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Whether your school is a big proponent of personalized learning or you have never heard of it before, it is undeniable that so many parts of our lives are being impacted and driven by personalized experiences. We are not grade level teachers, we are teachers of students. This is why personalized learning is making a greater impact in the world of education. So how do we accommodate all of the students in our classrooms to best support their learning?
Goal stations are a great way to help students have a more customized experience and practice necessary skills. A goal station is a group of activities and resources that students can access in order to help them reach specific goals that are aligned to learning skills or strategies. (You can watch me set one up here!)
Here are 5 ways they can help you to personalize your literacy instruction:
1) Gives students options for demonstrating mastery:
Gives students a choice in how they will show what they have learned
A goal station will have several activity choices to either show understanding or give time for practice
Create choice boards and craft choices around projects to give students different options to showcase their knowledge
2) Provides students with repeated practice:
Gives students the opportunity to continue practice at all levels,
You can tailor to student needs based on the level of cognition.
Brain research shows that students need spatial practice in order to help them retain the information they are being taught.
3) Provides students with extended practice:
Store previously played activities, review games, QR codes to online games for review, and simple self checking task cards.
Think of these resources as a means to continue the learning that is taking place.
Keep all of the practice and more challenging assignments in the folders for students to access materials.
4) Gives opportunities for enrichment and to challenge students:
Students can go far more in depth with the strategy or skill that they are learning.
Offer this as a learning opportunity for practice, or after they have demonstrated their understanding through their final product.
Think through how your students will know the difference between the enrichment, practice, and project based learning options.
5) Provides spiral practice to continue developing skills:
Providing students with opportunities to practice will give them the ability to make connections between the content they are learning.
You can meet and assign some practice for them to continue and review this skill even though you have already covered the content in class.
I hope you find this helpful, especially if you are looking for an alternative to centers in upper elementary. To watch me chat about this topic and give even more insight and tips, watch the video below! ↓