🗑 10 ways to manage student group work

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💡 THE BIG IDEA 💡

📢 10 ways to manage group work in the classroom

Teachers often have wildly differing opinions about student group work.

Put students in groups to work collaboratively? Some teachers LOVE the idea.

Others have seen mixed (or zero) results and have scrapped the idea.

It makes ALLLLLL the difference when students are working on a task that lends itself to working together.

In today’s new post, we share 10 ways to manage group work in the classroom (below).

Plus, we highlight a new FREE tool that helps you sort, create, and manage your groups — Grouper (grouper.school). Here’s what Grouper does …

• Import your roster

• Create groups of any size with one click

• Arrange by attributes (like proficiency, gender, grade from a recent quiz, etc.)

• Reshuffle groups as often as you need

It’s a simple tool that takes care of a tricky task in just seconds.

How to manage great student group work

Here is some of my favorite advice from our new post, 10 ways to manage group work in the classroom.

Explain the “Why”

Don’t just assign group work; explain its purpose.

Ask yourself: how does group work (in the context of your current lesson) contribute to communication, problem solving, teamwork skills, and the ability to consider diverse perspectives?

Sort students effectively

There are all sorts of ways to sort students for group work.

Heterogeneous groups (groups with differences)?

• Mixed gender

• Variety of scores on last week’s quiz (or standardized tests)

• Different responses from a student interest survey

Homogenous groups (groups with similarities)?

• Same gender

• Similar scores last week’s quiz (or standardized tests)

• Alike responses from a student interest survey

It gets even more complicated when you try to sort for multiple data points at the same time …

Data can help you create the similarities (or differences) you crave in a group. But it can also be overwhelming.

Grouper lets you identify and sort students into groups using multiple data points — and all based on the data you want to use.

BONUS: When you hover over a certain data attribute, it’ll highlight students in different colors based on their data (displayed in the image below).

Vary group work

Doing the same activities over and over again gets students in a rut. (It gets you in a rut, too!) Mix up your group activities whenever possible. It’ll keep students engaged and help develop a range of collaborative skills. Think of real-world issues or problems – or even connections to the things that students love – to increase student interest and motivation.

Keep groups flexible

When grouping students by level, make sure to re-form the groups when you get new data. Guided reading, writing or math groups are a great example of this. As students are assessed, re-form the groups based on the results. Grouper makes this easy with their import tool. You can pull in data from something as simple as a weekly quiz to form new groups.

Manage your student group work with Grouper

It’s one of those tools that you won’t have open on your phone or laptop for very long — maybe 30 seconds at a time.

But when you do open it, you create student groups that work, that make sense — and it goes fast.

Go to Grouper (grouper.school) to sign up for a free account and start creating student groups with intention.

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In our post — How to create substitute teacher plans in 15 minutes with AI — you’ll see some concrete steps you can take to write sub plans quickly.

We use a variety of tools and give example plans for 4th grade and for a 10th grade English class.

👋 How we can help

There are even more ways I can support you in the important work you do in education:

1. Read one of my six books about meaningful teaching with tech.

2. Take one of our online courses about practical and popular topics in education.

3. Bring me to your school, district or event to speak. I love working with educators!