Orchestration with the Interactive Whiteboard

The Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) is the first ICT tool primarily designed for whole-class interaction. It is now in regular use in most British primary schools. Research into its introduction in classrooms has revealed its distinctive potential for enabling the teacher to plan and orchestrate lessons using a wide range of multimodal resources. In this paper we explore ways in which teachers use the IWB in their everyday practice. In doing so we draw upon a conception of teaching as a form of disciplined improvisational performance. Our UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project has focussed on use of the IWB within four classes of children aged 7-11 years, at the upper end of primary education. Four teachers were video recorded during two sequences of two lessons, providing 16 lessons overall; a fifth teacher was recorded during two separate lessons only. These teachers were also interviewed to investigate their accounts of their use of IWBs within their classroom-based teaching and learning practices. Our analyses illuminate the ways in which teachers orchestrate a rich blend 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 focus on the distinctive contributions that the IWB can make to teaching and learning, including resourcing the development of ideas and themes over time, while enabling spontaneous responsiveness to situations as they arise. We show how, through imaginative deployment of the semiotic resources made available through use of the IWB, teachers sustain pupil engagement in creative acts of transformation.