Unit 6 - Fair is When Everyone Gets What They Need to Succeed

Photo from Pixabay via suju 

“Fair isn’t equal, it’s when everyone gets what they need to learn!” This was the retort I heard from a grade two to student to her classmate last week. Her poise and confidence in stating this blew me away. The classmate had protested about fairness because I, the substitute, let the student to write a list of the vowels on a whiteboard to help her with the assignment left by the regular teacher. 

It was clear to me someone had taught the little girl this phrase for just such occasions, and sadly, she knew all about where and when to apply it. “I have to tell them that sometimes,” she confided later, “because I need extra help learning, with the reading stuff mostly.” Then she got on with the task. 

Her task was slightly different than the other students. The teacher had grouped the class for spelling. This student did fewer words for spelling, an accommodation for her difficulty reading (dyslexia) and she had different words, shorter, and less complex than the words in other groups. 

Grouping like this is practiced in many elementary classrooms I’ve seen. When I started researching it, I was a bit surprised to find it considered highly controversial.  I suppose I found the controversy surprising because it makes practical sense and is so widely practiced. 

When I started to look for some data supporting or disproving the practice, I got another surprise. A meta-analysis on math groupings, although older, gave me the best perspective: “The number of studies that have looked at the pros and cons of ability grouping is overwhelming, and they conclusively prove one thing, that the research is inconclusive.” 

Loveless, T. (1998, July) The Tracking and Ability Grouping Debate. Retrieved from

http://edexcellence.net/foundation/publication/publication.cfm?id=127 https://edexcellence.net/publications/tracking.html

To clarify, tracking is most often defined as grouping students by level or ability within a school. It used to be rigid and mean a student kept in the same ability level (track), even if ability differed from subject to subject or improved.

Ability grouping means grouping within a class. Teachers usually do within class ability grouping based on student performance indicators (tests or observations). The trouble is the terms are often used interchangeably.

My spelling student was not “tracked”. Just because she was in the “need extra help learning” for spelling does not mean she was in that group for every subject. She also had the ability to improve and move to other groups as her performance indicators improved. 

This kind of grouping is called “flexible ability grouping”. It involves “constant reassessment” and the ability to “match a student’s readiness for learning with the the instruction provided, delivering the right content to the right student at the right time.” Olszewski-Kubilious, P. (2013, February). Setting the Record Straight on Ability Grouping. Retrieved from  https://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919701&bcid=25919701&rssid=25919691&item=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.edweek.org%2Fv1%2Ftm%2Findex.html%3Fuuid%3D1A7DF4D0-C175-11E2-8893-03A9B3743667

So, case closed? Tracking = bad, flexible ability grouping = good? I can’t seem to find any recent data that answers that question. The trouble is, it’s very difficult to study. It’s hard to control how groupings are administered from school to school. There are also so many other factors involved, such as class size, school, teacher, curriculum, other students in the class...each situation is unique. So in my next post, I’ll discuss a few things that tend to lead to successful groupings.