Where students work:
So over the last few years, I have had occasion to grab the maintenance guys and say "can you put a whiteboard up on that wall?" The result is that while I have the smallest classroom in the school, I have enough whiteboard space to support 7 groups of 3 students easily. Of course, covid nuked all of that. Fortunately, we have some covid money and I have the support of my administrator, so I have purchased several smaller rolling whiteboards and some of the wipebooks. This allows me to form groups in the other three classrooms where I work. I have a basket of "clean" pens and one for "dirty" pens. I routinely sanitize the dirty pens. Each student gets their own pen to use so there is no cross contamination. The biggest problem I have is that students don't do well keeping distance. They especially want to cluster together to work on the board, so I do have to remind them. This will work better when they can only have one pen per group.
So other than the covid restrictions, this is going very well for me. I've been using random groups on the whiteboard surfaces for about a month now and I have seen a huge increase in how students are functioning in my classroom. They are getting through far more problems than they ever did working on their own at desks. I also find that the energy level has increased in my classes and my own energy level has also increased. After a class period of working at the whiteboards, I feel great and energized as opposed to wiped out and discouraged.
I need to work on being a better observer now. Are students really taking turns at the board? Are there students who tend to dominate not matter what group they are in? Which students just do the work and don't interact? Which students hang back? What kind of questions can I ask that will help me see what they know? But also help them learn?
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