New Technique

My Classroom Layout

This weekend I went to my monthly class down in Monticello.  I heard a technique that a fellow student was trying with her class...centers.  That's right, centers.  Just like your local kindergarten teachers are doing.  I thought to myself when I heard this comment that there was NO WAY this would work in my classroom.  After really wanting to try something besides lecturing everyday six times a day for 45 minutes, I came up with how I was going to implement my own centers.

I started by prepping my students two days prior.  I told them what we were going to do, what I expected and how we were going to do it. Today was THE day.  I carefully divided my classes into groups of 3 or 4 students only.  I divided them by their average grade in the class at this point.  I decided to do it this way so I could do remediation with students that need it or give more indepth details/projects/questions to students who were ready to advance.  Some classes had 4 groups but most had 5.

My "centers" included a microscope section where students would look at a prepared slides and draw what they saw in the lab notebook (most of my students have never used a microscope and yes they are in the 10th grade!).  Next, was the reading table for students to read the section we are studying right now.  Third, was a vocabulary table where students picked three vocab words, from the same section, to draw a pictorial representation of the word.  The fourth center was the math group where students worked on basic math skills that they are lacking and desperately hate to work on.  Lastly was my center.  This is where students would have a discussion or mini-lecture with me.

I was terrified to try this.  I was afraid that there would be mass ciaos in the room and I would have wasted a day of instruction.  However, I was pleasantly surprised at how well  my students behaved and how much they got out of today.  More questions were asked about the concepts we are covering and time just flew by.  If this keeps up, we may only have one day of lecture a week!