Station Teaching

Today, I witnessed a nice example of Station Teaching at Barr Middle School with Carol Jurgensmeier and Kim Wagner.  They had 6 stations set up and students were given 8 minutes at each station to work with a Language Arts concept in a cooperative learning setting.  Peer support as well as teacher small-group support was provided.  The best part about this activity was that the small-group remediation for the various concepts were centered on concepts that had previously been identified through assessment (Acuity) as concepts that this particular class needed more work with.  A great example of using formative assessment to drive instruction.

Enjoy

Parallel Math Instruction

This is a nice example of differentiated co-teaching.  These two 6th grade Math co-teachers from Walnut Middle School used a formative assessment to decide which students needed more remediation within small-group, specialized instruction and which students needed challenged.  Based on those assessment results, students were placed in two parallel groups - both working on the same standard but with different strategies.
Enjoy.

Carousel Walk for Hamlet Characterization

I have been co-teaching in 12th grade English at GISH with Laura McQuinn a couple of days per week.  We usually plan once or twice a week, as well.  I have attached a video and photo related to the lesson we did last Friday.  She felt the students were getting confused with all of the characters in Hamlet so the day before this they did an activity where the characters were assigned to various groups of students and they placed sticky notes with important information about the character on posters for each character.  On Friday, we did a Line-up and then placed the students in heterogeneous groups for the carousel walk.  Each group started at a different Hamlet character and a visual timer provided them 2 minutes at each station to read stickies, discuss the character, and record information on the organizer (which is also linked to this blog).  The organizer had the students identify facts about each character as follows:
1.  Static or Dynamic
2.  Round or Flat
3.  Conflict he/she is involved in
4.  Any helpful statements or questions from sticky notes

Support was provided by co-teachers, graphic organizer and learning tips, cooperative learning groups, scaffolding the day before.  Differentiation was also provided for those students needing a challenge by giving extra sticky notes to students who would complete the organizer quickly...as they were asked to provided supplementary information about each character to the poster beyond what was already there.

Enjoy!

Co-teaching at GISH

Anne Beninghof was with us at Grand Island Senior High this week and there were some great examples of differentiation, strategies, and co-teaching happening!  Please check out some of the amazing things happening in the co-teaching classrooms at Grand Island Senior High!