The Skillful Teacher

Mixing Student Groups
Teachers faced with students who exhibit wide variations in their
backgrounds, identities, motivations, abilities, learning preferences,
and temperaments sooner or later face the choice of how to group
such individuals to accomplish specific learning tasks. Do you clus-
ter together individuals who are roughly the same and who you
think will therefore work well together? Or, do you create a peda-
gogic bouillabaisse—a mix of different experiential, racial, and per-
sonality ingredients, as well as students of different ability levels,
who are stirred together to produce a satisfying blend? I would argue
that both approaches are necessary and called for at different times.
Grouping students together who share a common curricular
interest, or who are at the same ability level, allows them to learn
without having to accommodate interests that are not their own or
to be asked to work in ways that are too slow or too fast for them.
This is something that is usually appreciated by students, particularly
early on in a course. One exception to this is the reaction of White
students to those students of color who choose to work together.
White students may quickly conclude that Black or Brown students
clustering together is a form of inverse racism, and feel excluded and
rebuffed when making what they feel are good faith efforts to be
inclusive. Although allowing students of color to work together in
a group may discomfort the White majority, it often creates a safe
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haven for those students who share similar experiences of racism in
the college, who understand the nuances of each other’s commu-
nicative style, and who do not have to worry about always speaking
circumspectly so as not to be misunderstood by or offend the White
majority. Students working in groups comprised of similar racial iden-
tities or temperaments often find the experience much less jarring
than when they are asked to work with students from different racial
backgrounds or students with radically different personality types.
On the other hand, deliberately mixing students of different abil-
ity levels, interests, racial backgrounds, learning styles, and person-
alities also brings benefits. Firstly, it matches the reality of life outside
the classroom where always choosing whom we will work or associ-
ate with is not an option. Most of us are required to work closely
with people who are very different from ourselves. For that reason
alone a major learning project of college should be that of learning
how to work in groups of difference. Secondly, there are many learn-
ing tasks where a diversity of group members is an enhancement. For
example, deepening our understanding of diverse perspectives in dis-
cussion can only happen when we are confronted with confident and
credible expressions of those different perspectives.
Learning tasks that require creative problem solving also benefit
from a mix of people who process information in very different ways,
have varying approaches to understanding and responding to prob-
lems, and bring a range of priorities and experiences to the activity.
It is interesting that whenever I preassign small-group membership
in class, the balance of comments about this on the weekly CIQs is
invariably favorable. Students say they appreciate being invited to
work with peers they have not worked with before and that this
brings an interesting experiential dimension to the course. It also
often allows students to reappraise in a positive way the abilities and
contributions of peers who had previously been dismissed.
There is often a developmental trajectory to mixing group mem-
bership. At the outset of a learning activity, students are under-
standably nervous about what waits ahead for them. In particular
Teaching in Diverse Classrooms
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KILLFUL
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EACHER
the anxieties of impostorship are very strong. When students
encounter difference early on in a course, when they find them-
selves working with peers who clearly have more experience in the
subject and are at a more advanced level, then their impostorship
is raised to excruciating levels. In such a situation it is natural for
people to seek out those they perceive as similar to themselves.
However, as students get to know each other, become more famil-
iar with the subject matter, and start trusting the teacher’s credibil-
ity and authenticity, they are usually more open to working in
mixed groups. So a prudent approach is to start by allowing students
to cluster in groups characterized by similarity and then gradually
to increase the amount of diversity of group membership they have
to accommodate. The CIQ responses will give you a good sense of
how fast to proceed in this matter.