Today I visited North Berwick High School. I had a great day, but only managed to visit half the department. This was partly because I got caught up in Ski trip admin first thing - getting caught up in stuff is always a risk when you are out of classes in your own school. A cheque for over £60,000 will be going off to Interski tomorrow!
Craig, Lorraine and I had an interesting the chat about the difference between those uses of the whiteboards which merely entertain our pupils and those which really enhance their learning. Craig gave a good example of the latter (one for which neither of us claim the credit!):
Take a problem that is solved with a standard technique, say the Cosine Rule for example, and write up the solution in pieces on a flipchart. Then take the pieces and jumble them up in a box below the problem. The task for pupils is to drag the pieces out of the box to reassemble a correct solution to the problem.
Lorraine was a bit sceptical that she would be able to produce such a resource, but after a couple of minutes of guidance from me she shooed me away and emerged 10 minutes later with the completed flipchart.
I also had a chat with Donald before lunch about what constitutes effective use of the board. We agreed that as time goes by we are thinking less about “cool tricks” on the whiteboards, and more about what you might call “effective learning episodes.” To illustrate how effective doesn’t always mean “all singing all dancing” Donald showed me a diagram he had on a flipchart page that looked something like this:
It doesn’t look much does it? But Donald does something effective with it: he points at an angle and asks a pupil to name it. If they get it right, they guess the size of the angle then come up to the board and measure it (using the protractor tool). If their guess was close enough, they get to point at an angle and ask someone else in the class to name it……..
Now this is pretty basic stuff, but very effective.
After lunch, I observed a lesson with Donald and his S3 top credit class. I found this particularly interesting as I teach the top credit class in the other half of the year-group. Donald used the board to start the lesson with a simple, effective activity that involved the pupils in coming up to the board and collectively completing a puzzle about highest common factors. What particularly impressed me about Donald’s style was the extent to which he gave the class the freedom to explore possibilities, make mistakes and disagree with each other, then trusted them to reach the right solution through discussion. He never said “yes, that’s right”, but by the end of the task most of the class had agreed that the solution on the board was correct. None of this has anything to do with an interactive whiteboard really - the whiteboard simply allowed Donald to prepare this activity in advance in a way that would have been awkward with an old roller whiteboard.
Categories: