Station Rotations in Journalistic Writing

Read how I came around to stations in a secondary classroom here.

First, full disclosure: I took no photos of my stations.

Why did I take no photos? Let me dispel a station rotation myth. For some teachers, setting up stations that allow students to work independently might mean time for the teacher to catch up on grading, parent contacts, etc. But implementing stations that way ensures teachers miss out on what I found to be the best feature: directed instruction with smaller groups of students.

So I couldn’t take photos because though 3/4 of my class was not in my immediate teaching purview, I was working with 1/4 of my class the entire time.

Second: this post is long. TL;DR: I think I found a way to make stations really work, despite teaching in a 47 minute block of time AND sharing a classroom with three other teachers.

Here’s how it happened.

Catlin Tucker suggests instead of planning lessons vertically, plan them horizontally. So I thought about thing I would spend an entire day teaching: AP Style, peer revisions, grammar instruction, and dissecting story examples. In previous semesters, those items took up four days of instruction. But was it all that effective?

So I went horizontal. Could any of those activities be done with correct supports, a little frontloading, and with collaboration between students instead of with me directing the whole show?

Yes. Here’s what it looked like on paper:

I needed two days for it to work. 10 minutes at a station is too little time. 20 would be perfect. I divided the class into four groups, and by the end of the second day, every student would have been through all four stations.

Station 1: AP Style quiz. All students have access to the AP Stylebook online, and a generous journalism teacher wrote 40 AP style quizzes and shared them with any adviser who asked. So I printed quizzes and these instructions:

Complete AP Style quiz 3 and 4.
Collaborate with each other on the quizzes.
Use the AP Stylebook.
Correct the quizzes as a group (come get the key from me when you’re ready!)

Station 2: Fixing comma splices and run on sentences. As students transcribe interviews, recognizing these two sentence construction problems is the #1 grammar issue I see in their writing. Here’s what I had them do:

Watch the Khan Academy video about comma splices and run on sentences.
Complete the quiz that follows the video.
Create a Google Doc in your Journalistic Writing folder and title it “Comma Splice/Run on practice.
Write at least one sentence that has a comma splice, and one that is a run on sentence.
Share your Google Doc with someone else in your group, and have them correct your incorrect sentence.

Station 3: Story dissection. Writers don’t become better writers if they aren’t reading. So I uploaded some examples to Schoology for them to read, and asked them to follow these instructions:

Watch the video that explains how you will get the stories, mark on them, and turn them in.
HELP EACH OTHER!
Read both stories, and highlight the who, what, where, when, why.
Also highlight details that the writer observed, and then wrote.
Share the note to the discussion board, and then look at what your peers noticed.
Discuss what makes a good feature story.

Station 4: Peer writing time. Students had been assigned a 150-word vignette earlier in the week. I used this time to debrief how the fact-gathering process went, and helped them fine-tune their ideas. I gave them time to write with me there, and as they wrote, I had their Google Docs pulled up. Students also asked questions as they wrote. After a few minutes of writing time, I highlighted sentences in their Google Docs and asked them to read the section out loud. I pointed out strong writing from every student.

This is already too long, so I’ll write another post about what went well and what needs to improve. Bottom line, though: I think it worked. On Monday I’m having students give me some feedback about it, and will tweak things from there. And I’m hopeful those tweaks will create better writers, better collaborators, and an overall better classroom culture.