Can Glass Boards be too much of a Good Thing?

On the one hand, my literature students have become so proficient at their group work that most of them have already discovered their online prompts and started discussing them before I’ve officially “started” the class. I have often felt that saying “let’s get started” seems unnecessary. On the other hand, the students have also become proficient at writing material down on their glass boards as their thoughts coalesce, and I wouldn’t have given this so much thought myself, much less considered it a problem, until I had a conversation with one of my returning students from the previous semester.

I had asked her how her experience of active learning in groups in the traditional crowded classroom with the tiny desks compared with the similar experience now in the space designed for active learning with its pods of tables, its glass boards, and its relative spaciousness. She said that she liked the more comfortable space, but she thought that the students might be using the glass boards too much. We discussed how this might be so and then I asked her to send me an email with her thoughts on the subject. As she has graciously permitted me to share her thoughts on my blog, I’ll relate what she had to write.

“I believe that the …boards present a tantalizing temptation—but perhaps a negative one,” she writes. “When one crafts thoughts for the board, they think in a different manner than when presenting information from notes or memory, where one is more likely to think in sentences and complete thoughts and—extrapolating from this—to think more in depth about the subject and reach more critical analysis.” By way of context, let me insert here that I designed some of my prompts to require written responses on the board, but not all of them, and I, too, had noticed how persistent the groups had been about requesting dry-erase markers and outlining their responses on the boards. Up to this point, I had considered the extra board work ancillary to the discussion and perhaps an aid to people taking notes in class, but my student’s points are pertinent. Does making the comments on display the focal point of your group’s response alter or curtail deeper, critical discussion?

The traditional classroom, where my student had taken her earlier class with me, had a single whiteboard at the front of the class, and as such, it was much less inviting for students to write on. Nevertheless, those are the circumstances that my student said were “better at keeping everyone engaged.” In the present classroom, with its ample glass board space on every wall, my student writes that “it is easier for one person to be charged with writing on the board and dictating these notes, whereas speaking about the topic facilitates group communication.”

In defense of the glass boards, I think some of the experiences that my student relates are unique to the group in which she now participates, and though I believe her account of her experience is accurate and insightful, I think it may be complicated by the personalities of the group members. I have never simply let students read their board writing to the class and called their presentation complete. Usually there are follow-up questions and requests for elaboration or explication. Just the same, though, I shouldn’t neglect this situation and I should be more alert to the possibility that the boards have become an unacknowledged crutch rather than the tool for thought that they are intended to be. And I continue to be intrigued by the question my student posed about how writing for the board may be affecting the collaboration and thinking during group discussion.