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In a growing number of secondary maths classrooms across the US, Sweden and beyond, it’s becoming common to see students working away from their desks. Instead, they are standing at whiteboards fixed to the wall, working in small groups on equations, diagrams and in-progress calculations.

The use of vertical whiteboards in maths has been boosted by the rising popularity of Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC), the pedagogical approach developed by Canadian education researcher Peter Liljedahl. BTC centres on the idea that most classrooms are inadvertently designed to stop students from thinking, and explores ways to dismantle those inhibiting practices, including with “vertical, non-permanent surfaces” (aka whiteboards) on the walls for students to work on.

And that particular approach has become a talking point in education circles, with plenty of heated debate about its usefulness.

A key part of the rationale for the whiteboards is that they are said to significantly change the psychology of a task. Workings can be erased, which means students are more willing to take risks and make mistakes publicly, and because the writing surface is vertical and shared, all group members are physically engaged. What’s more, because the work is visible across the room, there is a new level of transparency, whereby students can see other groups’ efforts in line with their own progress.

Using shared whiteboards in maths

Clare Hill is a doctoral researcher at the University of Southampton and a former head of maths who was using vertical whiteboards long before BTC became fashionable. The energy of the room would shift completely when they were used, she says.

“The whole classroom changed the second I went, ‘Right, we’re going to go to the boards,’” she explains, noting that her behaviour would change, too.

“I could see what they had already done, instead of second-guessing what they might have done, so I would talk to them differently,” she says. “And also because of the physicality of it, we’re talking face to face instead of me looking down on them.”

For her master’s dissertation, Hill recorded students working both at desks and whiteboards, then transcribed and analysed their talk, with surprising results.

“What I thought had been happening over the course of 20 years of teaching wasn’t actually happening,” she says. “There was really disjointed talk going on at the desks. [Students] weren’t always following each other, because essentially they’re in their own work for the moment and then jumping to the other person’s work. There isn’t a coherence in their thought processes between two pieces of work.

“But when they were working at the whiteboards, it was completely coherent and they were building their thinking line by line.”

Their talk while at the whiteboards was “cumulative” in nature, she adds - something that wasn’t the case when students were working together at their desks.

That distinction matters, Hill argues, because giving students the opportunity to generate their own mathematical ideas and extend their thinking can be transformative.

“Ultimately, students have to generate their own thinking to be mathematically successful,” she says. “If their answers are generally in response to a teacher’s prompt, that’s less likely to happen.”

Using the shared whiteboards helps with this, Hill explains, because the practice creates the conditions for what cognitive scientists call “elaborative interrogation”, whereby students question and explain ideas to each other, rather than simply receiving those ideas from a teacher at the front of the room.

And with the current national focus on oracy in schools, the boards offer structured conditions to encourage meaningful classroom talk.

Hill suggests that the boards also work as an equaliser. When everyone’s work is visible, students who assumed they were among the slower in the class can see that their peers are often at a similar point in a problem.

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“Some of the A-level students would be so surprised when they could see they had got something right that maybe people they perceived as being more clever than them hadn’t yet,” she says.

Anecdotally, then, the use of whiteboards can have a positive effect on teaching and learning. But is the approach supported by research?

Christian Bokhove, professor in mathematics education at the University of Southampton, is measured in his assessment of the evidence for vertical whiteboards and BTC in general.

“If your measure is randomised controlled trials, then there is no evaluation of Building Thinking Classrooms as an intervention,” he says. “Most of the research is design-based, more qualitative, smaller scale. And there is a risk that if you [only go on these types of studies], things then look very successful.”

Most of the evidence cited in favour of BTC, Bokhove argues, measures how students feel about the experience of learning maths, whether they enjoy it, whether they feel engaged, whether they report positive attitudes to the subject. These things matter, but this is not the same as demonstrating that students have actually learned more mathematics, he warns. So, it can be the case that students leave a whiteboard session buzzing with energy and still have grasped less than they would have from a well-structured direct instruction lesson, he says.

‘Teachers need to ensure that whiteboard work is followed by sufficient individual practice, not treated as a substitute for it’

Hill acknowledges this limitation, observing that students sometimes left whiteboard sessions with a sense of collective success that had not fully translated into individual understanding.

“Sometimes I could feel the class feeling successful as a whole [but in a way] that was more than the sum of its parts,” she says. “They had worked really hard, but as a group they hadn’t each done those pieces of thinking on their own. And they didn’t then do as much individual practice as they needed to, because of that sense of success.”

It is a risk, she says, and one that teachers need to actively manage by ensuring that whiteboard work is followed by sufficient individual practice, and not treated as a substitute for it.

After observing sessions in Sweden using the vertical whiteboard approach, maths specialist Craig Barton penned a of possible pitfalls, including the pattern he noticed in some groups, where one student (typically the strongest mathematician) would take the pen and effectively do the work while the others watched. The whiteboard then became the site of a solo performance with a small audience, rather than the site of genuine collaborative thinking.

This, of course, is a common pitfall with any group work in the classroom, regardless of what surface is being used.

Hill argues that it is really a problem with questioning: the more the task demands reasoning from every student, the less any one student can carry the group.

Likewise, Barton’s other concern that students could simply copy the work on other boards is an issue of implementation rather than design, she counters, and the answer is in setting the task effectively. Hill describes a Year 7 lesson on algebra stories in which each group had to write a different expression and then justify to the class why theirs was similar to, or different from, a neighbouring board.

“Even if they did have something that was very similar, they had to justify it, and that requires using the right language to do so. That’s a different experience to just allowing them to copy someone else’s,” she says.

Bokhove agrees that copying could be a genuine risk, saying: “It is one of the things I find it hard to simply dismiss.” But, he notes, this is not unique to vertical whiteboards, as any classroom activity that makes student work visible creates the same temptation, so what matters is whether the task is designed so that copying is less useful than thinking.

Introducing the approach in your classroom

On balance, then, if teachers feel that vertical whiteboards are worth trying, what practical considerations are there around incorporating them into lessons?

One thing to bear in mind is the size of the class, says Hill. She found that a class of up to about 24 students was workable for her A-level lessons, with eight boards around the room and students working in groups of three. With more students, however, the practice became challenging.

“With 30 kids standing up, it just didn’t lend itself to working with a lot of children,” she says, noting that she has also used the approach equally successfully with smaller, lower-prior-attaining sets.

The approach is “appropriate for use with students of any age at secondary school”, Hill adds, providing that it feels manageable with the size of the class.

Active management of the procedures around the whiteboards is also important.

“You have to establish it and you have to set the ground rules. And it has to be a safe environment; it’s quite a big change to what they expect from a maths lesson,” Hill says.

She adds that you do not need purpose-built whiteboard walls because you can buy mid-size whiteboards or temporary dry-erase sheets relatively cheaply. Instead, Hill says, the real investment should be in understanding why the surface matters, and building the classroom habits around it.

Using this approach well requires careful thought about task design, group size and classroom norms and, ideally, some time to observe or discuss the method with a colleague who has already tried it.

As Bokhove notes, school context matters, too. “It’s also about the norms of the school, the support from the headteacher, the department that you’re in,” he says.

Hill accepts that she had “a very encouraging headteacher who was very open to allowing me to try these things and wanted to see the impact of them”.

Her verdict on vertical whiteboards is positive, then, with the acknowledgement that they did not replace everything else in her classroom, nor should they have done.

Others remain more sceptical. And, like so much in education, when it comes to the success of vertical, non-permanent surfaces, context might just be everything.

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer