Neither students nor teachers win with heterogeneous grouping

Jack Caswell
Posted 10/6/15

The “zone of proximal development” is the difference between a student’s  developmental level and his or her potential growth after a period of instruction. Every teacher should understand …

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Neither students nor teachers win with heterogeneous grouping

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The “zone of proximal development” is the difference between a student’s  developmental level and his or her potential growth after a period of instruction. Every teacher should understand the fundamental but essential pedagogical approach that calls for meeting students where they are along the academic spectrum and growing their knowledge and skills from there. 

?Implicit in this approach is the understanding that students’ multiple intelligences call for differentiated instructional strategies to facilitate academic achievement. Differentiated instruction necessitates teachers’ best classroom management skills and requires them to be flexible, resourceful, knowledgeable, tolerant, resilient and indefatigable, especially when teaching 100 or so students daily and attempting to meet each of those student’s individual needs. However, differentiated instruction is easier and much more effective when students are grouped homogeneously (same ability grouping) as opposed to heterogeneously (mixed ability grouping).  

As recently as 2006-07, the Warwick Public Schools classified students for the purpose of instruction into three manageably homogeneous groups the district called “stanines.”  These groups were labeled, according to descending academic abilities, honors, 4-8, and 1-3. The district inexplicably reduced these high school classifications into a homogeneously grouped honors level and a heterogeneously grouped 1-8 stanine.  This means that English Language Learners are often grouped in classes with students who have proficient verbal-linguistic skills as well as indifferent students with chronic behavioral problems.  

Regardless of any teacher’s skills or efforts to differentiate instruction, heterogeneous grouping is unfair to all involved.  Students at both ends of the ability spectrum get less attention than they deserve, and the unmotivated students who are often behavioral problems get more attention than they deserve.

One result of this dynamic is that the motivated students enroll in honors courses that call for increased academic rigor and an increased workload they are often not prepared for.  Consequently, the honors classes have become overcrowded, and several students who have the intelligence but lack the desire to work extremely hard prevent others who possess both from enrolling in honors classes.  Nobody wins with heterogeneous grouping, including the often overwhelmed and exhausted teachers. 

Exacerbating this dilemma is the disturbing trend of teacher layoffs as well as the impending consolidation of schools, both of which will increase class sizes. The claim that class size has no correlation to teacher effectiveness and student performance is erroneous at best and disingenuous at worst.  The student-teacher ratios and the coinciding logic should settle that dispute.

Regardless of political affinities, all Warwick stakeholders should want the district’s students placed in classrooms that will do the most to promote their success and welfare.  Heterogeneous grouping undermines both teaching and learning.  

Furthermore, increased interaction between teachers and students can only enhance learning, and the ill-advised advisory period that is scheduled at peak learning time five days a week is tantamount to an instructional wasteland.   “Reformers” justified the creation of advisory to personalize students’ educational experience, to help each student become familiar and comfortable interacting with at least one faculty member.  That bond between a student and his or her teacher doubtlessly enhances student performance, but nothing promotes that bond more than classroom – not advisory – interaction. Teachers learn more in one year from reading their students’ writing, listening to their opinions, and engaging in meaningful classroom discourse than they do in four years of meaningless advisory.

Authentic school reform should begin with common sense approaches, not cost-cutting exigencies.  Heterogeneous grouping and advisory periods are two of the worst implemented educational policies in recent memory.  

It’s time to start doing what is best for students and cease paying lip service to that moral obligation, and two positive steps would be returning to sensible homogeneous grouping and jettisoning the advisory period.

Jack Caswell is a teacher at Toll Gate High School.

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  • Marccomtois

    Agree with most of this, but it costs money to keep lower class sizes and the like. I'm wondering if/when Mr. Caswell and his fellow teachers (and union brothers and sisters) will start attending City Council meetings and budget hearings to fight against the near-decade long level-funding of the schools. All of the pedagogical theory in the world is for naught unless these classroom stakeholders stand up for what they say they believe in front of the people that actually control the purse strings - our (mostly) ignorant city council.

    Wednesday, October 7, 2015 Report this