1.

Post the link to your article and these response questions on your website under your new
"Student Teaching Inquiry Project Spring 2019" tab. (5 points)
• DONE

2. Your inquiry question (3 points)

• How can strategies for productive transitions between direct instruction and
purposeful pairing (or grouping) of students be used to improve engagement and
retention?
o Specifically curious about:
the transitions between instruction and interaction
methods for heterogeneous pairing
group work as an incentive

3. Why you chose this text and how it relates to your inquiry question (7 points)
• I have been very curious about the effects of grouping children by achievement
levels, since although we strive to group children heterogeneously in our
classrooms, our classrooms themselves are stratified into different levels of
achievement through AP, standard, remedial, etc.
• This text seems very relevant to my inquiry question, as it drives directly at the
reason for my interest in grouping: how can grouping be used to help raise up our
lower achieving students? Specifically here, I want to examine the institutional
effects of ability grouping into classrooms, as a framework on which to hang my
conclusions about pairing and grouping of students within my classroom.
• This text is specifically examining the effects of grouping as it applies to the math
classroom.
• The main issue with this text is that it applies to children aged 4-8, which is much
younger than I will be teaching. The implications being that social interactions are
much more complex in older students, which could have profound effects on how
homogeneous grouping affects academic performance.

4. What useful information this text gives you about your inquiry question (10 points)
• Perhaps less applicable to my inquiry question, but still valuable information, is
the various mathematical instruction techniques that are being implemented in
these ability grouped classrooms.
• Also interesting is teachers hesitancies and acceptances of various grouping
strategies and their explanations of why grouping strategies are so important:
o Mixed year grouping due to Maori values and teaching strategies
o Homogeneous due to social grouping and abilities
o Balancing strong/dominant
• Issues with grouping:
 o Losing lower ability students when you extend the material for high
achieving students in the same group
o Need high expectation on students to share their thinking

5. What useful ideas from the text you could apply to your own teaching and how you plan to
apply them. OR, if there is not anything you can apply to your teaching, explain why the
ideas in the text won’t apply to your teaching, classroom, students, or your school’s
community (10 points)
• The standard for sharing your thinking needs to be high:
o Justification of reasoning
o Response to others thinking
o Affirming/challenging
o Comfort saying that they are lost or do not understand
• Much of grouping extends from a teachers professional ability
o Students need to be allowed and enabled to take control of their sharing of
ideas
o Larger groups to manage/more complex management of groups
o Cultural understanding
o Comfort with the material
• A shift to mixed grouping can change educators’ perception of students:
o “Everyone has a chance to get better”
o The need to create safe, open learning spaces with lots of talk, high
expectations, and connections
o Students must use their own thinking and reasoning
o Less talk of the smartest students and more of those most willing to take
risks
o The need for students to think for themselves
o The closer examination of students misconceptions
• At the end of the day:
o it seems that the quality of teaching and nature of students’ interactions are
the key issues, rather than the compositional structure of the classes
o Continuous changes in groups and objectives allows students to proceed
more effectively towards equitable and culturally responsive pedagogies

6. Write the citation for your article in APA format (5 points)

Anthony, G., Hunter, R., Hunter, J., & Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia.
(2016). Whither Ability Grouping: Changing the Object of Groupwork. Mathematics
Education Research Group of Australasia. Mathematics Education Research Group of
Australasia. Retrieved from
https://fortlewis.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true
&db=eric&AN=ED572400&site=ehost-live&scope=site