Math Stations

Last year, I was teaching grade 8 French Immersion. This was definitely out of my comfort zone, at the time. I trained at the P/J level, but then was hired to teach high school, and did so for two years, until I was moved to a grade 8 classroom for a year before being moved back to high school. That year was one of the most challenging years of my short teaching career. However, it was the year in which I probably grew the most as a teacher.

At first, I was struggling to keep my head above water. I was now teaching 10 different subjects a week, when I was initially told I'd be a multi-grade math specialist. Needless to say, many lessons became teacher-led lesson followed by practice. My lessons were boring and I was giving students a lot of work.

So once I got into the groove of things, I decided I wanted to do my entire geometry unit using student-centered stations, allowing me to work one-on-one with students and taking the entire teaching focus off of me. That was the scary part. I didn't do any formal teaching. I grew to love it and my students loved the independence.

So how did this work?

I started by taking my outcomes and grouping them into key ideas. I had five stations:

1. Rectangular Prisms
2. Triangular Prisms
3. Cylinders
4. Composite Figures
5. Enrichment

At each station, I had six folders:

1. Visual Explanation
2. Written Explanation (in both English and in French)
3. Video Explanation (often from YouTube)
4. Game
5. Practice #1
6. Practice #2

Students could start at whatever station they wanted. Many started with "Rectangular Prisms." At each station, students had to show evidence of trying to learn the content in at least three different ways (of the six... I counted "Practice" as one of the ways of learning). Then, once they showed this evidence (using a tracking card), they could attempt a quiz. Quiz days were Tuesdays and Thursdays. They needed to get 100% on the quiz before moving on to another station. If they didn't get 100%, they had to go back and try another way of learning (even if it was a dumb calculation error... this way, many students would use one of the two practices for the initial three pieces of evidence). I would track their success with stickers. Since there were really four primary stations, we worked on this unit for four weeks. Students thus had four weeks, working at their own pace, before the unit test. 

What I noticed with this method was that students were initially more off-task (the first time I used the stations, they had more time, so many slacked off). However, by the time they got to the unit test, they were so much more confident and more consistent with their work. The class average was about 10% higher than units that were primarily teacher-centered. 

I know my system has flaws, but for a first-time trial, I'd say it was a huge success. I managed to do a stations-method unit for our numbers strand, too. Students loved this set-up and asked to keep using it throughout the year. 

Unfortunately, being given another teaching load this year of new courses, I haven't been able to try flipping my classroom or using these stations. But! I do get to teach the grade 11 math course again next year, so I have more time to think about where stations would fit in nicely (I'm thinking quadratics, for sure). 

Have you used stations in senior math courses? How did they go? Any tips or tricks?