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Educating high and low achievers in the same classroo

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The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or "teacher quality." It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What's needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.

U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge-at least three grade levels. So if you're a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?

In the old days, "ability grouping" and tracking provided the answer: you'd break your students into reading groups, with the bluebirds in one corner, tackling advanced materials at warp speed, and the redbirds in another, slowly making their way through basic texts. Likewise for mathematics. And in middle and high school, you'd continue this approach with separate tracks: "challenge" or "honors" for the top kids, "regular" or "on-level" for the average ones, and "remedial" for the slowest. Teachers could target their instruction to the level of the group or the class, and since similar students were clustered together, few kids were bored or totally left behind.

Then came the attack on tracking. A flurry of books in the 1970s and 1980s argued that confining youngsters to lower tracks hurt their self-esteem and life chances, and was elitist and racist to boot. Jeanne Oakes's 1985 opus, Keeping Track, was particularly effective in sparking an anti-tracking movement that swept through the nation's schools.

According to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, this advocacy led to fundamental changes at breakneck speed. In a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute last year, he wrote,

An eighth grader in the early 1990s attended middle schools offering at least two distinct tracks in [each of] English language arts, history, and science. Mathematics courses were organized into three or more tracks. The eighth grader of 2008, however, attended schools with much less tracking. English language arts, history, and science are essentially detracked, i.e., schools typically offer a single course that serves students at every level of achievement and ability. Mathematics usually features two tracks, often algebra and a course for students not yet ready for algebra.

One of the reasons that detracking advocates claimed so many victories is that they painted their pet reform as a strategy in which everybody wins. Oakes and others insisted that detracking would help the lowest-performing students (who would enjoy better teachers, a more challenging level of instruction, and exposure to their higher-achieving peers) while not hurting top students. But by the mid-1990s, researchers started to compile evidence that this happy outcome was just wishful thinking.

In 1995, scholars Dominic Brewer, Daniel Rees, and Laura Argys analyzed test-score results for high-school students in tracked and detracked classrooms, and found benefits of tracking for advanced students. They wrote in the Kappan magazine, "The conventional wisdom on which detracking policy is often based-that students in low-track classes (who are drawn disproportionately from poor families and from minority groups) are hurt by tracking while others are largely unaffected-is simply not supported by very strong evidence."

And this was before the policy incentives shifted sharply to prioritize low-achieving students. In another study for the Fordham Institute, Loveless found a clear pattern in the late 1990s when states adopted accountability regimes: the performance of the lowest decile of students shot up, while the achievement of the top 10 percent of students stagnated. That's not surprising; these accountability systems, like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, pushed schools to get more students over a low performance bar. They provided few incentives to accelerate the academic growth of students at the top.

This dynamic might have been most pernicious for minority students. Earlier this year, an Indiana University study found that the "Excellence Gap," the racial achievement gap at NAEP's advanced level, widened during the NCLB era. One possible explanation is that high-achieving minority students are likely to attend schools with lots of low-achieving students, and their teachers are focused on helping children who are far behind rather than those ready to accelerate ahead.
The Power of Peers
The attack on tracking also claimed an innocent bystander: ability grouping, which became suspect in many circles, too. Yet in recent years, the "peer effects" literature has shown the benefits of grouping students of similar abilities together. One clever study, by economists Scott Imberman, Adriana Kugler, and Bruce Sacerdote, looked at the fallout from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. They wanted to know what happened when students who were evacuated from New Orleans ended up in schools in Houston. They found that the arrival of low-achieving evacuees dragged down the average performance of the Houston students and had a particularly negative impact on high-achieving Houston kids. Meanwhile, high-achieving evacuees had a positive effect on local students. As Bruce Sacerdote told me, "The high-achieving kids seemed to be the most sensitive. They do particularly well by having high-achieving peers. And they are particularly harmed by low-achieving peers." He added, "I've become a believer in tracking."

In 2006, Caroline Hoxby and Gretchen Weingarth examined the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System. For the better part of two decades, the district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning numbers of students to new schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments in which the composition of classrooms changed dramatically, and randomly, and that, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the "boutique model" of peer effects, "a model in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type." When school reassignments resulted in the arrival of students with either very low or very high achievement, this boosted the test scores of other students with very low or very high achievement, probably because it created a critical mass of students at the same achievement level, and schools could better focus attention on their particular needs.

Does that mean students should be sharply sequestered by ability? Not exactly. Here's how Hoxby and Weingarth put it in their conclusion: "Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal. This is because (a) people do appear to benefit from interacting with peers of a higher type and (b) people who are themselves high types appear to receive sufficient benefit from interacting with peers a bit below them that there is little reason to isolate them completely. What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types."

