Elevate Peer Teaching with Whiteboard Painted Walls

Peer teaching using classroom whiteboard walls is a highly effective instructional method. For decades, educators have used peer teaching to enhance learning outcomes. Instructors can easily augment this strategy by having students write and draw on walls coated with whiteboard paint. Studies show that peer teaching noticeably improves students’ learning gains and knowledge retention. Peer teaching also encourages collaboration among students and sharpens their social skills. This occurs because peer teaching stimulates one-on-one interactions while boosting empathy, teamwork, and communication.

This article will delve into different aspects of the peer teaching approach. We’ll discuss its impact, advantages, and challenges, along with the best ways to implement the method in the classroom by using walls coated with whiteboard paint.

1. What’s the definition of peer teaching?

In its traditional form, peer teaching is a shared active learning technique where learners take on the roles of both teacher and pupil. In peer teaching, students tutor and learn from one another, sharing their knowledge, skills, and experiences related to classroom lessons and other topics.

Peer teaching is noteworthy because it doesn’t support the established educational hierarchy. Instead, it acknowledges that students contribute to one another’s learning through their unique understanding, perspectives, backgrounds, and expertise.

2. How does peer teaching break with tradition?

Breaking with tradition is defined as intentionally stopping behaviors that one’s society or culture has adhered to for a long time. Peer teaching definitely falls into this category. It’s different from customary teacher-centered instruction in these ways:

• Peer teaching focuses on the student rather than the instructor. Teachers have been the sole purveyors of wisdom and knowledge across culturesfor centuries. However, peer teaching switches the instructional focus onto students and their engagement in teaching and learning with one another.
• Peer teaching gives students the power to take personal responsibility for their education by actively connecting with their lessons and instructing their fellow learners.
• Rather than submissively absorbing facts and ideas from their classroom instructor, peer teaching ensures that students engage in interactive learning experiences. This helps them to develop their critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and ability to empathize with others.

3. Peer teaching and student-centered learning

Peer teaching aligns with student-centered learning theory by doing the following:

• Focusing on learners’ academic needs: Peer teaching cultivates personalized educational experiences designed to meet each student’s unique requirements, preferences, and learning styles.
• Promoting personal autonomy and responsibility: By actively participating in the teaching and learning process, students develop self-sufficiency and accountability for their own educational outcomes.
• Encouraging positive lifelong learning habits: Peer teaching fosters a love of lifelong learning in students by promoting curiosity, investigation, and continuous self-improvement.

4. How whiteboard painted walls reinforce peer teaching

Studies show that students who do class work on non-permanent writing surfaces like whiteboard painted walls, especially when standing upright, show more significant improvements in learning than those who work on permanent surfaces like notebooks or workbooks. As a result, peer teaching is greatly enhanced when done in conjunction with vertical surfaces such as walls coated with whiteboard paint.

5. Whiteboard Painted Walls Elevate Student-led Instruction

Student-led instruction is another form of peer teaching. In this approach, teachers ask students to come to the front of the classroom to teach a concept or explain their thinking to the rest of the class.  Doing so on the large, attention-grabbing surface of a whiteboard painted wall makes the whole class become more engaged and attentive to what’s being shared. Hence, peer-led learning activities done on whiteboard walls reinforce students’ understanding of lesson content and heighten their level of confidence.  The walls help to create cultures with a perceptible lift in student thinking, teamwork, and dialogue.

6. Improving Collaboration in Peer Teaching with Whiteboard Walls

Learning is a social process that requires students to interact and collaborate with one another constantly. Research in educational psychology suggests that teachers must present engaging learning tasks promoting regular student interaction. Instruction that calls for students to convey their thoughts, while thinking logically and making sense of ideas, gradually moves their knowledge and awareness to higher levels.

Perpendicular non-permanent surfaces such as whiteboard walls are best for this collaborative, socially oriented type of learning. Setting up designated learning spaces on whiteboard walls where students work in groups for peer teaching is ideal. Rather than always acting on their own at their desks, students should stand in front of a whiteboard painted wall. There, they can explore tasks that encourage open discussion and peer-to-peer learning as they jointly solve problems and understand concepts.

Whiteboard walls also allow teachers to share students’ peer teaching efforts with the whole class. This can be especially helpful for discussing different ways to solve a problem or understand a concept. The teachers’ role moves toward supporting and coordinating the two-way experiences among learners.  In this way, educators relinquish more and more of the reasoning and calculating work to students engaged in peer teaching.

7. Promoting Better Communication

Doing peer teaching on the vertical canvases of whiteboard painted walls triggers communication featuring more non-verbal expression and increased knowledge mobility. That is, ideas and knowledge are able to move easily among the pairs of students engaged in peer teaching. At the same time, standing and working at a whiteboard wall in pairs reduces feelings of anonymity among class members. When students feel anonymous, they tend to disengage from their lessons. This, in turn, leads to reduced collaboration, faulty thinking about lesson content, and reduced learning.

By contrast, whiteboard walls used for peer tutoring boost students’ enthusiasm, dialogue, engagement, and diligence. The walls’ large, inviting surfaces tend to encourage greater risk-taking among learners. And the fact that the walls are in clear view of the entire class makes student disengagement from peer-to-peer interactions less likely.

8. Classroom-wide Peer Teaching Exercise

An incredibly effective form of peer teaching is the classroom-wide peer teaching exercise. In this approach, all students are involved in the instructional process at the same time. Learners work in pairs on the whiteboard wall to instruct each other on skills or concepts that have just been covered in class. The members of each pair take turns acting as the teacher. The teaching student asks questions about points that the classroom instructor presented earlier and judges the correctness of their partner’s answers.

Correct answers are worth two points. Partly answered or incorrect answers are worth one point after the correct answers are repeated out loud and written on the whiteboard painted wall. Then the roles are reversed and the students in each pair ask each other more questions about the facts or skills taught in class. The peer teaching pairs then add up their points to determine the day’s winning team.

But what about those students who seem disengaged, that is, not wanting to talk and not sharing ideas with their peer-teaching partners? This is an issue that teachers often encounter.

9. The Power of Visualization on Whiteboard Painted Walls

The problem of disengaged students can be addressed by using visualization. Visualization plays a crucial role in helping students better understand and express concepts and relationships. Vertical whiteboard painted walls give students blank canvases on which to express their ideas visually. They provide large, open areas that encourage students to engage more deeply in their lessons by writing out math problems, drawing Venn diagrams, creating decision trees, and the like. This makes it easier for disengaged learners in peer teaching to see and understand the steps needed to solve equations and grasp other lesson-related content.

Unlike traditional chart paper or notebooks, walls coated with whiteboard paint, along with a dry-erase marker, provide the means for dynamic representations in all subject areas. Students can quickly erase and redo their work, making trying different answers effortless and easily correct errors in real-time. Learners can use hand gestures, draw illustrations, make links between ideas, and manipulate images. Such acts of physical engagement with a whiteboard painted wall strengthen conceptual understanding, even in the most reticent of students. Such activities can also inspire disengaged learners to work more readily with other students and thus enhance their understanding and self-assurance.

Summary

Article Name

Elevate Peer Teaching with Whiteboard Painted Walls

Description

Enhance peer teaching with whiteboard painted walls for interactive learning, fostering collaboration and creativity in any classroom.

Author

Susan Anspach

Publisher Name

ReMARKable Whiteboard Paint

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