Tag: whiteboard

(This is adapted from a poster I presented at the 2018 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) Conference, Université de Sherbrooke, June 20-22, 2018.) Updated 2019 to include the first results of the impact of the design on student success and course instructor teaching strategies (presented at International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms, Minneapolis, MN, 7-9 August 2019.)

(Photo courtesy of Ashlyne O’Neil. Thanks @ashlyneivy!)

Designing a Large, Active Classroom

As class size increases, instructors face an increasingly difficult challenge. There is clear evidence that more students are more successful in classes with active learning.[1] Yet the work required to facilitate active learning – logistics, providing feedback, supporting and interacting with individual students – increases with class size. And despite the importance of the design of learning spaces,[2] large classrooms often impede student-student and student-instructor interactions.

At UBC’s Okanagan campus, I was invited to advise the architects and campus planners on the design a new 400-seat classroom.

Design Principle:
Eliminate everything that hinders
student-student collaboration and
student-instructor interaction.

My poster uses a giant 6-page “book” (you can see it drooping slightly in the center of the poster in the picture above) to highlight different features and characteristics of the design:

Student flow: Main entrances to the classroom are at the middle of the room. Students flow in and downhill toward the front. Sitting at the back takes deliberate effort. Students can discretely enter and exit without disrupting the class or the instructor.

Main entrances to the classroom are at the middle of the room. Students flow in and downhill toward the front. Sitting at the back takes deliberate effort. Students can discretely enter and exit without disrupting the class or the instructor.

Accessible seating: Fully 20% of seating – roughly 90 locations – are accessible to students using wheelchairs. They can sit in groups with their peers at prime locations, instead of being isolated or confined to designated seats.

Fully 20% of seating – roughly 90 locations – are accessible to students using wheelchairs. They can sit in groups with their peers at prime locations, instead of being isolated or confined to designated seats.

Network of aisles: A network of aisles throughout the classroom allows instructors and teaching assistants to get face-to-face or within arm’s reach of every student. Wireless presentation system allows instructors to teach from any location and project any student’s device.

A network of aisles throughout the classroom allows instructors and teaching assistants to get face-to-face or within arm’s reach of every student. Wireless presentation system allows instructors to teach from any location and project any student’s device.

Group work with whiteboards: Students on narrower front desks swivel around to work with their peers on wider desks. With 150 whiteboards scattered throughout the room, groups can be collaborating within seconds of their instructor saying, “Grab a whiteboard and…”

Students on narrower front desks swivel around to work with their peers on wider desks. With 150 whiteboards scattered throughout the room, groups can be collaborating within seconds of their instructor saying, Grab a whiteboard and…

Lighting: Separate front, middle, back lights create smaller classrooms for 250 and 100 students.

Prep room: Prep room is accessible from outside the classroom so instructors can prepare before and after class. Includes sink, glassware drying rack, storage cabinets, lockable flammable solvent cabinet, fume hood, chemical resistant countertops, first aid kit, demo cart.

Prep room is accessible from outside the classroom so instructors can prepare before and after class. Includes sink, glassware drying rack, storage cabinets, lockable flammable solvent cabinet, fume hood, chemical resistant countertops, first aid kit, demo cart.

Design Features Promote Collaboration and Interaction

The classroom is gently tiered so students farther back can see the front. There are 2 desks on each tier. The front desk is wide enough to hold a notebook and laptop. The rear desk is nearly twice as wide, allowing the front student to swivel around and work with their peers in the rear desk.
Swivel chairs on wheels allow students to easily move and work with others around them.
The front desk on each tier has a modesty screen. There are deliberately NOT modesty screens on the rear desks, allowing students on the front desk to swivel around to the rear desk without smashing their knees or having to sit awkwardly.
There are power outlets for every student under the desktop, leaving the work surface unbroken and smooth for notebooks, laptops, and whiteboards.
When the instructor or teaching assistant stands in the aisle in front of the front desk, they can speak face-to-face with the 1st row of students, and are within arm’s reach of the 2nd row. From the aisle on the back of this set of four rows of desks, the instructor or teaching assistant is face-to-face with students in the 4th row and within arm’s reach of the 3rd row.

