Make random groups whilst managing behavior or special needs
Erin Scholes, from the podcast From Student to Teacher, recently shared why she uses Clever Groups and an interesting way of using Clever Groups to make random groups yet uphold difficult decisions to keep some students apart.
“As a mentor for new teachers, I am continually learning with them and we are continually working to find new and effective resources to use in our classrooms.”, says Erin.
”Recently, as a school, we have been working on group work and incorporating more student driven activities into our classrooms. It was suggested that we continually be changing groups, and keep them random so that students are always working with a variety of their peers. There are lots of resources out there for randomly making groups, but Clever Groups has become our go to because of the numerous features.”
Tools that make random groups are available, and typically that’s the start and finish of such tools’ capabilities. However, Clever Groups is primarily a tool that captures students’ and teacher’s preferences and works within those in the first instance. It only introduces random assignment of individuals to groups if all other preferences and requirements are satisfied first. Clever Groups’ users typically are attracted to its ability to capture and respect each students’ “buddy” preferences in the first instance, and the teacher’s “buddy blocking” preferences, and only where that is lacking does it resort to random assignment of students into groups.
“One of the concerns with randomized groupings is that there is no teacher control, and we all know there can be those two students that simply can not be productive together (for whatever reason.) When one of the new teachers, Abbey Clemmey, was trying to find a way to keep two students separate while still using random groupings she turned to Clever Groups. We love that there is a feature to keep students separated on the back end, but on the front end all the students see is randomized groupings. Ever since Abbey started using it, I have recommended it to several beginning teachers as a tool to help make groups.”, says Erin.
Abbey continues to use it:
“I think it’s one of the most helpful teacher resources I’ve ever used. It makes creating groups a doable task which then allows me to do group work more frequently.”, says Abbey.
”Which is exactly what we want, our students working in groups, learning together, improving both relationships and knowledge.”, adds Scholes.
“I have found Clever Groups to be such a successful solution that I couldn’t help but shout it out on my podcast, “From Student To Teacher.” This is a podcast that I host with a former student, Josh Chlebowski, who has now become a teacher himself.”, says Erin.
”Our goal is to help pre-service and new teachers through the first few years in the classroom. We know that there is so much learning that takes place by a beginning teacher, and so much work that goes into making a classroom run successfully. We are always looking for resources to help our listeners, and Clever Groups is definitely one we recommend.”, says Erin.
🔗 Learn more about Erin and Josh in this Clever Groups blog and on their website or podcast episode:
🎙️ From Student to Teacher podcast, hosted by Erin Scholes and Josh Chlebowski
🌐 fromstudenttoteacher.com
🎧 Spotify
🎧 Apple Podcasts