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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 2: First half-term: enhancing classroom practice - grouping and tailoring

    • Classroom practice

    Grouping pupils effectively

    • Home and away
    • Talk partners
    • Monitor group performance

    By trying this activity you will...

    Learn how to:

    • Paired and group activities can increase pupil success, but to work together effectively pupils need guidance, support and practice.
    • How pupils are grouped is also important; care should be taken to monitor the impact of groupings on pupil attainment, behaviour and motivation.
    • Flexibly grouping pupils within a class to provide more tailored support can be effective, but care should be taken to monitor its impact on engagement and motivation, particularly for low attaining pupils.
    • Considering the factors that will support effective collaborative or paired work (e.g. familiarity with routines, whether pupils have the necessary prior knowledge and how pupils are grouped).
    • Providing scaffolds for pupil talk to increase the focus and rigour of dialogue.
    • Applying high expectations to all groups, and ensuring all pupils have access to a rich curriculum.
    • Changing groups regularly, avoiding the perception that groups are fixed.
    • Ensuring that any groups based on attainment are subject specific.

    If this is successful, you will see…

    • Pupils working effectively in different kinds of groupings.
    • Pupils who do not perceive themselves as being in a ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ group.
    • Pupils scaffolding work for each other.

    Practise…

    Home and away

    In this activity, pupils will be in a ‘Home team’ and an ‘Away team’. It helps if you organise the classroom so that tables are in groups. Pupils should have necessary prior knowledge (such as how to work in a group) to be successful.

    Home team = mixed attainment grouping

    Away team = prior attainment grouping

    Pupils have a group activity to complete as the Home team. In order to complete the activity, they need to go and work in their Away team on one aspect. This aspect can be tailored to pupil prior attainment.

    Example

    Pupils are learning about how methods of police investigation have changed in the 20th Century ‒ they need to find out about DNA, fingerprints, CCTV, witness interviews. Pupils need to go to the Away team to find out about a particular method. The work can be tailored for the attainment group through:

    • Complexity of content
    • Amount of scaffolding
    • Adult support at the Away team table

    Pupils will then return to their Home team and each take a turn at teaching the others in their group about what they learned with their Away team.

    Talk partners

    Pupil talk is a valuable way to support pupils with being able to write well later down the line. Ensuring high quality pupil talk is something which needs to be taught and practised. Using ‘Talk partners’ in your classroom is one effective way to do this. It’s likely you are already doing this to some extent already because you ask pupils to ‘discuss with the person sat next to you’. ‘Think, pair, share’ is a similar process.

    Using talk partners explicitly and regularly changes the dynamics of talk in the classroom. In a traditional classroom, talk is often between teacher and pupil. This can lead to some pupils who are confident dominating talk in the classroom and leaves other pupils with an option to ‘opt-out’ if they feel like it. By using talk partners and providing scaffolding (e.g. on key vocabulary or structures) all pupils have the opportunity to practise articulating their ideas.

    When you pose some questions in your next lesson, instead of expecting pupils to respond to you, use talk partners so pupils can first share their thoughts and ideas with each other.

    It is useful to mix up talk partners every few weeks so that it avoids the idea that this grouping is fixed and allows pupils to interact with others in their class.

    Intentionally monitoring group performance

    So that you can start to really understand what types of groupings are working well in your lessons, it would be worthwhile monitoring them intentionally.

    It would be useful to share your findings (sensitively). If a group activity did not go well, it is not about never doing it again but finding ways to improve performance. One way to do this is to make sure pupils understand what their group could have done better.

    For example: ‘I am going to give you some feedback on how we did that group activity. I thought Group X performed really well. I heard them speaking politely to each other. I heard them asking each other good questions. As a result, their work is very good. Group Y did not do so well at supporting each other through the task – you got annoyed with each other when you thought it wasn’t going well. What could you do differently next time?’

    In your notepad

    Reflect on your practice:

    • which idea(s) for practice did you try?
    • what did you do?
    • what happened?
    • what will you do next?