What is station rotation?
The Station rotation template is designed for courses where groups of learners will move through a series of stations:
An online learning station for independent learning or practice. This could be videos or recorded lectures. Or for practice tasks with immediate feedback.
A teacher-led station where the teacher meets with a small group of learners. This setting allows for a more personalised and differentiated mini-lesson as well as an opportunity to provide targeted remediation and enrichment.
A no tech station where learners may be journaling in a notebook, reading a book, or creating a graphic organiser to self-check their knowledge of the content.
A collaboration station where students complete learning activities with at least one other student.
To find out more about station rotation check out our blog post on the Station rotation model.
What's in the station rotation course template?
We've structured the template to have just a few welcome pages and then a separate section for each “session” (this could easily be based on "topics") with subsections for each station “type” described above.
The online learning station
In the online learning station, learners will usually be on their own device at the station. There is a range of options for the sorts of things learners might be doing in the online station, so we have created pages for each of these options below:
Recorded lectures or videos
Lectures slides and notes
Readings and resources
There are pages with tasks to support learners to be active in their reading/watching, such as:
Reflecting on a resource
Summarising a resource
Predict, prior knowledge, purpose
Finding evidence from a resource
Making connections to what we already know
There are also tasks for learners to practise what they’ve learned. Ranging from simple recall to more cognitively complex skills including metacognition:
Helping recall
Helping understanding
Comparing and contrasting
Explaining
Tasks for formative feedback
The teacher-led station
The teacher-led station usually involves small group teaching and feedback. The teacher may have already looked at some formative tasks from learners, and have some concepts or skills to go over. Or they may be extending learners' current thinking. Either way, as this station is teacher-led, learners may not be doing quite as much in the online course as in other stations.
Instead, you might simply want learners to reflect on their session with the teacher and what they learned/gained from it (as in the example task below). This reflective task can act as a handy way to store their notes to come back to later.
The no tech station
In the no tech station, learners will usually be completing "offline" activities. Things like journaling in a notebook, reading a book, or creating a graphic organiser to self-check their knowledge of the content. But, there are still advantages to capturing the completion of these offline tasks within the online course - both learners and facilitators can see all their work in the one place and easily see where they're at.
The template contains examples of how you can use multiple choice tasks as checklists for offline activities.
The collaboration station
In the collaboration station, learners work together to discuss, reflect, problem-solve and/or create artefacts. We have created pages relating to these sorts of activities below:
Think, pair, share
Affinity mapping/Categorising
Continuum
Nine diamond ranking
Peer-teaching
Group negotiation of most crucial aspects
Co-creating a concept map
Here’s an example of a task that asks learners to collaborate to complete a nine-diamond ranking task.
Filling in the rest of the weeks
This general structure or approach you’ve used in Session 1 can then be repeated for each subsequent session. You can even use starred pages to add in a copy of the relevant pages to save you time.
Summary
As with all our templates, this template is entirely customisable. You can change all the text, tasks and images to suit your particular context.
For instructions on where to find these templates, check out How to use a template.
If this particular template isn't quite right for you, why not check out our full list of iQualify templates, or, create your own!