Student-to-student discourse: Tip #2

Imagine this: You walk into a colleagues class and you see students scattered around the room, huddled into groups of 4, having great math discussion about different mathematical tasks. Students are debating, critiquing the thinking of their team members and practicing building MP 1 and MP 3. You scan the room looking for your colleague and you notice they are sitting with one group, answering the team's questions, and yet... everyone else is still on task!   

This scenario is a true story.  I see this frequently when I am visiting classrooms where the teachers are utilizing Stations or Centers, a cooperative learning structure, to engage students in mathematical tasks with required math talk. In the elementary world, these are used all of the time. My best experience watching stations in action was with Mrs. Moss, my son's Kindergarten teacher.  Each team was a shape and the shapes were listed on the board in order of how the student teams needed to rotate through the stations. Talk about organization! Every student knew the expectation of each station and when to move to the next station.  Below are the basic directions for setting up stations in your classroom.  

Directions:

1. The students are placed into teams of 4.  At each group of desks or tables, there is worksheet or activity for the group to complete.  Students are given a time limit to complete the task. Teams are expected to ensure that everyone on the team understands the task and thinking needs to be visible.  
2. After the first time limit (generally 5-15 minutes per task), the team rotates to the new station.
3. Students will rotate through all stations.  
4. Optional- At each station there are answers from the previous station so that the students can check their work. 

Stations provide teacher ample time to rotate through the room and work at specific stations where the students are having more difficulties. I used this strategy for reviewing for an assessment or a chunk of material when I knew students needed time to process and apply the information.  

Engage NY has exemplar tasks and our curriculum team created this Station activity from their Module 1 materials as a review activity. 

CAUTION: The trick to planning a great station activity is to make each station the same length so teams finish around the same time. I always had to have something planned or had rich "Advancing Questions" to engage the teams that finished early.