The Flexibly Grouped Classroom

How to Organize Learning for Equity and Growth

Kristina J. Doubet

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781416631033
• eBook ISBN: 9781416631057
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Want to make your instruction more equitable and effective, more interesting, and more fun? It's time to try flexible grouping.

Unlike traditional grouping, which typically puts like with like or combines students without regard to the best way to promote their individual growth, flexible grouping is both purposeful and fluid, regularly combining and recombining different students in different ways to pursue a wide range of academic and affective goals.

In this comprehensive guide to flexible grouping, author Kristina J. Doubet shares a staged implementation approach that takes students from simple partner set-ups designed to build cooperative skills to complex structures ideal for interest and readiness-informed academic exploration. She covers the key factors to consider when forming groups and highlights how this approach to organizing learning can help you disrupt rigid tracking, deliver targeted instruction, connect to student interests, boost collaboration, and build community.

Focused, practical, and written for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, The Flexibly Grouped Classroom provides

* Dozens of strategies to expand your instructional repertoire, along with links to additional models and resources;
* Guidance on setting the tone and expectations for group tasks, ideas for student role distribution, and tips for monitoring progress, noise, and time;
* A planning template and sample grouping plans for an elementary and secondary classroom; and
* Specific troubleshooting advice to help you navigate common complications.

Choosing to make your classroom a flexibly grouped one means positioning every student to learn better—without feeling superior or inferior, without being overburdened or underchallenged—and to discover for themselves how much farther they can go together than they ever could alone.

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Chapter 1

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The Purpose of Flexible Grouping

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Flexibly grouped classrooms are necessary both because the world is changing and because it has not changed enough.

Adapting to the Modern Workplace

As dependence on technology grows, more and more routine jobs (such as factory work) have become automated. Remaining and emerging occupations require employees to have social and collaborative skills that cannot be replicated by technology (Deming, 2017; National Association of Colleges and Employers [NACE], 2018).

Collaborative group work has indeed become ubiquitous in the modern workplace, both in face-to-face and online environments. In fact, "the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more" since the mid-1990s (Cross et al., 2016, p. 74). This changing world of work is driven in part by studies showing that "groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems" than individuals do (Duhigg, 2016, para. 12).

Recognizing this increase in collaboration, Google (2016) conducted an internal study to determine the defining qualities of an ideal team—one whose members planned, made decisions, and reviewed progress in a highly collaborative, interdependent manner. Codenamed "Project Aristotle," the study concluded that successful teams share the following characteristics:

1. Psychological safety. Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of one another.
2. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet a high bar for excellence.
3. Structure and clarity. Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals.
4. Meaning. Team members find the work they are doing personally meaningful.
5. Impact. Team members think the work they are doing matters and creates change.

Note that these characteristics reflect principles rather than logistics. In other words, they reflect the health of team relationships and the nature of the team's work—not the traits of individual team members.

Other studies of the emerging workplace reinforce the value of employees being socially nimble—that is, being able to effectively communicate and collaborate with a variety of people (NACE, 2018). Deming (2017) notes that "the fastest growing cognitive occupations—managers, teachers, nurses and therapists, physicians, lawyers, even economists—all require significant interpersonal interaction" with a diverse range of individuals (p. 1595).

If school is to meet the changing demands of the workplace, it must help students learn to effectively exercise social skills and to grow in their collaborative capacities. Fortunately, such a shift aligns with what we know about how people learn. Echoing Project Aristotle's findings, educational research reveals that student growth depends in large part on two principles: (1) a healthy classroom environment (Hattie, 2012; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM], 2018), and (2) meaningful, relevant, and engaging curriculum and instruction (McTighe & Willis, 2019; NASEM, 2018). Research also affirms the belief that students should have the opportunity to interact with a wide range of classmates in both low- and high-stakes settings. Fluid movement in and out of instructional groups provides this opportunity and helps to build "intellectual camaraderie," a hallmark of a healthy classroom community (Bransford et al., 2000; NASEM, 2018).

Opposing a Stagnant System

While the world of work has changed before our eyes, within schools, there are many deep-seated systems reinforcing division and inequity that have not changed nearly enough. Instructional grouping is one of those systems.

Instructional grouping can refer to everything from how students are assigned to classrooms, specialized services and programs, and leveled (tracked) courses to how teachers organize students for instruction within the classroom. I am a staunch advocate for dismantling tracking at the district and school levels, as research from all parts of the world confirms that tracking hinders the growth of the vast majority of students (see OECD, 2012). However, tackling such a large-level change lies beyond the scope of this book. What this book can and will address is reforming the kind of instructional grouping that occurs at the classroom level.