And here’s what it actually looks like!


(left) Students focus their attention on the front of the room when the instructor is lecturing and writing on the doc cam. (right) At a moment’s notice, students can swivel and gather on the wider, rear desks, grab a nearby whiteboard, and work together.

Optimizing Visibility of the Screen

A slightly curved screen at the front of the classroom is large enough to display two standard inputs. A third projector can display a single image across the screen. The screen is about 7 or 8 feet above the floor, so the instructor at the front does not cast a shadow on the screen or look directly into the projectors (housed in a 2nd floor projection room at the back of the classroom.) The size and curvature of the screen ensure all but the very front-left and front-right seats have views of the screen within UBC’s guidelines.

Here’s what it actually looks like! I’m running two PPT presentations, one through the left projector and through the right, to fill the entire screen with one 32:9 image:

Does the Design Enhance Learning?

We are studying the impact of the design by comparing data collected before and after course instructors teach their courses in the 400-seat classroom, including

distributions of final grades and grades on in-class activities like peer instruction (“clicker”) questions and group work sheet
drop, fail, withdrawal (DFW) rates
locations of the course instructor and teaching assistants at 2-minute intervals throughout the class period
what the instructor is doing (lecturing, writing, posing questions,…) and what the students are doing (listening, discussing peer instruction questions, asking questions,…) using the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS)3,4

COPUS captures what the instructor and what the students are doing during the class. There is a clear difference here between a traditional, lecture-based course and a course that uses active learning. (Graphic by CWSEI CC BY NC)

Update: Summer 2019

During the Winter 2018, Fall 2018, and Winter 2019 Terms, we used the COPUS protocol to record what John, Steve, and Tamara were doing, and what their students were doing, both in the active learning classroom and in other, more traditional lecture halls.

Spoiler: I was hoping for an obvious uptick in the kinds instructional strategies they facilitated and increase in students marks when they moved to the active learning classroom. We didn’t find it. And we think we know why: they need to teach for a term in the new classroom to discover what it enables and how they can revise their materials and lesson plans for the next time they teach there.

The COPUS protocol records what the instructors are doing during the class. Here’s what John, Steve, and Tamara do in the traditional lecture halls (blue) and what John and Tamara do the active learning classroom (green). There’s no obvious change in the three most frequent instructional strategies, lecturing, writing on the doc cam, and asking clicker questions.

The COPUS protocol records what instructors are doing in class. These instructors regularly switch between lecturing, writing on the doc cam, and asking clicker questions. They did not appear to change their instructional strategies when they moved to the active learning classroom.

With no significant change in what the instructors are doing, it’s no surprise there’s little change in what their students are doing:

The COPUS protocol records what students are doing in class. In both the traditional and active learning classroom, students spend almost all their time listening to the instructor, problem solving, and discussing clicker questions.

It’s also not surprising that are big changes in students’ final marks. While it’s true physics marks are different than chemistry marks, there are no significant changes in students’ physics marks or students’ chemistry marks between courses taught in traditional lecture halls (blue) and the active learning classroom (green).

While there are differences in final marks between physics and chemistry, neither physics marks nor chemistry marks changed significantly when the courses moved from traditional lecture halls (blue) to the active learning classroom (green).

Conclusions:

Instructors may need to teach for at least one term in the active learning classroom to observe and experience the features that enable more active learning instructional strategies before they make lasting changes to their teaching.
Instructors should get an orientation to the features of the active learning classroom as soon as they’re scheduled to teach there, so they can get a head start on revising how they teach.

