1.10 Classroom Culture: Routines & Procedures

Having a set procedure for working using the station rotation model is imperative, mainly because one of the stations usually involves the teacher.  The procedure I set up for my classroom included an instruction page, which was located on the LMS, which looks like this:

Also included in the first slide of a Google presentation was which individuals started in specific groups based on either ability level or students who just worked well together.

After all the students understood what they would be doing first I used the remainder of the Google Slides to push the class along.  As the students worked in their individual station, the timer counted down. Once the time was up, I moved to the next slide to reveal to the students which station they would be working on next until the end of the period.  The pictures below show these slides.

With this procedure in place along with the repetition of using these slides, students were able to efficiently change from one station to the next.  Adding these slides was a pivotal procedure for making the station rotation model to work. Without, it was easy to lose track of time with one group's station with me and would then have to cut short the time the next group was able to spend in that small group tutoring. Along with the slides, having the instructions available on the LMS allowed me to work with one group without giving any real-time instructions to the other two groups.  One thing that I plan to add to the instruction sheet is

Along with the slides, having the instructions available on the LMS allowed me to work with one group without giving any real-time instructions to the other two groups.  One thing that I plan to add to the instruction sheet is to include short instructional videos in the case of the instructions being unclear.

A procedure that changed from the beginning of using these slides was having the students stay in the same physical positions in the room, and having the stations rotate to the students.  Doing this saved valuable time because the only one moving through the classroom was one teacher instead of 20 students.