May 2, 2025, by Rupert Knight

Crafting mathematical learning journeys for children: the power of board work

Many primary school lessons – mathematics lessons included – include use of a PowerPoint, Google slides (or similar) presentation. Popular schemes of work provide slide decks (e.g. NCETM PD materials, White Rose, and Oak National Academy), and also include all of the resources, worked examples, explanations, and pupil tasks needed for lessons. Teachers supplement the existing slide content with their own modelling, explanations and demonstrations, annotating directly onto the slides where they have working interactive whiteboard or touch screen technology. In this blog post, Bruce Lander, Marc North, Catherine Gripton, Balbir Kaur, and Geoff Wake consider how this shapes teaching, through a ‘PowerPoint pedagogy’.

PowerPoint pedagogy

The benefits of using prepared presentations are significant for teachers, particularly in terms of reducing workload (as identified by the DfE in 2016). They are often perceived as enabling teachers to focus more on teaching quality and less on planning and resource development. However, there are also some potential drawbacks, particularly in responding to formative assessment and making adaptations where the scale of changes needed can be time-consuming. It can also be difficult for the teacher to access the design-thinking behind the resources, without professional development or teacher guide resources to provide this.

An often-overlooked challenge of presentations is that their potential to shape pedagogy. Marc Isseks suggests that:

The root problem of PowerPoint presentations is not the power or the point, but the presentation. A presentation, by its very nature, is one-sided. The presenter does everything—gathers information, eliminates extraneous points, and selects the direction and duration of the presentation. The role of the audience is to sit and absorb the information.

Following this line of thinking, ‘PowerPoint enhances, quite literally, the ability or power to point.’ (Adams, 2006, 398). By using slide presentations, teachers can point accurately, vividly and quickly to important information presented in different forms – as text, numbers, pictures, videos, and so on. But, by enhancing the teacher’s power to point, the technology reduces the children’s involvement in the construction of knowledge as the organisation and formatting of information has taken place without them. The children are not afforded the opportunity to share in and learn from the sequencing and structuring of information, reducing their ability to do this for themselves.

An additional challenge with PowerPoints is that each slide can only contain a limited amount of information, and once a teacher has moved on from one slide the information captured on previous slides is no longer visible or accessible to the children. The ‘learning journey’ of the entire lesson isn’t easily captured in this one-at-a-time format. Children can find it difficult to hold previous information in their heads and make connections between content when they don’t have access to the entire learning journey. For some children, this can hamper their ability to recall and draw key information together when applying it in their group or individual work. In a small number of schools, every child has a tablet and can move forwards and back through the slides for themselves, but still they have to navigate information which is in a fixed sequence of single slides.

On a recent trip to Japan, we observed several powerful mathematics lessons that didn’t include PowerPoint presentations, and this has led us to reflect further on the importance of children having full view of the learning journey across the lesson. The Japanese elementary school teachers that we observed used ‘chalk-and-talk’, writing extensively and almost exclusively on chalkboards, working left to right across from the beginning to the end of the lesson. We believe that this board work which is referred to as ‘Bansho’ in Japan has some potential advantages over a ‘PowerPoint pedagogy’.

Japanese Bansho

Japan is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. However, in most elementary (primary) classrooms, teachers still use a chalkboard as the main resource for recording, organising and presenting information to the children. These typically span almost the entire front wall of the classroom, filling the children’s field of view.  The dimensions of a typical chalkboard in Japan are a width of 360cm and 120cm in height. This provides a surface area 5-6 times the size of chalkboards in schools in England that were mostly phased out in the 1990s.

Fig. 1. Typical Bansho layout of a year 4 maths class in Japan.

The board work – or Bansho – component of a Japanese maths lesson is a central element of the learning experience. The board work is more than just a record of the key learning concepts. Instead, it captures the learning journey that the children have travelled on during the lesson, carefully orchestrated by the teacher. For this reason, the Japanese word ‘Bansho’ actually means more than just ‘chalkboard’ or ‘board writing’; it also encapsulates the importance of the process and the product. Bansho is about the deliberate and purposeful chalkboard organisation, sequencing, coherence and structure to enhance learning for the children.  The use of the board in this way plays a crucial role in showing a complete record of the lesson from left to right (Stigler and Hiebert, 2009). As Stigler and Hiebert suggest, the role of Bansho is paramount to student learning, ‘as each feature of the story within Bansho fits together to form a whole’ (2009, p.75) and aid in children’s learning.

The development of the board work as the lesson progresses

As part of the pre-lesson planning process, teachers in Japan plan what they will write on the board and how the information will be organised. There are even suggestions in textbook manuals that suggest what could be added at each stage of a lesson in the Bansho process. Teachers also plan for how they will include and engage children in the development of the chalkboard writing.

As a result, the development of the board work throughout the lesson is an immersive and collaborative process, which actively involves the children in the knowledge construction. Children in older year groups also note important aspects of the board work in their maths jotters as a record of the key learning points. The fact that children can take notes at any point of the lesson that they feel would be helpful to them, means they are in control of this as a sense-making process. They draw out what is important in the lesson for them so recording is personalised, and helps to present notes in a manner which will aid their later recall of content. That children are able to distil information in the format most useful to them and make notes of things they are unsure of is paramount in the process of Bansho.

The board work is the well-laid out story of the learning in the lesson and not for the children to copy or recreate in their books. The process of interpreting the teacher’s board work and creating their own notes enables children to better remember the maths content.

Fig. 2. Child’s notes written during the lesson.

