William Brannick's List: Ability Grouping

• In-class grouping---a common approach in which teachers break out two or three ability-based groups within a class for instruction---can benefit student achievement.
• Once students are grouped, they generally stay at that level for their school careers, and the gap between achievement and levels becomes exaggerated over time. The notion that students' achievement levels at any given time will predict their achievement in the future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• • Beliefs affect effort -- and effort affects success.
   
  • Learners need both time and experts to improve.
   
  • Past performance is just that... past performance.
   
  • Because reading levels change, we should change how we group
• We have inadvertently given many struggling readers the message that no one believes they can or will read in school. Our low expectations give students an excuse to opt out of improving.
• Success begets success and students who are struggling are in even greater need of experiencing success.  Quite often the first step toward success is to simply have someone cheering them on, encouraging them that they can do it and believing they have the ability to grow and learn.

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• My plans were quickly dashed when the groups were announced. We had been strategically placed into specific time slots and were asked to stay with our assigned group. As the names were read, it became embarrassingly clear that we had been grouped by our perceived levels of confidence around technology.
• I started to wonder whether our beliefs about struggling readers had inadvertently given students permission to give up
• Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we have identified struggling readers as early as 1st grade and have shared with them the cold, hard truth about our perception of their abilities. It's no wonder that by high school, they have often given up on themselves. Special reading classes just give some kids a better place to hide.
• Struggling readers, like all struggling learners, need confidence, or they won't take risks. And if they don't take risks, they won't improve. Of course, just saying to struggling readers, "I think you're the best reader in the world!" isn't going to magically make them so. But there is a valuable middle ground. Having reasonable expectations and providing scaffolding with strategy instruction may not be flashy, but it's effective
• An effective way for me to learn is to find people who are more skilled than I am. These experts serve as models who enable me to "see" what to do. Jean-Claude Killy, the famous French skier who dominated the 1968 Winter Olympics, said, "The best and fastest way to learn a sport is to watch and imitate a champion."
• Cordoning struggling students off by themselves simply won't meet their needs. Struggling learners tend to shut down with frustration.
• Proponents of tracking claim that if such students aren't together, they will spend all their time helping less able learners. This can pose a problem. However, advanced learners are more confident than strugglers. They tend to be more impatient when their needs aren't met, and this impatience can force them to take a more active role in their learning. Instead of saying, "I don't get it," they typically isolate their confusion by asking specific questions that lead to more targeted feedback.
• Giving too much weight to old assessments is dangerous. Each year, I am forced to place incoming 9th graders into reading classes using scores that are 6–12 months old. I have to make judgments about students' abilities on the basis of old performances. To make matters worse, secondary students who struggle often don't try because they have a history of not doing well on those tests
• Three factors affect readers' ability to understand texts. The first is background knowledge.
• he second factor has to do with motivation.
• The third factor is purpose
• Students need to know that their teachers believe they can succeed. For this to happen, we must, as Bennett writes, know our students well
• More important, students need to have faith in their abilities as learners so they can face their learning challenges head on. When students experience success each day, they will take the risks they need to take in order to learn.

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• Unfortunately, the research base on grouping is extremely dated and does not clearly evaluate the four alternative grouping arrangements described in Table 1. An analysis of the dates of the most recent comprehensive reviews with opposing conclusions
• When students are grouped by age, all children of the same age face the same grade-level standards and are expected to learn the curriculum provided for that grade level. Early proponents of tracking criticized the appropriateness of age-based expectations (Turney, 1931), just as current advocates of mixed-age, mixed-ability grouping do (Brederkamp, 1987). Not all children of the same age should be expected to achieve the same outcomes. Tracking redefines expectations for a child's performance based on the child's general ability rather than age. Expectations though are still standardized for the different tracks (e.g., European systems).