In other words, a little bit of variation is okay. But when the gap is too wide-say, six grade levels in reading-nobody wins.
Enter Differentiated Instruction
So if grouping all students together leads to pernicious effects, but divvying kids up by ability is politically unacceptable, what's the alternative? The ed-school world has an answer: "differentiated instruction." The notion is that one teacher instructs a diverse group of kids, but manages to reach each one at precisely the appropriate level. The idea, according to Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia (UVA), is to "shake up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn." Ideally, instruction is customized at the individual student level. Every child receives a unique curriculum that meets that individual's exact needs. A teacher might even make specialized homework assignments, or provide the specific one-on-one help that a particular kid requires.

If you think that sounds hard to do, you're not alone. I asked Holly Hertberg-Davis, who studied under Tomlinson and is now her colleague at UVA, if differentiated instruction was too good to be true. Can teachers actually pull it off? "My belief is that some teachers can but not all teachers can," she answered.

Hertberg-Davis worked with Tomlinson on a large study of differentiated instruction. Teachers were provided with extensive professional development and ongoing coaching. Three years later the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. "We couldn't answer the question," Hertberg-Davis told me, "because no one was actually differentiating."

Teachers admit to being flummoxed by this approach. In a 2008 national survey commissioned by the Fordham Institute, more than 8 in 10 teachers said differentiated instruction was "very" or "somewhat" difficult to implement. Even ed-school professors are skeptical. A 2010 national random survey of teacher educators asked them the same question and got the same result: more than 8 in 10 said differentiated instruction was very or somewhat difficult to implement.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible. I was curious to see differentiated instruction in action, so I visited my local elementary school in Takoma Park, Maryland. Piney Branch Elementary serves an incredibly diverse group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, from the children of übereducated white and black middle-class families, to poor immigrant children from Latin America, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, to low-income African American kids.

I sat down with the school's principal, Bertram "Mr. G." Generlette, who has the friendly, laid-back manner of his native Antigua. I cut right to the chase. I'm wondering if I'd be making a mistake to send my son to a school like Piney Branch. Is it going to slow him down if his classmates are several years behind or still learning the language? (Of course, not all poor or minority children are low-achieving, nor are all white students high-achieving. Still, achievement gaps being what they are, the range of academic diversity does tend to be larger at schools with lots of racial and social diversity.)

It was pretty obvious that Mr. G. had heard these questions before, particularly from white folks like me. I asked him if that was the case. "Parents come in, yes," he told me. "They are new to the neighborhood. Or their child is in kindergarten, or they are moving from private school. After a few minutes, you get the idea." However, he said with a sly grin, "they very rarely ask the question directly."

But he wasn't afraid to answer me directly. "We are committed to diversity," he started. "It's a lens through which we see everything. We look at test scores. How are students overall? And how are different groups doing? It's easy to see. Our white students are performing high. What can we do to keep pushing that performance up? For African American and Hispanic students, what can we do to make gains?"

Since Mr. G.'s arrival five years ago, the percentage of African American 5th graders passing the state reading test is way up, from 55 to 91 percent. For Hispanic children, it's up from 46 to 74 percent. It's true that scores statewide have also risen, but not nearly to the same degree.

And there's no evidence that white students have done any worse over this time. In fact, they are performing better than ever. Before Mr. G. arrived, 33 percent of white 5th graders reached the advanced level on the state math test; in 2009, twice as many did. In fact, Piney Branch white students outscore the white kids at virtually every other Montgomery County school.

What's his secret? Was he grouping students "homogeneously," so all the high-achieving kids learned together, and the slower kids got extra help?

"There's no such thing as a homogenous group," Mr. G. shot back. "One kid is a homogeneous group. As soon as you bring another student in, you have differences. The question is: how do you capitalize on the differences?"

Well, that sounds OK in theory. But come on, Mr. G., how are you going to make sure my kid doesn't get slowed down?

"My job as a principal is to let my parents know that your child will get the services they need," he answered patiently. "We are going to make sure that every child is getting pushed to a maximum level. That's my commitment."

And that's when I was introduced to the incredibly nuanced and elaborate efforts that Piney Branch makes to differentiate instruction, challenge every child, and avoid any appearance of segregated classrooms.

So how do they do it? First, every homeroom has a mixed group of students: the kids are assigned to make sure that every class represents the diversity of the school in terms of achievement level, race, class, etc. Then, during the 90-minute reading block, students spend much of their time in small groups appropriate for their reading level. (Redbirds and bluebirds are back!) However, in the new lingo of differentiated instruction, the staff works hard to make sure these groups are fluid-a child in a slower reading group can get bumped up to a faster one once progress is made.

For math, on the other hand, students are split up into homogeneous classrooms. All the advanced math kids are in one classroom, the middle students in another, and the struggling kids in a third. This means shuffling the kids from one room to another (a process that can be quite time-consuming for elementary school kids). But it allows the highest-performing kids to sprint ahead; one of the school's 3rd-grade math classes, for example, is tackling the district's 5th-grade math curriculum. (Because of large achievement gaps at the school, these math classes are more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous than the student population as a whole.)

