Why Stations are More Effective Than Study Guides.

Are you getting ready to give your students an end of the unit exam? Maybe you want to pause in the middle of a unit and have students review the material they've been learning. Stations is a great way of achieving an interactive and engaging review of lesson content over a course of two lesson periods.

Traditionally, teachers will give students a study guide with a comprehensive list of fluency drills or questions to help them review for an exam. Some teachers may not even provide review at all and only instruct students to be prepared for their exam on a certain date. In any event, review is critical and very necessary. Fluency is a product of effective review. Studies show that students are more successful when they achieve automacity, the ability to recall math content and learned skills accurately, quickly and effortlessly. When students are fluent in math, they have demonstrated that they have attained a level of mastery that allows them to retrieve math content quickly and with reason. Fluency is imperative to a student's academic success.

Aside from providing guided and independent practice in a typical lesson and hands-on activities here and there, I also do Stations to pull everything together. Recently, my Algebra 2 class just finished a mini unit on Factoring Polynomials. This topic was something my students severely struggled with which I came to realize after assessing data from their September Diagnostic. Students learned about six different factoring techniques and were okay with factoring polynomials as long as they were told what type of factoring they needed to do for a specific type of polynomial. However, when I gave them a mix of polynomials as a Do Now assignment, they immediately flipped out as they realized they weren't given instructions on what type of factoring to do. They struggled.

It was evident right away that students were studying the content in isolation. They weren't making connections. The first lesson on factoring started with Prime Factorization and the Greatest Common Factor. We also analyzed the two methods, compared them, and studied when it is useful to use the GCF. The next lesson was factoring a quadratic when the leading coefficient is equal to one. The following lesson was on factoring a quadratic when the leading coefficient is greater than one. We compared these two factoring techniques and discussed when it is necessary to use them. The lessons continued until we got to special factoring like a Difference of Perfect Squares, Perfect Square Trinomials, a Sum or Difference of Cubes, etc. We continued to compare methods, formulas, and polynomials. However, when it came time for students to independently identify the type of polynomial they were working with and which factoring technique to use, it was almost like they forgot everything they had learned. This is why Stations is so important.

I spent a lot of time on my putting together my Stations worksheets. They are differentiated into tiered groupings (Group A - high performing students exceeding standards, Group B - medium performing students meeting standards, Group C - low performing students approaching standards). For each learning target, we spent a lesson (one period) learning the content. Sometimes we spent two lessons depending on formative assessment data like the Do Nows, Exit Tickets, etc. Those same learning targets showed up as the basis for my Stations worksheets.

I created a total of six learning targets for each Station and two fluency Stations (a mixed review) for a total of eight stations named Station A through Station H. The differentiated worksheets are also color coded. Group A is in Green, Group B is in Orange and Group C is in Yellow. Students are grouped before hand and I display their groupings on the board. My students are very used to the groupings as I group them for just about everything, from the Do Now to the Exit Ticket and the groupings change every few days or the next day. Their seat assignments are random for this activity but it is important to make sure that groupings are heterogeneous and have a group A, B and C student at the same table. It won't work obviously to have all Group A students sitting together, all Group B students sitting together, etc.

Once students are seated and understand the instructions, they should be using their answer sheets to work out the problems. Each station has three problems. 1) Problem Solving. 2) Error Analysis. 3) Reasoning/Application. Each of these problems assess student thinking in several ways. Students are not just working on drills. They've done that throughout the lessons. It's important for them to practice but also be assessed in other ways such as analyzing errors and making connections with problems through reasoning.

Stations is a very effective activity to have students review concepts instead of just handing them a list of questions they need to answer. It also allows them to get up and move around, which changes up the style of the classroom environment. Stations is also great because it can be used for any content, not just math. If you are not familiar with stations, try it out. I also have this Stations Bundle available in my TpT All Things Teach Rm 321. If you are familiar with stations, have you tried it before? What was your Stations set up? How did it go? Let me know.

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~ All Things Teach Rm 321