Grouping Kids: Let's Not Make It Just About Reading

One of the things we teachers do best is putting kids into groups by what they know and what they are ready to learn. This is important work. It's how we give kids what they "need" in what feels like an equitable and efficient way. Or at least that has always been MY thinking and I've popped a few brain cells spending a huge amount of time planning academic differentiated lessons for those damn reading groups. I'm so over reading groups.

As teachers the more efficient we can be, the easier our day. Right? What if grouping kids only through reading levels is the least efficient way to teach them? What if instead we think about students who have similar social-emotional needs as a group? Or kids who learn in similar ways? Maybe even the kids who function better in the morning instead of the afternoon. What about kids with very little adult supervision or kids who are marginalized in similar ways? Educating children effectively comes from more than just grouping kids by academic level. With all of this talk about equity we must look at and understand who these children are that enter our rooms daily. Using insight through conversations with and observations of students see them in ways that will support students in more than just academics.

Lucky for us who are ready, willing and excited to put equity at the front of our teaching a brilliant educator named Cornelius Minor has created a book called "We Can Do This". In this book, we are invited to rethink the role of the teacher and the way we learn about and know our students. To make it much less daunting, he has given us simple templates on which we can layer our knowledge and think about our students, their wonderous diversity and their learning so we can create meaningful and equitable classroom communities and lessons for our unique groups of students.

I used one of these templates to help me discover new ways to view my students. I know when I looked at my 20 kinders through a multitude of lenses I realized the myriad of ways that I could group them to better support their needs, not just in reading or math, but throughout the day. In 20 minutes, my IA and I came up with at least 6 different ways to group 10 of our kiddos. Our various groupings came from reflecting on our students abilities in creative and critical thinking, their socio-economic needs, their academic and behavioral needs, their learning style and their teacher attention needs. I had one child I could have put into four different groups. None of these had the word “leveled” in them. Or used the words, high, mid or low to define the students in them.

I’ve decided that being a better teacher means it’s time for me to put the reading group teaching to the side and start looking at my students through multiple lenses. I am going to do better than putting kids into academically based groups. I'm going to look carefully at my own teaching and how I "group" kids. I'm going to look at and group students in a myriad of ways that will keep equity at the front and center of my classroom. I am going to create more opportunities for them than moving from level A to level B in their reading groups.

Cornelius Minor's book, "We Got This" and the resources he shares are now my teacher bible. As CLT lead on the Kinder team, I can share these resources with my teammates and we can use them to help guide our conversations about our students and our PLC, which should have equity at the base of anything we do in our teaching, assessing and reflecting on student learning. As a member of our school leadership team, I am able to share Christopher Minor's work with school leadership in order to create awareness about these materials and other team leads so that they can then share them with their teammates. As a member of our school's equity committee I can bring these resources to our planning

meeting and create ways to put these ideas into our SIIP goals. As a member of our SIPP-NIC committee I can not only do the above, but share out the information with other schools in our county. One rock can create many ripples. im hoping if we as teachers can all follow this authors ideas about equity, we can create a tidal wave of equitable change for all students.