Update: Fall 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced all courses online. The active learning classroom, sadly, is quiet and empty. Only a few COPUS observations were made in the Winter 2020 Term before the emergency pivot and no observations have occurred since.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Dora Anderson, Heather Berringer, Deborah Buszard, Rob Einarson, W. Stephen McNeil, Carol Phillips, Jodi Scott, and Todd Zimmerman for the opportunity to help design to this learning space.

Blueprint and visualizations by Moriyama & Teshima Architects. Used with permission.

References

1	Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1319030111
2	Beichner, R., Saul, J., Abbott, D., Morse, J., Deardorff, D., Allain, R., … & Risley, J. (2007). The Student-Centered Activities for Large Enrollment Undergraduate Programs (SCALE-UP) project, a peer reviewed chapter of Research-Based Reform of University Physics. College Park, MD: Am Assoc of Physics Teachers.
3	Stains, M., Harshman, J., Barker, M. K., Chasteen, S. V., Cole, R., DeChenne-Peters, S. E., … & Levis-Fitzgerald, M. (2018). Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities. Science, 359(6383), 1468-1470. doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8892
4	Smith, M. K., Jones, F. H., Gilbert, S. L., & Wieman, C. E. (2013). The Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS): a new instrument to characterize university STEM classroom practices. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 12(4), 618-627. doi.org/10.1187/cbe.13-08-0154

Everybody gets a whiteboard!

October 2, 2015

Peter Newbury

One of the key findings about How People Learn is that teachers need to draw out and work with students’ existing knowledge and skills. Ken Bain, in What the Best College Teachers Do, emphasizes students need to encounter a safe environment to try, fail, get feedback, and try again before facing a summative evaluation. The challenge for instructors is to find ways to draw out knowledge from EVERY student and create opportunities for EVERY student to practice.

Small, portable whiteboards (aka dry erase boards if you’re searching your institution’s suppliers’ catalogs) can achieve both of these.

Let me save the kinds of whiteboard-related tasks you can give to students for a future post. Here, I want to describe the class sets of whiteboards we put together. Each set contains 12 whiteboards which, when used for collaborative activities in groups of 3-4 students, can handle classes of 40-50 students. The key components are

light-weight whiteboards that are small enough to carry and manipulate in class but large enough to let multiple students collaborate
getting dry erase markers into EVERY student’s hand
a convenient way for the instructor to get the kit to class and then carry it away afterwards

1. Portable whiteboards

Size and weight are the biggest concerns. Oh, and cost. You can cut way down on weight by foregoing magnetic whiteboards. We found these 18″ x 24″ light-weight whiteboards by Universal available through CDW. They’re only $15.99 retail (and even cheaper through our institutions purchasing system). These boards are so light, it’s very easy for students to pass them around, rest them on their knees, and hold them up for others to see. The only drawback to these particular boards is an inch-wide pen “tray” along the bottom of the board — the boards are made to be mounted on the wall — but it makes a good handle for students to grab.

2. Dry erase markers.

To create opportunities for EVERY student, it’s important to have enough dry erase markers that EVERY student gets one. Otherwise, he who holds the marker, holds the final say. I also like to give each student a different colored pen so they (and I) can easily see their contributions. We went with EXPO fine tip dry erase markers that come in boxes of 12 for $23.92 at Grainger. Four boxes – black, blue, red, green – gave us four markers for each board. We also included an eraser in each kit ($3.99 each by Universal from CDW) and a container of EXPO cleaning wipes ($14.99 at Grainger) we use to give the boards a once-over every now and then.

You can’t waste a lot of time handing out pens and erasers, collecting them again at the end of class so we put each set of 4 markers and an eraser into a pencil case, one per board. This works beautifully – quick to distribute, quick to collect, quick to reset for the next class. We found these canvas + mesh (mesh was great because you see what was in the kit without having to open the zipper) at our university bookstore for $2.29 each.