The rest of the time-when kids are learning science or social studies or taking "specials" like art and music-they are back in their heterogeneous classrooms. Even then, however, teachers work to "differentiate instruction," which often means separating the kids back into homogeneous groups again, and offering more challenging, extended assignments to the higher-achieving students.

It sounds like some sort of elaborate Kabuki dance to me, but it appears to succeed on several counts. All kids spend most of the day getting challenged at their level, and no one ever sits in a classroom that's entirely segregated by race or class.
Reading War
Test scores indicate that the strategy is working, too, but that doesn't mean all parents have been thrilled. Three years ago, Mr. G. told me, a group of white parents pushed to get the school to move to homogeneous classrooms for reading as well as math. "Parents felt that the only way to get kids to read at a high level was to have other kids around them who read at a high level," he explained. (That didn't sound so unreasonable to me.) "We had a lot of meetings. The staff overwhelmingly supported the diverse approach, the heterogeneous approach. That was good for me as an administrator because the staff was behind me."

I tracked down one of the "troublemaker" parents. Her name is Sue Katz Miller and she personifies much of what makes Takoma Park great: she's smart, she's an activist, and she's committed to helping make the city a welcoming community for families of all incomes and backgrounds. (A neighbor of mine called her "a force of nature.") A former Newsweek reporter and now a regular columnist for The Takoma Voice, she spent two years as PTA president at Piney Branch and is an enthusiastic booster of the school and its diversity. "My kids have both benefited enormously from being in a Piney Branch social milieu," she told me.

But the reading decision still sticks in her craw. "Why is it OK," she asked, "to have homogeneous grouping in math and not have it in reading? The answer you get is: well, we can't do both, they would be switching classes all the time, it would be like middle school and they won't be able to handle it.... It's a huge disservice to the kids who are ready for rigor in the humanities and are not math kids. It's bizarre. We've said we're going to accommodate kids in math but not in reading. It's completely insane as far as I'm concerned. It makes me angry."

She lost that battle, but Mr. G. and his teachers didn't ignore the parents' concerns, either. He went out and found reading programs suitable for advanced students, like William and Mary, Junior Great Books, and Jacob's Ladder. He trained his teachers on these programs, ensuring that the students in the top reading groups would be challenged with difficult material. (The teachers loved it.) He tried hard to live up to his promise to push all students as far as they could go.
Competing for Kids
Mr. G. and Piney Branch face some healthy competition. Montgomery County offers a half-dozen "Centers for the Highly Gifted," magnet schools that are designed for supersmart kids and located in elementary buildings throughout the district. Pine Crest, just a few miles away from Piney Branch, hosts one such center, and an increasing number of Piney Branch 3rd graders were testing into it for 4th and 5th grades.

A year ago, 25 Piney Branch kids were accepted-more than any other elementary school in the district. If they all took up the offer, Mr. G. said, "That's a teacher walking out of my building."

So in 2009-10, in cooperation with the district, Piney Branch launched a pilot program to bring the "Highly Gifted Center" curriculum into its classrooms. This wasn't easy; there wasn't a curriculum, per se, at the centers. Teachers had the freedom to do what they wanted. So the district helped the teachers put down on paper everything they were doing in the classroom.

Mr. G. arranged to have a 4th-grade and a 5th-grade teacher trained on the Highly Gifted approach, and formed a "cluster group" of gifted students in their classrooms. This means that, in one classroom in each of these grades, there are 12 or so gifted students, along with another 12 or so "on-level" kids. While they are taught together some of the day, they are frequently broken into small groups, so the gifted kids can learn together at an accelerated pace.

Pulling this off takes an energetic and gifted educator; 4th-grade teacher Folakemi Mosadomi, who has the gifted group in her classroom, appears to fit the bill perfectly. Now in her 5th year of teaching (all of them at Piney Branch under Mr. G.), Ms. M. acknowledged that differentiating instruction in this way requires "extensive planning and training," not to mention someone who is well-organized and creative. But even that's not always enough.

In the first year of the pilot, she had four different reading groups in one classroom, from kids still learning English to the highly gifted students. "I went from sounding out the 'A' sound with one group, to talking to another group about how the Exxon Valdez oil spill was like the Battle of Normandy." That range was simply too much for one teacher to handle-remember Caroline Hoxby's finding about "continuity of types?"-so the next year she had just two groups: the gifted students, and the next level down. "Now it's easier to do more with both groups of students together," she told me.

And the strategy seems to be working in one important way: last year, about half of the gifted children chose to stay at Piney Branch.
Fragile Compromise
So with a well-trained and dedicated staff, and lots of support, "differentiated instruction" can be brought to life. But even at Piney Branch, which benefits from the vast resources of a huge, affluent school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, it sure seems rickety, held with lots of duct tape and chewing gum, and subject to collapse without just the right staff and parent support.

