Beyond the Basics: Mastering Flexible Grouping in the Hub

This week’s post is a guest post written by the amazing, Sheilah Curtis.

The growth edge is pivotal and can lead to either a breakthrough or a breakdown (Duffy, 2008).

As we wrap up our fifth week of school, our Grade 4 team continues to refine our collaborative teaching and personalized learning in our vibrant hub. We really wanted to help each learner get to and learn at their growth edge to cultivate learning breakthroughs.

Our team knew that flexible grouping had benefits for both students and teachers for learning breakthroughs. Along the way, we have come to realize that flexible grouping is not just a strategy for engagement but a game changer for differentiating instruction and personalizing learning. But the real question is, how do you design and structure flexible groups to maximize learning and boost student agency and engagement?

Our experiences have taught us that teachers’ adaptability is the secret sauce to effective, flexible grouping. Our grade 4 team leans heavily into flexibility and trust, which gives us space to creatively design, structure, and change our learning environments. After all of that planning, we make more changes. In a personalized learning environment, flexibility begins with the adults.

But what does flexible grouping look like?

We hear you. While we have read many articles, blog posts, and chapters about the importance and power of flexible grouping, real-life examples and ideas that work for our context can be hard to come by. This week, we are ready to open up a bit of our playbook for you.

This is what flexible grouping looked like in our learning hub this week:

Literacy

On Monday, students visited five rotations to experience different options for literacy projects. Their options were persuasive speeches, poetry, art critiques, mini-memoirs, and storytelling with beads. After experiencing each activity, students completed a survey to inform us of their top three interests. Students are now grouped by choice for Literacy and will be working in their literacy project groups for the next three weeks.

Unit of Inquiry

All students traveled in small groups through five rotations during the week to experience persuasive communication techniques.

Brain Breaks

Students are given four daily options, including stretching, drawing, reading, and snacking. They are encouraged to choose based on what they need at that moment.

Math

The focus of our first math unit is multiplication and division. This week, we took the main ideas and learning standards and developed a mastery-based continuum. We lived that practice by creating four workshops, each targeting a specific multiplication strategy. As soon as students demonstrated mastery of that skill, they moved to the next group in the continuum.

Instead of approaching learning standards by day:

We organized flexible grouping by readiness levels and mastery:

Next week, our approaches to grouping will look a bit different. There will be a few more whole hub lessons in math and we will need to reorganize students for our Unit of Inquiry.

But, how did we get here?

Check out our previous posts about how we chose to prioritized Personalized learning through Path and Pace.