Grouping Students in the Classroom

I must admit that the thing I struggle with most in this new way of teaching (with Carnegie) is grouping my students. I have tried multiple ways to organize my students into groups and I have YET to find a sure-fire way that keeps my classroom on task and focused all of the time (maybe that’s just an impossible goal anyway – HA). And maybe you all can help me out this week!! I’d love to hear YOUR ideas on grouping students (just make a post in the comment section if you don’t mind to share). Here are the things I’ve tried so far…

I have come to the conclusion that I like groups of three students best. I have tried groups of four, but I find that they aren’t as quick to have discussion with everyone in the group because usually what happens is they split off into groups of two and just talk with their “partner.”

Most of the time I group the students myself. Usually I use their latest test scores and I try to make sure each group has a high, medium and low student. That seems to be what works BEST (so far). Occasionally I will sort them according to where they are in the Cognitive Tutor. When I’m in the Teacher’s Toolkit I click on “View Class Progress” and when I click “Unit” it sorts the students in order according to what unit they are on. Then I just put a top student with a low student and a medium one.

One time I sorted my students by their latest test scores, but I put low with low, mediums with mediums and highs with highs. The one thing I really liked about this is that in the low groups someone had to step up and lead. A lot of times the low student in the group will just ride the coat-tails of the other members, but when they were in the group with other low students, they had to step up and figure things out. And it was really easy to differentiate some of the assignments as well. But I found myself spending way too much time with low groups.

A few times (later on in the year) I have let me students choose their own groups. I tell them up front that it is temporary and if they can behave and work well with who they have chosen they will be able to stay together. This works well for a few weeks, but inevitably they get too social and it’s harder for them to get the work done.

I have never tried any kind of random sorting, like choosing a card from a deck of choosing names from a hat. Maybe that’s because I’m too much of a control freak!!

So, what am I not thinking of?? What are YOU doing to sort YOUR students? I’d love to hear from you!!