Creating Classroom Groups

I have learned that the first few weeks of school are chaotic for any teacher regardless of experience. One of the reasons for this is that the students and teacher have not built a relationship with each other yet. They have no clue who the other one is and how they will respond.

While setting up the classroom, teachers create a space for each student but who really knows if that will work or not. It takes time to decipher where the best spot is for each students.

After the first four weeks of school was completed and the initial assessments were completed. There was finally enough data collected to rearrange the students into a working seating arrangement but the question became how?!

I love this comic as this is totally how I felt while discussing creating teams for the classroom. We used a Kagan Cooperative Teams to build the structure for the classroom. Each child has their name added to a rectangle shaped paper. We first marked off our hard and easy kids to manage (see the comic!).

Next we evaluated test scores and used those to add more information to the student card. Armed with this we were ready to rock!

Student #1 is a high testing, well behaved student where as Student #3 is low testing, low behavior. Student #2 and #3 are fillers. This system is for building groups of 4. You could go up as high as 5 but 4 is the ideal number.

The theory is to have 1 high and 1 low with 2 middle of the row students. That way there is someone there to help when someone is struggling. Sometimes you have a high function low behavior student. You pair them with a low function high behavior student. The high behavior (ie the good kid) acts a model for the group. The other two help balance it out.


In my classroom, we did this by grades and then by groups. Most people do not have multiple grades in a classroom so no need to worry about it. We have been using these new groups now for 2 weeks and they work amazingly well.


Do you use EEKK from Daily 5? We use it with out groups! Work with your elbow buddy or knee buddy. So much fun and reinforces the vocabulary of our classroom.


How do you create groups in your classroom? Do you have an alternate method?