If the school community placed its highest value on pushing all kids to achieve their full potential, including its high-achieving students, it would probably organize its classrooms differently. It would embrace "ability grouping" and homogenous classrooms wholeheartedly, and would skip all the gymnastics required to keep classes academically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse throughout the day. But Piney Branch understandably seeks to balance its concerns for academic growth with its interest in maintaining an integrated environment, so this uneasy compromise is probably the best it can do.

Piney Branch and Ms. M. might be able to pull it off. But how many Piney Branches and Ms. M.'s are there?

Technology may someday alleviate the need for such compromises. With the advent of powerful online learning tools, such as those on display in New York City's School of One, students might be able to receive instruction that's truly individualized to their own needs-differentiation on steroids.

Perhaps. But until that time, our schools will have to wrestle with the age-old tension between "excellence" and "equity." And that tension will be resolved one homogeneous or heterogeneous classroom at a time.

Michael J. Petrilli is executive editor of Education Next, research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is working on a book for parents considering diverse public schools like Piney Branch.

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Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom

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Tiered Lessons: One Way to Differentiate Mathematics Instruction

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Tiered Lessons: One Way to Differentiate Mathematics Instruction

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Tiered Lessons: One Way to Differentiate Mathematics Instruction

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This article is about differentiation. Due to the broad range of academic needs among students, teachers find themselves in a dilemma. The Burris Laboratory School outlines how teachers can reach all the students in their classrooms when they are academically diverse, have special needs, are ESL learners or have some combination of any or all of these factors.

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What Research Says About . . . / Differentiated Learning

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What Research Says About . . . / Differentiated Learning

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Today's classrooms are filled with diverse learners who differ not only culturally and linguistically but also in their cognitive abilities, background knowledge, and learning preferences. Faced with such diversity, many schools are implementing differentiated instruction in an effort to effectively address all students' learning needs.

What We Know

Researchers at the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum define differentiated instruction asa process to approach teaching and learning for students of differing abilities in the same class. The intent is to maximize each student's growth and individual success by meeting each student where he or she is . . . rather than expecting students to modify themselves for the curriculum. (Hall, 2002)

Although experts and practitioners acknowledge that the research on differentiated instruction as a specific practice is limited (Allan &amp; Tomlinson, 2000; Anderson, 2007; Hall, 2002), solid research does validate a number of practices that provide the foundation of differentiation. These practices include using effective classroom management procedures; promoting student engagement and motivation; assessing student readiness; responding to learning styles; grouping students for instruction; and teaching to the student's zone of proximal development (the distance between what a learner can demonstrate without assistance and what the learner can do with assistance) (Allan &amp; Tomlinson, 2000; Ellis &amp; Worthington, 1994; Vygotsky, 1978).

Moreover, a growing body of research shows positive results for full implementation of differentiated instruction in mixed-ability classrooms (Rock, Gregg, Ellis, &amp; Gable, 2008). In one three-year study, Canadian scholars researched the application and effects of differentiated instruction in K-12 classrooms in Alberta. They found that differentiated instruction consistently yielded positive results across a broad range of targeted groups. Compared with the general student population, students with mild or severe learning disabilities received more benefits from differentiated and intensive support, especially when the differentiation was delivered in small groups or with targeted instruction (McQuarrie, McRae, &amp; Stack-Cutler, 2008).

Tieso (2005) studied 31 math teachers and 645 students and found that differentiated instruction was effective for keeping high-ability students challenged in heterogeneous classrooms. In this study, preassessments prior to a three-week unit on statistics and probability indicated that high-performing students brought greater levels of prior knowledge to the start of the unit. Those students who were taught using a differentiated curriculum that supplemented the textbook curriculum and were placed in various groups according to their performance level demonstrated significantly higher achievement on the post-test than did high-performing students who were taught using the textbook curriculum and whole-class instruction. She concluded that revising and differentiating the curriculum, along with creating purposeful flexible grouping, may significantly improve students' mathematics achievement, especially for gifted students.

Lawrence-Brown (2004) confirms that differentiated instruction can enable students with a wide range of abilities-from gifted students to those with mild or even severe disabilities-to receive an appropriate education in inclusive classrooms. Building on Vaughn, Bos, and Schumm's (2000) basic, three-level planning pyramid and Tomlinson and Kalbfleisch's (1998) work on differentiated classrooms, Lawrence-Brown explains how a teacher might address some students' individualized education plan goals by adapting the classroom curriculum to include manipulatives, visual aids, charts, audiotapes, and explicit expectations, while also offering an enriched curriculum to gifted students.

Baumgartner, Lipowski, and Rush (2003) studied a program to improve reading achievement among elementary and middle school students using differentiated instructional strategies, including flexible grouping, student choice of learning tasks, self-selected reading time, and access to a variety of texts. In all three of the classrooms in the study, the targeted students improved their decoding, phonemic, and comprehension skills. Student attitudes about reading and their own abilities also improved.

