Grouping students for different communicative

GROUPING STUDENTS FOR DIFFERENT COMMUNICATIVE
ACTIVITIES - ADI ISMA – [e-mail]
3
2. Random Choice
Grouping students by random can help prevent the students from pegging
other students as slow or advanced. It also may allow for improved classroom
management as the teacher will not always have the same troublesome students in
the same group, and provides the teacher opportunities to separate students who
need to not work in the same group. Random student groupings can be
accomplished by having students count off, pair up, or any other method of class
division you come up with.
Random Grouping is completely arbitrary grouping. Use this technique
when the teacher’s focus is on management and forming groups of equal size.
Random grouping can also help students get to know each other better.
3. Teacher Choice
There may be times when the teacher wants to select the groups’ students
for certain activities. The teacher may wish to mix the strong and weak students or
to put all the strong students together for a specific task. His/her students may well
be aware of why you have selected certain students to work together so the
teacher may or may not decide to tell students how the teacher chose the groups.
Teenagers normally pick up on this quickly if the teacher selects the group by
ability so he/she may want to think about how he/she is going to explain his/her
choices to the students beforehand.
However the teacher decides to group his/her students it’s something that
should be considered at the planning stage. The teacher should always have the
final say in how the groups are formed so however persuasive his/her students are,
he/she should be the one who makes the decision on how groups are formed.
4. Student Choice
Allowing students to choose their group partners is another method of
grouping students that may work well for some projects. As in student interest
groups, students can be allowed to pick a partner or group of students whom they
desire to work with. This runs the risk of having students left out, or having a

---