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VNPS
I am curious how teachers are using Vertical Non-Permanent Stations, VNPS, in their classrooms. Before our mandatory closure for COVID-19, I was able to get students into visual random small groups with a problem to solve on a VNPS. Those small groups are getting better at solving their problems and showing their flexibility. However, I would like students to rotate to other small groups VNPS to see how other groups are solving math problems. This part has been hard and I’m curious how other teachers are sharing their students’ learning and progress with the classroom.
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3 Replies
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I’ve treated the VNPS as I would treat works of art (masterpieces) in an art museum. The students go from one surface to another, admiring the work of others.
You could have them write out their reactions (evaluations) of their favorite (2 or 3, maybe) masterpieces, and also have an “ask a question” section on their reaction sheets. I haven’t gotten this far in the process, but its a take-off of a method I believe is called GRAFFITI.
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I did something very similar where students were given a prompt and told to act on it with no guidance at all — “Tell me everything you can about the slope of this line” (before we had talked about slope). After a few minutes, they rotated to a new line, and they could see what the pair before them had done. So if that group had talked about angles, they had to figure out something else to say. Maybe they had an idea about turning it into a triangle. And so each group would see what interesting thinking their classmates were trying and take it with them as they rotated.
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How safe is it going to be to use my VNPS’s this fall? I can’t imagine going back to individuals doing seat work all class. What if they work in pairs instead of three or four to a group?
