Elevating Your Lessons: The Transformative Benefits of Station Teaching
If you’ve known us for a while, then you know how much we love Station Teaching. If you’re new here...hi, hello, and welcome! We’re thrilled you found us! Whether you’re a standalone general education teacher or a co-teacher, we can help you utilize Station Teaching to elevate your practice.
Station teaching replaces whole-class instruction and is not to be confused with Centers. We love Centers. Centers are awesome! They are simply NOT Station Teaching. What’s the difference? In Station Teaching, teachers actively instruct; in centers, teachers facilitate.
Getting started:
No matter what kind of class you’re teaching, you want to make sure that your stations do not affect how long it will take to cover the content. Look at a lesson that you’d normally teach whole group and see if you can easily divide it into a few different parts. Each station can last just a few minutes, a whole period, or somewhere in between!
If you’re a standalone teacher, divide your class into equal-sized heterogenous groups. You can have as few as 2 groups or as many groups as feels manageable. Plan a minilesson that you will teach at your station, and then plan independent activities for each of the other independent stations. The independent stations can have students working completely independently, in partners, or as groups. Each group will rotate through all the stations.
If you are co-teaching, divide your class into 3 equal-sized heterogenous groups. Each teacher plans a minilesson for their station, and one station is independent. The independent station can have students working completely independently, in partners, or as groups. All three groups rotate to each station.
A Few Guidelines to Make Sure Your Stations Run Smoothly:
Stations must be non-sequential! Students must be able to start at any station, so they can’t need the content at one station in order to be successful at another station.
The timing of each station must be the same every time so students all get the same instruction (for example, 3 rounds of 15-minute stations).
Provide backup materials at all stations in case one station finishes before the others.
Invest time in creating or putting together tasks for the independent station that can become low to no prep (examples: independent reading, choice board for independent station, spiral review, online skill practice, ongoing projects, partner review games, etc.).
Explicitly teach the transition. Don’t assume your students will just go where they need to! Make sure to really break it down until they have nailed the structure.
Why Should I Use Station Teaching Anyway?
The benefits of station teaching are innumerable, so we’ll highlight the most important.
You end up with small groups! And as we talk about all the time, small groups should be the goal for as much instruction as possible. The benefits of small group instruction are widely known, researched and written about in articles such as this Harvard meta-analysis
Students are much more likely to take academic risks when in a small group. You know that student who never speaks in class? Put them in a small group and we bet you’ll start hearing from them.
Students are less likely to fly under the radar. It’s much harder to “hide in the back” when you have just 10 students in front of you as opposed to 30.
Your kinesthetic learners will thank you (maybe not literally, but it’s a thankless job). Breaking up the period into a few distinct parts helps so many types of learners, including those with ADHD, those who like to move or switch gears, and even those who like to do more than one thing in a period!
Special note to co-teachers: Some people have a hard time believing this one, but we promise it’s true: once you become comfortable with station teaching, planning gets easier! Here’s why: when you sit down to plan stations with your co-teacher, you need to decide the following:
What the station content will be and who will teach what
How long they’ll last
Where in the room they’ll be
Who is going to get the materials for the independent station (if applicable)
And that’s it! Once you’ve decided those quick things, you can go off and plan YOUR station in the comfort of your home, your car, or the rock you hide under after a long day teaching rowdy youth. (We know this rock well.)
Start Small
If all this feels overwhelming, we get it. Wrapping your head around going from whole group instruction to this new format can feel like a lot. There is nothing wrong with starting small. Test out station teaching with just two stations. Make them short. Keep the content of each station as simple as possible. Build up your comfort slowly by taking small, calculated steps, building in a little bit more each time you implement the model. Eventually, you can work your way up to 3 (or more!) stations. In time, once you work toward building in all the systems and routines described above, your stations will essentially run themselves.