Strategies to Elevate Whiteboard Mini Lectures

Whiteboard mini lectures (WMLs) are interactive, small group didactics using the whiteboard as the primary teaching tool (also known as chalk talks). Chief residents in internal medicine routinely use WMLs to reinforce learning from patient cases, encourage clinical reasoning, and role model effective teaching skills.

This workshop will establish WMLs as an effective teaching tool, justify Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML) as a scholarly framework to enhance WMLs, and examine 10 strategies, grounded in specific CTML principles, to elevate WML design, delivery, and refinement: simplify the text, organize with headings, integrate labels, divide the whiteboard, familiarize the terms, set the mise en place, bring a markup and marker, create an advance organizer,engage the audience, and go back to the drawing board. Think-pair-share activities will provide interactive opportunities.