The lost art of teaching with the whiteboard?

 I thought I had messed up with my Year 9 after school Spanish beginners. Last Monday we were doing the round the class My brother touched a starfish story. And I hadn't pitched it quite right, or they were a bit tired after school, or something else. But probably, I hadn't pitched it quite right. So this week, I made sure that the pace and challenge of the lesson evolved directly and flexibly in response to their interaction. Teaching with a whiteboard and a whiteboard pen. No plan except the unfolding logic of what the pupils need next.

So when they arrived, the story of the Brother and the Starfish was on the board. They were pleased to see it, and before the lesson started, were already telling each other what they remembered it meant.

Several things to note. Firstly, it's a nice story of going to an aquarium and dropping your phone in the touch pool. Secondly, it is designed to meet the GCSE criteria of opinions, reasons, tenses and narration. And thirdly, it is built around the powerful core language pupils are going to use across topics.

We began the lesson with reading aloud and translation, in pairs and then picking pupils to tell the class. It was good to see that something which had stretched them the week before, was now something they were enjoying working on.

Next, I removed the words and verb endings that make up their core repertoire. Just by rubbing them off the board. I have removed the words like I like, because, I can, I went and the endings for what was happening and what happened:

As a class, we went round and told the whole story. This is helped by the fact that each of the structures "belongs" to a pupil - in the original Brother touches a starfish lesson, they had it written on their desk in board pen. So if one pupil gets stuck, there is always one pupil in the class who definitely knows the structure. We did it as a class with each pupil in turn supplying their missing word. Then the pupils did it in pairs, telling the whole story. Then we did it with a class, with me deliberately NOT picking the pupil who owned each word. Here you can see us in the process of telling the story and putting the missing words back in.

Of course, now we've put the core repertoire words back in, I can now delete all the aquarium words:

In pairs, the pupils reconstructed the story and as a class we took turns to tell the whole story together.

Then I rubbed the board completely and pupils told me the story.

And before we left, we did this:

A list of infinitives for the Theme Park story. So using the same (now rubbed off) template as the aquarium story, the pupils told me a completely different story by changing the infinitives. We did this quickly at the end of the lesson with each pupil in turn deploying the structure they have "ownership" of. And next lesson, that's where we will start. Going through a similar process as in this lesson, with the new story.