How Unstructured Doodle Time Helps Kids: What My Art Classroom Whiteboard Taught Me
Cleaning out the back storage closet at the start of the spring term last year, I tripped over something hard wrapped in a faded drop cloth at my middle school art magnet. It was a beat-up rolling portable whiteboard, one wobbly leg, the marker tray snapped off clean, scrawled with half-erased dates from five years prior, when the previous art teacher retired. I didn’t need it. My classroom already has two big mounted whiteboards for lesson plans, supply lists, and project examples. I could have dragged it back, stacked it over the broken easels and unused clay wheels, and forgotten about it entirely. Instead, I propped it in the empty corner by the classroom door, out of the way of the worktables, and tossed a handful of leftover dry erase markers next to it.
First day of term, I was checking in 8th graders finishing up their college prep portfolio pieces when I glanced over and saw Mia, a 7th grader who’d spent all of fall semester erasing every sketch she started before anyone could see it, leaning against the whiteboard. She had a blue marker in her hand, and she’d drawn a tiny chonky cat in the bottom left corner, with a little coffee mug next to its paw. I didn’t say anything. I just kept grading and moved on with class. Next morning, the cat had a little mouse sitting on its head. By the end of the first week, every inch of the whiteboard was covered. There were stick figure fights, a doodle of the principal napping in his office, a bar graph comparing the quality of vending machine chips, a list of all the teachers who gave extra homework that month. Someone even scribbled that I drink iced coffee for breakfast, which is 100% accurate.
I kept meaning to erase it to make space for something “useful” every time I walked by, but every time I grabbed an eraser, a kid would stop me and say, “Wait, don’t — I still need to show my friend this thing.” So I just left it. If it got too full, someone would erase a corner to make space, or a small group would wipe the whole thing over the weekend when the classroom was empty and start over. No one asked me for permission. No one expected me to judge what they drew.
I’ve been teaching art here for 12 years, and I’ve always prided myself on being flexible. I do student-led projects, I let kids pick their own subjects for portfolios, I don’t force anyone to draw a flower if they’d rather draw a dinosaur. But even I didn’t realize how much unspoken pressure we put on kids to make something “good” all the time. Every piece they make in my class either gets hung on the hallway wall, goes into their portfolio for high school or college applications, or gets sent home to show their parents. This whiteboard is the only thing in the whole room that doesn’t count for anything. No grades, no judgment, no one’s saving it next week. That’s why the kids who never draw anywhere else draw here.
Take Javi, a 6th grader with ADHD who can’t sit through a 45-minute project and always gets up to wander the room. He doesn’t join after-school art club because he says he “can’t make anything good enough.” But every day, when he walks in, he stops at the whiteboard and adds one tiny doodle to a big roller coaster mural that’s been growing for two months. He stands there for two minutes, doodles, and then goes to his seat, calm enough to work on his assigned project for the rest of class. I never would have guessed that two minutes of unplanned doodling would be the thing that helps him settle in, but that’s exactly what it does.
Parents ask me all the time how to get their kids to draw more, or stop saying they’re bad at art. I used to tell them to pick up a nice sketchbook and encourage them to fill it. Now I tell them something simpler: pick a blank spot in your house that’s just for random drawing. It can be a cheap $10 whiteboard taped to the inside of a pantry door, a big roll of craft paper taped to the playroom wall, even the back of an old corkboard. Don’t tell them they have to make something nice. Don’t sort through their drawings and hang the best ones up for guests to see. Just leave it there, and let them draw whatever, whenever. If it gets full, just wipe it or unroll a new piece. No rules, no pressure to keep every little thing.
For teachers, the adjustment is just as small: don’t fill every blank wall in your classroom with anchor charts and perfect student work. Leave one unassigned space, something that doesn’t have a pre-planned purpose. It doesn’t have to be a whole rolling whiteboard — even a 2-foot by 2-foot section of wall covered in butcher paper works. Don’t police what goes up there, as long as it doesn’t make anyone feel bad. If something mean goes up, just erase it quietly and move on, no big lecture needed.
Last week, the wobbly leg finally gave out, and the whole whiteboard tipped over when a group of 7th graders leaned on it to see a new doodle. I propped it up against the wall again, ordered a new replacement leg, and it’s been sitting there lopsided for a week. Kids are still drawing on the parts that don’t fall off. It doesn’t fit into any of the state art standards I’m supposed to cover this semester. I don’t have a lesson plan for it, and I don’t know if it’s making anyone a better technical artist. But it’s given them a place to put all the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else: the bad jokes, the test stress, the tiny doodles that don’t need to be saved or graded or shown off. That’s more than any structured lesson I’ve ever planned could do, I think. It’s still messy, still wobbly, still a work in progress — just like most of the good stuff in teaching and parenting.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How Unstructured Doodle Time Helps Kids: What My Art Classroom Whiteboard Taught Me