The ultimate formative feedback? Tales from the whiteboard classroom.

The idea is extremely (and deceptively) simple: Cover your classroom with whiteboards, then think about how to get students to spend most of their time standing at the whiteboards, rather than sitting at a desk listening to you talk from the front.

A "fish eye" view of my whiteboard classroom - Dec 2017. 

There are 7 whiteboards (not all are shown here) and the room comfortably fits 16 students, and 24 at a pinch. In mid 2018 I removed half the desks to make more space.

This was the challenge posed to me by Tricia Forester (University of Wollongong) at the 2017 MANSW Conference, referencing the "Building Thinking Classrooms" work of Peter Liljedahl.  Well actually, Tricia was more clever than that - she posed interesting maths problems to groups of teachers, providing a "vertical non-permanent surface" space to try it out.  It didn't take long to see the power. When I got back to school, my principal gave me permission to try it out for real, transforming a smallish classroom no-one really liked into a fully fledged whiteboard room with 7 large boards.

It's now been nearly one and half years that I've been working in a whiteboard room for my senior classes (unfortunately I can't fit 30 junior class students in the room) and there's no looking back! There are many things to share about the experience and why it supports such powerful learning, but for now I'll confine myself to a few big ideas.

The power of the whiteboard room is the way it provides continuous formative feedback - to both the teacher and the student. In fact, for the teacher, it's overwhelming - you will be bombarded by feedback. You instantly see what students can and cannot do, you see the approaches they take and you hear many simultaneous conversations discussing the problem. For the whole lesson. It's almost too much feedback. In the whiteboard room, we have a "live stream" answer to the "How do I know what my students learned?" question. I don't have to give them a diagnostic test every day - I can see it every minute. This continuous formative feedback allows me to dynamically alter the lesson according to needs of the students. It's a bit of a high-wire act some days, and often full of unexpected surprises, but it makes for exciting and rewarding lessons that students really enjoy and demonstrably produces learning. I'll write some more soon about the strategies I've developed to dynamically respond to so much continuous feedback.

Students working in "interleaved" mode on a problem.  The students worked out on their own that harder integration questions are easier done in "parallel" by two students - but they still end up correcting each others work! Different colour markers let me quickly see how (or if)  students are working together.

The student engagement factors at play in the whiteboard room, especially when combined with the Visibly Random Groups technique, are truly astounding. I have seen students who previously had difficulty making friends,  difficulty communicating, who were disengaged, lacked confidence, transformed by the whiteboard room experience. The combination of the social interaction, the risk free "non-permanent" writing surfaces and physical movement in the whiteboard room seems to work magic on students. One day a learning support teacher came into the room and asked a notoriously lazy student why he liked the room so much, he replied "Because I can't sleep in the back of the classroom any more!".  Everyone, without exception, is engaged in the whiteboard room - there's no option to not be involved *.

We also use the whiteboard room for our before school "Year 8 Algebra Workshop" - a weekly session for students who need a little more support with algebra. The whiteboards allow them to work together while developing fluency. The social interaction and support created by the whiteboard room is an essential component of this program which seeks to build confidence and a growth mindset attitude.

Is this "student-led" or "teacher-led" teaching? I think it's a blended approach, and a good example of why we need to get beyond using labels.  However I do think I need to be clear: while students are doing most of the work, the lessons for my senior classes are very strongly guided by me. The student feedback steers the lesson according to what they need or where they are ready to go, but I'm still the "guide", it's just I don't "teach from the front". Several times during the lesson I will regroup the class in front of a student whiteboard I selected because it has a "teachable moment" and then "microteach" to summarise or clarify, and then teach a small amount of new content as required so students can continue with the next set of problems.  Other times, a carefully selected sequence of problems means I don't need to do that - the learning follows naturally, and I can "spot teach" to the groups who need more scaffolding. My lesson designs have changed significantly. Because the students are doing so much work, the whiteboard room forces me to seriously consider the "What will my students be doing?" question. I spend much more time on thinking about examples and problems than on what I will say. 

It's scary to change how you teach, and even after all this time, I sometimes worry I'm doing something too different from the other classes at my school. This year, the whiteboard room is less available to me (because I'm encouraging other teachers to use it!), and due to timetabling, while I still have the whiteboard room for my Year 12 class, I can only use the room with my Year 11 class for four out of every thirteen periods - so it's been interesting to see what happens when you mix things up.  Sometimes old habits resurface, and I'm tempted not to use the whiteboard room when it's available - because it is easier to stand at the front, or you just haven't had the time to plan a whiteboard room lesson sequence. But much to my (pleasant) surprise, my Year 11 students complain and insist we go to the whiteboard room, so we just do it. And you know, when we finish the period, it's so clear they were right - it's a better lesson, even if I hadn't planned it as a whiteboard room lesson.

Some starting resources and ideas:

Laura Wheeler's @wheeler_laura blog post Building thinking classrooms is an excellent starting point.  Here's a handy link to all her posts with the "thinking classrooms" tag.

Can't set up whiteboards in your room? Try out Magic Whiteboard to transform any wall into a vertical non-permanent surface.

Peter Liljedahl's @pgliljedahl papers "Building Thinking Classrooms (pdf)" and Visibly Random Groups (pdf) are highly readable and motivating!  Liljedhal's "Thinking Classrooms" framework is much more than just vertical non-permanent surfaces (VNPS) and visibly random groups (VRG). For me this is start of a journey.

* If a student really wants "to be alone", I'll give them a break and let them work solo for a while, hoping they will change their mind later, or next period. They always do.  Also at the end of a really hot day, we might decide to sit on chairs for a change - sadly the whiteboard room doesn't have air conditioning.