Week 8, Blog 1 - Classroom Groups

The article is from the following site: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-grouping-homogeneous-heterogeneous-ben-johnson.

This interesting article explores the issue of grouping students.  He notes that teachers have sometimes grouped the best students with the worst students so that they can lead the others to the promised land of disciplined learning.

With this premise, he maintains that many students can see right through what teachers are doing.  This creates tension, anger, resentment, and even hurt feelings because of trying to eliminate discipline problems. 

The points that he makes are very valid.  At times in years past, I have done this.  What often happens is the same people take the leadership and direct the learning and some people never have a voice. 

His solution was that we need to divide students up in various ways.  Highly motivated learners with highly motivated learners.  Medium with medium.  Low with low.  You can also split them up in various ways.  From there, he noted that you can split kids up based upon their favorite ice cream color, candy, etc.  This would be more random and would create a fun atmosphere as well.  And with technology, I’m sure there’s some programs that can split the kids up completely randomly.

This makes sense; kids will work with others and this will allow for some students to have more of a voice and take on more leadership skills.  Furthermore, the randomness will allow for more respect between the student and the teacher.  No longer will that resentment be there and this will help increase the learning and the motivation.

In my classroom, I often let students pick their own groups.  This works because they can work with their friends and concentrate on accomplishing the task while knowing that they can trust their partners.  Of course, I explain that there are strict expectations and that if they deviate from staying on track, then they will not be working towards mastery of the learning material. 

In sum, varying up the way that you do grouping is the way to go.  This keeps things fresh in the classroom and may help some students become stronger leaders and learners.


Johnson, Ben.  “Student Learning Groups: Homogenous or Heterogeneous?”  2 Aug. 2011.  Web.  Edutopia.org.  7 Aug. 2011.  <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/student-grouping-homogeneous-heterogeneous-ben-johnson>.