My biggest success of the 2014-2015 school year. Big board math.

"Teacher, can I please be board?"

Yes, I did spell "board" correctly.  At the end of this semester's final exam for my Math119 Number Sense course I provided my students with an opportunity to give me some feedback on a variety of strategies/technologies I had implemented.  One of these was the use of three foot by two foot whiteboards for table work.  In short, this was a HUGE success.

I have always been a proponent of getting students to look at the work of others.  However, the ways in which we accomplish this can be varied, both in structure and effectiveness.  In the past, I have had groups work together in ways to communicate a concept or to solve a problem that would only allow the kids to put their work under the document camera or to transcribe all of their work at the board.  Both of these methods were inefficient and had drawbacks in terms of the ability for the entire class to stay engaged in the process.  My math classroom at Concordia has always had small, individual whiteboards for class use.  While these whiteboards were decent for individual work, they didn't work very well at all for collaborative work.  In steps the big whiteboard.

Our local Home Depot sells 32 ft square paneling that works great for whiteboards.  Not only is this paneling inexpensive ($13.97 a sheet), but the wonderful people at Home Depot will cut it to size for you.  Including tax, I was able to spend less than $30 to equip my room with eight three-foot by two- foot boards and four two-foot by two-foot boards.

On one particular day of the semester, I was introducing ideas of operations with fractions.  All of these pre-service teachers had some level of prior knowledge with the concepts covered.  I decided to use the big boards to let them show me (and each other) what they knew.  I intentionally wanted to see if they could recall/describe more than just a blind procedure in respect to the operations.

Here is what the students were prompted to do.

Table Task

1.            How would you describe your given fraction operation to a student?

2.            Where do you think they might get confused?

3.            Can you think of a way to help them deal with the confusion?  How? 

4.            Is there a way to represent your operation with a model/drawing?

 As you can see from the big boards, some were able to make some solid group representations, some were not able to do so.

One of the many wonderful aspects of big board work is that the boards can easily remain visible for the duration of class time.  I noticed students referring to the work of classmates throughout our conversations that day.  My six foot square boards rested nicely within the marker trays.  As you can see, I took pictures of the boards for later use.  I noticed students doing this as well.  I can easily see the use of Padlet.com for easy reference at a later time for students.

By nature, big board work at tables forces the members of a group to lean in to the table to work together on the board.  As I have implemented more big board work, I have heard some wonderful mathematical arguments about what one group member saw as relevant for the group's representation.

This sort of collaboration and cooperation is to be firmly entrenched with the best practices mathematics classroom.  SMP 3 is a bedrock of this sort of activity, as students are encouraged to diagnose the big board work of others.  Students are prompted to ask questions of other students, not the teacher.  In the somewhat new document put out by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) entitled, "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All," a clarion call for mathematics instruction is established for our schools.  In this book, the NCTM writers lay out eight focal points that describe good math teaching.  Two of these focal points are naturally a part of big board work - facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse and elicit and use evidence of student thinking.  In short, big board work (regardless of the content) is fertile ground for the kind of teaching we all should be doing within the math classroom.

I have also made use of the big boards to facilitate discussions on homework at the beginning of class.  As students enter the room, I assign each table one problem from the homework from the previous night.  Sometimes more than one group will work together on a problem from the night before.  While the group is determining how best to represent their answer, I am floating throughout the room checking for completion of individual work from the night before.  When a table is done working out their response on their board, they put it up in a marker tray.  In about five minutes, the room has become a discourse magnet, both at tables and throughout the greater room.  After this brief and efficient amount of time, we can move on to our inquiry/discovery/discussion of the day.

For the twenty-one students who responded to my request for feedback on my teaching strategies throughout the semester, they gave the big boards an average score of 9.2 on a ten point scale.  The next closest strategy/technology was Plickers (I will blog on this at a later time).  It is safe to say that my students enjoyed working together, getting up out of their seats, standing, and talking about the beautiful math.  Good stuff!

These were my initial successes with big board math.  Do you have any ideas on how I could make this even better?  I welcome all thoughts.