Why Use Stations in English Language Arts?
Do you dream of a classroom where students are focused, engaged, and collaborating?
If the answer to that question is yes, then I encourage you to consider adding Stations to your teaching repertoire. In stations, students work in small groups of 3-5 students to solve a challenge. After twelve minutes, they rotate to a new station with a new challenge.
Middle school students in 2023 benefit and thrive in a fast-paced environment. Any adult will tell you that social media moves faster today than it ever did just twenty years ago. By having students rotate to new material every twelve minutes, engagement goes up. Fewer students are bored, waiting, or daydreaming. To meet the timelimit deadline teams of student learners instinctually begin to work together to solve the challenges at a quicker pace. A warm feeling fills my chest whenever I walk around the room and hear my students talking about the English concepts at their stations. This type of activity builds trust, communication, and comradery skills in the classroom. It also mirrors a real-life workplace environment. In the real world, adults collaborate to meet deadlines on a regular basis, so it mirrors an authentic workplace environment.
Stations shouldn’t be the only type of work you do in the classroom. So, let’s talk about the situations when it makes sense to utilize a station activity. This type of lesson structure focuses on bitesize challenges to build comprehension, expose learners to new skills or information, and push them to practice to the rigor of specific standards. I personally enjoy using stations as a pre-reading leading up to teaching a new short story.
What type of work are students doing?
I’ve found success with many different activities, challenges, and skill assessments. Below is a list of some common stations that I use. These are all available in my Short Story Stations Bundle on TPT.
SOME TYPES OF ACTIVITIES FOR STATIONS:
Introduction of the Setting of a Text (pictured left) - Students learn about the environment, weather, time period or other aspects of the setting that play a crucial role in the text that they will read.
Vocabulary Building - New vocabulary is introduced. The teacher should choose difficult or domain specific words that will appear in the next text that students are going to read in class.
Core ELA Skills - Stations offer the opportunity for teachers to introduce concepts like foreshadowing, theme, figurative language, point-of-view, and more. Sample problems should be included to test student understanding of new material.
Comparable Texts - When I teach students The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs, I have them read another short story about the consequences of making wishes. This reinforces the theme of the short story through an adjacent/comparable text.
Text specific information - If a teacher plans to teach something like The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe as a Halloween unit then they may want to have a station dedicated to teaching suspense techniques used by Poe in his writing. Examples should be provided for students.
Author’s Biography (pictured right) - Teach students about the author of the story.
Making Predictions - a small excerpt from the short story or next class text can be introduced to students. They can form their initial reaction to the first paragraph or first page of a short story.
Overall, stations make for a great lesson structure for introducing new information or assessing student performance in existing skills. I recommend giving it a try. It may seem daunting at first to design stations. It can be a lot of work up front to make high quality stations, but the payoff is extremely worth it. If you don’t have much time for planning and preparing then you should look at the various Stations available on my teachers pay teachers store: New Age ELA. I have stations for teaching poetry and figurative language, text structures, and a variety of popular short stories used in the middle school classroom.