Small Whiteboard Questions

“Small whiteboards” are whiteboards that are about 30 x 40 cm (12 x 16 in) that are used by all students individually. For class sizes of 5-50 students, it is feasible for a teacher to ask a question and in a few minutes walk a round the classroom to see what all students have written on their whiteboards. Whiteboards can be held up for the rest of the class to see and discuss.

Benefits

• Inexpensive, low-tech
• Allows for free-response (text, diagrams, graphs) & multiple-choice answers
• All students participate
• Can be spontaneous or planned
• Instructor can respond & adjust to student answers
• Use with Peer Instruction techniques, where students discuss their reasoning with each other
• Wakes students up
• Engages students' prior knowledge
• Signals to students they have relevant knowledge that can be refined and built-on

Tips & Tricks:

• Establish a norm of a student writing a question mark on their board if they have no idea what to write down. If you see a sea of question marks, then you know that many students will benefit from a review - or that they don't understand the question!
• Remind students to write in a large font size so that whiteboard can be read from a distance. Students tend to write too small.
• In a large classroom, place whiteboards under a document camera so that everyone can see them. In a small classroom, line-up boards on the chalk/pen tray.
• Ask students to make a habit of getting a small whiteboard, a pen, and an eraser as they walk into the classroom. This saves time, especially for spontaneous small whiteboard questions.
• Make the boards more anonymous by collecting a bunch of boards and bring them to the front of the room for discussion.
• Collect boards from around the room “Write down something you know about...?”) to guide your review lecture of a topic. Your students will appreciate that your lecture is building on your students' ideas.
• Compare & contrast boards to discuss connections between multiple representations, details/subtleties in notation, and strategies for recognizing errors.
• Stopping in the middle of a derivation and asking all student to write the “next step” of a derivation on their whiteboards can immediately focus a student's attention on the how to do the calculation. Many students watch derivations as spectators and fail to recognize that derivations in current course will be problems assigned in the next course. Students benefit from any signal that derivations should be studied and understood.
• You can intentionally select the boards from students who don't otherwise participate much. Holding up the board of a student and using it as a positive example can help make the student feel more welcome & valued.