HIGH-LEVERAGE PRACTICES IN General Education and Resource CLASSROOMS

Clever Configurations:
Utilizing Advantages of Flexible Grouping

Episode Description

In this episode, Heather talks with Ann, an early learning instructional coach, about how flexible grouping can unlock student growth when it’s done with purpose. Ann shares how she used both homogeneous and heterogeneous groupings across subjects—and how the real value came from knowing her students well enough to make thoughtful decisions about who should work together, when, and why.
They explore what flexible grouping looks like beyond popsicle sticks and random pairings: using peer models, regrouping based on skill need, and leaning into group dynamics to promote both academic and social success. The key takeaway? Grouping students isn’t just a strategy—it’s a responsive, ongoing process that, when done well, helps students learn with and from each other.

Key Points and Takeaways

  • Effective flexible grouping requires profound knowledge of students' abilities, personalities, and social dynamics to create homogeneous and heterogeneous groups that maximize learning outcomes.
  • Teachers must be adaptable, regularly reassessing and restructuring groups to meet evolving educational needs and objectives.
  • Flexible grouping fosters negotiation and collaboration among students, essential skills for academic and life success.
  • There's a balance between homogeneous groups for targeted instruction and heterogeneous groups for collaborative problem-solving and social interaction.
  • Close monitoring and ongoing feedback from teachers are vital to sustain productive group dynamics and enhancing learning outcomes.
Podcast Guest

Ann Potter,
MSM, MEd

Ann Potter is an instructional coach specializing in early childhood development, play-based instruction, and early elementary instructional practices. She has been a reading specialist, general education co-teacher, inclusion teacher for students with emotional disorders, extended school day lead teacher, grade-level technology lead, and paraprofessional supporting elementary technology instruction, but she started her career as a software engineer for a computer consulting firm. Outside of her professional work, she enjoys traveling and has continued to support her community as a reading tutor and daycare provider. Ann is an Instructional Coach for Early Learners with her Bachelors in Business Administration, Master of Science in Management, and Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction.

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High-Leverage Practice #17:
Use flexible grouping.
Teachers assign students to homogeneous and heterogeneous groups based on explicit learning goals, monitor peer interactions, and provide positive and corrective feedback to support productive learning. Teachers use small learning groups to accommodate learning differences, promote in-depth academic-related interactions, and teach students to work collaboratively. They choose tasks that require collaboration, issue directives that promote productive and autonomous group interactions, and embed strategies that maximize learning opportunities and equalize participation. Teachers promote simultaneous interactions, use procedures to hold students accountable for collective and individual learning, and monitor and sustain group performance through proximity and positive feedback.
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As human beings, for the most part, we do not work in silos. We work in communities.

ann potter

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Host: Heather Volchko

Guest: Ann Potter

For this high-leverage practice today, we are talking about using flexible grouping. We've been talking about all kinds of different instructional strategies for the past month or so, and with me this week, I've got Ann, our instructional coach for our early learners. She has a long-standing history of being very effective at working with very diverse and divergent learners in her classroom, and then also coaching those around her to do the same. So I'm really curious to see where this conversation goes with using flexible grouping. So, Ann, in your practice, what has this looked like? How has it worked for you?

Like all instructional practices, it depends, sometimes on the day and the group of children. Over the course of time in the classroom, flexible grouping has always proven to be an effective strategy but depending on the group of kids I had, it was more effective and less effective than others. Instructionally, I could always get my biggest bang for the buck by mixing and matching students so it looked like a bunch of spaghetti noodles that you just kept stirred in the pot, and different noodles would stick together at different points of time in the cooking process.

I might have one group of children for math-type activities. I might have another group of children for reading and language arts kinds of activities. Sometimes I wanted a homogeneous group because I was doing a targeted skill that I was either launching some of my advanced learners or reinforcing some of my challenged learners. Sometimes I wanted a heterogeneous group so that my solid learners could reinforce their skills by reteaching and helping out the kids who have not yet got it.

So that in some of my settings, it wound up being really effective to use my solid kids as teachers for the challenged kids because when I had a really solid group, they could explain things more than one way and differently than I explained it, so that the other kids would have a chance of picking up a little bit different way of looking at it and learning it. So, when I was trying to instruct new skills, advanced skills, refresher skills, homogeneous grouping worked really well.

When I was trying to do some practice-type work, the heterogeneous groupings were very effective. And because my experience is primarily primary grades, because you have such a divergent set of skills across kids at that age, there was always regrouping going on, retooling going on, and depending on what I was doing, that gave me, as a teacher, tremendous feedback for where my kids were at so I could target the instruction they needed to advance their skills from wherever they were to wherever it was they were going to be.

There's so much intentionality to what you're talking about. I know I've been in some elementary classrooms where they'll do the popsicle stick style. You know, pick a partner, and the first two names come out as a group, and the next two names is another group, right? And it is grouping, and it certainly is flexible because it's whatever sticks come out of the cup, right? But that's not what you're talking about. To be able to do what you're talking about, you have to have some pretty decent depth of knowledge about the skills that your students have, how they interact with their peers, and how their combination is showing up in that moment.

