Help me give my students a vital tool for active instruction. A mobile whiteboard will provide a place for instruction in our nontraditional classroom space.
My students are creative, funny and engaging. The students in my classroom are excited to learn, they strive to impress their peers as well as their teachers and most importantly they show me who they are through the food they prepare in class. My students are eager to share their culture, their interests, and love to tell me what they are the best at creating in the kitchen. In the classroom, my students work with their peers to find a balance between content and technique. They learn from watching, doing and instructing each other. Most importantly the food the students create is a reflection of their personal lives, cultures and practices.
One of my favorite parts of teaching this trade is seeing the sense of accomplishment on a students face when they have completed a cooking lab.
My classroom is an important part of their day. Students come to my class with a variety of goals, some wish to go into the food and beverage industry, others strive for careers in engineering, accounting, business or science, the commonality in the classroom is providing an opportunity for students to express themselves through the food they create.
My Project
The classroom this whiteboard will be in is a student run cafe open to our high school staff. Without a designated learning space my students have limited opportunities for direct instruction. Chalkboards and whiteboards are arguably the most iconic tools associated with teaching.
Research suggests that students learn better by having information presented through multiple modalities, especially through visual means and a whiteboard is perhaps the simplest visual teaching tool.
A whiteboard can be easily utilized to encourage active learning in the classroom. In a classroom that doubles as a cafe I can use this board to engage students with problem-solving and brainstorming activities and create an active learning environment that feels more like a classroom to my students. I plan on using this whiteboard to emphasize key terms, expand on and display examples from my slideshows, and actively involve students in concepts such as customer service, table settings and menu development.
Having the ease of a mobile whiteboard will allow me to shift from a cafe lab setting, to classroom seamlessly, something that would greatly improve the learning environment for the student interns.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. DeMarco and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.