Instruction as orchestration: multimodal connection building with the interactive whiteboard

Abstract

The interactive whiteboard (IWB), the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction, is now in regular use in most British primary schools. In this paper, we explore its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate activities and lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources, to engage students' cognitive and imaginative capacities. We show how teachers use combinations of ‘matched resources’ to support the bridging of pupils' understanding from the known to the new, and from everyday to academic understandings. We demonstrate how teachers can use the IWB to resource the development of ideas and themes over time while maintaining spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise, effectively enacting Sawyer's notion of teaching as ‘disciplined improvisational performance’.

Keywords:

• interactive whiteboard
• multimodality
• orchestration of resources
• teaching as improvisational performance

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the ESRC grant RES-000-22-1269. The principal investigator was Neil Mercer, University of Cambridge; Judith Kleine Staarman was a co-investigator.