You know this student.
Worksheet in front of them. Pencil in hand. Four minutes gone and not one mark on the page. You walk past and they cover it. You ask how it is going and they tell you they are thinking.
They are not thinking. They are stalling. Whatever they write down first might be wrong, and wrong is going to sit there in graphite where everyone can see it.
Now put that same student on a whiteboard on the wall. Standing. Two classmates next to them, one marker between the three of them.
The stakes just collapsed. Anything they write can be gone with a swipe of an eraser. So they write something. Probably something wrong. And that wrong thing is where the math finally starts.
This is not a thought experiment. Several of the schools we work with are currently putting whiteboards on every surface their math room will hold. Over the bulletin board. Above the cabinets. Into the gaps between the windows. On the back of the door. Anywhere a group of three can stand.
From the doorway it looks excessive. It is not. There is a name for what they are doing, and there is research behind it.
What are vertical non-permanent surfaces?
Vertical non-permanent surfaces, usually shortened to VNPS, are erasable writing surfaces mounted on the walls, where students stand and work in small groups instead of sitting at their desks with paper. Whiteboards are the usual choice, though chalkboards work just as well. Only two things matter: the surface has to be upright, and the work has to erase.
The term comes from Building Thinking Classrooms, an approach developed by Dr. Peter Liljedahl, a mathematics education professor at Simon Fraser University. He spent years chasing one stubborn question: how do you get more students thinking, and thinking for longer?
A surprising amount of the answer turned out to be about furniture.
Why does erasing change what students are willing to try?
Because it takes the permanence out of being wrong, and permanence is what your frozen student is actually afraid of.
Liljedahl's team ran a comparison worth sitting with. They put some groups on whiteboards and other groups on flip chart paper, gave them the same task, and watched the clock. As Edutopia reported, the whiteboard groups started working within about twenty seconds. The paper groups did not.
Same students. Same problem. Same room. The only thing that changed was whether a mistake could be undone.
Think about what you are actually asking for when you hand out a worksheet. You are asking a student to commit their first guess, in pen or pencil, to a page that will be collected. For a confident kid that is nothing. For an anxious one it is the whole obstacle. The board removes it without you having to say a word about it.
Why does standing change who participates?
Because sitting at a table lets people disappear.
Picture four students around one desk with a single worksheet between them. One does the work. One helps a bit. Two go quiet and let it happen. You have watched this a thousand times and probably blamed the grouping, or the task, or the two quiet ones.
It may just be the seating. Liljedahl has described it in terms of anonymity: students who feel invisible check out, and standing up takes the invisibility away. Nobody is behind anybody at the whiteboard. There is no back row.
And here is the part teachers tend to fall for. Once every group's work is up on the walls, the room starts teaching itself. A stuck group looks up, sees three other approaches in progress across the room, and borrows one. Ideas stop being trapped at individual tables and start moving.
One thing worth knowing before you go shopping. The research found the material barely mattered. What mattered was that the surface was vertical and that it erased. If you have old chalkboards in decent condition, you may already own more of this than you think.
But does science actually back up standing?
Here’s the straight answer; because a lot of what circulates on this topic online is loose.
On engagement, the standing research looks good. A Texas A&M study from their School of Public Health compared classrooms using stand-biased desks against traditional seated ones in grades two through four. They measured roughly 12 percent more on-task engagement, which works out to about seven extra minutes of real instruction per hour. Hold onto that number. It is the one that gets budgets approved.
On cognition, it is promising but early. A separate Texas A&M team followed 34 high school freshmen through a school year on stand-biased desks, testing executive function and working memory and imaging their brains while they did it. The results showed improvements in executive function and working memory, with matching changes in frontal brain activity. Real caveats though, and the authors say so themselves: no control group, the sample dropped to 27 students, and they call the work exploratory. Interesting, not settled.
And then there is the posture study everyone gets slightly wrong. You may have seen a stat going round that 56 percent of students found math easier standing up. It traces back to research from San Francisco State, and the real study is more useful to you than the version in circulation. Researchers had 125 college students do mental subtraction either slumped over or sitting up straight, and 56 percent said the upright position felt easier. Slumping, one of the researchers put it, "shuts them down."
Read it closely though. It compared slumping against sitting up straight. Standing was never one of the conditions, and it measured how students said it felt rather than how they scored.
What that study is really about is math anxiety, which makes it more relevant to your room, not less. The effect showed up strongest in the students who described themselves as anxious about math. The same ones who freeze over the worksheet.
So the fair summary is this. The standing-desk research points somewhere useful. The posture research is a genuinely interesting finding about math anxiety. But neither one studied kids writing on vertical whiteboards. The direct case for VNPS comes from Liljedahl's own classroom research, and that is what you want in front of your principal.
We will also say this, because you will find out anyway. VNPS has critics, and there is a real argument running in education circles about how well it works and for whom. Go read the skeptics before you spend a budget on it. Better that than being disappointed later.
