Mini Whiteboards

Using Mini Whiteboards for whole-class response, retrieval practice and catch-up learning.

The two things I like best about this mini whiteboard technique are:

a) You have a good chance of discovering which students got the correct answer through a lucky guess.
b) Even students who missed the learning you’re checking for can participate and learn the right answer.

Mini whiteboards are great for getting formative feedback through whole class responses, and for retrieval practice, and I’d been using them for several years before I attended a Formative Assessment workshop with Dylan Wiliam way back in 2015. The big realisation I took home from that weekend was how badly I’d had formative assessment presented to me in the past, and consequently how ineffectively I was doing it. I set myself the goal of devising a strategy to add to the formative assessment canon, and two or three years later this technique was the result. The more I use it, the more benefits I discover.

Mini Whiteboards – The Snake’s Method:

Step 1
There’s nothing revolutionary in step one. Ask a question and have the students write their answers on their mini whiteboard. Ideally, you’d want them all to do this without showing anyone else in the class. In practice…well, you know what happens…

Step 2
Still nothing new here. Have all the students show their answers. This works best if you can do it in a circle or other arrangement in which everyone can see everyone else’s answer.

Step 3
This is where it gets good. Instead of simply checking to see who got the right answer, and deciding whether I need to reteach or can move on, my feedback is going to be something like:

“Five people have given the correct answer. Look around you and change your answer if you think you need to.”

or,

“Six of you have written the definition of “split-staging” that I asked for, but the rest have given me an example of how we used it last week. Look around at everyone else’s answer and change yours if you think you need to.”

Step 4
Repeat until everyone has the right answer, or until it becomes obvious that you’re going to need to reteach it, or spend some individual time with that one student who hasn’t responded to “I see twenty-three correct answers, and one wrong…”

Extension
I usually use this in tandem with Doug Lemov’s “Right is Right” strategy (“When you respond to answers in class, hold out for answers that are “all-the-way right” or all the way to your standards of rigor” Teach Like a Champion 2.0 – Doug Lemov, 2015), expecting correctly-structured sentences, to develop students’ writing skills at the same time (and particularly praising those whose correct sentence is different to everyone else’s correct sentence).

Bonuses
The first “bonus” that I discovered, in terms of in-the-moment data collection, from this system was that students who don’t yet understand aren’t just revealed through the initial round of answers (and given a chance to correct their understanding through a sort of self-assessment / peer-assessment hybrid). What often happens is that it also reveals those who got the correct answer through a lucky guess, when they change their correct response to a wrong one after looking at everyone else’s answers. These students would often slip under the radar because we’ve interpreted their initial lucky guess, or cribbing from the student next to them, as secure knowledge or understanding.

The second “bonus” is that students who missed the content that you are testing them on can also participate, and this becomes a learning activity for them. Encourage them to guess what the answer might be from the context of their prior learning. Of course, their first answer is likely to be wrong, but that’s OK. Now they can look around at the other students’ answers and attempt to work out from your feedback (“I can see five correct answers”) what the correct answer must be. Active, self-driven learning, and reinforcement of the idea that it’s OK to be wrong if that’s part of the process that leads to learning.