Classroom Management Strategies
Strategies for forming groups for class activities
Why group students?
Have you ever heard of the saying "two heads are better than one"? In many cases, pairing or grouping students allows them to be more productive, more creative, and more engaged than when they work as individuals. Students also need to learn important skills that can only be learned through grouping, such as how to collaborate, communicate, share responsibilities and tasks, take leadership roles and how to function in a group dynamic. This webpage brings you many strategies that could be used in any classroom (K-12) to help you organize students into groups for classroom activities.
Benefits for Students
- Break complex tasks into parts and steps
- Plan and manage time
- Refine understanding through discussion and explanation
- Give and receive feedback on performance
- Challenge assumptions
- Develop stronger communication skills.
- Tackle more complex problems than they could on their own.
- Delegate roles and responsibilities.
- Share diverse perspectives.
- Pool knowledge and skills.
- Hold one another (and be held) accountable.
- Receive social support and encouragement to take risks.
- Develop new approaches to resolving differences.
- Establish a shared identity with other group members.
- Find effective peers to emulate.
- Develop their own voice and perspectives in relation to peers.
- Groups can be refreshing ways for students to interact with new information or to practice and deepen their understanding of information.
Benefits for Instructors
- Teachers can assign more complex authentic problems to groups of students than they could to individuals.
- Groups of students may approach tasks and solve problems in novel, interesting ways.
- Can be refreshing for instructors.
- Grouping students can be useful when there are a limited number of topics or resources to distribute.
- Grouping students can save time when grading assessment pieces from students, especially in secondary classrooms when the total number of students can be above 100 for a particular teacher.
Strategies
Grouping students according to learning modailities
Having students take a learning styles inventory at the beginning of the year can be a valuable strategy for not only the teacher but also the student. Both parties learn how the student learns best. This can be eye opening for the student, allowing them to become self aware and learn strategies for studying and processing new information. The teacher can use their learning modalities to prepare lessons and to group students who learn in similar ways together and provide each group with different activities or tasks that are better suited to their learning style.
Grouping students according to ability level (flexible skills grouping)
The teacher can predetermine groups and purposefully assign students to groups based on a knowledge of the students ability level. Students who require more practice can be grouped together and assigned to a student-tutor or work with the teacher to receive further instruction on a topic. Students who have mastered a particular skill can be grouped together for extension or enrichment activities that require a deeper understanding of the content or an application of skills to solve a related problem. The teacher may also choose to disperse higher performing students throughout the classroom groups in order to support struggling learners or to serve as peer tutors/mentors or student teachers.
Partners and small groups
Often times it is desired for each student to partner up with only one other person. This may be for a quick discussion, to think-pair-share, to check work and provide feedback, to review or study, or to complete some task or activity.
Scholastic has published a list of "15 Quick and Creative Ways To Group and Partner Students"
While this website is targeted towards K-5 students several of these could be adapted to serve some secondary classrooms.
Interest Grouping
Assess students to uncover their interests and assign students to a group based on similar interests.
Student Choice Grouping
In some scenarios giving the students the choice of their groups may be an option. I would caution against this choice with groups of unruly students and for teachers with poor classroom management. In any case, the instructor should make sure to set parameters and guidelines for the group and take steps to ensure that all group members participate.
Random grouping
Grouping students randomly is essentially throwing students together without care or cause for the group dynamic. There are a number of ways to randomly pull students into groups I have listed a few below:
- Progressbook's seating chart has a "randomly assign students" option which will organize your seating chart randomly with given parameters about rows and columns. You can also choose alphabetical or reverse alphabetical arrangements.
- Popsicle Sticks or Tongue Depressors can be made with student names on them (for elementary) or with seat numbers (secondary) and individual sticks can be chosen from a cup to assign students to groups.
- Numbering student chairs: this may be used along with Popsicle sticks or random selector tools to assign students into groups based on their seat number. Number the individual seats (tables or chairs) that the students sit at; students can be selected for groups based on their number assignment. If students already sit in group tables on a regular basis, groups can be changed by numbering the chairs at each table. For example, all the students who sit in chair number 4 could team up for a different activity, such as a jigsaw, could learn about their topic, and then return to their "home group" to share what they learned.
- Counting off students: if you need to divide the class into 4 groups, number students off "one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four...." or groups of 2, 3, 5,6, 7, 8 etc.
- Choosing students to work together in groups based on something else that may be random, such as the color of their shirt, their age, their birth month or their hair length.
- Student selector tools: There are a number of digital tools that allow you to input your student classroom information and then generate groups, teams, pairs, or select individual students. Below are some examples of digital selector tools that could be utilized in any K-12 classroom.
Kagan: Selector Tools
Not Free but you are able to upload your class rosters and arrange random groups with the click of a button. Kagan
Instant Classroom
A free tool to randomly assign groups, you need only enter or upload classroom information and choose parameters for groups. Instant Classroom.
SMART Exchange
Many teachers in the district have access to a SMART board and through the SMART Exchange there are several random group generators available. SMART Exchange
Author: Amy Jensen
Sources:
Instructional Grouping in the Classroom - Beatrice A. Ward
Grouping Students for Instruction - New York University
Grouping Students by Ability Regains Favor in Classrooms - Vivian Yee: New York Times
Email: amy.jensen@ocps.net
Website: teacherpress.ocps.net/amyjensen
Location: Liberty Middle School, South Chickasaw Trail, Orlando, FL, United States