ELA Learning Stations

By: Erica

This year I have been working with a first-time teacher who has been very adept at adapting her classroom set-up to work with her students. We are working in an English Language Arts class. At the beginning of the year, our students did not seem engaged during class. Their minds would wander (as middle school minds are wont to do) and become unfocused. She then began mixing up the class set-up and the response was fantastic.

One way that the class has changed is the use of learning stations. Four or five stations are set up throughout the class, which is broken up into smaller groups. One station may focus on reading a story as a group while another listens to a reading of the story. Another station answers response questions, and another station completes a writing activity. The students rotate through the stations over the course of one or more classroom sessions.

The class has responded really well to the small group setting, and appear to benefit from having different activities as opposed to one classroom activity. The response has been good enough that the teacher has made learning stations a regular thing. If I ever experience the same when teaching a classroom, I would strongly consider dividing the class up into learning stations to see if the class dynamic changed for the better.