Mathematics
How Do Tutors Show Working in an Online Class?
On a shared whiteboard, written line by line at talking speed. Why a finished solution on a slide teaches little, and when a tutor should stop writing.
Short answer
How do tutors show working in an online class?
On a shared whiteboard, writing each line at the speed they would write it on a board in front of you. A finished solution pasted on screen teaches far less, because the student never watches the choice being made.
The short answer
Tutors show working on a shared digital whiteboard, writing line by line while talking, as they would at a board in a classroom. The difference from a screen-shared PDF is that the student sees the solution being decided rather than reading one already decided, and can take the pen and write on the same surface when it is their turn.
A finished solution and a solution being written are different objects
A completed worked example is a record of somebody else's thinking. It is tidy, every line follows, and a student reading it will understand all of it and be able to reproduce none of it. This is the most common way an online lesson goes quietly wrong: the tutor shares beautiful notes, the student nods at each line, and on Saturday morning they cannot start the question.
What a shared whiteboard adds is the decision. When the tutor writes 'let x be the number of adult tickets' before anything else exists on the board, the student sees that somebody chose that, and that it was a choice rather than a fact. Nothing on a prepared slide shows this, because on a slide the choice has already been made and hidden.
The tool is almost irrelevant to this. A basic whiteboard used live beats sophisticated software used to present.
Pace matters more than the software
The rule that separates a good online explanation from a bad one is simple: never write faster than you can say what you are doing. A tutor who writes three lines silently and then narrates them has produced a slide with extra steps. A tutor who says 'I want the x terms on one side, so I'm subtracting 2x from both' while the subtraction appears has taught the reason and the move at the same time.
Too slow is a real failure as well. Long silences while a tutor draws a neat pair of axes are the points where a student's attention leaves the screen, and it does not come back for free. Axes and tables should already be on the board before the class starts. Only the thinking should be written live.
The other half of pace is copying. A student copying is not listening; the two cannot be done at once. Say what is worth writing down, and say when it is safe to just watch.
The moment a tutor should stop writing
About two lines in. A tutor who works a whole question from start to finish has demonstrated one thing conclusively, which is that the tutor can do the question. The student's belief that they cannot is untouched, and may have got worse.
The move that works is to hand the pen over at the point where the method is established and the arithmetic is not. Tutor writes the first two lines, asks what the next one should be, waits, and then lets the student write it — on the board, in front of the group, wrongly if necessary. The correction that follows is the lesson.
This is also the honest answer to why we cap groups at four. In a group of four, every student writes on the board in every session. Beyond that, some students watch for an hour, and watching is the thing we have just established does not work.
What else is on the screen
A past paper PDF, shared and annotated directly, so the student sees the question in the form and layout the exam will use rather than retyped. A graphing tool when the shape of a curve is the point, because dragging a coefficient and watching a parabola move does something no static drawing does. And a mark scheme, shown after the attempt and never before it.
Recording changes one thing genuinely for the better. A student who lost the thread at line four of a solution can go back to line four — not to a summary of the lesson, to the actual sentence the tutor said while writing it. No classroom has ever offered that, and it is the one clear advantage the screen has.
Common questions
Which whiteboard software do you use?
The built-in Zoom whiteboard, plus annotation directly over shared PDFs for past papers. We are deliberately unexcited about this choice. The pen the tutor writes with and the pace they write at decide whether the explanation lands; the application is close to interchangeable.
Can my child write on the board, or only watch?
They write, in every session. It is not a courtesy feature. A student who has not produced a line of mathematics in front of the tutor has not been assessed that hour, and the tutor is guessing about what to teach next week.
How is a recorded class different from a video on YouTube?
A video cannot be interrupted at line three. Almost all the value in a tutorial is in the question the student asks at the moment they lose the thread, and a recording of your own class at least captures the answer to the question your child actually asked.
Do tutors send the board notes after the class?
We save the board and it is available. We are cautious about promoting it, because a student who knows the notes are coming stops writing, and writing during the explanation is part of how it gets learned. The notes are for checking a detail later, not for replacing the notebook.
Is this different for English or science?
Yes. Prose is better typed than handwritten, so English feedback is done in a shared document with tracked comments, where the student can see the alternative sentence next to their own. The line-by-line whiteboard is specific to subjects with notation.
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