And especially if it's something new, you have to have a pretty quick gauge on did they catch it or nothing? Can they hold what type of role in this activity that I'm asking them to get into? There's a lot of just intentionality and understanding and awareness that you have to have about your students to be able to do everything you just riddled off because it sounds great, but my goodness, the amount of understanding that you have to have to pull that off, that's intense.

You're not going to get all of that all of the time, every time. You're going to sometimes throw the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. For me, flexible grouping with names out of a cup, I might as well just put you in alphabetical order and sit you next to each other. And there's nothing very intentional about that. Like I said, flexible grouping, I had different rates of success depending on the groups that I had, depending on the personalities of the kids that were in the classroom with whom I was working.

Some were very open to working with others and others were, “don't bother me, man. I got my own things to think about.” But as a teacher, my max class size, in the primary years, I think was 24. So I only had to manage those 24 little bodies, personalities, learning types, strengths, challenges to try to best match them. Yes, I can pull sticks out of a cup and say I'm doing flexible grouping, but if I want my bang for my instructional buck, I need to be intentional about it as often as I can.

Yes, there were days where I'm going, “I just need to mix this group up and not have those same people working together,” and it's not intentional. And everybody has a new chance to work with somebody. And so I may have eight different little groups going, and six of them are train wrecks, but the other two were a success today. Put those in your back pocket and say, okay, I got to remember that one before.

And more often than not, I would just sort of spitball it and say, okay, we're just putting it together today. The ones that worked were the ones that I went, “really? Didn't see that one coming.” So even when I spit wad how I pull the groups together, oftentimes I can learn something instructionally about how kids better work together. And I still, to this day, I remember I had one kid, and it's long enough ago now, I remember the kid's face, and I don't remember what it was he explained, but it was some sort of math concept, and kids were just not getting it, not getting it, not getting it.

And he said, “You know, it's like this.” And I looked at him, I said, “Oh, my gosh, that's the most brilliant explanation I have ever heard.” And it was a kid who didn't talk often and was very often in the group that said they needed to be taught it again and again and again in order to get it. But he made it make sense in his head and explained it, and I went, “Oh, this is the reason why I always ask kids what they're thinking,” because it was one of those that, for the next five years, I taught, I used his example of that concept. At this point, I wish I could remember what it was, but that interaction, that explanation made such an impression. And then I used him, “You're my teacher.” And he would rotate through some different groups and then use that idea in the years that followed.

I mean, one of the big goals of using flexible grouping is to kind of instill sort of a guided sense of autonomy. That's exactly what you're talking about. It’s: can I put you in a situation where you've got some pieces and I'm going to guide you through the rest of those pieces? So it's not okay enough to just know it or just do it. It's: can you actually do that with someone else? Can you share your skills with someone else? Can you learn their skills while you're working together?

Because that is that independence, that is how the bulk of life works when you're not just, you're in charge of your own work, period. Pretty much every workplace environment has some kind of collaboration that has to happen with it. And so from an early age, we're now practicing how can we not just learn the stuff, but can we learn the stuff and practice stuff and do the stuff with other people around us as well?

And that's exactly what you're talking about. You're setting them up to be able to practice those skills while they're also working on those academic skills.

And in this small group, part of the thing you're instilling in them is negotiating skills. You get two people together who are working on a particular problem. They don't agree on the solution. I had more than one group come up and say, “Miss, miss, he said this, but I think it's that. And he's wrong. He's wrong. He's wrong.” Well, I say, “I appreciate that. You both have a good idea. Now go sit down, and you tell him why he's wrong. Use all of your explainers. Explain to him why yours is the right answer. And then you go and you explain why yours is the right answer. And then figure out which part of each of your answers really is what has to come together.” But it's those negotiating skills. As human beings, for the most part, we do not work in silos, we work in communities. And part of the benefits of flexible groupings is you give students lots and lots of opportunities to experience different communities and develop those cooperation, communication, and negotiating skills.

Yeah, and I mean, the rest of this episode is going to go into some more of those strategies on how do we group or what types of thoughts do we need to be thinking to figure out what kinds of groups might be useful for different activities. But I love the fact that you are calling out that there are so many ways to do it and that it is so contingent on who's in the room at that moment, what happened, what they have for breakfast, you know? All the little things that, even with the best-laid plans, can come in, and it's going to need to adjust. But that's based on knowing the players, knowing who you've got, how they're showing up. And that's not just how they're showing up academically, it's how they're showing up socially, behaviorally. Like, how can we truly position all of our students to be successful learners in their own right and with those around them?