Teachers make decisions every day about how to use groups in their classrooms, even if they choose to rely solely on whole-group instruction or individual work. While studies have shown that group work in general has a positive effect on student achievement (see Lou et al., 1996), not all group work has the same impact. When decisions about instructional grouping are based on a single factor and remain static, group work tends to hinder student growth, erode classroom community, exacerbate status differences, and reinforce the racial, cultural, and socioeconomic inequities present in our larger society (Batruch et al., 2019; Hattie, 2009; OECD, 2012). On the other hand, when decisions about instructional grouping are based on a variety of student learning needs and ensure that students change groups frequently and purposefully, group work can foster growth, provide access to equitable learning experiences, strengthen student capacity for collaboration, combat status differences, and build empathy. This dynamic approach to grouping at the classroom level is called flexible grouping.

What Is Flexible Grouping?

Essentially, flexible grouping is a system of organizing students intentionally and fluidly for different learning experiences within a classroom over a relatively short period of time. The groupings are flexible because they align with specific, changing goals, and because decisions about group size, membership, and longevity are guided by recent classroom assessment results or other student or class characteristics that are relevant to a specific instructional purpose.

Flexible grouping is not a formula or a set of steps, but there are several "hallmarks" of flexibly grouped classrooms. These are principles that, when applied together, make and keep flexible grouping "flexible."

Hallmark 1: Groupings change based on goals and student characteristics that matter for the task

When grouping is flexible, the teacher employs a range of grouping configurations that depend on and change with instructional goals and tasks. Too often, when a teacher claims to use flexible grouping, it means that groups change only if and when the teacher sees a need for change. In practice, this might mean students need to "prove themselves" to the teacher in order to be "released" from a static grouping, or that the teacher is letting intuition and personal comfort—or even the manageability of group size—guide the decision to change a grouping (Jean, 2016).

Flexible grouping assumes that groupings will and must change, because students' readiness needs, motivations, and learning preferences routinely change.

Hallmark 2: Groupings vary in composition, duration, and size

Just as a hand mixer won't fry an egg and a pair of tongs can't ladle soup, no single grouping system can meet all instructional needs. The Introduction's example scenarios included several established grouping configurations, including standing reading groups, project-based learning, cooperative learning, lab partners, whole-group instruction, and Socratic seminar circles. While there is a time and a place for each of these approaches, none of them can serve every instructional purpose.

There are times when groups of three or four work best (e.g., to facilitate creative brainstorming) and other times when partner work is more efficient (e.g., to provide direct one-on-one feedback). Heterogeneous groups may be optimal for test preparation, but homogeneous groups are preferable for targeted instruction, especially when they are composed based on recent classroom-level assessment evidence. Project-based learning groups may engage in sustained inquiry together, but teachers can form smaller, more temporary groups of students (pulled from each project group) to "catch up" students who have been absent, to coach individuals to be technology "experts," or to peer edit and rehearse interview questions.

Hallmark 3: Students consistently work with a range of peers

Grouping isn't flexible if students make sense of ideas, discuss content, practice skills, or create products with the same classmates, day in and day out. While group work isn't the only setting in which students develop relationships with one another at school, it is a chief mechanism for bringing them together in the classroom. There is no hard and fast rule for how often group composition must change, but over the course of a few weeks, students should have opportunities to interact with most, if not all, of their classmates in the service of purposeful discussion or tasks. Carol Ann Tomlinson (2005) put it this way: "After a month's time, every student should have had the opportunity to both be challenged and to be the challenger." A good "test" for whether students are consistently working with a range of peers is to periodically ask them to make a list of their classmates' first and last names and provide facts about each (an interest, a favorite musical artist, a hobby). The results are a fairly dependable barometer of how flexible the groupings in the class really are.

It's important to note that flexible grouping is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. The act of forming or being in any kind of a group won't "save" poorly designed instruction. Although peer collaboration can provide opportunities to facilitate growth (see Vygotsky, 1978), poorly designed collaborations can deny students that access just as easily as grant it (Jean, 2016; Lou et al., 1996). In other words, both groups and group tasks need to be carefully and strategically planned in order for students to benefit from group work.

How Does Flexible Grouping Intersect with Differentiation?

Flexible grouping is a hallmark of a differentiated classroom. In Tomlinson's model of differentiation, flexible grouping refers to the practice of planning "a consistent flow of varied student groupings within a unit of study based on the nature of the work and the individual needs of students" (Tomlinson & Imbeau, 2010, p. 90). Many grouping configurations (e.g., like-interest, like-readiness) can function as delivery systems for differentiated tasks. It's important to note, however, that groups can also be a means of increasing instructional efficiency, building community, resetting attention, increasing motivation, and so on. Said differently, flexible grouping facilitates differentiation, but it serves other purposes as well. We will examine the relationship between flexible grouping and differentiation more closely at the end of this book.

Why Group Flexibly?

Flexible grouping combats the power of school to establish, reinforce, and justify stereotypes by granting learning privileges to some and denying them to others. Such inequities flow from various school structures, most notably tracking—the practice of sorting students into levels that they stay in throughout much of their school experience.

