Grouping Students for Successful Learning in a PLC

Had another interesting email land in my inbox this week.  Tom—a principal of an elementary school working to restructure as a professional learning community—asked:

This upcoming school year, I would like my teams to start leveling their students (high, medium, low) and team-teach by ability level.  What do you think of this idea as it pertains to PLCs? 

Have you had any experience with leveling?  If so, what do you do with those teachers who want to ONLY teach their own students?

I think it’s helpful for any leader of a PLC to remember the critical questions that Rick and Becky DuFour believe should guide the work of any educator interested in student learning:

1. What is it that we want students to be able to know and to do?  What outcomes are the most essential for student success?
2. How will we know when our students have mastered these collectively identified essential outcomes?
3. How are we going to monitor progress towards those essential outcomes over time?
4. What are we going to do as a school when students don’t master those essential outcomes—or when they’ve mastered those essential outcomes and need opportunities for deeper study?

What that means is that leveling in a traditional sense—dividing entire grade levels of students into high, medium and low groups early in a school year—is an ineffective practice.

You see, student mastery is too unpredictable for stagnant, level groups.  Kids who master content in some areas quickly and easily will struggle in others. 

To respond to this intellectual diversity in their student populations, the most effective PLCs are constantly monitoring and responding to student performance indicators over an entire school year.

While they may create leveled groups of students at times, those leveled groups are determined by progress made against specific performance indicators and are flexible in composition. 

An example:  If a team of second grade teachers has determined that writing a complete sentence is an essential outcome for their students, they might begin their work by defining exactly what they want to see in their students’ sentences.

Then, they’d develop a shared rubric and a set of student exemplars that could help both teachers and students to understand what mastery looked like in action. 

Finally—after spending time teaching students about the characteristics of complete sentences—they’d collect a work sample from every child and use their shared rubric to assess student progress.

After analyzing the results of the data that they’d collected, the team might decide that there were a group of students who needed extra help with sentence writing. 

Only then would they consider leveling their students. 

Together, they might plan a period of time during the next week when teachers particularly skilled at teaching students to write good sentences could work with small groups of kids in need of remediation and/or enrichment.

Leveling in this case is based on an identified strength or weakness in progress towards mastering a specific objective. 

Students who continue to struggle even after the first attempt at remediation might continue to receive small group instruction.  Students who demonstrate mastery after an intervention, however, would move out of the intervention cycle.   

Some teams schedule regular weekly or bi-weekly intervention times when this kind of regrouping and intervention can occur.  Other teams wait until they’ve finished a common assessment to intervene. 

Does this make sense? 

Tom’s second question—what do you do about teachers who only want to teach their students—is a bit trickier. 

I’ll tackle it in a second post sometime next week!

Comments

[Tracy]

We have leveled for over 20 years in Reading beginning in 1st grade, and add in Math starting in 4th, and have found that we are able to have a powerful impact on student learning. In regards to teachers who only want to teach their own students, I would continue the dialogue. I suspect that you will find it is because they know how important it is for children to have the influence of a strong interpersonal relationship with their teacher. I look forward to following this discussion.

[Philip Cummings]

Great explanation, Bill. Thank you for pointing out that "leveling" should only be done for a specific learning goal after the students have had the opportunity to learn the skill and demonstrate mastery. The best thing the school leader can do is set clear expectations for what collaborative teams should be and carve out time within the regular school day for the teams to do this planning and have these conversations.

[TeachMoore]

One of the most sensible and accurate explanations I've ever heard on this topic, Bill. Well done.

[Janet]

One of the most powerful things a teacher can do is sit down with colleague to analyze student portfolios. In the context of Rick and Becky DuFour's questions, teachers can begin sorting groups for specific mini-lessons.

1. What do we expect students to know when they enter x-grade? While review is essential for most students, which will need structured remedial support for finding independent reading material? Paragraphing? Open-ended problem-solving? etc.

2. Which students appear to have mastered these collectively identified essential outcomes? Have some reached them already? How can we do a quick-check and possibly extend their learning?

3. How can we work together, creating flexible small groups, to support students at all levels? After a reading mini-lesson, can one teacher facilitate a small reading group to reinforce the lesson? How might the teacher librarian help?

4. Given that we might work with students from other classes, how can we communicate progress and set up simple double-checks for understanding?

[R. Spell]

Take a look at the site below from the Sutton Trust a world leading educational research group. This new report has much to say and ability grouping certainly did not come out where many people would have thought

http://www.suttontrust.com/research/toolkit-of-strategies-to-improve-learning/

[Anderson]

There are a variety of advantages which one can utilize when he opts for a job experience. A work experience 10 may help a person to get an added advantage over others in the job and so it is better to go for work experience.