What You Can Do

According to Tomlinson and Strickland (2005), teachers usually differentiate instruction by adjusting one or more of the following: the content (what students learn); the process (how students learn); or the product (how students demonstrate their mastery of the knowledge or skills). However, there is no one-size-fits-all model for differentiated instruction; it looks different depending on the prior knowledge, interests, and abilities students bring to a learning situation.

Focus on the essential ideas and skills of the content area, eliminating ancillary tasks and activities.

Respond to individual student differences (such as learning style, prior knowledge, interests, and level of engagement).

Group students flexibly by shared interest, topic, or ability.

Integrate ongoing and meaningful assessments with instruction.

Continually assess; reflect; and adjust content, process, and product to meet student needs.

Tomlinson (1999) examined school-level and district-level implementation of differentiated instruction and identified ways that education leaders can best support this change in practice. She recommends that leaders first develop a solid understanding of differentiated instruction so that they can present it coherently to teachers and provide committed school-level leadership. Leaders should also nurture different teaching models; encourage teachers to apply differentiation with flexibility, creativity, and choice; and provide teachers with high-quality professional development as well as time to collaborate, plan, and implement differentiation.

Educators Take Note

Tomlinson (1999) offers a caveat: "For all its promise . . . effective differentiation is complex to use and thus difficult to promote in schools. Moving toward differentiation is a long-term change process" (p. 6). It is best to begin by seeking out the wisdom of other educators who have experience with differentiated instruction, ground your own practice in the theory, and learn in a way that is meaningful to you.

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What Research Says About . . . / Differentiated Learning - ASCD

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Today's classrooms are filled with diverse learners who differ not only culturally and linguistically but also in their cognitive abilities, background knowledge, and learning preferences. Faced with such diversity, many schools are implementing differentiated instruction in an effort to effectively

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Abstract

Appropriate Levels of Dominance

Establish Clear Expectations and Consequences

Establish Clear Learning Goals

Exhibit Assertive Behavior

Appropriate Levels of Cooperation

Provide Flexible Learning Goals

Take a Personal Interest in Students

Use Equitable and Positive Classroom Behaviors

Awareness of High-Needs Students

Don't Leave Relationships to Chance

By using research-based strategies combining appropriate levels of dominance and cooperation and an awareness of student needs, teachers can build positive classroom dynamics.

Abstract

Appropriate Levels of Dominance

Establish Clear Expectations and Consequences

Establish Clear Learning Goals

Exhibit Assertive Behavior

Appropriate Levels of Cooperation

Provide Flexible Learning Goals

Take a Personal Interest in Students

Use Equitable and Positive Classroom Behaviors

Awareness of High-Needs Students

Don't Leave Relationships to Chance

Today, we know more about teaching than we ever have before. Research has shown us that teachers' actions in their classrooms have twice the impact on student achievement as do school policies regarding curriculum, assessment, staff collegiality, and community involvement (Marzano, 2003a). We also know that one of the classroom teacher's most important jobs is managing the classroom effectively.

A comprehensive literature review by Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (1993) amply demonstrates the importance of effective classroom management. These researchers analyzed 86 chapters from annual research reviews, 44 handbook chapters, 20 government and commissioned reports, and 11 journal articles to produce a list of 228 variables affecting student achievement. They combined the results of these analyses with the findings from 134 separate meta-analyses. Of all the variables, classroom management had the largest effect on student achievement. This makes intuitive sense-students cannot learn in a chaotic, poorly managed classroom.

Research not only supports the importance of classroom management, but it also sheds light on the dynamics of classroom management. Stage and Quiroz's meta-analysis (1997) shows the importance of there being a balance between teacher actions that provide clear consequences for unacceptable behavior and teacher actions that recognize and reward acceptable behavior. Other researchers (Emmer, Evertson, & Worsham, 2003; Evertson, Emmer, & Worsham, 2003) have identified important components of classroom management, including beginning the school year with a positive emphasis on management; arranging the room in a way conducive to effective management; and identifying and implementing rules and operating procedures.

In a recent meta-analysis of more than 100 studies (Marzano, 2003b), we found that the quality of teacher-student relationships is the keystone for all other aspects of classroom management. In fact, our meta-analysis indicates that on average, teachers who had high-quality relationships with their students had 31 percent fewer discipline problems, rule violations, and related problems over a year's time than did teachers who did not have high-quality relationships with their students.

What are the characteristics of effective teacher-student relationships? Let's first consider what they are not. Effective teacher-student relationships have nothing to do with the teacher's personality or even with whether the students view the teacher as a friend. Rather, the most effective teacher-student relationships are characterized by specific teacher behaviors: exhibiting appropriate levels of dominance; exhibiting appropriate levels of cooperation; and being aware of high-needs students.