Whilst the sequencing of information (and how this will be presented) on the board has been carefully planned in advance by the teacher, it is committed to the board as it arises in the lesson. This presents the opportunity to adjust the sequence, add in an additional steps or use a child’s representation if this is how it plays out in the classroom. As Tan (2023) explains:

From a student’s perspective, seeing the board slowly fill up with interactions between teachers, classmates, and learning materials shows how the Bansho is built collaboratively as a classroom artefact. (Tan ,2023)

Crucially, children see the teacher constructing the information in real time. They watch how to layout ideas with the teacher explaining their thinking in this live-modelling.  They may also take note of suggestions and ideas that other classmates have raised during the process which logged on the board and attributed to that child. Having a record of children’s ideas, strategies or solutions that are tagged as theirs, enables children and the teacher to discuss and refer back to these as the lesson progresses.

An example of Bansho in a mathematics lesson

The chalkboard images shown are from a Grade 5 (Year 4) primary school class of 8- and 9-year-olds. The lesson focus was on the angle properties of triangles, investigating the angle created when two different right-angled triangles (one isosceles and one with angles in a 1:2:3 ratio) are combined corner to corner. The teacher encouraged children to make angles by manipulating their own triangles cut out of card and calculate the angles created in degrees. The lesson progressed to recording all of the possible combinations of angles that could be created using the two right-angled triangles and involved deriving unknown angles from known angles.

This is a chalkboard in a typical school classroom in Japan.

Fig. 3. Bansho board work with translations of Japanese text.

The flow of text is from left to right using the full surface area of 4.32m². Blank-spaces are purposefully left to allow for children’s contributions.

Fig. 4. Bansho board work with further translations of Japanese text.

Children’s contributions are recorded and labelled with their name to show whose idea, strategy or solution that contribution was. This is helpful to children as it provides a form of shorthand to refer to the entries on the board as belonging to a specific child which is useful when they articulate their thinking about them. Key ideas are summarised so they can be referred back to and children are able to refer to the board work to scaffold their thinking, meaning they have to hold less information in their heads. The whole learning journey is available to them simultaneously.

Fig. 5. Bansho board work showing children’s nameplates to label their ideas, strategies and solutions in the lesson.

A ‘whole learning journey’ pedagogy

Teachers think carefully about how they sequence information in maths lessons, and digital presentation software can be helpful in supporting this sequencing, but this does not guarantee that this sequencing is apparent to the children. It is tempting with prepared presentations to have many slides, not wanting to delete them in case they are needed, or not having time to edit longer slide decks. The benefits of using a single board means being selective in recording the information which is most important for learning.

Use of colour, lines and arrows means that particular representations can be highlighted, sometimes in the moment and sometimes when returning back to this key information later in the lesson. Adding manipulatives and annotating around them can also draw attention to key relationships. Sticky notes or blank pieces of card can be stuck on as missing information for the class to generate. These can also be moved to new locations or ordered so children see the physical transfer of an answer into a new context or to form a pattern, helping expose mathematical structure.

Strategies for effective board work

Shirley Tan has some helpful advice on how to use board work effectively to capture and support the children’s learning journey in maths lessons which we have summarised:

• B – Balance: Think about the way in which the information is organised and segmented (‘balanced) on the board. Perhaps plan to divide the board into different parts of the lesson so each section is clear.

• A – Attention-grabbing: Manipulatives, cutouts, and photos are helpful for grabbing the children’s attention and to draw attention to connections between maths concepts (so are much more than decorative).

• N – Name: Stick name cards or initial/label children’s ideas or contributions that have been captured by pupils in the class on the board.

• S – Space: Have a tidy board, leaving space for adding connections or annotations later in the lesson. Leave sufficient blank space to give children the sense of the possibility of further contributions or additions.

• H – Highlighting: Highlighting using arrows, lines, and colours to draw attention to key learning points and to connections between ideas. Where possible, use the same colour or box for a specific feature, e.g. cloud around a generalisation, blue for a key connection.

• O – Order: Sequence ideas on the board to support coherence and maintain the learning focus. Provide scaffolding using the board, deliberately including prompts, worked examples, deliberate mistakes, and possible misconceptions at strategic points in the board work structure.

Reflections on your own board work

There are a range of alternatives to slide presentations which can offer teachers in England similar opportunities to the Japanese chalkboards. Long or multiple whiteboards or, more cheaply, writing on sheets of flipchart paper which are stuck or pegged up sequentially, can be used to build the learning journey of the lesson. Whilst a scheme provides PowerPoint or similar presentation material for lessons, we can use this to plan but choose to create the presentation with the children ‘live’ in the lesson using boards or a series of flipchart paper sheets. Using sheets has the added benefit over chalkboards or whiteboards of permanence and portability so these can be displayed to referred back to in future lessons.

Reflecting on the effectiveness of board work on learning is also important. These questions might help prompt further reflections:

• How much time do you spend ‘presenting’ learning to children and how much is spent actively involving them in the construction of knowledge?

• How much live-modelling do the children experience, where they watch the teacher write down the mathematics and can contribute to this and be part of the building up of knowledge and learning?

• How accessible is your board work to the children so that they can work confidently and independently during independent work?

• How much do the children contribute to your modelling and how are their contributions valued and recorded?

• How much information is presented to the class during a mathematics lesson and could this be reduced? Could important information be highlighted or summarised in one place?

• How is the journey through the maths concept represented in a lesson and is it clear to the children?

• How often do you move back to earlier content to point to or highlight previous information which is relevant to the current problem or application?

• At the end of a lesson, how is the learning journey summarised?

• How are generalisations captured when established, and how will children be able to refer back to these in the future?

• How and where is the learning journey captured for the children to use as a resource to support their independent work and for retrieval and revision in future lessons?

• Which children might most benefit from seeing the whole learning journey of the lesson at once and having it to refer back to throughout the lesson? How can these children be provided with the opportunity to refer back regularly and check agreed key information to help them as they learn new mathematics content?

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn