How do secondary school teachers choose within-class student grouping strategies?
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Pupil grouping and organisation of classes
What was the effect of whole class grouping on lesson content?
The researchers noted that didactic, whole class teaching seemed to give teachers control over the subject matter under discussion. Such teaching made students aware of what the teacher thought was appropriate knowledge. It also enabled teachers to direct who took part in discussion and to choose who answered which questions.
Teachers sometimes asked students to model how they reached their answers to the rest of the class. One teacher explicitly stated they used ‘the brighter students’ for this.
Teachers tended to assume that, in whole class teaching:
- students benefited from their own demonstrations;
- a single student’s modelled response, supported by the teacher, would be understood and internalised by other students; and
- all members of the class were actively listening and could benefit from the answers given by other students.
The researchers noted that teachers did not seem to reflect on the possibility that some students might exclude themselves from this process.
Whole class teaching also helped teachers to control the lesson pace. A mathematics teacher remarked that her department had switched from individualised schemes of work to a greater proportion of teacher-led work in order to increase the pace of the lesson.
“We used to use individualised schemes of work but we thought the students weren’t learning properly. When they dictate the pace, it’s often too slow…We felt that we as teachers needed to be in control of their learning much more so we switched to a class teacher-led way.” Mathematics teacher
