Grouping Students: Cast a Wider Net with Grouper.school for Better Classroom Collaboration

Creating effective student groups has always been a challenge. Ten+ years ago I created a spreadsheet to help me group my students based on my observational and academic data, so that I could quickly create both heterogeneous and homogeneous groups. I've learned a few things from over a decade of regularly using flexible student groups. 

Reel Results:

First, students don't like this. Changing seats is out of their depth. Talking to new people feels like swimming upstream. Working on a task with a new person makes them crabby. This does not deter me because I have seen the magic happen. Year after year my students report that even though they didn't like being in new groups, or working with new partners frequently, over time it helped them get to know many more of their classmates. Years ago a student told me, "In my other classes I only know a few people, but in this class I feel like I know everyone because you make us move a lot." 

Second, being able to group and regroup students quickly is critical. I'm not going to bother with groups if it takes me too long to create them. I need to be able to enter fresh data, or work with existing data quickly to get the combinations I need. 

Third, it is critical that students can quickly catch on to where they need to go when they enter the room, while also obscuring their access to the data that created these groups. I don't want my students to know whether their groups are homogeneous or heterogeneous. Most of the time they assume the groups are random and I let them believe that. 

A Better Fish in the Sea

Move over spreadsheet. Now there is Grouper.school. Ten years ago I looked for a solution that would help me group my students and did not find anything that would do what I needed. Then, just a few months ago, the fine folks at Grouper.school reached out to tell me about their new tool. I was instantly hooked. (Sorry, there will likely be more fishy puns ahead.)

Grouper.school lets you sync with Google Classroom, enter your students manually, or upload a CSV file. You can enter any attributes you like about your students and then use multiple attributes at a time to create groups. Once you have your groups created, click the display button and show students how they are grouped for that day. You can even set specific "do not group with" options for specific students. 

I tried for years to convince teachers that spreadsheets aren't sharks (I warned you), but I understand that the mechanics of sorting and formulas can make some feel like they are floundering. With Grouper.school you don't need spreadsheet skills. It has a simple functional interface. It's easy to adjust groups if a student is absent, and you can even save groupings for reuse later. 

Need to cast a net over students falling behind on a piece of process writing, created a targeted group. Want to create schools of kids who share a common interest, survey them and add an attribute for that. Need to get big fish and small fish in the same pond, heterogeneous groups are just a few clicks away. 

Let's Tackle Some Tips: 

First a screen shot of the groupings page. 

Above I have a demo class and I've got them in six homogeneous groups based on their fall reading score. I can tell this is a homogeneous grouping because the arrows in the blue box next to Fall Lexile are pointing towards each other. Just click the blue box next to the attribute to toggle between heterogeneous and homogeneous groups for that attribute. 

When you are ready to show groups to students, you probably will not want to show them this page. Instead click the blue circle on the upper right that has a monitor icon. That will give you a display page that only shows the cute avatars and student names. My display page also shows icons for the timer and picker. Those are tools the team is still developing, so if you don't see them on your page yet, just be patient. 

The group names are suggested by Grouper.School, but you can edit them. In fact, the editing tool is intuitive enough that if you start to enter colors it will rename all the other groups to different colors. It tries to guess what your naming theme is, so that you don't have to type all the group names. 

Teachers have bigger fish to fry than spending their prep period making groups. A few minutes spent learning to fish with Grouper.school will make grouping easier all year long. 

Here is a short video I made about how it works: 

As you've noticed, I'm a Grouper.school fan, but this is not a paid post. I did get to do some advisory phone calls with their team and they paid me for my time and wisdom, but this blog post is all about me just wanting to help you. I hope you'll check out Grouper.school for yourself and the fish in your sea.