The Advantages of Heterogeneous Student Groups in Math
When students with diverse performance levels are grouped together, they can all benefit.
It’s just two months into the school year, and students in my class are working in their student-led, heterogeneous learning communities. Students know these as just “learning communities.” In distress, “Leilani” stormed out of her learning community and walked up to me to ask, “Mr. Manfre, can I switch groups?” When I asked why, she proclaimed, “Well, they just don’t get it!” At that moment, I realized Leilani was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Leilani had always been a high-performing student in mathematics. In previous years, she would correctly complete her assigned work, and then the teacher would “differentiate” by providing new material to accelerate her learning and avoid “holding her back.”
That approach fed into the misconception that high performance correlates to greater mathematical ability, when in fact, it’s actually just quick processing. Quick processors like Leilani thrive in an inequitable educational system bounded by tight time constraints of a class period, school day, and school year.
Providing Leilani with this sort of accelerated differentiation feeds into the fixed (and incorrect) mindset that she is smarter than her peers. In fact, the more I accelerate her learning, the more isolated her learning experiences become, narrowing her perspectives of mathematics and decreasing opportunities for her to develop conceptual understanding through discourse.
For every Leilani, there’s a “Keala,” a “low-performing” student who is only perceived this way because she’s not a quick processor. Keala needs to understand the intricacies of the whys and hows of mathematics in order to fully process it. She may also need more visuals, as it is harder for her to grasp abstract concepts. Keala’s needs would be seen as an inconvenience in a classroom that valued fluency above all.
To read more, click here >>>> The Advantages
No comments:
Post a Comment