I tried something new in class this week that I think solves a few random problems:

1. Sometimes, when working on whiteboards, one student hogs the marker and does a lot of the work (and thus the learning)
2. With whiteboard work, students don’t have anything in their notebooks to study later
3. When we practice things like derivatives in our notebooks, I feel like their notes become almost useless because it is a mess of 15-20 examples.

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Practice and Reflect

I put the whiteboards out on the desk and left them there the whole period. We were learning the derivatives of exponential and logarithmic functions of bases other than e so I wanted to go back and forth between the whiteboards and their notebooks a few times.

After teaching them a derivative rule as a whole class, I gave them a sheet of 15-20 problems that definitely got more difficult as they went along. I gave them 12 minutes to practice (I put a timer on), and they worked on the problems with partners on the whiteboards, which gave them a chance to discuss, erase mistakes and see problems in large format with different colors.

Then, I asked them to put the markers away and open up their notebooks and gave them 3 minutes to reflect. I told them they could do whatever they want with this – copy down a few problems that were tricky, write down some things that they want to remember, write down steps for the problem. With this, I feel like their notes were a bit more focused and useful. I also felt like the whole routine was efficient, in that it kept a vast, vast majority of the students moving and engaged. I’ll definitely try this again.