You probably don’t give a lot of thought to writing on the board. After all, once you’ve got the whole writing-on-vertical-surface-while-standing-up thing sorted, there’s really not that much to it. And as for what boards are used for, it’s usually key ideas, whole-class work, listing those on their last legs behaviour-wise, or for drawing a quick diagram - nothing complicated there.

But what if there is actually a lot more to it? What if we treated writing on the board more as the mastering of an art rather than the wielding of a tool? What if we viewed “board work” in the same way the Japanese do?

If your first reaction is “How much more to board work could there be?” then you need to speak to Shirley Tan. She’s a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at Nagoya University, Japan. And she is as expert as they come in the Japanese art of Bansho (she is doing her PhD on it, for a start).

Put simply, Bansho means “writing on a board” or “board writing”, and it’s widely used by teachers in both primary and secondary schools in Japan - especially in subjects like maths and science. Rather than using the board as a tool, Bansho makes the board an explicit and considered part of the teaching process. It’s how teachers and pupils in Japan problem-solve together and it is a crucial element in collaborative work.

“Bansho is both the process and product of producing words or illustrations on a blackboard or whiteboard,” explains Tan. “It serves as a ba [space] for children to develop and deepen their thinking and awareness collaboratively.”

During her studies, she identified three key aspects of teaching where Bansho played a role: variation of ideas, connection of ideas and attention to ideas.

“As a common artefact in the classroom, Bansho allows for a series of ideas/opinions to be displayed simultaneously on the board,” says Tan. “The fact that pupils’ ideas were displayed publicly on a common space in the classroom further motivated pupils to formulate fuller and more complete ideas. Moving on, with a variety of views on the board, students could participate or engage in others’ ideas with the teachers’ use of visualisation aids - arrows, lines, etc. There, students are made aware of the similarities or differences in their own thinking [compared] with their classmates’.”

It’s a bit like the board is the hive mind of the class, with the teacher the executive function directing the traffic. OK, you might think, this all still puts board work in the same space in the UK as it seems to be in Japan: we use boards for similar reasons of collaborative problem solving or engagement with ideas here, too. But Tan says that Japanese teachers see Bansho as something to be honed, planned for and explicitly used not for teaching but as teaching.

What does that mean, exactly? She explains that when Bansho is done well, it starts with the board being central to the lesson plan, or, as it is called in Japan, the Bansho keikaku - the “Bansho plan”.

“Specifically, to ensure that the whole lesson could fit into one rectangular board, teachers have to make decisions on ‘what to keep and what to toss’ during the process of the Bansho plan,” explains Tan.

“That is to say, the Bansho plan could act as a mirror for teachers, to reflect on their understanding of the content of teaching material and hence help to make the selection of content on the plan.”

Secondly, in the lesson teachers must listen attentively to students’ opinions to include them as part of Bansho content. “Students’ opinions are always marked with a nameplate [a magnetic strip labelled with a student’s name] to indicate ownership and to facilitate discussion among students,” says Tan.

Finally, after the lesson, teachers always take a picture of the board to help them plan for the next lesson. Tan says that teachers collecting these images “serves as an effective tool to reflect on their teaching either individually or in a professional development setting, such as lesson study”.

You see? Bansho is a lot more than just “board work”.

Tan says that this very focused approach pays dividends because it “promotes the engagement of students’ attention to ideas, particularly joint attention”.

There’s other research to back that up, too. In a research paper published in 2014, researchers found that through observing the writing processes of Bansho, learners were better able to “perform ‘information push’, where they could compare key points and comprehend the flow of ideas better”.

It’s no surprise that Bansho is starting to make its way out of Japan and into classrooms in other countries. For example, a number of teachers in Ontario, Canada, have interpreted and adapted Bansho to complement the local curriculum with a focus on collaborative knowledge building through problem solving.

Tan is also aware of it being used by Mills College in Oakland, California, and by the Lausanne Lesson Study Group in Switzerland.

So is the Bansho method set to make a considered collaborative appearance in UK classrooms, too?

Sally Kawagoe, a primary teacher in the East Midlands who has taught in Japan, says there is one key difference between classrooms here and in Japan that might make implementation tricky.

“The boards were much bigger [in Japan] than we have here - usually the width of the classroom - so stuff could be left up on them while the teacher worked across,” she explains. “The problem with this in the UK is that most schools ripped out all their large whiteboards about 20 years ago and replaced them with tiny interactive white boards.”

In addition, although she says that some Japanese teachers are no doubt really skilled at selecting what information to write on boards and how to write it, Kawagoe is not convinced that Bansho is “the golden bullet for deeper mathematical understanding” that some may wish it to be.

Peter Mattock, who has been teaching mathematics in secondary schools for more than 15 years, also cautions against a one-eyed view of the impact of Bansho.

“Knowing the Japanese school system, and maths in particular, I would think that there are several things about the approach to maths teaching and the school system in Japan that contribute to their success in pupils developing a real fluency with mathematical concepts that it would be impossible to attribute it to Bansho alone or significantly,” he says.

That said, Mattock is not suggesting that Bansho should be ignored.

“Much like knowledge organisers, I can see [Bansho] being a useful part of some mathematical learning, particularly related to learning of conventions, definitions and facts/fact families, but I suspect that unless it was paired with further pedagogical approaches to support meaning-making and problem solving - like they use it in Japan - that it would do little on its own.”

So should you rush into the school office and demand a six-metre whiteboard to be delivered at once? Probably not. But what Bansho represents is an interesting alternative way of doing things in the classroom. And you never know, trying a little Bansho keikaku may turn out to be just what you need to get those young minds whirring.

Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 25 September 2020 issue under the headline “Are you on board with Bansho?”