Innovation and Risk.

Iterating the model.

I have been using the station rotation model for about 4 weeks and already I have gone through several cycles of improvement and some innovation which adds an extra element where students collaborate online at home as well as during the lesson.  Essentially this uses BLOGGS and Google Moderator  to add a 4th element to the rotation.  From the outset it was important that my senior students were able to discuss the material and develop their ideas further and then bring questions and viewpoints raised to the next lesson.  I am not sure if this 4 stage model is out there but my students decided to call is the Google Rotation as it used Google Moderator, Google Docs and Google forms.

These questions were then used in the next blended learning lesson in several ways.   I would answer questions / deal with misconceptions etc in the teacher part of the cycle.  However a few tweaks were made as I went along.

Some students found it hard to function within their specific stage of the model, most of the time this was students working in the individual part of the cycle who want to work in a collaborative way on the playlist.  Therefore there were times when I needed to ignore this and other times when I had to discuss this as part of the teacher session.  These were learning conversations where I explained the the teaching methods and the reasons for each part of the cycle.

Risk.
I feel a fair level of risk was taken, mainly because so much control of the classroom was handed over to students and they spent about two thirds of their time without direct supervision.  There is also a strong cultural expectation in Hong Kong that the teacher must be the "Sage on the stage".   I also had concerns raised by the Special Education Needs Department about theit students a too challenging environment to work in.