Thursday
January 24, 2008
I just discovered a great new blog, The Faculty Room, jointly written by a group of teachers and administrators, led by Grant Wiggins, who some of you will know from his work on authentic assessment. It’s fairly new, but the concept seems to be that they pose a big question and several of the bloggers respond over the course of a week or two.
For example…
Should we be grouping students heterogeneously, homogenously, or not at all? Some thoughts from The Faculty Room:
Grant Wiggins frames the debate by reminding everyone that,
[I]n our proper criticism of tracking we have thrown out the idea of user-friendly grouping. Tracking is not grouping. Grouping presumes that smaller affinity groups are helpful ways of helping everyone reach the same goal. Tracking, by contrast, means separate tracks with lower tracks being intellectual dead ends.
Wiggins takes the slightly controversial position that “intelligent grouping,” homegeneous grouping that is not permanent and serves a specific purpose, makes much more sense than the current vogue for throwing everyone together in a single class and attempting to differentiate on the fly:
The painfully obvious variation in human ability and background experience require us to group, if we want to make it easier for both teacher and student to make progress. Why in the world would we want to maximize heterogeneous grouping? We don’t do it in sports, music, dance, karate, computer software classes, foreign language. Intelligent grouping means we have the same hopes and expectations for all learners, but we tactfully recognize and honor where people are in their progress. Some might even say that this is more thoughtful than heterogeneous classes where people have to learn together just because they are the same age.
Several writers focused, quite rightly on the extremely central role of teacher quality in determining whether any grouping strategy will work. For instance, Devin Ozdogu:
In the end, each student should have equitable educational opportunity. If this means grouping heterogeneously, then the teachers better know how to teach well in a heterogeneous classroom. If this means grouping homogeneously, then the teachers better know how to engage higher-skilled students and provide exceptional opportunities and support for lower-skilled students. Ultimately, this comes down to resources. The real question is: How do we structure and fund schools to provide students with exceptional teachers and additional support structures?
Of course, there is no easy answer. When I taught, I absolutely never felt like I was skilled enough at differentiating instruction or in using different types of groupings to best serve the needs of my students. I wonder if there are more effective ways to teach this skill to new teachers.
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When I started teaching in the early 60s, classes were homogeneously grouped in every subject. My science classes were ranked from 8-1 to 8-13. Needless to say, the 8-13s were primarily behavior problems or students who had demonstrated low achiebement through their entire elementary career. Their difficulties in 8th grade science demonstrated the self-fulfilling prophecy that such grouping seemed to create.
When I left teaching in the late 90s, I was part of a middle-school team in which every class was heterogeneous. In science, students worked in cooperative groups. Each group often contained special education students as well as members of the National Junior Honor Society and all the variations in ability in between.
I found the heterogeneous classes to be more exciting to teach and to produce much better discussions and lab results than the homogeneous groups of 30+ years earlier. This is clearly just one teacher’s experience, and is hardly more than anectodal. I would be interested in what research has been done comparing teaching effectiveness of the two modes of grouping