Each whiteboard comes with a pencil case containing 4 different-colored markers and an eraser. (Picture: Peter Newbury)

3. Carrying case

University instructors very rarely have a classroom where they can leave things. Instead, you arrive at the classroom 5-10 minutes before your class starts, bringing everything you need – computer, video adapter thingy, notes, water bottle, hand-outs, WHITEBOARDS – and then carry it all away after class. So, portability of these whiteboards is a critical.

We totally lucked out searching our universities suppliers’ website for “carrying case” when we stumbled onto this carrying case made for a retractable TeleSteps ladder ($74.90 from Grainger.) The bag easily holds twelve 18″ x 24″ whiteboards, with enough room to toss in the pencil cases. I’m not saying the strap doesn’t dig into your shoulder after walking halfway across campus but the case keeps everything in one place and you can dump on the ground when you get to class and deal it once you’ve got everything else ready. Heck, ask one of those enthusiastic students in the front row to distribute the boards and pencil cases for you.

Total cost per set of 12 whiteboards

Item	Ea.	Total
12 18″ x 24″ whiteboards	$15.99	$191.88
dry erase markers (black, 12 pack)	$23.92	$23.92
dry erase markers (blue, 12 pack)	$23.92	$23.92
dry erase markers (red, 12 pack)	$23.92	$23.92
dry erase markers (green, 12 pack)	$23.92	$23.92
12 dry whiteboard erasers	$3.99	$47.88
12 pencil cases	$2.29	$27.48
1 container cleaning wipes	$14.99	$14.99
1 TeleSteps carrying case	$74.90	$74.90
	Total	$452.81

There’s taxes and delivery. And prices will vary if you buy these directly from the supplier or through your university’s purchasing website. You’ll have to keep buying more markers and cleaning wipes but everything else is a one-time purchase.

Overall, that’s a lot of learning for $500 🙂

Chalkboard tips

January 14, 2015

Peter Newbury

teaching 8 Comments

I work with a lot of instructors, many of them teaching for the first time. We talk about the design of the course, what active learning techniques to use, things like that. I often forget about the basics, though, like how to use the lav mic, managing the classroom, and (the subject of this post) how to write on the chalkboard. (I’ll use “chalkboard” – some people call it the “blackboard.” These tips apply to using whiteboards, too.) The sobering part is, the best-laid plans of the instructor are irrelevant if students can’t read the chalkboard.

What do suppose the students have in their notebooks? (Image: The University of Waterloo School of Architecture by Jason Paris on flickr CC-BY.)

[Update 7/7 after re-reading the excellent comment from Andy Rundquist.] Instructors need to think hard about how to create opportunities for active learning in their classes. Students learn when they’re creating and challenging their own understandings and ways of thinking, especially in collaboration with their peers. If an instructor’s lesson includes episodes of lecture when material is presented on the chalkboard (and lectures in small doses can be very effective), the instructor needs to ensure that activity has value. And one sure way to lessen its value is poor board work.

Many of the points below are directed at instructors who use the chalkboard to derive formulas or solve math problems but many apply equally to instructors who write names, concepts, theories, dates, etc. on the chalkboard while lecturing.

Disclaimer: Some of these points may seem obvious and there are legitimate reasons to ignore any one them. And c’mon, writing on the chalkboard — how hard can it be, right? Well, I’ve witnessed instructors “break” every one of these tips. Not because they’re malicious or lazy but because it’s how they learned when they were students.

Practice writing

Writing on a chalkboard is different than writing on paper – it takes your whole arm moving from your shoulder rather than just your hand resting on the page. It can be tiring. And it’s a skill that takes practice. The first time you write a complete sentence or a derivation on the board should not be your first class. If you haven’t done it before (or haven’t done it in a while), find an empty classroom and practice.

Write large enough

Write larger than you think you should, especially if there are (matrix) subscripts. I know, it looks huge to you. That’s because you’re standing right there, mere inches from the board! Students don’t have the expertise to know matrix entries are always x_ij, for example, so they’re struggling to accurately copy exactly what’s on the board. The smallest characters need to be visible to the students sitting farthest away.

