Leanna Pitsoulakis took a lap around her freshmen honors math class at Carl Sandburg High School, scanning the work spread across each student’s desk before returning to the front of the room with a conclusion.
In a few minutes, she said she found not everyone understood the triangle theorem. She could see every student’s thinking laid out in marker, drawn directly on their whiteboard desks in the space where classroom notes once sat.
Those visible mistakes matter, Pitsoulakis said, as they show her who needs help and give students a chance to correct their work and try again.
So when Pitsoulakis returned from her loop around the classroom, she started at the beginning of the problem again, drawing out step by step, as students mirrored her movements. They practiced the theorem again and again, both with her then on their own, until it clicked.
Four whiteboard desks were installed as part of a $1,000 grant from the District 230 Foundation and correlated with a 4.57% increase in student test scores, measured by comparing performance across seven topic tests from last year’s to this year’s honors math one class, said Jennifer Waterman, District 230 communication director.
This method of whiteboard-based learning became popular after the pandemic in an effort to guide the transition back to in-person instruction, as stated by the book that inspired Pitsoulakis’ methodology, “Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics” by Peter Liljedahl.
Pitsoulakis said the desks empower students to take more risks in trying new concepts, engage them with the content and even build soft social skills.
“They’re able to take more risks and feel more comfortable talking with their peers because everything they’re doing is visible,” she said. “The students are actually fully bought into what they’re doing and they are in the moment, understanding, learning, growing and able to make mistakes.”
She said this especially helps the students who missed a lot of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her freshmen students would have been in third grade in 2020, when the pandemic closures began.
She said the whiteboard desks help students learn to collaborate and disagree, without fighting or losing confidence in their own answers.
“So much of it is, they’re freshmen, so, like, we gotta get them right now, talking to their peers, so their next four years of high school and in college they have social skills,” she said.
She said the whiteboards help her English learner classrooms because students can draw or point to concepts for which they might not remember the word.
With the whiteboards, students investigate problems together, can erase and try again, and she can catch a misunderstanding before it shows up on a test, she said.
Fatima Warden, a freshmen in Pitsoulakis’ math class, said the whiteboard desk helped her during a test when she was stuck on a problem. She said she tried to do it on her paper, but said there was not much room, and it became messy. She said she understood the problem more clearly when she worked it out on the whiteboard.
“With the whiteboard, there’s more room and it’s clearer,” she said.
Warden also said the whiteboards show her there are many ways to do something and said it pushes her to try something new.
Anna Mraz, a freshmen in Pitsoulakis’ math class, said she is more engaged and less tired in class when using the whiteboards.
Mraz also said she likes seeing her classmates ideas.
“It also just helps with collaborating with, like, the skills of just talking, and I feel it really brings out like more than just silently taking notes,” she said.
Pitsoulakis said she cannot see what students are doing when they take notes on paper, which she said means she can not measure the students’ understanding to address confusion immediately.
She also said, in her experience, students don’t often process information when passively taking notes.
“If I have them write this down like on their paper, they would not care,” she said. “They would not be engaged.”
So instead of note taking, her students practice the skills over and over during class until they feel confident. She said students often tell her they are not worried about taking math tests.
She said the lack of note taking often worries parents at first, but she said she explains the research and it doesn’t take long for the parents see their student progressing using these methods.
Pitsoulakis said she was taught the new learning technique seven years ago at Bolingbrook High School. But when she returned to her Orland hometown to teach at Sandburg, she found the staff was not aware of it.
She said she began using whiteboard learning at Sandburg four years ago, but had to use whiteboard stickers that she ordered on Amazon that often quickly peeled off desks.
With the new desks, her learning style is much more permanent and effective.
Ron Farina, math and business division chair at Sandburg, said Pitsoulakis brought a lot of new ideas and ways of learning from Bolingbrook, which are now used in the math resource center.
Farina said teachers encourage students to use whiteboards in the resource center because the more they attempt new skills and show what they’re doing, the more feedback they get and the more they understand what they’re doing right.
“Your best learning comes from the mistakes you make,” he said. “They feel more comfortable making those mistakes that we as teachers need to see in order to correct and provide the feedback to improve learning.”
Farina said instant feedback is important so students do not create bad habits.
Pitsoulakis said she hopes the whiteboards continue to demonstrate success and garner more support from other teachers and classrooms.
She also said she still needs more whiteboard tables, as she does not have enough desks for every student and still uses whiteboard stickers on some desks.
awright@chicagotribune.com