So thank you so much for sharing kind of how you've done this in your classroom and how you've been able to walk even some of the most challenging students through having real, legitimate academic success simply based on who you get them to work with. So thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

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Instructionally, I could always get my biggest bang for the buck by mixing and matching students.

ann potter

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Special education teachers master the art of flexible grouping to tailor instruction and address individual student needs. The grouping patterns they use are highly adaptable, shifting between homogeneous and heterogeneous small groups, pairs, whole-class settings, and individual instruction as lesson goals and objectives evolve. This dynamic approach not only accommodates diverse learning needs but also fosters meaningful academic interactions and collaborative skills among students.


Research and professional organizations, such as the International Literacy Association and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, support the use of flexible grouping. Within this framework, special educators often utilize small groups—typically consisting of two to six students—for targeted, intensive instruction. These small groups can be homogeneous, composed of students with similar abilities to tackle specific skills and concepts, or heterogeneous, where students of varying skill levels collaborate on grade-level content and enhance interpersonal relationships.


Homogeneous groups are particularly effective for concentrated instruction on high-priority skills. Teachers design these groups to address short-term goals, using explicit instruction techniques and strategies to maximize student engagement and response opportunities. Smaller group sizes, sometimes as few as one or two students, have proven especially beneficial for improving achievement, with added time and focused practice further supporting student mastery.


Conversely, heterogeneous groups mix students with different knowledge and skill levels to enrich discussions, facilitate collaborative problem-solving, and improve social dynamics. In these groups, teachers set collaborative tasks, promote productive interactions, and ensure all students have equal opportunities to contribute and learn. By monitoring interactions closely and providing consistent feedback, teachers help sustain group cohesion and maximize learning outcomes.


Overall, flexible grouping enables special education teachers to meet diverse student needs effectively while enhancing both academic and social development.


When it comes to grouping students, teachers constantly adapt their approach based on the specific skills or learning activities they are targeting. These groupings are not static; they shift in response to students' evolving needs, skill levels, and knowledge. The art of effective grouping lies in the teacher’s ability to make agile, informed decisions that address these needs.


This flexibility in grouping is crucial but doesn't operate in isolation. For it to truly enhance student performance, it must be complemented by other High-Leverage Practices (HLPs). For instance, decisions about group size and the instructional methods used within these groups should align with evidence-based practices and other HLPs, such as HLPs 2 and 6, which emphasize creating a positive learning environment and using data to inform instruction. In essence, while flexible grouping is a powerful tool in itself, its effectiveness is amplified when integrated with a broader strategy of skilled instructional practices.


Teachers who excel in using flexible groupings understand the power of adapting their approach to fit students' needs and learning goals. They seamlessly vary group sizes—sometimes opting for whole groups, other times breaking down into smaller clusters—depending on what's most effective for the lesson at hand. They also carefully choose between homogeneous groups, where students with similar abilities work together to tackle specific goals, and heterogeneous groups, where diverse abilities mix to enhance discussions and foster stronger interpersonal connections among students.


In practice, these teachers might employ cooperative learning structures like jigsaw or quiz-quiz-trade to address a wide array of instructional objectives, from academic to behavioral to interpersonal skills. They stay attuned to the dynamics within these groups, closely monitoring both individual learning progress and group interactions. Holding students accountable, both as individuals and as a team, helps strengthen personal responsibility and encourages positive interdependence. By providing varied opportunities for all students to engage actively, these educators ensure that every student remains involved and invested in their learning journey.


To truly support teachers in using flexible groupings effectively, school leaders should start by offering comprehensive instruction and professional development focused on the nuances of grouping strategies. It’s crucial to observe how teachers implement these groupings in their classrooms and provide targeted feedback to refine their approach, ensuring that the practice meets its intended goals and offers constructive guidance when needed.


Encouraging educators—whether they’re co-teaching partners, solo teachers, or teams—to experiment with various grouping configurations can be incredibly beneficial. Highlight the versatility of flexible groupings, reminding them of the broad range of instructional objectives these configurations can address. Given that managing and implementing flexible groups can be complex, it’s essential for leaders to regularly check in with teachers who might be struggling. By helping them pinpoint specific challenges and collaboratively finding solutions, leaders can greatly enhance the effectiveness of this dynamic teaching strategy.


Assessing the effectiveness of flexible grouping can be challenging because it involves a range of instructional setups—from individual work to whole class activities—that change based on students' needs and learning goals. Essentially, flexible grouping functions like an intervention package, with its success dependent on isolating and studying each component of its implementation. To fully understand its impact, we need more empirical studies that delve into the decision-making processes behind flexible grouping strategies.


Research shows that both homogeneous and heterogeneous small-group arrangements, when designed and implemented effectively, can enhance a range of academic and interpersonal outcomes. For these groups to be successful, they need to be structured with careful selection of goals, tasks, and materials, clear instructional guidance, and strategies to ensure that every student has the chance to engage and contribute equally. As with any teaching practice, it's crucial for teachers to monitor student performance closely, offer timely and constructive feedback, and ensure that students are accountable for their own and each other's progress.

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