Appropriate Levels of Dominance

Wubbels and his colleagues (Wubbels, Brekelmans, van Tartwijk, & Admiral, 1999; Wubbels & Levy, 1993) identify appropriate dominance as an important characteristic of effective teacher-student relationships. In contrast to the more negative connotation of the term dominance as forceful control or command over others, they define dominance as the teacher's ability to provide clear purpose and strong guidance regarding both academics and student behavior. Studies indicate that when asked about their preferences for teacher behavior, students typically express a desire for this type of teacher-student interaction. For example, in a study that involved interviews with more than 700 students in grades 4-7, students articulated a clear preference for strong teacher guidance and control rather than more permissive types of teacher behavior (Chiu & Tulley, 1997). Teachers can exhibit appropriate dominance by establishing clear behavior expectations and learning goals and by exhibiting assertive behavior.

Establish Clear Expectations and Consequences

Teachers can establish clear expectations for behavior in two ways: by establishing clear rules and procedures, and by providing consequences for student behavior.

The seminal research of the 1980s (Emmer, 1984; Emmer, Sanford, Evertson, Clements, & Martin, 1981; Evertson & Emmer, 1982) points to the importance of establishing rules and procedures for general classroom behavior, group work, seat work, transitions and interruptions, use of materials and equipment, and beginning and ending the period or the day. Ideally, the class should establish these rules and procedures through discussion and mutual consent by teacher and students (Glasser, 1969, 1990).

Establish Clear Learning Goals

Establishing and communicating learning goals at the beginning of a unit of instruction.

Providing feedback on those goals.

Continually and systematically revisiting the goals.

Providing summative feedback regarding the goals.

The use of rubrics can help teachers establish clear goals. To illustrate, assume that a teacher has identified the learning goal "understanding and using fractions" as important for a given unit. That teacher might present students with the following rubric:4 points. You understand the characteristics of fractions along with the different types. You can accurately describe how fractions are related to decimals and percentages. You can convert fractions to decimals and can explain how and why the process works. You can use fractions to understand and solve different types of problems.3 points. You understand the basic characteristics of fractions. You know how fractions are related to decimals and percentages. You can convert fractions to decimals.2 points. You have a basic understanding of the following, but have some small misunderstandings about one or more: the characteristics of fractions; the relationships among fractions, decimals, and percentages; how to convert fractions to decimals.1 point. You have some major problems or misunderstandings with one or more of the following: the characteristics of fractions; the relationships among fractions, decimals, and percentages; how to convert fractions to decimals.0 points. You may have heard of the following before, but you do not understand what they mean: the characteristics of fractions; the relationships among fractions, decimals, and percentages; how to convert fractions to decimals.

The clarity of purpose provided by this rubric communicates to students that their teacher can provide proper guidance and direction in academic content.

Exhibit Assertive Behavior

Teachers can also communicate appropriate levels of dominance by exhibiting assertive behavior. According to Emmer and colleagues, assertive behavior is the ability to stand up for one's legitimate rights in ways that make it less likely that others will ignore or circumvent them. (2003, p. 146)

Use assertive body language by maintaining an erect posture, facing the offending student but keeping enough distance so as not to appear threatening and matching the facial expression with the content of the message being presented to students.

Use an appropriate tone of voice, speaking clearly and deliberately in a pitch that is slightly but not greatly elevated from normal classroom speech, avoiding any display of emotions in the voice.

Persist until students respond with the appropriate behavior. Do not ignore an inappropriate behavior; do not be diverted by a student denying, arguing, or blaming, but listen to legitimate explanations.

Appropriate Levels of Cooperation

Cooperation is characterized by a concern for the needs and opinions of others. Although not the antithesis of dominance, cooperation certainly occupies a different realm. Whereas dominance focuses on the teacher as the driving force in the classroom, cooperation focuses on the students and teacher functioning as a team. The interaction of these two dynamics-dominance and cooperation-is a central force in effective teacher-student relationships. Several strategies can foster appropriate levels of cooperation.

Provide Flexible Learning Goals

Just as teachers can communicate appropriate levels of dominance by providing clear learning goals, they can also convey appropriate levels of cooperation by providing flexible learning goals. Giving students the opportunity to set their own objectives at the beginning of a unit or asking students what they would like to learn conveys a sense of cooperation. Assume, for example, that a teacher has identified the topic of fractions as the focus of a unit of instruction and has provided students with a rubric. The teacher could then ask students to identify some aspect of fractions or a related topic that they would particularly like to study. Giving students this kind of choice, in addition to increasing their understanding of the topic, conveys the message that the teacher cares about and tries to accommodate students' interests.

Take a Personal Interest in Students

Use Equitable and Positive Classroom Behaviors

Awareness of High-Needs Students

Classroom teachers meet daily with a broad cross-section of students. In general, 12-22 percent of all students in school suffer from mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders, and relatively few receive mental health services (Adelman & Taylor, 2002). The Association of School Counselors notes that 18 percent of students have special needs and require extraordinary interventions and treatments that go beyond the typical resources available to the classroom (Dunn & Baker, 2002).

