A Method for Using Stations in a High School Math Classroom

During my tenure as a teacher, I have always taught Algebra 1 to students who struggle the most with math. The structure of my classes depended upon the school I was teaching. Two schools had students take Algebra 1 over 2 school years while another had students taking 2 classes of Algebra 1 every day for an entire school year. 

One day I was talking with my co-teacher about the best way to get our students to actually attempt their assignments. After several brainstorming sessions, we landed on trying stations for our Algebra 1 class. We both went home and thought about what we could do in the upcoming school year to best help our students. We landed on M.A.T.H. stations. I do not remember where we saw this acronym, but I can tell you, we did not create it. 

First, we decided to split students up into groups of 4 or 5. We created a PowerPoint slide to show students who were in their groups. We decided to group students together with similar abilities. Below is an example slide that my co-teacher and I used. The next slide would rotate the heading instead of the student names to make our lives easier when creating the presentation.

Second, we named our stations by slightly altering the original acronym’s meanings to fit with our classroom. And finally, we determined for our 45-minute class period, our classroom structure would be 4 minutes of introductory directions, 9 minutes stations, and roughly 1 minute between each station for rotating.

M - Mr., Mrs., or Ms. Teacher Last Name

This station allows students to work with their teacher on the current lesson’s assignment. My co-teacher and I were fortunate enough to have kidney bean tables (see our classroom below), so we used them to our advantage. One of us would sit with this group of students and answer one question at a time, then move to the next student. This process repeated until the last student and then would start over. We trained our students on this procedure to help us limit chaos and misunderstandings.

We generally started one of our groups that we knew would struggle the most here so they could be provided with individual instruction or refocusing directions.

A - At Your Seat

Our students had individual devices for them to access our lesson’s materials. This station was a chance for students to see what they could do individually without teacher or peer help. We used this station for several types of activities: IXL strands, watching videos, digital assessments, exit passes, or continuing to finish the current lesson’s assignment.

We typically assigned this station to our self-starters and higher achievers because they did not need the additional support to start.

T - Technology or Together

This station was used differently depending upon the lesson. Some lessons technology was a better use of this station and other times a group activity was best.

For Technology, our school had purchased IXL for us to utilize in our classrooms, so sometimes we would assign an IXL strand for our students to practice. Other times, we had our students explore concepts using graphing calculators like slope or games on Desmos.

For Together, we would have students work as a group to complete a card sort or matching game. Two examples come to mind. One example was having students sort Properties of Real Numbers example cards to their appropriate category. Another example was having students practice applying exponent rules by matching the question with the answer.

We liked to place students who were successful in math but needed a confidence boost in this station first. This station allowed these students to bounce their ideas off each other, generally, correcting misunderstandings quickly.

H - Hands-On Examples

This station had the other teacher directing students to finish their lesson’s assignment by using manipulatives to demonstrate the math concepts. The different types of manipulatives we used were algebra tiles, Hands-On Equations, and Desmos the graphing calculator. This station helped our visual and tactile learners comprehend the concepts that teachers so often only present with algebraic symbols. (You can click on the picture below to see where we purchased our algebra tiles set.)

This was the station we assigned to our students who struggled the most with grasping mathematical concepts for two reasons. The first reason was the opportunity to show students a different method of solving the problem that may "click" with them better than the one presented in class. The second reason was due to the order of rotations. Directly after this station, these students would be rotate to the M station with the other teacher. This provided back-to-back stations with teacher support.

Additional Note: I would like to mention these stations were designed for students to have several avenues of interacting with the lesson’s concept. This means the corresponding assignment was only 10 - 15 questions long depending upon the skill. Students are gaining additional practice through the use of technology, collaborating with teachers and their peers, and working with manipulatives. I would strongly suggest if M.A.T.H. Stations is a strategy you would like to implement in your class, then you should reduce the number of problems you assign for homework (or as we called it, practice).