Can we stop with the learning stations already? My teacher prep endorsed them. My first instructional coach trained me in them. Every school that I’ve ever worked at has incorporated them. Look them up on Teachers Pay Teachers and you’ll find scores of activities for various literacy stations, each one promising that they are proven effective.
Unfortunately, this idea—that a teacher should only teach for a few minutes before setting kids loose to transition through a maze of stations full of glitter, glue, and razzmatazz—is a glossy, inefficient, ineffective use of class time.
Stroll through a classroom that uses learning stations and you’ll see students engaged in all sorts of seemingly compelling activities and projects. Look more closely, and one sees a hodgepodge of the promising and the pointless, tasks that demand thinking beyond realistic expectations and tasks that require no mental effort at all: some extended writing or structured practice and lots of needless coloring or word searches.
Consider just one concrete example. In a video on the influential site Edutopia, which specializes in instructional advice, one station-based classroom exhibits high student engagement and seamless routines. But a critical consideration of what’s actually happening at these centers raises concerns. What’s the point of a twenty-minute station where students spend their time cutting, pasting, and writing in rainbow letters? And that doesn’t even touch on the copious references to kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and other ways of learning, allusions to the myth of “learning styles,” which has as much basis in reality as homeopathic medicine.
The body of research on learning stations is bordering on inexistent, but there are plenty of correlational studies to warrant hearty skepticism, if not outright rejection, of this popular classroom practice.
In one study, researchers split students into groups that received either 25 percent, 50 percent, or 75 percent of class time on teacher-directed activities versus seatwork, and then all students took the same test. The conclusion was simple: Students who had more teacher direction learned more. Similarly, Barak Rosenshine found that the most effective math teachers spent the majority of class time in direct instruction, modeling, and questioning.
Conversely, classrooms built on literacy stations, like the one in the Edutopia video, tend to feature only a short teacher-led mini lesson, followed by an hour of individual student work time—an allocation of time in the aforementioned studies that achieved the worst academic gains.
There is an influential body of research from the 1980s, generally referred to as “process-product research,” that points to a similar conclusion. In it, researchers observed teacher behaviors and correlated their actions with student outcomes. Across the board, teachers and classrooms that were highly structured and spent more time on direct instruction, whole class practice, and discussion generally achieved more. Humorously, in one cluster of studies, the researcher set out to prove that student talk was the best means of learning, only to conclude the exact opposite: “teacher talk correlated positively with both achievement and attitude.”
As one more piece of evidence, another study found that high achievers can learn comparatively well in self-directed activities, but low achievers need direct guidance the most. Understood so, student-directed learning may work for some, but it is a pedagogy of the privileged.
None of this evidence is a slam dunk against learning stations. Rarely if ever does evidence in education function so. Almost all classroom practices work to some extent, somewhere, sometimes, for some students. Any academic activity is better than none. The doggy paddle will get you across a lake, but surely a breast stroke would be better. Everything can work, but what works best?
Without doubt, many of the activities at the stations themselves have academic value—reading passages, phonics work, small group discussions, extended reflections. But if each of these activities are, in fact, worthwhile, the evidence recommends it would be better for the teacher to facilitate each one as a class. Rather than split a room of boisterous students into three or four separate learning groups, all working on separate activities, a teacher should instead run each activity as a class. Read and respond to a passage together, then transition the class to phonics work, and perhaps end the hour with a fun activity for a reward.
Neither is this evidence a criticism of all individualized instruction outright. In many ways, stations are an attempt to manage a seemingly unmanageable spread of academic abilities in one room. What will Johnny do while Timmy’s group gets an extension lesson from the teacher? Such individualized challenge or support can occur in the format provided above, though. In my classroom, every student read the same complex, challenging text and then responded to reflections of varying difficulty while I floated around challenging or supporting accordingly.
Inadvertently, one student in the Edutopia video provides the individual testimony that recommends this approach. She tells us that her favorite station is the one where she interacts with her teacher in a small group. During whole class instruction, every student has the teacher’s attention and every student receives instruction. Conversely, during stations, only a few get attention from the teacher, and the rest are on their own. I have said before and will say again that all these appeals to individualized or differentiated instruction often result in collective neglect.
Undergirding this approach to the classroom is an almost religious commitment to the idea that students learn best on their own, which simply is not the case. Like a heresy that springs anew, new models that are built on this false faith spring up over and again—project learning, discovery learning, and now learning stations. Every time, the rebuttal is the same: Teachers, not students or activities, are simply the best conduit of learning in a classroom. That should a self-evident conclusion, but alas, it is for some reason controversial to say so.