They have to be able to read your writing

The writing has to be legible – you can’t count on students listening to you as you scribble an expression or someone’s name on the board: they have to be able to read it.

Write in horizontal lines

Be careful to write in roughly horizontal lines. It’s not uncommon to see instructors start writing at their eye-level and then the text drops down to the right along the “arc” of their arm. (Maybe this is true only for right-handed instructors?) Instead of reaching, shuffle your feet along as you write.

Don’t write and talk

There’s often a delay between when you write something on the chalkboard and when students copy it into their notebooks. For one thing, they have to wait for you to get out of the way. They might also be thinking about the material and get a little behind on the notes. If you say the words you’re writing as you write them

And…so…by…the…def..in..i..tion…

your students probably aren’t listening. They’re half a board behind you and all you’re doing is distracting them or splitting their attention (Should I be copying the notes or listening to him speak?) When you write something on the chalkboard, finish writing, step out of the way, and give the students time to copy it into their notes. You’ll see their heads bobbing up and down from the board to their notes as they draw/copy. When the bobbing stops, they’re ready to listen to you and follow as you talk them through it.

Work from notes

Don’t hesitate to stand at the board with notes you carefully wrote on paper, and copy them out. You don’t need to re-derive the results or solve problems in real time on the board. You should be concentrating on making it legible rather than using your brain to actually do the derivation. The students won’t think less of you because you’re not doing it “live” but they will get frustrated if you regularly get stuck. Don’t be that prof with chalk in one hand, the eraser in the other, who goes back and corrects mistakes.

Wait, what?! Why isn’t the answer negative? [stands back, looks at chalkboard for a minute] Oh, here’s the problem, I used -2 instead of +2 over here. Okay, let me just change this [erase, re-write] and this [erase, re-write] and…this [erase, re-write] Yes, that’s better. Now, as I was saying…

Write connecting phrases

Especially in classes with math, you need to include English words on the board between the steps of the derivations/solutions. It’s not enough that you say them out loud because 1) students only write what’s on the board 2) they’re likely a board behind copying the notes you’re no longer blocking. Adding the extra words takes longer but it’s critical that the students have a record of the reasons why this step follows that step or what this result means. For example, you should write words, “Therefore, by the conservation of energy,” or “Because matrices are invertible if and only if the determinant is non-zero,”

Chalkboard + PowerPoint

There are a hundred questions about how to use PowerPoint and/or the chalkboard but I’m only going to address one here: instructors who present the majority of their content through PPT slides and add snippets of content on the chalkboard. You should imagine a math instructor who does worked examples on the chalkboard or a philosophy instructor who write key names or phrases on the board. Let me use the math example to describe what I’ve seen:The instructor flips through PPT slides, flip, flip, flip, walk to the chalkboard for a quick calculation/derivation, flip, flip, flip, draws a graph, flip, flip,… What do the students end up with in their notebooks? A series of context-free, unrelated bits of math. Later, when they’re studying from the PPT slides, they don’t know to look in their notes for the supplemental info. When they look through their notebooks, they don’t know where any of these snippets come from. Students don’t have a chronological record of what happened in class.What to do about it? Instructors could abandon PPT and do the whole class on the chalkboard. Or they could abandon the chalkboard and only use PPT. There are pros and cons to both of these. If you insist on using a mixture, how about this: Each time you write something on the board, start by writing a label or tag that marks where the snippet goes. Nothing huge and energy-sapping, just write “(Slide 24)” on the board before you proceed. Coach the students to have their notebooks open next to their computers when they study so when they flip, flip, flip to slide 24, they see the matching supplemental content in their notebooks.

Record your “sense-making”

Experts often talk about equations and results, with “testing” (“Wait, let’s check the units here…yep, m/s^2. Okay, so…”) and “sense-making” (“Notice if Mass 1 is much, much larger than Mass 2, this reduces to the simpler case from last time – good.”) This is where you share your expertise with the class! It’s the rationale for why this follows that, why you use this approach instead of that one, how you know this result is correct (well, not wrong, at least). Instead of only saying it aloud, write it down. When the students are reviewing and studying later, they’ll see those flashes of expertise in context in their notes.

