Hi, I'm Jennifer Gonzalez, I'm here for Cult of Pedagogy
and today I would like to tell you about a great discussion tool
that I'm going to call "Chat Stations."
These are very similar to other kinds of station work that you would do in your classroom
but they're much simpler and faster to set up.
A lot of elementary teachers use station work
and it's really great for having kids move around the room and get a lot of different activities done.
As we move through the grades and start teaching older kids,
a lot of teachers don't use stations very much, because they're time-consuming to set up.
And so chat stations are a simpler tool,
and really fast to set up, very flexible, so... Here's how they work.
Start by writing out your questions.
Then place them around your room.
Put students in groups of 2-4,
and give each group a recording sheet that corresponds to the questions.
Groups then rotate from station to station
discussing the questions and recording their answers.
Once all groups have visited all stations,
they return to their regular seats. Now the whole-class discussion begins.
Work your way through each station one at a time,
calling on individual groups to summarize their findings.
Because each group has dealt with each question on their own,
they're likely to have different outcomes,
which makes for a richer class discussion.
So here are some of the great advantages of using Chat Stations.
First of all, it incorporates movement into your instruction.
Any time the brain -- the body gets to move around,
the brain starts to operate better.
It increases the involvement that more students can have. If you're breaking them into smaller groups --
this is just like cooperative learning --
then more students are actually participating, because the discussion isn't being conducted
by just one or two students and you.
It also increases your one-on-one time with students because you rotate around
with the groups and interact with them. This allows you to be able to modify for different student abilities,
to catch misconceptions about a concept as they're happening
instead of waiting until you've quizzed the students,
and it just allows you to interact with the students in a much more intimate, one-on-one setting.
It also incorporates novelty. Novelty is just an important concept in learning:
Any time a student learns a concept in a novel situation, they're going to remember it better.
So what this does is, it physically puts them in different parts of your room
so that they'll remember later on that the question that they talked about back in that corner,
it'll spark a memory that might not have happened if they just talked about everything from their seat.
And also interactions with individual people about certain concepts will also build in more novelty.
And finally, there's flexibility in Chat Stations. These are not complicated, hands-on,
equipment-heavy types of stations. This is just questions that you're popping up around the room.
You could easily have these be just on a worksheet, but instead
you're having them move around and discuss them one-on-one.
So, next I've got a couple tips for you
to help make Chat Stations work a little bit better for you.
First, to keep groups in step with each other,
set a time limit for stations.
The amount of time will depend on the kinds of questions you ask.
After the established time is up, have all groups rotate simultaneously.
Another tip is to predict the number of groups you're going to have
and prepare more stations than groups. You can even make duplicates if you don't want to add questions.
Having one or two extra stations helps if one station takes students longer than the others do.
With extras, everyone else can still rotate and have something to do.
A third way to make things go smoothly
is to have one group model the process first.
Have 3-4 volunteers discuss a sample question in front of the class
with your help.
Point out which behaviors are helping, and which ones are not.
For example, some students will think that each group member should take a turn "doing" each question,
meaning the others stand around doing nothing, while one person answers the question.
Have your model group demonstrate how to get all group members' input for every question.
Finally, keep a checklist of expectations and tie this to a grade
so students know they're still accountable for things like staying on task
and actively participating in all discussions.
So here are a couple of ideas that you could use Chat Stations for:
Imagine that you're studying the scientific method with students.
You can put example scenarios of different types of research studies around the room
and have students go around and critique them for the quality of their design.
If you're studying some type of literature, you just read a short story, you can put excerpts of that story around the room
and have students rotate around them and discuss their significance to the story.
You can take your next worksheet and chop it into pieces and spread it around the room.
Math problems can go around the room. There's really an endless amount of different types of things.
So what I'm trying to do is put out the idea that
stations don't really have to be as complicated as we make them.
The complicated ones are amazing,
but this is another way to incorporate more movement and more one-on-one discussion
in a quick and easy way.
So if you're looking for a way to build more movement into your classroom
and shake things up a little bit, try Chat Stations.
Thanks so much for watching, be sure to visit www.cultofpedagogy.com
for more resources and inspiration.
Thank you.