So how many boards do you actually need?
This is the part that stops teachers cold, so let us just say it.
Groups of three. One board per group.
Run that against your own roster and the number gets uncomfortable fast. A UK teacher running A-level classes settled on eight boards around the room for about 24 students, which is a reasonable benchmark to plan against.
Eight. Not one big one at the front. The big one at the front is the room you already have, and the room you already have is why you are reading this.
This is also the moment teachers start looking at their walls like a Tetris board. Over the bulletin board. Above the cabinets. Between the windows. Back of the door. That dead strip beside the existing whiteboard that has never held anything.
Which is how a math room ends up with no bare walls left.
Our classroom whiteboards come in standard and custom sizes exactly this. Group-sized, not stage-sized. Several modest boards beat one enormous one every time here, and framed Lam-Rite boards starting around $58 are what turns covering a whole room into a realistic ask rather than a capital project.
What if your walls are already spoken for?
Three ways round it, depending on what your room gives you.
Go over the top of what is already there. Retro-Fit Whiteboards are the quiet hero of this whole approach. They mount straight over bulletin boards, across cabinet fronts, into spots a framed board will never fit. Ours come in 1/4" and 1/2" thicknesses. Take the thinner one when you are mounting onto something never built to hold weight, and the thicker one where the board is going to take a beating.
Get one made for the gap. Classroom walls are never tidy rectangles. If what you have is a 22 inch strip beside a window, or an awkward run above the coat hooks, a made-to-order board will actually use it. That is what our team at New York Blackboard is here for.
Or bring the wall to them. Shared room? Glass walls? A building where you are not allowed to drill anything, ever? Mobile whiteboards let you set up stations wherever you want and roll them out of the way when the bell goes. They are also how you run this in a room that is not yours.
And if the bulletin board you were about to cover is one you genuinely still use, a combination board gives you dry-erase and cork in one unit, so you are not trading away something you need.
Which surface survives a room full of teenagers?
Different question from which surface survives you.
A VNPS classroom means dozens of hands on every board every day, with markers of wildly varying age and quality, plus the occasional student who grabs whatever pen is nearest.
Ceramic steel is the one that lasts. It fights ghosting and staining, it is magnetic, and it is built for this kind of daily punishment. If a board is going to be worked on every period for the next fifteen years, this is what you ask for.
Lam-Rite is the sensible way to find out whether this suits your teaching before you commit real money. Outfit one room, run it a semester, see what happens.
If you want to go deeper we have written up the different whiteboard surfaces and magnetic versus non-magnetic boards. And because a student and a Sharpie will eventually find each other, keep this one bookmarked.
Getting someone to pay for it
Do not walk into that conversation asking for whiteboards. Walk in talking about instructional time.
Seven minutes an hour. That is the Texas A&M engagement figure and it is the most useful sentence you have. Multiply it across a school year and you are describing a serious recovery of teaching time, bought once, from something still hanging on that wall long after everyone in the meeting has retired.
Then bring a plan, not a wish. Eight boards. These four walls. These sizes. This total. "Can we get some whiteboards" gets tabled. A cost plan for a specific room gets approved.
We have been making boards for schools since the 1940s, including a lot of the chalkboards still hanging in older buildings around the region, and we quote room-sized and building-sized orders directly. If you want a hand working out what your room needs, call us at 973-926-1600
or ask for a custom quote. Tell us the wall and we will tell you what fits.
Even the dead strip beside the pencil sharpener.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does VNPS stand for?
VNPS stands for vertical non-permanent surfaces. These are erasable writing surfaces mounted on walls, where students stand and work in small groups instead of sitting at desks. The term comes from Peter Liljedahl's Building Thinking Classrooms.
Do vertical non-permanent surfaces have to be whiteboards? No. The Building Thinking Classrooms research found the material mattered far less than two qualities: the surface must be vertical and it must erase. Chalkboards, whiteboards and other erasable panels all work.
How many whiteboards does a thinking classroom need?
Plan on one surface for every group of about three students. For a class of roughly 24, that means around eight boards spread around the room. A single large board at the front will not do it.
Can you mount a whiteboard over an existing bulletin board?
Yes. Retro-Fit custom sized Whiteboards are regularly installed over bulletin boards, cabinets and other existing surfaces. A 1/4" panel keeps weight down on surfaces not built to carry much, while a 1/2" panel is sturdier for heavy daily use.
Does standing actually help students do math?
The honest answer is that it looks promising. Stand-biased desk studies report better on-task engagement and improvements in executive function. A widely quoted posture study compared slumping against sitting upright rather than standing, and measured how students felt rather than how they scored. The strongest direct evidence for vertical whiteboards comes from Liljedahl's classroom research.
Which whiteboard surface is best for a classroom?
Ceramic steel is the long-term choice for daily student use, resisting ghosting and staining while staying magnetic. Lam-Rite costs less and is a good way to trial the approach before committing to a full room.