Questions to Ask During Whiteboarding

For me personally, developing productive Socratic dialogs when whiteboarding is my biggest challenge. I printed three posters to prompt students to contribute effectively to whiteboard discussions and to help them prepare excellent whiteboards. One of these posters ended up in the background of a photo I tweeted and generated a couple of questions. The content of the posters is directly from the article [Engaging students in conducting Socratic dialogues: Suggestions for science teachers](http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/publications/engaging_students.pdf) by Carl Wenning, Thomas Holbrook, and James Stankevitz. (Jim was the leader for the Modeling Instruction workshop that I attended.)

Based on this article I created three posters: Questions to Ask (prompts for questions), Lab Presentation (tips for whiteboarding labs), Whiteboard Presentation (tips for whiteboarding problems).

Download (PDF, 29KB)

2 thoughts on “Questions to Ask During Whiteboarding

  1. Doug Smith (@bcphysics)

    Hi Geoff,

    I’ve been using whiteboards more this year. I notice that most of my groups end up with having very similar data and presentations. Do you only present one or two whiteboards at the end of a lab, or do you go over all of them? I typically have 30 students with 8 to 10 groups…

    Secondly, do you have a list of labs that you have the students to in physics? I’ve read in a few places on your blog this year that you may be putting more focus on labs. I haven’t done this, and many of my labs are described as “activities”. In 2nd year physics we don’t do many at all, since many topics are repeated from 1st year.

    thanks

    Reply

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