Groupings - Math Activity
Another selection of my notes regarding group creation, this time a brief excerpt showing how I constructed math groups for a follow-up lesson in my kindergarten class. In this case, the top portion is organized based on students' results on the assessment that concluded the previous lesson, and the bottom portion shows how I created partnerships using the assessment data (trying to pair students who were more proficient with those who were less so) as well as social-interpersonal factors.
In this case, nearly all of the students were very successful in the following assessment. It is hard to determine the extent to which this was due to A) the difference of the task, B) the additional preceding minilesson, C) struggling students simply imitating their partners, or D) peer mentorship and support within mixed-ability groups -- obviously the latter was what I was going for, and it definitely seemed to play at least a modest role. Interestingly, the pair that was least successful was the pair where I included as the "more proficient" partner a student who had done well on the preceding task, but who generally was a student who struggled in math tasks; this might be seen as evidence that groupings should be constructed with regard to more holistic understandings of individual students, rather than based solely on particular measurements.
In this case, nearly all of the students were very successful in the following assessment. It is hard to determine the extent to which this was due to A) the difference of the task, B) the additional preceding minilesson, C) struggling students simply imitating their partners, or D) peer mentorship and support within mixed-ability groups -- obviously the latter was what I was going for, and it definitely seemed to play at least a modest role. Interestingly, the pair that was least successful was the pair where I included as the "more proficient" partner a student who had done well on the preceding task, but who generally was a student who struggled in math tasks; this might be seen as evidence that groupings should be constructed with regard to more holistic understandings of individual students, rather than based solely on particular measurements.
Gottschalk, J. (2014, March 13). Observation Notes, Kindergarten.