Student Contributor: C. Shimasaki
Stoplight Cups are great for students to ask questions and get the teacher’s attention without walking around the room, or coming up to you all at once. With this, the teacher is able to scan the room and prioritize who to go to first depending on the color.
Students will have 3 cups total, a red, yellow, and green cup. Students can use these when doing independent or group work. The different colors give meaning to how well they’re doing on their assignment. Green meaning “I’m on it, I do not need help”. Yellow meaning “I have a question, but I can wait”. And Red meaning “I can’t wait, I need help now”. I would take into consideration, the size of your cups, with the space of their tables, you wouldn’t want them to become a distraction or be in the way. With that, you can also vary its usage whether only when it’s supposed to be quiet, if you want the colors to mean different things for different lessons, etc.
This tool is perfect for supporting a collaborative classroom. Using this tool would be allowing students to voice their needs, without relying on a teacher intervening right away, and taking away from their learning process. Through this teacher and students are working together for the lesson to go smoothly without either being interrupted or unnecessary.
More Information –
Tool Source: @bee_in_the_library on Tik Tok. A junior high teacher-librarian.
@bee_in_the_library Yes, they practice their cup stacking skills, and yes, that gets annoying, but it’s still a super helpful visual when you’re working with 25 kids at once, so we suck it up. I work with some smart teachers – love their ideas! #librariansoftiktok #teachersoftiktok
