Teacher Feature: What do stations look like in Lindsay’s classroom?

6 Oct

Last school year, Tracy Rosen and I offered a workshop around stations at AQIFGA 2016. Our workshop was all about introducing adult education teachers to the station rotation model and blended learning. There are many different models for setting up stations but the basic gist is that students move and rotate through different activities (i.e. – learning stations) during a class.

Lindsay Harrar, a Literacy teacher at ACCESS Brossard (Riverside School Board) was in our workshop and she was inspired to start using stations in her classroom soon afterwards. This September, I asked Lindsay if I could visit her English Literacy classroom in order to document and share how she was using stations.

In the following video, Lindsay explains that one of the biggest benefits to stations is that it gives her the ability to work with her students in small groups and increases student engagement:

l_vid1

Why Stations?” (2:13)

We also created a video that shows each one of Lindsay’s stations in action and how she incorporates a mix of traditional and online resources, aka blended learning. One thing I really liked is that Lindsay keeps the use of technology simple, so there are few glitches and students are able to work autonomously:

l_vid3

Stations and Blended Learning in Action” (2:41)

In regards to planning, Lindsay and I sketched out a simple diagram to plan out the different stations. We wanted to ensure that we had different ways for the students to learn the material (writing, conversations, reading, etc..) and an idea of how the students would tackle the objective at each station:

plan

If you’d like to learn more about how other adult education teachers in our community are using stations, please visit Tracy’s latest PD Mosaic tile, “Learning in Stations”. Once again, a huge thanks to Lindsay and her students for allowing me to visit and document their classroom!