips with me, I also capture each of those interviews as videos that you can use to share with colleagues get loads of ideas there. And there’s also the tips of teachers newsletter, I email you a tip for you to try out in your classroom every Monday morning. And finally, there’s all my tips for teachers online courses, and face to face courses just in case you need a bit more support. Thanks so much for watching. Hope you found that useful.