How do you provide quick feedback, check work and work through misunderstandings from two metres away? That’s the challenge that many teachers will be facing this term under the coronavirus protection guidelines, and a popular solution will be mini whiteboards.

These small, plastic, wipeable tablets have been used in some schools for a while now. But, given the current situation, wider adoption now seems inevitable.

But what is the best way to use them? We asked Emily Gunton, who was an early adopter of mini whiteboards. The director of music, head of co-curricular and outreach and school consultant teacher at Blackheath High School, in south-east London, has trialled various options.

So, are mini whiteboards well-established in schools now?

Having spoken to colleagues within my own school and across a variety of other schools, the mini whiteboards have taken root, although their use does appear to tail off in the older years and they tend to appeal to maths and the sciences more than English and the humanities.

Also, they do appear to be like Marmite: you either love them or hate them. I think it is fair to say that while I am still a firm hater of Marmite, I have been able to change my opinion when it comes to my faithful mini whiteboards, and I have gone from sceptic to convert.

What led to this conversion?

I decided to trial them, and if I was going to trial something, I needed to be 100 per cent committed. So I took the same approach as I did with dry January; it was all or nothing.

Having used them sporadically over the years, I was aware that if used badly, they could get in the way of progress. Also, I wanted to reduce the amount of paper that I used. I didn’t want to be tied to booklets and I wanted all my students to be regularly showing me what they knew.

So, one day, I gave each student a whiteboard pack and they became a firm fixture in our lessons.

In terms of use, students would be told to do certain written tasks on their whiteboards that would normally be done in books or that they would usually answer verbally, and either I would glance over their shoulder to see the results or we would have a Mexican wave effect in which everyone would hold their boards aloft and I would quickly scan each.

I also set rules, which were mainly no doodling or dubious images, please.

Did the students need any training?

Yes, I had to explain that tasks had to be completed at a certain size and they had to get used to using the whiteboards rather than their booklets. They had to be taught how their whiteboard packs worked - whiteboard, pens and rubber - and to wipe their boards at the end of the lesson and hand in any “dead” pens ready for recycling.

But after a week everything was in place. I could actually see the students’ work when they held it up and, more importantly, nearly everything in the lesson was done on their whiteboard.

That makes it sound like a flawless system …

Not quite. Having set out the guidelines for my students, I realised that I, too, needed to toe the line. Some students were unsure of the protocols - “Is this in our booklets or on the whiteboards?” was a frequent cry - and they had a habit of wiping down the boards before I had seen the work, either out of confusion or to avoid scrutiny.

These may seem like small issues, but they add up to a lot of time lost. I needed some simple solutions to fix them.

So we set up some routines. First, I borrowed from The Power of Culture, edited by Katharine Birbalsingh. One of the chapters, written by Tom Kendall, uses the phrase “On your whiteboards, go”. This was just what I needed. I then added in “evanesco”, which is the spell used at Hogwarts to make things vanish, and this became the cue for cleaning the boards.

Unfortunately, some students do still wipe down their boards prematurely, but we are getting there: confidence, on their part, is improving and that has a big impact.

Some may argue that there is little difference between a whiteboard and a workbook, so why bother?

I don’t agree. It has made my lessons more inclusive and, looking back to my teacher training days where Assessment for Learning (AfL) was all anyone talked about, I would say that my AfL is the best it has ever been. I found that the longer we used the mini whiteboards, the more I understood my students and their progress.

Whiteboards also make the students behave differently in terms of how they work. I am not sure whether it is because it brings out the inner child, whether it is still a novelty or if it is because it does not necessarily matter if the work on it is not neat or if the spelling is accurate, but engagement is definitely up and children are braver. Most importantly, it gives our students a sense of freedom, particularly my students with special educational needs and disabilities.

And after years of battling with notebooks, booklets and folders, I have improved my environmental impact and have come to rely on my whiteboards. They are robust, able to survive a general trampling and give students the opportunity to work effectively on an individual basis or in groups.

Are the students as enthusiastic?

Although I began this whiteboard journey full of enthusiasm, I needed to ensure that my students felt that they were benefiting from the experience. I decided to stop using the whiteboards for two weeks to observe their reaction. I gave no warning and didn’t mention them, but my students commented on their absence and I was greeted with uproar when we reverted to old methods.

However, one thing they did miss about the old paper-based system was the opportunity to accumulate evidence that workbooks gave them. We were able to remedy this by taking a photo of their boards at the end of each lesson to document what they had done.

That sounds a slightly cumbersome process. Is there not an easier way?

Perhaps. As someone who is always on the lookout for a new snazzy app, and with the new term upon us, now seems like a good opportunity to look for an app equivalent of my trusty mini whiteboards. With Covid-19 stretching our need to innovate, this looks like a good next step.

This article originally appeared in the 25 September 2020 issue under the headline “How I...fell in love with mini whiteboards”