How to Use the Whiteboard Effectively on CELTA (and Beyond)

If you’re preparing for teaching practice on your CELTA course, or just starting out as an English language teacher, one of the tools you’ll rely on most is the whiteboard. Whether you’re standing in front of a traditional board or screen-sharing on Zoom, clear, confident boardwork can make your lessons smoother and more effective. But when you’re new to teaching, it’s hard to know what “good” boardwork looks like, especially when your head is already full because you're trying to remember a grammar rule you studied the night before or you're trying to remember what the next step in your lesson plan is.This post offers some practical whiteboard tips for CELTA trainees and early-career teachers working in any mode: in-person, hybrid, or online.

What Does Good Boardwork Look Like on CELTA?

Good boardwork doesn’t need to be artistic — it needs to be clear and it needs to be useful. One of the most common issues in CELTA lessons is that the board becomes messy, overloaded, or unclear. Think of your whiteboard like a visual organiser for your students: clean, well-labelled, and purposeful. Whatever you put on the board should be in a similar format to how you expect students to record it in their own notes.

For example, during a vocabulary lesson, you might divide the board into three sections:

• Meaning: definitions, images

• Form: part of speech/articles if relevant/other forms like past tense or irregular plurals

• Pronunciation: word stress and phonemic transcription of difficult sounds

Use headings to label each section — students should be able to tell at a glance what’s what. Colour coding helps too: many trainees and teachers use black or blue for text, green for features of form, and red for pronunciation. So if you're clarifying the phrase used to, your board might show:

• used to + base verb (green) 

• I used to smoke (blue)

• a stress mark to show pronunciation: /ˈjuːst tə/ (red)

And remember: you don’t need to write everything. For example, in a listening task, don’t clutter the board with all the comprehension questions — handouts or digital displays work better. Likewise, if students are doing a speaking task in pairs or groups, there’s no need to write the full script. Just support them with a few useful phrases like Would you mind if...? or I’m afraid that’s not possible.

Physical Whiteboard Tips for CELTA Teaching Practice

In a face-to-face CELTA setting, your whiteboard can either support or sabotage you. Here are some basics that matter more than you’d think:

• Use big (or big-ish) lettering and write clearly. Consider testing visibility from the back of the room.

• Use capital letters naturally: don't capitalise words just because they're on the board. Think about how you would expect the words to be recorded in the students' notes and use that as a guide for which words to capitalise.

• Avoid very slanted or hard-to-read joined writing.

• Mark grammar chunks using spacing and colours (e.g. have been + -ing)

• Keep your layout clean. Avoid filling right to the bottom or into every corner if you can avoid it because parts of the board might be harder to see than others.

• Leave space for emergent language. These can be errors or good phrases that come up during activities that the whole class can learn from.

For example, if a student says “She goed to work yesterday,” you might write it exactly as said, then guide them toward the correct version and highlight the corrected form in another colour:

❌ She goed to work yesterday

✅ She went to work yesterday (green “went”)

This visual clarity helps reinforce form and correct errors without needing a long explanation.

Interactive Whiteboards: Making the Most of Tech

If your classroom has a IWB - interactive whiteboard like a SmartBoard or Promethean Panel , you can use it just like a regular board, but you can also take advantage of interactive features.

A great tool is hide and reveal, where you cover text or images with a shape and gradually uncover it. For example, during a functional language lesson, you might show this on screen:Could you ___ me the salt, please? Students guess, you reveal the missing word, and you highlight the polite request structure.

Drag-and-drop activities work especially well for:

• Matching sentence halves (e.g. conditionals)

• Sorting vocabulary into categories

• Reordering scrambled questions or instructions

Tip: Always test your slides before the lesson. Interactive whiteboards are powerful, but when they go wrong mid-lesson, they can cause panic — especially during a timed CELTA teaching practice. Have a paper or PDF backup just in case!

Online Whiteboard Tools for CELTA and Beyond

Online teaching has become a regular part of English language teaching, and online whiteboards are key to keeping lessons interactive. There's no need to learn a whole new technology for this and you can make software that you're familiar with serve the same function as a whiteboard in an in-person class. If you can record vocabulary clearly, quickly and usefully on a Word document while sharing screen, then there's no need to learn all about new software options. The same is true of Google Slides or any other tool you can use to share written and visual information. That said, there are lots of options out there if you would like to level up and try something a bit different.

Zoom’s built-in whiteboard is basic but generally effective: you can draw timelines, elicit answers, or collect student ideas, but do remember to test it as it can be clunky and you might prefer not to take the risk in a teaching practice scenario. If you're already familiar with presentation software for IWBs like ActivInspire, you can also consider that.

For individualised tasks, platforms like whiteboard.fi give each student their own whiteboard. For collaborative tasks, the easiest route is probably a Google Document or a Google Form, but there are also more complex and slicker tools like Miro or Google Canvas that allow students to move icons, complete diagrams, or brainstorm ideas together. These can be useful for activities like:

• Ranking tasks (e.g. Which job is the most stressful?)

• Matching vocabulary and images

• Organising storyboards for speaking or writing tasks

  
  

It's important to keep it simple when you're choosing tools, especially when you're first using them. It's definitely better if there's no login needed, a low lag time, and limited clutter. If the whiteboard becomes more of a barrier than a tool, simplify. And always give clear instructions for how students should interact with it.

Boardwork Tips for CELTA Trainees and New Teachers

Here’s a final checklist of CELTA whiteboard tips to help you feel more confident:

• Plan your board layout in your lesson plan

• Use consistent colour coding for grammar and pronunciation

• Take a photo or screenshot for reflection and revision

• Don’t try to fit too much

• Leave room for spontaneity: error correction, useful phrases, real student language

And if you ever finish a lesson and think, “Argh, my board was a mess!”, that’s OK. It’s part of the learning curve. Over time, you’ll start to anticipate what your students need on the board before they realise they need it. That’s when you’ll know your boardwork has gone from being a stress point to a real strength.

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About the author:

Dr Connor O'Donoghue hails from Ireland and he started teaching English as a foreign language in Poland in 2003 and he became a CELTA trainer in 2008. He has taught and trained in Ireland, the UK, France, Italy, Slovenia, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Connor also holds a Masters and a PhD in Education from Trinity College in Dublin. He has previously managed large teacher training centres in Vietnam and in London before founding DC Teacher Training.