Blended Update #3 - Station Rotation Love

Last week I wrote about my experience going to +Marcia Kish's Blended and Personalized Learning Conference in November. The conference gave me time to reflect on my own practice and what I was doing with the blended pilot in my Honors Spanish 3 class. This week I’d like to talk about how I processed this information and what I did to improve instruction and learning in my own classroom.

While I was at the conference, two things really stuck in my craw.

First, I realized that when we had blended days, the students typically all ran out of the room as fast as they could because of the novelty of it (and because teenagers love the idea of freedom). Yes, the students earning below a 70% were required to stay in the room with me, but that didn’t mean that they were the only students who needed my help. It was also challenging for me to connect with students if they weren’t with me (and like most educators, I place a really high value on building and maintaining positive relationships).

The second thought that Marcia really hit home was that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and as much as I wanted, Phase 3 wasn’t going to happen tomorrow. When I envisioned my classroom, Phase 3 was exactly what I wanted, but I needed a reminder that it would take me both time and work to get there. Additionally, I think that I needed to work with my students to help them understand how they can learn to maximize what they’re doing in the classroom. This thought also helped me rein in the frustration from some overwhelming thoughts I was having about how I would get to Phase 3.

So...where did I go from there?

After Thanksgiving break, I decided to follow Marcia’s process and start with Phase 1. At the time, we needed to work on the present subjunctive, as well as keep working on vocabulary and more cultural connections. I picked a purple week so that I’d see them three times and decided to do all three lesson plans in the station rotation format. Here’s what our week looked like:

20 minutes per station	Station #1 ---------------------- Mini-lesson	Station #2 ---------------------- Independent Practice	Station #3 ---------------------- Digital Content	Station #4 ---------------------- 4Cs
Monday	Mini-lesson: subjunctive	Culture: Colombia	Flipped lesson: subjunctive	Catch Phrase
	Students received direct instruction from me on the grammar topic.	Students read about Colombia via their online textbook and completed accompanying online activities.	Students watched two flipped lessons on EdPuzzle on the same grammar topic as the mini-lesson.	Students worked collaboratively to play Catch Phrase in Spanish with the current vocabulary list.
Wednesday	Subjunctive practice	Culture: Colombia	VHL Central practice	Vocabulary definition production
	Students worked with me and five classmates to complete practice on the grammar topic.	Students completed a video activity on Schoology.	Students completed online textbook activities to support grammar and vocabulary work.	Students worked collaboratively to write definitions, in Spanish, for all of the unit’s vocabulary words on big posters hung on the wall.
Friday	Writing practice	Practice quiz & Cultural activity	VHL Central practice	Heads Up
	Students worked in a small group with me to produce written work with the new grammar topic.	Students worked on two shorter activities: 1) practice vocab quiz on Schoology & 2) cultural listening activity.	Students completed additional online textbook activities to support grammar and vocabulary work.	Students played a paper version of heads up (aka holding a piece of paper on your forehead). They utilized the definitions from last class to help them. E-version

I made a conscious effort to follow Marcia’s model pretty closely with one change. For the independent practice station I had the students utilize technology. When I first made the decision to do so, it’s simply because I wanted them to watch a cultural video clip on Colombia; however, the results from that activity were positive and I liked the data I received from Schoology so I decided to continue infusing technology into the independent practice station.  

And my impressions of Phase 1 Station Rotation?

I LOVED it! We would have done almost all of the activities, but doing them in this format gave me so much more time to work with individual students. At the end of each class, I was able to confidently say that I knew where each student was on the various topics. I had both online data from a few sources (Schoology, online textbook, EdPuzzle) and I had my own personal impressions of their work since I had interacted individually with each student. Additionally, I felt that doing this helped the students understand my expectations for their work in class.

Controlled chaos

Last week when we blogged about Marcia Kish’s phases, +Lee Ann Haralambakis wondered if it made a difference at what station they started working in relation to the mini-lesson. The answer is yes. Marcia recommended utilizing review work for the Independent Practice Station on a day with new information on the mini-lesson (4 review question, 2 new reaching questions, 2 real-life application questions). While I don't remember specifically, I assume this applied to the Digital Content station as well.

When I went to plan my class, I got around this in two ways. First, for the Independent Practice station, I used a cultural listening activity that could be completed without the mini-lesson. I contemplated what Marcia recommended with review questions, but I didn’t find that it lent itself well to my specific lesson. Second, for the Digital Content station on the first day of station rotation I used flipped lessons on the same material that I presented in the mini-lesson. By doing this, the students were exposed to the same content twice, but in two different styles. For the next two classes with station rotation, the order of the stations did not matter because I didn’t present any new material when the students worked with me. I did, however, make a conscious decision to start a certain group of students who were having a tougher time with the material with me so that I could work with them closely before they moved on to the next stations.

So, what are my next steps?

Keep working on Phase 1 until I feel a little more comfortable to start to work into Phase 2. I think that the Spanish PLT has created lots of material that will lend itself well to setting up my classroom this way. My goal is to figure out how and when I determine each student’s needs for a specific lesson/topic/unit. In doing this more efficiently I will be able to better determine who I will meet their needs in Phase 2 and eventually Phase 3.

As mentioned previously, Dawn and I are working on a post with additional resources that would help anyone interested in trying out this method of blended/personalized learning. We're also working on a way to share some live action station rotation to help share with each other.

Is there a topic you'd like to see on the blog? Give us some ideas and let's get the conversation started! Are you doing something cool in your classroom that we could highlight to help learn from each other? Let us know! Is one of your colleagues doing something great that we should see and blog about? Please tell us! We all know there is a lot of amazing work going on in our building. Let's share!