This topic has come up here before, and I feel like it’s one of those ‘evergreen’ topics - How do you group students in your class for robotics activities? I feel like this is a question with a multitude of answers, and that those answers also change over the course of the year, so I thought it could be good to start a thread where everyone can share their strategies and thought processes, so that we can all learn from each other and build up our collective repertoire of teacher tools :).
Grouping students is something we do often, and likely in a sort of cyclical fashion.
So I have 3 main questions to help guide us:
1. How do you assign groups?
2. How do you assess if those groups are working well or not?
3. How do you respond when you sense that things need to change?
I’ll give an example to get things started…
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I tended to group students based on personalities and strengths. I wanted kids who would listen to each other, and students who had strengths in different areas. So I would often start with the ‘easiest’ groupings, then work my way out from there as I was planning for activities. Sometimes those first groups stayed through the end of plan, sometimes the kids I knew would be flexible, got moved around to new groups.
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I made sure to give time to various groupings in order to see if my kids could settle in to working with kids they may not be used to being with. Unless something was blowing up immediately, I generally tried to wait several lessons before making a real ‘assessment’. I’d look for things like how on task students were in their groups, if they were listening to one another, and if all members of a group were participating fully. If there were things that seemed to be popping up across groups - like the quieter kids not getting a voice, I also used that as fodder for other lessons and things for the whole class (rather than just regrouping right away).
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Once I could tell that we needed to shake things up - which tended to come when little bickering seemed to escalate, when students were less on task than they used to be - basically when the ‘comfort’ turned to ‘complacency’, I would take some planning time to regroup students. I’d never present this as a punishment, but would always frame it as a positive!
By the end of the year, or for shorter explorations, I would also sometimes give my kids a chance to group themselves, based on what they’d learned about being positive group members over the year.
I’ll tag a few folks to get the conversation rolling - @Anna_Blake, @Desiree_White-Price, @Tina_Dietrich, @James_Nesbitt, @Maree_Timms, @Daniel_Faddis, @Molly_Gomes
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@Audra_Selkowitz you and I had very similar classroom grouping strategies! I always tried to look at making groups as a rich opportunity for students to practice their abilities to collaborate as well as to learn more about how they themselves learn with others. Of course, it is always tempting to group students solely on who they will be least disruptive with, and that’s certainly a factor. But, when we make that our main focus, we aren’t challenging our students to grow by interacting with others they are less skilled at interacting with!
Once the year really got rolling, and I had solidly figured out the personalities and dynamics in my classroom, I would deliberately group students with others that I knew would be just enough of a social challenge to help them to grow, and to spark classroom conversations about how to collaborate successfully. I might not keep those groupings all day, or all week, but sprinkle them in here and there to provide a growth opportunity. The trick is to really know your kids and to be ready to facilitate interactions when needed, to make sure it is an overall positive experience for all of the students in the classroom.
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@Aimee_DeFoe @Audra_Selkowitz In the past I did the same types of grouping you both mentioned. But last school year I tried something a little different. I experimented with homogenous groups (all girl groups and all boy groups) for the first half of the year. I found there were a lot less problems/arguments. Collaboration/teamwork went very well. The girls had a lot of success. The boys were more distracted, but still successful. I did not have to move group members around. The second half of the year I moved to heterogenous groups and unfortunately problems began to arise. A few girls became bossy and the boys complained. Other girls became less engaged and intimidated, therefore I saw less collaboration and teamwork. The data I collected was very interesting to me. What do you think about homogenous and heterogenous groups like this?
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That is really interesting! To me, that comes back to really knowing your students and building relationships with them, so that you can group based on what will make those students comfortable. If homogenous groupings during VEX class is what brings out the best collaboration/teamwork and allows you to focus more on the conceptual learning your during that time - then go for it!
And maybe you gradually introduce group changes, as certain kids are ready for a change - so it’s not a whole class massive switch, just an occasional movement of one or two students swapping groups. That could be less of a jarring change for them, perhaps?
And this is just one class period in the day - so if students are grouped as all girls/all boys then, maybe they are not grouped that way for math or reading or science or another time of the day. The goal to me is more about fostering collaboration skill building so that you can lean on those skills later on, rather than forcing kids to be in groups with clashing personalities. Yes, we want students to learn how to work with those different from them, but they may need more time to build the comfort, confidence, and skills that will let them do that.
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