BRENDAN C. A. MENG

One of my favorite activities for producing visible student knowledge as a way of formatively assessing their progress is through the instructional strategy of whiteboarding. This strategy includes any range of activities which students use a whiteboard to display their learning relating to particular content knowledge, essential understandings, or skills. By utilizing resources to adapt instruction to all my groups of learners, this strategy allows me to easily monitor student learning and engage learners in assessing their own progress of content knowledge acquisition. Like many of the previously mentioned instructional strategies, this strategy presents additional opportunities for me to vary my role in the instructional process as students take charge of their learning. Depending on what task I instruct students to utilize the whiteboards to accomplish, I am able to provide any number of representations of concepts and skills as students demonstrate their knowledge through a variety of performances. These activities are often crafted to assist in engaging learners to develop higher order questioning and metacognitive processes. If these processes are not directly employed during the activity, this instructional strategy always provides follow-up opportunities of reflection and review where I am able to probe for deeper learner understanding, assist learners articulate their ideas and thinking, stimulate further curiosity, and help learners to develop their ability to question various artifacts and ideas as I work to foster connections within the content in my students. I believe this is a developmentally appropriate instructional strategy to achieve learning goals and expands my learners' communication skills through reading, observing, listening, writing, speaking, and collaborating. The consistent utilization of whiteboarding as an instructional strategy demonstrates my understanding of how multiple forms of communication convey ideas, foster self expression, and build relationships among my students. Additionally, whiteboarding demonstrates my ability to employ a resource for a variety of learning tasks which foster engagement among my students. I believe this instructional strategy also shows that I value the various ways in which people communicate and encourage learners to develop and use multiple forms of communication to achieve learning goals by communicating ideas and displaying their cognitive processes.