Figure 1. Categories of High-Needs Students

The Key to Classroom Management - table

Category

Definitions & Source

Characteristics

Suggestions

Passive

Behavior that avoids the domination of others or the pain of negative experiences. The child attempts to protect self from criticism, ridicule, or rejection, possibly reacting to abuse and neglect. Can have a biochemical basis, such as anxiety.

Fear of relationships: Avoids connection with others, is shy, doesn't initiate conversations, attempts to be invisible. Fear of failure: Gives up easily, is convinced he or she can't succeed, is easily frustrated, uses negative self-talk.

Provide safe adult and peer interactions and protection from aggressive people. Provide assertiveness and positive self-talk training. Reward small successes quickly. Withhold criticism.

Aggressive

Behavior that overpowers, dominates, harms, or controls others without regard for their well-being. The child has often taken aggressive people as role models. Has had minimal or ineffective limits set on behavior. Is possibly reacting to abuse and neglect. Condition may have a biochemical basis, such as depression.

Hostile: Rages, threatens, or intimidates others. Can be verbally or physically abusive to people, animals, or objects. Oppositional: Does opposite of what is asked. Demands that others agree or give in. Resists verbally or nonverbally. Covert: Appears to agree but then does the opposite of what is asked. Often acts innocent while setting up problems for others.

Describe the student's behavior clearly. Contract with the student to reward corrected behavior and set up consequences for uncorrected behavior. Be consistent and provide immediate rewards and consequences. Encourage and acknowledge extracurricular activities in and out of school. Give student responsibilities to help teacher or other students to foster successful experiences.

Attention problems

Behavior that demonstrates either motor or attentional difficulties resulting from a neurological disorder. The child's symptoms may be exacerbated by family or social stressors or biochemical conditions, such as anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorders.

Hyperactive: Has difficulty with motor control, both physically and verbally. Fidgets, leaves seat frequently, interrupts, talks excessively. Inattentive: Has difficulty staying focused and following through on projects. Has difficulty with listening, remembering, and organizing.

Contract with the student to manage behaviors. Teach basic concentration, study, and thinking skills. Separate student in a quiet work area. Help the student list each step of a task. Reward successes; assign a peer tutor.

Perfectionist

Behavior that is geared toward avoiding the embarrassment and assumed shame of making mistakes. The child fears what will happen if errors are discovered. Has unrealistically high expectations of self. Has possibly received criticism or lack of acceptance while making mistakes during the process of learning.

Tends to focus too much on the small details of projects. Will avoid projects if unsure of outcome. Focuses on results and not relationships. Is self-critical.

Ask the student to make mistakes on purpose, then show acceptance. Have the student tutor other students.

Socially inept

Behavior that is based on the misinterpretation of nonverbal signals of others. The child misunderstands facial expressions and body language. Hasn't received adequate training in these areas and has poor role modeling.

Attempts to make friends but is inept and unsuccessful. Is forced to be alone. Is often teased for unusual behavior, appearance, or lack of social skills.

Teach the student to keep the appropriate physical distance from others. Teach the meaning of facial expressions, such as anger and hurt. Make suggestions regarding hygiene, dress, mannerisms, and posture.

Source: Marzano, R.J. (2003). What works in schools: Translating research into action (pp. 104-105). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

School may be the only place where many students who face extreme challenges can get their needs addressed. The reality of today's schools often demands that classroom teachers address these severe issues, even though this task is not always considered a part of their regular job.

In a study of classroom strategies (see Brophy, 1996; Brophy & McCaslin, 1992), researchers examined how effective classroom teachers interacted with specific types of students. The study found that the most effective classroom managers did not treat all students the same; they tended to employ different strategies with different types of students. In contrast, ineffective classroom managers did not appear sensitive to the diverse needs of students. Although Brophy did not couch his findings in terms of teacher-student relationships, the link is clear. An awareness of the five general categories of high-needs students and appropriate actions for each can help teachers build strong relationships with diverse students.

Don't Leave Relationships to Chance

Teacher-student relationships provide an essential foundation for effective classroom management-and classroom management is a key to high student achievement. Teacher-student relationships should not be left to chance or dictated by the personalities of those involved. Instead, by using strategies supported by research, teachers can influence the dynamics of their classrooms and build strong teacher-student relationships that will support student learning.

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ASCD empowers educators to achieve excellence in learning, teaching, and leading so that every child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.

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Marzano Art and Science of Teaching Framework  

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Pg. 9 and 17 focus on grouping in depth

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Review of: Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous

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Review of: Heterogeneous vs. Homogeneous

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Brief: grouping must be done based on intended outcomes. Determine outcome and then decide on a grouping method.

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Out dated

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Each grouping idea, homogeneous, heterogeneous and student chosen, will last for a predetermined amount of days. This will provide more data.

