The Flexible Grouping Window: Prioritizing interaction to enhance learning

Sometimes I hear people say that the only way to display DI is through small group instruction and by having a thousand centers in our classroom.  It might  sound ideal, but let's be practical, who has all that time for that cumbersome load of work that is needed to put everything together?  I love the idea of incorporating varied settings for group work in which students could gain understanding, a strong feeling of belonging and still construct meaning and master concepts and skills.  Betty Hollas sythetizes her third window as follows:

Some aspects to take into account are also:

1.  Group size.

2.  Building students' awarenss on accountability and roles within the groups:  I have incorporated a group checklist after students finish a task.  They know that they will have to self-assess at the end of every project and that gives them a clear view of what I expect from their work.  Prompting and scaffolding is provided along the way, thus developing a sense of increasing independence, something that I love to see in my first graders.
3.  Agree on protocols and norms to make group work a smooth thing to do.
4.  Teachers are coaches and facilitators.

Incorporating flexible grouping within your daily practices for DI makes sre that you approach learning styles, multiple intelligences, skills, interests, readiness etc.  Grouping promotes student achievement and a personal interaction with knowledge that sets the tone for a more meaningful way to learn and also teach!  Flexible grouping also offerss the opportunity of extending student understanding of concepts and content through anchoring, a concept that is closely related to DI and something that we have incorporrated into our daily planning as we teach in Primero B.

Students will soon start understanding and using the language of DI as you develop the awareness of grouping as a powerful tool to  meet each individual's needs.  My students for example, already know there are groups for Language and Math and they've realised that the group setting changes over time. They've also realized that once you master certain skills you are able to move on to another group.  Sometimes we mix students (a yellow, a blue and a red member into one group) in order to add variety to the interaction, and also so that students in the lowest spectrum of skills development are in touch with successful learners and strategies they use to tackle learning opportunities and activities.  The learning they get from this interaction is valuable, and clearly sets the tone for further reflection and awareness in our classroom.

Some practices we've been using in our classroom are:

• Numbered Heads Together:  Grouping students in fours and assign each one of them a number 1 to 4.  Then you pose a question or an issue to be discussed.  The group will then get together, discuss and share their response, and everyone needs to be very attentive and be able to respond if I call them up to share the group's opinion.  Those students to tend to be "wiser" will somehow "teach" the others, while the "lazy" ones need to find a way to contribute as well at least by paying attention because they don't know which number will be called. 
• Discussion Cards for Narrative Text:  Students are given a reading assignment according to their level of readiness and they are assigned a given "job" in order to focus on one element of the reading:  characters, setting, theme, and resolution.  We have included differentiated question prompts for each one of the "jobs" so that students have a clear target as they read and prepare their product.
• 4-6-8:  As a whole class, you could work out the names of 4 characters, 6 settings and 8 events that might happen in a story.  Then you can circle a character, a setting and an event and encourage the students to write a story using these cues.

By clearly stating the roles within the group, this quad of first graders was able to put together a song that tells about our responsibility towards our natural resources.  Careful planning using the guidance of the teachers, and appropriate monitoring and self-assessment at the end, with clear criteria for success made it possible to hear a wonderful product!