Teaching Using The Station Rotation Model

One year I had a particularly chatty group with a handful of students that were frequently interrupting instruction, mostly immature boys who could not help but make a comment about everything or made constant annoying  noises. I was following my usual procedure of issuing warnings, assigning behavior reflections, and making phone calls home, which would lead to temporary improvements, but I was still frustrated by the lost instruction time, so I decided something had to change.

I was still pretty new to teaching middle school at that point (I had taught high school for six years and then worked as a middle school reading intervention teacher, which is not the same as trying to command a room full of preteens), but I had had some success with using small groups when I taught math the previous (and only) year. I decided to try it out in my ELA classes, but knew I needed more structure to the class than just adding small groups to the mix, so I decided to try out the stations rotation model.

How I Structure My Middle School English Language Arts Class

I have a 90 minute period of English Language Arts daily with my sixth grade students. And before I break down what the structure of that period looks like, I want to acknowledge that seeing my students for 90 minutes daily all year long is something most ELA teachers can only dream of. Most middle school ELA teachers are working with 45-60 minutes, some even less. Some schools are on block schedules where teachers see students every other day or for only half of the year. And there's schools where reading and writing are broken up into two separate classes. 

While I don't know the pain of trying to jam it all into a 38 minute period, I have taught class periods of shorter lengths and could offer ideas about how to make things work with less time. But that is for another blog post. This one is just about what works for me in my current situation. I'll start with the parts of class that are always the same, the beginning and end of class.