Tracking remains a prominent structure in today's schools, despite both decades-old and more recent evidence outlining the dangerous inequities it promotes (Batruch et al., 2018; OECD, 2012). In tracked (or "leveled" or "streamed") systems, students are sorted into different "ability pathways" for their schooling, with some students pursuing "advanced" levels and others remaining in "general" or even "remedial" classes. Decisions about which track students will be assigned to are usually based on standardized test scores that reflect a student's status at one moment in time and ignore the influences of social, cultural, emotional, economic, and experiential (e.g., trauma) factors on learning. They reflect blanket assumptions about the potential of students based on limited evidence and "condemn" students with "less ability" to coursework that is less rigorous, less relevant, less authentic, and less engaging, often for the remainder of their school career.

Teachers in tracked classrooms sometimes internalize and reinforce the stereotypes dictated by designated levels (Kelly & Carbonaro, 2012), but this does not have to be the case. Even in leveled classrooms, teachers who incorporate flexible grouping can shake up both their own expectations of students and their students' expectations for themselves and their peers by consistently changing the lens through which they view student performance. When students flow in and out of groups based on like interest, like need, and preferred ways of taking in or demonstrating knowledge, student affinities for the curriculum—and for one another—bubble to the surface. Flexible grouping can, among other things, showcase students' learning strengths rather than deficits, and it can do so regardless of students' perceived "levels" at initial placement.

Thankfully, some schools and districts have heeded the warnings about tracking and have begun to move from tracked classes at the middle and secondary levels (see Burris & Welner, 2005; Tomlinson et al., 2008). These districts and schools may collapse three or four levels of some subjects into two levels or even one. But shifting students into more heterogeneous settings is just that—changing their setting, and providing students with "new geography" is not enough to advance equity. Gallagher (1997) reminds us that the real work is attending to what is happing to students in their changed setting. Teachers not trained for this newfound diversity may gravitate to systems that functionally hide student diversity (e.g., whole-class instruction), exploit it (e.g., cooperative learning), or fixate on it (e.g., ability grouping or creating smaller "tracks" within a classroom). No matter the grade level, none of these fixed structures actually harnesses the power of diversity. That is what flexible grouping can do.

Flexible grouping capitalizes on the rich tapestry of talents present in any classroom, giving students equal access to important learning experiences and, in turn, cultivating growth, building classroom camaraderie, strengthening students' collaborative capacity, combating status differences, increasing exposure to diverse perspectives, and fostering empathy. Let's take a closer look at each of those benefits.

Benefit 1: Flexible grouping grants access to equitable learning opportunities

In a flexibly grouped classroom, students work with a variety of their peers in different configurations to achieve multiple purposes. In classes with static groupings (e.g., Ms. Bonelli's 1st grade class from the Introduction), students are often "retracked" within the class by perceived ability, most often for reading instruction. When this kind of grouping structure is the only one used, some students consistently receive remediation and lower-level tasks (Sparks, 2018). If, however, a variety of groups are used—groups based on interests, learning preferences, and other factors as well as on academic readiness—these same students have the opportunity to shine in other areas.

In one study of emergent talent at the primary level, students remained in their established reading groups but were "regrouped" for other subjects (including math) based on the results of frequently administered classroom assessments. "Wendall," a student in the lowest reading group, surprised his teacher when formative assessment data indicated he should be in the most advanced group for certain measurement tasks. His teacher reflected, "Wendall kind of surprised me when we were reading the book How Big Is a Foot? because he's not the one to participate as often as the others, but he was the first one to come out with the response we were looking for. Wendall was up with the high group, which he usually is not" (Brighton, 2007). Not only did the use of flexible grouping grant Wendall access to the more challenging task, but it also provided him a setting in which he could thrive. This helped him grow in both his competence and confidence. This is the promise of a flexibly grouped classroom.

Benefit 2: Flexible grouping cultivates growth

As illustrated in Hallmark 2's "kitchen tools" metaphor, in no single grouping structure cultivates growth in every scenario. Elizabeth Cohen's (1998) work on complex instruction advocates for the creation of groups made up of students with different talents, all of which are needed to complete a complex task. This model holds promise for project-based learning; if the project is complex enough, multiple skills will be needed to achieve success. Determining the diverse skills necessary fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: How Traditional Models of Grouping Fall Short
• Chapter 1. The Purpose of Flexible Grouping
• Chapter 2. Planning for Flexible Grouping
• Chapter 3. The Progression of Flexible Grouping
• Chapter 4. Procedures for Flexible Grouping
• Chapter 5. Troubleshooting Flexible Grouping
• Chapter 6. Portraits of Flexible Grouping
• Conclusion: Embracing the Promise of Flexible Grouping
• Appendix A. Flexible Grouping Planning Template
• Appendix B. Sample Flexible Grouping Plan—Elementary
• Appendix C. Sample Flexible Grouping Plan—Secondary
• Appendix D. Online Resources
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright