The Flexibly Grouped Classroom: How to Organize Learning for Equity and Growth

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.

Kristina J. Doubet is a professor in the College of Education at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she has received the Distinguished Teacher Award, the Madison Scholar Award, and the Sarah Miller Luck Endowed Professorship for Excellence in Education. As an independent consultant and ASCD Faculty member, Doubet has partnered with hundreds of schools, districts, and organizations around initiatives related to differentiated instruction, curriculum design using the Understanding by Design® framework, performance assessment and project-based learning, formative assessment and feedback, digital learning, and classroom management and grouping.