Remember how encouraged you felt when the teacher called on you for an answer and you got it right? Remember how disappointed you felt when you had the right answer but didn't get called on? If the whole class is using white boards our class can have multiple winners!
Our school is located in a mostly rural county in the mountains and we serve a diverse population.
We have some of the greatest kids that you will find anywhere. They are almost all polite, respectful, and they want to learn - regardless of what level they are at.
I have two sets of "kids" in my school - the children that I teach and also the five, yes five, math teachers that have less than two years on the job! Talk about making a man feel old! As head of the Math Department, I am devoting myself to enabling these new teachers to experience the joy that I have been blessed with over the last three decades. One way I am trying to help is with classroom materials.
Our new teachers have the basics to use, but not much more. With five new teachers, we have many needs - more than our school resources can fill.
My Project
Our five new teachers are very good at cooperating to share our limited resources - they must have had a great kindergarten teacher! If our request is funded, we will make a schedule of which days and which periods the white boards are needed.
The students will use the white boards to answer questions posed to the group. There are many ways that the teacher can direct this kind of class activity: Ask the entire group a question and acknowledge the first several right answers when the boards are held up, have races with groups in the class with one board per group and run it like a game show without the buzzers, and have the children who are stuck hold up their board with a big question mark on it so the teacher will have immediate feedback and know where to direct support.
I am sure that my new teachers will find all sorts of variations on the ideas I mentioned and come up with great new ones as they experiment using these materials.
I am totally convinced that this is a low-tech method of allowing the teacher to monitor student progress within the class.
With our large class sizes, the teacher can see several things happening at once - who is done, who is still working, who needs help.
More importantly, I believe the use of class whiteboards will help our students to feel empowered, allow the student to answer without fear of being wrong in front of the class, and make class more interesting.
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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 Mr. Pressley and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.