This High Leverage Practice deals with how students are grouped for everything from instruction to skill practice to group project work. The premise behind flexible grouping is that it is a dynamic way to organize students in such a way as to optimize learning outcomes.

Flexible grouping is an incredibly powerful teaching tool. Through flexible grouping, I can cluster a specific homogeneous group to provide focused, intensive instruction to students with common instructional strengths and needs where the groups are configured to meet short-term goals and objectives. It allows me to remediate deficient skills for a specific group of students. It allows me to provide targeted instruction to accelerate a specific group of students. It allows me to provide instruction at nearly the exact level for a specific skill for a specified group of students. With the ability to employ flexible grouping, I can manipulate and change student groups by subject and by skill within that subject.

 Flexible grouping also allows me to construct heterogeneous groups. Heterogeneous groups include students of varied knowledge and skill sets and can serve multiple instructional purposes. I can construct groups of students with complementary but differing skill levels. With this kind of grouping, I can assign high level tasks that students can work on cooperatively supporting each other and producing a singular product that may be superior to anything produced by a homogeneous student grouping.

Flexible grouping gives me the power to cluster students on any dimension…or on multiple dimensions. I can group students with a heterogeneous mix of skills (to support each other with skill levels needed to complete a task) but with a homogeneous learning style (so students in the group have a similar preference for how they receive and process material).

Yes, flexible grouping is an incredibly powerful instructional tool. With focused, intentional small group work, students have the benefit of instruction at an appropriate level at an appropriate time with an appropriate instructional methodology. Several studies show intentional instruction with students in small groups leads to improved student achievement. This is extremely powerful. What educator would not want to do everything possible to improve student achievement? I truly want each of my students to benefit from instruction delivered in such a way that maximizes their understanding and achievement while they are engaged in my classroom…but I live in the real world.

If I were to fully implement it across my classroom, I would need an ongoing complete skill assessment of each of my students across all content and skills. One might ask, “Don’t you already have that?” The answer is generally yes. I am constantly monitoring where my students are so I can target them for specific supports. However, the frequent reconstitution of student groups requires more administration than I can manage. My heart says, “Yes! Fully implement ongoing flexible groupings so all students have the best learning experience possible.” My head says, “There is no way I can keep up with constantly shifting groups and lesson delivery.” It’s a tough argument to reconcile.

If I had only 10-12 students in my classroom, this would be a no-brainer. I can stay on top of 10-12 students and 3-4 groups across all subject areas or class periods. But that is not my reality. I never had less than 23 students in my primary classroom and at the intermediate level class sizes could be close to 30 students. With ever-shifting curricula, I cannot always reconfigure groups at the optimum time to meet the needs of all students. I cannot always find the time to both collect and analyze all the data that leads to the best arrangement of student groups.

Every time I change up groups, there is somewhat of a learning curve as group dynamics sort themselves out and the new group of students gets used to working together. Sometimes the groups I assemble “work” and sometimes they don’t. There is an element of personality that goes into any group and I need to be attentive to that reality for learning to happen effectively; members of a group need to be able to work together cooperatively. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I don’t. I do need to be aware and willing to shift group members for all sorts of reasons.

So, how do you reconcile the competing forces of “Yes, this is a great idea” with “Oh my gosh, no, how can I ever keep up with it?” The answer lies in what educators always do. You do the best you can. In my classroom, flexible groupings were always a “work in progress.” Some weeks I was on my game with effective reading groupings and my math groupings were the best I could “spit wad” at the time. By “spit wad”, I mean I did not collect present levels on all the students for specific skills, analyze the results, and constitute groups based on the results. Instead, I spent 5-10 minutes considering what I knew of where students were in their learning and grouped them accordingly. Other weeks I was on top of math groupings and reading or writing groupings were the “spit wad” groupings. In a perfect world, I could see frequently rearranging group membership; but in my instructional setting, I could at best rearrange groups weekly and sometimes not that frequently. I did the best I could.

Flexible groupings offer a powerful way to deliver instruction, develop skills, enhance learning, and improve achievement. However, they do come with a requirement for additional instructional administration that is a challenge to find time for in some instructional settings. If I only implement flexible groupings for one subject or one class period, I am helping those students and doing the best that I can…maybe the other subjects and class periods come later.

Thank you for considering the ideas put forth in this post. Best wishes for success in your classroom where students walk out more prepared than when they walked in because of the work that you do.