Establishing a Teaching Persona first iteration and using whiteboards

The new course, ‘Establishing a Teaching Persona’ ran for the first time today and yesterday. I was really impressed by how enthusiatically people participated, and by the thoughtful feedback that my group gave each other this morning for the micro-teach activity.

One of the issues that came up during the micro-teach was whether to use Powerpoint slides whilst teaching, or whether to write key points and explanations on the white board: in my group, we had people who did both. We explored the benefits of the whiteboard: how the flexibility of being able to write or draw anything enabled connections to be made easily between different points, and how engaging it could be to see the key issues emerge as you watched and listened. The issue of handwriting size and legibility came up – I have difficult reading back notes I’ve made sometimes, so I definitely struggle with writing clearly at speed. We also talked about how many students will benefit from having materials in advance, so that they can go over it before a session and understand how the information is structured – it’s easy to do this with a prepared Powerpoint, but might be harder if the lesson is centred around the whiteboard.

When I came back from the session, I mentioned these discussions to my colleagues, and Ali sent me some links to resources about using whiteboards which will be useful if you use them in your teaching. The first is from Yale, and has some recommendations for using whiteboards in teaching. The second is from the British Council, which is a little more focused on school teaching, but much of the advice about teaching with whiteboards is transferrable and interesting. Let me know if you have found any other good resources.