Those Whiteboards
I never liked writing on blackboards, whiteboards, or easel pads. I have, of necessity, done so when teaching, especially when I started out and lacked the technology or the skills to use technology that might have replaced writing information on a vertical surface while I taught. Even then I knew that a lot of my time was spent chalking out words and phrases, which required me to turn my back to the class, breaking the face-to-face contact repeatedly. I even taught in one classroom where the blackboard was so old that it was actually made of slate, with all the roughness and bumps nature gave it. The idea, I suppose, was that my writing denoted the most important points and helped the students focus their efforts, but I’m very skeptical of that now. I think that as a student note taker, I came to learn better when I had to discern for myself which ideas were most pertinent.
So I was initially puzzled when I asked my own students to use the whiteboards in our classrooms to share their ideas with their peers and they seemed more engaged with board-writing than I ever was. They seem to particularly appreciate listing things. The charm escapes me. Then one day I asked some of them why they liked writing on the board in addition to discussing their insights, and they answered that it helped them take notes when they could copy things from the board. The skeptic in me grumbled, but then I remembered that this wasn’t the board work of an individual authority. And, moreover, it was the students discriminating for themselves which ideas were most important. Here are some typical prompts of the sort:
List the seven clear advantages to Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” brought out in the essay.
According to the poet Basho, what are the possible advantages and disadvantages in being “attached” to the world?
Draw a Venn diagram on the board to show how the marginalized categories of race, gender, class, and religion may overlap and see where you would place Hugh, Deborah, Harriet Jacobs, Tom from Typee, Equiano, William Bradford, and Ben Franklin.
List the cultural changes that Zitkala-Ša describes being forced to make at the missionary school. Why do you suppose her school wanted these changes to be made?
I’ve not grown any fonder of writing on boards, but then, I’m not doing the bulk of that writing and as long as I’m convinced that there is pedagogical value in this process, I’ll continue to include prompts that will encourage writing out students’ responses, and I’ll ask for a list from time to time, too.
