A visitor entering my classroom more than 15 years ago, when I taught in the UK, would have been struck by neat rows of desks, large windows and - in pride of place - a thick electronic whiteboard fixed to the wall.

I spent half my time figuring out how to use that interactive whiteboard. It had replaced a simple whiteboard, and it became a bit of an albatross in my teaching. I remember taking ages creating timelines and other materials on my laptop in order to project them on to the screen. It was occasionally useful to be able to embed a link in the notes on the board, but when a student asked me why I didn’t just write the notes directly on to it, I had no good answer.

Better teaching - or better training - may have enabled greater creativity. But, for me, this was a case of technology not meeting an expressed need.

A visitor entering my English classroom now, at Phillips Exeter Academy in the US, might be struck first by the “Harkness table” in the centre of the room - we are, after all, known nationally and internationally for our student-led pedagogy (more of which later). But they will often comment, too, on the slate boards that cover an entire long wall of the room.

The slate was installed in the 1930s when the building was built, has been preserved through recent renovations, and is silky-smooth with an almost powdered finish. We wrestled with chunky and ineffective chalkboard wipers for decades until a bright spark recently placed a microfibre cloth on the ledge of each board, so now they can be cleaned with a satisfying sweep of the arm.

Chalked up to experience

Such boards are ubiquitous in Phillips Hall, our English and modern languages building, but they can also be found in the academy’s history, art, religion, Classics and maths classrooms, in the library and in the music building. The science building, constructed more recently, is one of the few places on campus where whiteboards are the default.

On any given day, my students tumble through the door and make their way to the board to put up a question or comment on the previous night’s reading, and we often use those scrawled notes to structure our discussions or to move on from a silence. As Chelsea Woodard, my colleague in English, says: “I like how [the blackboard] becomes a collaborative space, where the class thinks or brainstorms or forms a consensus together.”

Exeter is not a dinosaur institution. Our classrooms contain built-in projectors and devices for streaming from phones and laptops. There are document cameras and wi-fi is everywhere. Our science classrooms include microscopes to enable DNA barcoding in our genetics course, a makers’ space and a robotics studio. We have digital music studios. We have cameras that can be used to record athletes’ movements in coaching. Yet, we hold fast to our blackboards and demand that they be preserved for future generations of scholars.

The Harkness approach - a pedagogy based on round-the-table discussion in which peer-to-peer dialogue is emphasised - has been using the principles of a flipped classroom since the 1930s. Students here do homework in advance of class, trying their skills on new problem sets and expanding a little beyond their current knowledge each night instead of reinforcing lessons imparted by a teacher. Then they come to class to uncover where they got stuck, what they noticed and how many ways there are to solve the issue or reach an understanding.

The blackboards become the space in which they demonstrate their preparation. Maths is notorious for students arriving early. They sprint to the classroom to put up problems from the set assigned the night before, leaving later arrivals to answer the harder problems or reveal exactly where they got stuck. Teachers of Chinese and Japanese talk about students using the boards to demonstrate character strokes.

Another English colleague, Michelle Dionne, describes the crack running across her blackboard and how often it is used by students to expand their understanding of metaphorical imperfections in a text.

A big draw

The size of our blackboards is a positive feature for many, too. In some of our rooms, boards fill three walls, permitting a discussion to track questions early in the reading, in the middle and at the end. Amy Schwartz, a teacher in our history department, tells me: “I use blackboards to pinpoint topic questions, get students up out of their seats, draw flow charts (causal thinking is key in history) and maps (geography is also key), record key comments and quotes, and in a variety of other ways. It is a truly rare day that I or a student don’t go to the board during my class.”

There are outliers. Some of my colleagues in history talk of wishing for whiteboards so they could project maps and have students write on the projections as the lesson unfolded. Others proclaim no preference or say that they feel the boards are merely part of the window dressing for our New England boarding school setting, along with marble staircases, wainscoting, polished floors and muntined windows. The chalky feeling on the fingers that some of my colleagues discuss with nostalgia, others cannot stand.

Everyone I speak to does agree that the classroom elements of blackboard, table and book highlight the central engagement of the student with the idea. All that students have in our classrooms is one another’s minds, the teacher’s guidance and a space in which to write and speak. If the lights go out, no matter. If the internet is down, carry on. It feels like a continuance of an educational thread that began at Exeter in the late 1700s, survived the upheavals of independence, civil war, Spanish flu, two world wars and the revolution in teaching methods that occurred when Edward Harkness gave us the gift of his pedagogical approach.

Eimer C Page is director of global initiatives at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, US

This article originally appeared in the 1 February 2019 issue under the headline “Back to black?”