To be able to adequately assess each student in the class, we need to see what they are doing - observation is still one of the best assessment strategies, because it allows us to delve deeper with each student by asking them questions to see if they truly understand a concept or whether they are parroting back what they have heard. Think of all those questions you ask in class, by the time you walk out of the room and walk to your next class you've forgotten most of the comments students have made a clipboard provides the opportunity to quickly capture those golden moments.
Surely the advent of technology has allowed an easier way to capture this? With all the great things that technology has done, it cannot improve on the speed and ease of using a pen and writing on a piece of paper as you walk around the classroom, that is of course unless you have a Tablet style device and a Pen that mirrors writing on paper anyway!
Of course for all this to work, you are hopefully still not talking 80% of the time (like the research has shown) and have moved to let the students do most of the talking!
What to have on your clipboard?
There is a strong argument to have blank writing paper and that is all, after all, it is easy to set things up. Without too much work though, you can create a single sided A4 sheet with 2 columns - each student's name in the first and space to write in the second. You may like to include their photos at the start of the year. You may be tempted to take this a step further by having criteria that you can tick off and whilst this seems like a great idea, experience tells me that this is not sustainable as you would have to set up a new sheet every lesson. Stick with the simple class list and room to write - set it up once and print a whole heap.
For more info on how you could use clip-boarding, see the video below from TeachingChannel.
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