No using things again!

You’ve probably seen it: the instructor solves a long problem or does a long derivation that takes a chalkboard panel or two. The next part of the lesson is solving a similar problem, this time with mass m=50kg, with 4x instead of 2x, or with amino acid A instead of T. The instructor works his way through the chalkboards with chalk in one hand, an eraser in the other, making all the little changes, and eventually, reaching a new conclusion. Students can only record notes by working down the page, not jumping back and changing, updating, or re-using things.If you draw a diagram or write an expression like a big matrix and then come back to that panel of the chalkboard later, if you need to use it again, you have to write it out again, giving students the time to write out it out, too. That’s the only way students will have the correct sequence of notes. Yes, this takes longer but you have to let the students keep up.

Portrait, not landscape

The board is “landscape” but students notebooks are “portrait”. Don’t write long expressions by working farther and farther across the chalkboard because students cannot reproduce that in their note books. Consider drawing a line vertically down the middle of the chalkboards, creating “pages” on the board. Work your way down each page and then to the right. If you’re writing a long calculation or derivation, you should already have it on paper. Your sheet of notes is “portrait” so it will automatically set the width of the work on the board.

Erase deliberately and fully

When you re-use a chalkboard, fully and deliberately erase it completely. All the way to the top and all the way to the tray on the bottom. If there are marks, lines, ticks left behind, students may think those marks part of the new material. We know that little chalk line is left over from before but to a student, it might look like a prime or an accent. Remember, they’re not always copying notes “in real time” – they’re often a board behind (because they have to wait for you to move out of the way) and they won’t notice the tick marks are NOT part of the new material.

Two colors, max

I’ve had math profs who come to class with a box of colored chalk and create glorious, multi-colored graphs where white means one thing, blue means another, red…, green,… And I’m sitting there with a pencil and a pen – two colors. Unless you’ve asked your students to bring colored pens and pencils to class, you should stick to two colors, max.

Describe how to draw it

I’m forever grateful to my first graduate-level quantum prof, Luis de Sobrino, for teaching us how to write complicated matrices in our notebooks and on the board so that the entries are centered down each column. The problem is, when you write entry a₁₁, how do you know where to write it so it ends up centered on the column (especially when entry a₃₁ is a longer expression)? The trick, de Sobrino told us, is write the longest entry first. You can easily estimate where the row should be so go down that far and write the longest entry. This sets the width of the first column. Then add the other entries in the column above and below, centered in the first column. Now move to column 2, and so on. The thing is, de Sobrino made sure to tell us this trick because no one noticed what he was doing (we were still copying the expressions on the previous board and didn’t witness the creation of this work of art.) So, if writing expressions, sketching certain kinds of graphs (like trying to draw in 3D in math class), or drawing a map of France is a skill you want your students to learn, teach them how to do it.

What tips do you have?

What did I miss? What do you do that’s different from the suggestions here? Which of these tips do you think is completely wrong? Feel free to leave a comment!

[Update Jan 19, 2015: Within hours of posting these chalkboard tips, Andy Rundquist left a comment that immediately made me stop and think (Thanks, Andy! You should follow him on Twitter at @arundquist). I’m making the assumption below that what students should get from class is an accurate, written record of the material presented. That’s very short-sighted of me, considering the amount of energy I put into promoting active classrooms. Here’s the question that’s now got me stumped: what artifact do I want students to take from a class that’s driven by peer instruction? Should students be taking notes to capture their own thinking, the conversations they have with their neighbors, and the class-wide discussion? No, i don’t think so – I want them present and engaging, not writing in their notebooks. Unless note-taking enhances their engagement? Definitely need to think more about this. ]

Anatomy of a 400-seat Active Learning Classroom