[Music] hi everyone I'm Dr catlyn Tucker and I got a question from Jennifer who is a math teacher and she's interested in using the station rotation she sees the value in small group differentiated direct instruction at that teacher-led station but kind of struggling to figure out how on Earth to make this work in a math class and it's not an unusual question I hit this a lot with Math teachers because because one there are so many math standards to cover and two the math curriculum is so linear with everything building on the thing before and so this idea of moving kids in stations and rotations where they're going to be doing work before they see the teacher is often really challenging for teachers to kind of wrap their heads around so let me share with you a strategy I often use in coaching sessions so if you are going to use a station rotation model here's a way to think about the model so you have your teacher-led station this is where we're going to differentiate direct instruction we're going to think really deeply about what are the problems we want to focus on with each group what specific supports and scaffolds might they need would they benefit potentially from seeing deconstructed examples how do we want to structure this time with them maybe for our highlevel kids we want to start with a hook and challenge them to try to problem solve before we give instruction for our middle and maybe lower level groups we want to do the I do we do pairs do you do approach but the goal is to really think about how to best meet the needs of small groups of Learners at that teacher Le station right down to what is the vocabulary that we're using and is this experience within their zone of possibility the nice thing is even though you might only have 20 minutes to work with a group in this differentiated direct instruction it is likely to be so much more smooth and effective I can't tell you how many classes I've been in where the mini lesson for the whole class was supposed to be 15 or 20 minutes and it ballooned into a 45-minute experience because a handful of kids needed another explanation they needed to see another model they just were not understanding it the way it was being presented for the whole group then we always dedicate a station to Spiral Review what we know is that students must revisit Concepts processes and formulas over time in order to truly remember them so whether this Spiral Review is sending them to what they did the day before the week before or the month before I really like having a dedicated station for that work then this third station this can be whatever you want it to be so sometimes we'll work um to design a collaborative kind of creative challenge where we'll find a really messy real world math problem so one of my favorite places to grab these is um is yum math.com you might also grab a cool math kind of Challenge on illustrative mathematics and have students work collaboratively to problem solve and if they're problem solving something like a messy real world math problem for me the goal isn't even for them to get the quote unquote right answer the goal is for them to be able to articulate their mathematical reasoning what steps would you move through to try to solve this problem so that can be a really fun to capture on a video platform like flip then you could have a alternatively a video Lesson designed to kind of preview the concept that you're going to be pulling into small group differentiated instruction the next day you might even also have kind of a preassessment to figure out you know I'm going to be teaching this concept tomorrow I wonder what students are already thinking about it knowing what are the gaps what are the misconceptions because it can help us to group them more effectively you might also have a math program where you have students doing self-paced personalized math practice so this first teacher-led station is going to move along in our linear instructional path the Spiral Review is going to give them dedicated time to revisit Concepts processes and formulas and then this third station like I said we can change it up we can be creative is it personalized practice is it a collaborative group challenge how can we make this fun meaningful and really engage students in the learning and just keep in mind if you're excited to use station rotation that's wonderful but it doesn't have to happen every day you could use the whole group rotation station rotation you might do a playlist or a hyperdoc so it doesn't have to be like this is all I'm doing every day especially in the beginning when we're still learning how to take our really linear math curriculum and reimagine it through the lens of a station rotation model