Whiteboarding:

Whiteboarding is a both thinking tool and a platform for focused student discourse. Working in small groups, students “develop their model” for how a given phenomenon works. Using erasable markers these ideas change as they develop. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers. Students are instructed to use evidence from a given experiment to guide their thinking. These group ideas will be shared with the larger class and the validity of these ideas will then be challenged or reinforced through the whiteboard meeting that follows.

Whiteboard Meetings:

Whiteboard Meetings are a method of student discourse where students share the models they developed within their smaller groups with a larger audience. The larger audience then has the opportunity to view multiple perspectives of the same concept.

Students engage in using evidence to construct ideas, build on the ideas of others, challenge ideas, and reflect and adapt ideas according to given feedback. The teacher is part of the circle and acts as a facilitator to make sure the discussion moves towards a deeper understanding of targeted concepts.

Below is an example of a whiteboard meeting with a group of 8th graders. In the inner circle, 12 students are actively engaged in the discussion, and in the outer circle, 12 students are “note-takers” who are in charge of recording the ideas presented in the discussion. The students will then rotate and switch roles for the next whiteboard meeting.

The total time for this activity was 35 minutes including transition time. Students had 5 minutes to observe the phenomenon, 15 minutes to develop their models on whiteboards, and 12 minutes for the whiteboard meeting.


Summary of “Our Model so Far”

In this whiteboarding lesson, students developed an understanding (a conceptual model) of pressure. Previous to this lesson, these 8th graders had not studied pressure. Most were familiar with this word, but could not define it or explain it. Here students very effectively defined pressure as a “pushing force acting on a surface” and they also recognized that particles have the role of the “thing that is doing the pushing.” They also identified the cause-and-effect relationship between “more particles cause more pushing and so greater pressure.” The learning objective for the teacher in this lesson was for her students to “develop a model” for pressure. In the lesson that follows this one, she then had her students apply this model for pressure to sound waves. By first having her students develop a deep understanding of pressure, she could then have her students build on this model as they use it to explain how sound travels and the role of particles and pressure in this process.

Notice that the students are the ones who are defining and explaining things. The teacher has the role of clarifying, rephrasing what students are saying, and guiding the discussion with questions that help the students focus.

With this type of Modeling Instruction lesson, students often comment that they enjoy being the ones to “figure it out” and that this process makes them “feel like a real scientist.” In addition to developing an understanding of pressure (the lesson content or knowledge objective) they are also developing their critical thinking and communication skills. This is an example of the 3-Dimensional pedagogy inherent in NGSS where students “learn science by doing science.” The cross-cutting concepts embedded here “cause and effect” and “energy and matter” will continue to transfer and build in later lessons and later years.

As students engage in group discourse they also learn to value that there is a diversity of ideas in any given group. In the whiteboard meeting, this becomes clear as they see that others have ideas that add value to the discussion. They are actively practicing all of the attributes of the IB Learner Profile.

Note: Many of the girls in this session did not choose to engage in this discussion as they knew it was being videotaped. The teacher is working on ways to keep student discourse balanced with girls, and boys taking equal roles as well as introvert vs extrovert personalities. The use of colored papers for taking turns is one strategy that she is using in addition to others for tracking discussions and helping students to be more aware of their contributions to these discussions.