How I’m Using Mini-Whiteboards
Mini-whiteboards are quickly becoming a staple of my classroom practice. I was recently observed and my feedback noted that some questions I asked would really suit a mini-whiteboard, why? because you can make the thinking of 25–30 students visible at one time. Instead of hearing from one or two students you can quickly view 25–30 answers and gain rich data to inform your next steps: will you move on, give further practice or begin a reteach?
Being able to scan the room and identify who still has misconceptions and who is becoming more confident with the information is such a powerful formative assessment strategy. It allows us to really be responsive teachers. Further, in ‘Principles of Instruction’, Barak Rosenshine notes in one of the principles that the best teachers ‘ask a large number of questions and check the responses of all students’, mini-whiteboards allow us to do this effectively, and who doesn't want to be one of the best teachers?
In short, like so many others, I can’t believe that mini-whiteboards were not already a staple of my classroom practice. Well, they definitely are now but how am I using them?
Ratio
I’ve written about the guiding concept of Ratio before but just to recap it is from TLAC by Doug Lemov and it really helps us think about our classroom practice in a meaningful way. Ratio involves:
Thinking Ratio-how hard are our students thinking
Participation Ratio-how many students are participating
Using mini-whiteboards is one of the best ways, in my mind, to drive up both participation and thinking ratio. It encourages all students to write something down meaning that they need to think about what to write. What’s more, writing really helps students encode learning into their long term memory. It also ensures that all students are participating in the lesson and the learning.
Shape the Path
One reason why many teachers opt not to use mini-whiteboards is because they can take a while to hand out, and can cause a bit of disruption if students are having to ask for a new pen or the whiteboard they have isn’t already clean. We can overcome these slight barriers by carefully considering before we use them exactly how we want them to be distributed and ensuring that there is sufficient equipment in the form of pens and rubbers.
To do this effectively we need to ‘shape the path’ and make the handing out of whiteboards and pens a fine art. For example, begin by front loading your expectations; ‘in silence you have 30 seconds to pass out the whiteboards’. For this to work I either have a basket with all of the whiteboards or pens in each row of seating or I prepare for 4–6 whiteboards to be piled up at the side of the row, so that they can be handed out quickly. I instruct students that if they need a new pen to stick up their hand and there will be a student assigned to hand out spare pens for those that need. Because I have front loaded my expectations -‘in silence…’- it is easy for the student to spot who needs a new pen.
Huge thanks to Adam Boxer for all of his work on this to really accelerate my practice and share terms like ‘shape the path’. You can hear Adam discuss this here: https://tipsforteachers.co.uk/mini-whiteboards/
Remember, Tom Bennett recommends that behaviour is a taught curriculum, so I explicitly teach the students how I want the whiteboards handed out and we practice this a few times to make it more and more efficient. Also, Bennett recommends that we constantly check for understanding and reteach our expectations where necessary. I’ve asked a few classes to ‘do it again’ when they haven’t quite met my expectations. I lacked confidence in doing this at the start of my career but I shouldn’t have had I been clearer on what I wanted. So take some time to script out how you want your mini-whiteboard routine to operate for your classroom and your students.
Check for Understanding
Checking for understanding is a staple in our teaching arsenal and we want top check, check and check again to help students encode learning into their long-term memory. I use mini-whiteboards to constantly check for understanding in a variety of ways. To check for correct spelling; to write out definitions; to give one word answers to definitions; for multiple choice questions such as hinge questions.
There is so much data to can get from using mini-whiteboards but there are a few considerations to make them really effective:
-Have a consistent command for their use. I instruct my students to write their answer, hover their board with the answer facing down and then hold them up when I say ‘boards up in 3,2,1’
-Ask students to write bigger if they need to or ask them to ‘do it again’ and hold up for review
-If a student doodles or writes something inappropriate have a consistent consequence that is equal to the indiscretion. Students quickly stop doing these things when there are clear consequences.
- Have a system for checking. I mix up who I check for example, I might say ‘when I say ‘yes’ put your board down’ and work through each one (I also mix up the order — for one I will check back to front and the next time I'll check front to back) or I may ask the students to put their boards down and cold call students for their thoughts.
Ways to use mini-whiteboards
In addition to checking for understanding there are so many other ways that I am using mini-whiteboards. These include; for formative writing prior to a turn & talk; working through a problem step by step and tasking the students with building up through note taking on each step for future reference; for completing ‘we do’ tasks during the I-We-You teaching sequence.
There is so much that you can do with a mini-whiteboard and I can’t believe I didn’t use them as much before. They are one of the best formative assessment tools around and certainly one of the best ways to gather rich and meaningful data on what your students know. They make thinking visible and allow you to check the responses of all of your students instead of just one or two.
How are you using mini-whiteboards?