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Mills, G. E. (2003)

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Evaluation-
*Teacher Made Tests
*Standardized Tests
*Report Cards
*Attitude Scale

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Descriptive-

*interviews

*rating scales

*journals

*Observation

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Mills, G. E.(2003). Action research: A guide for the

teacher researcher (2nd ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Merrill/Prentice Hall.

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Education Northwest

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Math Center Structure

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B. Johnson, 2011

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Whether to form groups with students of similar or mixed ability depends on the purpose of the learning activity.

©Shutterstock.com/Syda Productions

"OK, kids, we're going to be learning in groups today. Each group needs a math checker, a presenter, a writer/editor, and an illustrator. You decide who does what. You'll be reviewing the best ways to solve polynomial problems. Please pull out the instructions and the rubric for this assignment. As a group, your task is to create a one-page, step-by-step process that someone could follow to arrive at a solution. You have 15 minutes to complete this task according to the rubric that I have handed out. Ready, set, go!"

The teacher who gives these instructions then spends the next 15 minutes roving about the classroom, reviewing the progress of each group and asking probing questions to help the individual groups clarify their thinking.

Grouping sounds so easy. What we don't see in the above example is how the teacher has organized students in the groups in order to achieve the best results. Some educators firmly believe that a teacher must mix the groups so that students of all levels are represented in each group (heterogeneous grouping of students), while others believe that a teacher must organize the students by ability levels (homogeneous grouping of students). Robert Marzano, Debra Pickering, and Jane Pollock explain in Classroom Instruction That Works (first edition) that there are advantages to both methods, depending on what the teacher wants to do.

Identifying Purposes

If the purpose of the group learning activity is to help struggling students, the research shows that heterogeneous groups may help most. On the other hand, if the purpose is to encourage medium ability groups to learn at high levels, homogeneous grouping would be better.

I learned this as a teacher when one of my gifted and talented students told me in confidence that she really hated being in heterogeneous groups (she said it differently, of course) all the time because by default, the other members of the group expected her to be the leader, organize things, and do all the work.

This was a tipping point for me, because it made me realize that I wasn't grouping students for increased learning. I was using grouping mainly as a discipline management tool, and in actuality my attempt to increase student engagement had completely backfired. By always making sure that the "smart" students and the struggling students were equally divided in the groups, I was actually limiting the student participation to the de facto leaders of the groups.

Deciding Which Is Best

Because of this epiphany, I remember vowing that I would further differentiate my teaching by also seeking ways to give the upper-level students challenging and engaging learning activities. I promised to stop using the "good kids" in the hope that some of their "goodness" would rub off on the other students. An interesting thing happened when I grouped the students by ability. New leadership structures formed, and students who had never actively participated in groups before all of a sudden demonstrated skills and creativity that I never knew they had.

Students are smart and can easily figure out what we're really doing. Students, in our classrooms, know when they are being grouped to mainly tutor and remediate less capable students and... most of the time they resent it. We can also tick them off when we form groups solely for discipline purposes by placing the calm, obedient students in each group to separate and calm down the unruly ones. My daughter Mercedes, who falls in both categories above, said that when teachers do this to her, she doesn't learn and it's not fun for her or the other students. Perhaps more often than not, students are savvy enough to play along when they recognize that the grouping is nothing more than a routine way to spend the time and has no real learning purpose at all.

If given a choice, students prefer to learning in groups of their peers and friends (homogeneous groups), but they also appreciate getting to know and learn from other members of the classroom. This requires that we trust students to make good decisions and hold them accountable for following the norms of learning in groups.

According to Marzano, Pickering and Pollock, effective learning in groups must have at least the following elements:

The work must involve every member of the group.

Each person has a valid job to perform with a known standard of completion.

Each member is invested in completing the task or learning goal.

Each member is accountable individually and collectively.

Remember that the desks are not attached to the floor-we can mix things up in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups in interesting and creative ways: eye color, left- or right-handedness, preferred pizza toppings, number of siblings, music preferences, gender, nationality, hair length, shoe laces, genetic traits, learning styles, etc.

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Student Learning Groups: Homogeneous or Heterogeneous?

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Whether to form groups with students of similar or mixed ability depends on the purpose of the learning activity. ©Shutterstock.com/Syda Productions "OK, kids, we're going to be learning in groups today. Each group needs a math checker, a presenter, a writer/editor, and an illustrator. You decide who does what.

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Johnson & Johnson, 1999; Brown, 2000; Slavin, 1994

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I plan to study the students in their math center groups and interactions between the students because I want to find out if heterogeneous, homogenous or student chosen groups function with more time on task to show the relationship between math center groups and time on task so that I may better understand which type of grouping would better help my students to stay on task and be most successful.

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Lauren Roberts

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Topic: Math Center Groupings and
its Relation to Student's Time on Task

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Topic: Math Center Groupings and
its Relation to Student's Time on Task