Interactive Grouping to maximize instruction

We know the time we spend actively teaching is vital, not only to us as professionals, but because we know that it's the single most important factor in determining the success of our students.
If you are teaching elementary school, you probably have thirty to forty students the whole day and five or six subject areas. If you are at middle or high school, you teach 30 to 40 student five or six periods per day. How can a teacher make time for all of them?

The reality is that we need to come up with strategies which will help us increase the teaching/ learning time. This is sometimes called academically engaged time. One of the structures that will increase the amount of time that students can "engage" is the grouping of our students.
A word of advice here... don't do what I did my first year of teaching, what many teachers do today: arrange the class into high, medium and low groups. This is an anathema to all groups especially the low one.

A friend of mine, some years ago, proudly shared with me that in his school they departmentalized. They didn't have three groups instead, one teacher had the high group, one teacher had the medium group and one teacher had the low group. All they did was to make a bad situation worse! these foolish experiments with other peoples children will never help students meet their potential because of low expectations, low instruction and low interaction between students with wide range of abilities. There is a serious danger of locking students into low groups for the rest of their school life. Sometime later he admitted to me that eventually each teacher had three ability level with in each departmentalized class again. All they accomplished was to create more low students. Shame on them!

Hopefully by now you have studied your students school records, scores, previous teachers input in light of your own assessments and observations. You now know your student's strengths and needs, not weaknesses-their needs.

Each student brings to class different levels of ability, cognition and experience. Understanding where the students are will help you plan appropriate lessons and learning environments. We cannot teach everyone the same thing, the same way at the same time and expect them all to learn at the same rate or at the same level of cognition.

So... now that you know where each of your students are performing, it is your responsibility to structure interactions and instruction based on what the student is capable of doing and the grade level expectations (standards). The interactive structure takes the form of collaborative groupings where students of differing abilities collaborate with each other to meet the standard. The communication and interactions that transpire between more knowledgeable or proficients students will help the whole group build better understanding of the concepts being taught. Students learn better from each other. My observations, over the years, of students in collaborative groups lead me to believe that they also help each other in transferring learning into long term memory. They are exited and engaged in their learning.

In order for you to guide your students through the learning task, it is important to recognize the strengths students bring to school, their culture, environment, cognitive and social development what Lev Vygotsky* calls zones of proximal development. (ZPD**)

Using their strengths and attributes to provide and support student learning you, as a more knowledgeable practitioner, will need to guide them into making connections, predicting outcomes, compare and contrast, context clues etc. Provide them with "accurate" examples of what needs to be done and why it is important; articulate and connect the learning goal and its intent or purpose. Proper guidance and methodology connected to the learner's daily contexts of his environment will result in student's intellectual development. You can expect more involvement in class, more discussions, higher level thinking and yes more critical questions for you to guide them through.

When you change from homogeneous groupings to collaborative instructional groupings you need to remember that students move in and out of groups based on the different students ability/outcomes on the subject being studied. The most knowledgeable student in one subject will not always be the most prepared in another. As social interaction with and among students increases, so will the cognitive development of all group members. All of these wonderful interactions will be a symphony to your ears.

With time you will learn to recognize the dramatic impact that collaborative group learning will have in meeting the needs of your students, their needs and learning style. Herein lies the answer to key the question, how can I make time to meet the needs of all my student?

With respect, trust, willingness to change, and the belief that your students bring to the classroom their unique strengths; you and your students will increase both achievement and satisfaction meeting your and their needs. Yes, you in a single classroom will insure that your students will acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for lifelong learning.




* Lev S. Vygotsky is a preeminent figure in the field of education. His seminal work on Social Cognition is based on his theory that learning is largely a socially-mediated activity. Optimum/real learning takes place in one's Zone of Proximal Development.

** " ZPD is the distance between the actual development as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers." ( Lev S.Vygotsky)