Teaching mostly through Stations

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(like 85% of the time)

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@kaisamng

Advantages of teaching through Stations

• More individualized environment
• Allows Movement for the fidgeters
• Facilitate groupwork and students helping each other
• Solves:
• Big class sizes my school wasn’t designed for (Not enough chairs, calculators, room, etc)
• “Fragile” mathematicians
• Being too lazy to move desks
• Building in procedural fluency practice for children that are at vastly different places
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Barriers

• New Coteacher
• How much Time? Can I make time?
• What Routines and Structures?
• How to Group
• How to Assess
• Are my kids ready for this amount of independence?
• Differentiating for 35% children with disabilities (SLD, ED, visual impairment, audio impairment, student with TBT and dedicated aide) and 20% of children who are on average ~4 grade levels above.

The Plan: Do three Stations a day, but pick from 4

• Teacher’s Lounge: 10 minute mini lessons, using guided notes. Provide colors for kids who need color coding (basically everybody used them)
• <Interchanges with> Application Station: for discovery-based activities where students create conjectures of their work and then try to apply their rule. Also a word problem and group quiz station.

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• Practice Plaza: procedural fluency and reinforcement of skills

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• Tech Hub: Computer-only station to do practice. Included choice with IXL Platform, and also a Canvas’s Mastery Pathways Platform.

Planning Difficulty

• Teacher’s Lounge: Moderate
• Basically the same guided notes I would use in a whole-class lesson, and had to be conscious of whether I could fit those guided notes within 10 minutes
• Application Station: Hard
• Struggled with sectioning off something meaningful that could be done in 15 minutes
• Practice Plaza: Easy!
• Make a worksheet, make a key. Steadily ramp up rigor throughout the year by incorporating more word problems
• Tech Hub: Easy!
• Easiest to plan! Both IXL and and Mastery Pathways were adaptive.

Sequencing Stations

-Start each unit off with a whole-class task

-Then stations all the way down until exam.

-Sometimes regrouped for projects

Timing

• Station 1: 15 minutes
• Station 1 Exit Ticket: 3 minutes
• Station 2: 15 minutes
• Station 2 Exit Ticket: 3 minutes
• Station 3: 15 minutes
• Station 3 Exit Ticket and Clean up: 5 minutes

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• Each station has their own work that you can’t see. Photocopy it onto different colored papers!
• (Make time tracking a classroom job. Also answering the phone. And taking attendance. And account for missing students to save make up work for them. I am an incredibly lazy teacher).

Grouping

• Mostly behavioral at first
• Then random: take names and throw them on the board
• Maybe like… once every two weeks? Then I got lazy

Norms

• Norms for all students at each station at the beginning of the year.
• First month: set in time for students to silently read over norms before doing work.

Assessment: Exit Ticket Paper

• Procedural Component
• Open-ended choice component (with scaffolding)

Teacher’s Lounge: tinyurl.com/capcitygeo

• Color Markers, glue sticks
• Students sit down, grab a page of guided notes, and glue them in their notebooks.

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• Tinyurl.com/capcitygeo: online notes for students who are absent, lost their notebook, recently got evicted and lost their stuff etc…
• Sometimes: screen recorded and uploaded to YouTube

Practice Plaza

• Co-teacher took this station
• (Had to provide an answer key)
• On days co-teacher wasn’t there, I just circulated around
• Differentiation: create a color-coded version for ELLs!

Tech Hub

• Mostly used IXL Platform

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https://www.ixl.com/analytics/questions-log#skill=2004009949&student=63450851

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https://www.ixl.com/analytics/questions-log#skill=2002026048&student=63450851

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Tech Hub pt. 2: Canvas Mastery Pathways

• Students get a pre-assessment
• Based on how they do, they get a separate assignment
• Get your Canvas administrator to turn it on! All Canvas platforms have Mastery Pathways.

Sample Google Docs written work

Application Station

Took on three flavors:

1. Word Problems
2. Discovery Activities
3. Group Quizzes

Application Station

• Sometimes with discovery activities!

HNPS

Application Stations Pt. 3

The Data!

IDK if student achievement increased, I’ll find out in August

Caveats!

• Still sometimes needed whole group teaching, or just groups of four (15% of this year)
• Required really careful and thoughtful planning to sequence concepts
• Required lots of resources that teachers might not already have: colored paper, Canvas, IXL, a coteacher...

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If you want to try this out yourself…

1. Be conscious of what role students have in the room
1. Do you want them to work together? How much of that 15 minutes do you want them to work?
2. Interact just in small groups with the teacher? How much of that 15 minutes is interacting with you?
2. Start with doing stations twice a week
• Don’t do two days of stations in a row
3. Plan that you will only have 80% of your period for stations
4. (20%) Spend lots of time in the beginning developing routines. MAKE TIME FOR ROUTINES!
• If they don’t follow the routine (i.e. during transition, children are horseplaying, talking about the mall, taking too slow to transition), make them go back and do it again.
5. Do TONS of formative assessment. (I use Fist to Five, trade and grade exit tickets mostly)
• Sometimes students need more than 15 minutes for a station. Sense if you are moving too fast!
6. Don’t hesitate to stop stations if it turns out it just isn’t working for students.
• I’ve done this lots of times, but eventually doing it enough I figured out how much content to fit in each station day.

Pushes for Next Year

• Facilitate more explicit group roles
• Pinpoint the reasons why some students do not feel a sense of belonging in the classroom
• Ensuring everyone in the class is accountable for their work
• Better ways to split conceptual tasks
• Currently 50% procedural and 50% conceptual: is there a way to push this?
• Help?????