What is Regrouping

Regrouping students is the process of separating students from their existing groups and placing them into new groups. A common outcome of regrouping is that students are never in the same group twice. MIXINTOOLS^TM are designed to make regrouping easy.

We promote regular regrouping as a great teaching strategy for the following reasons:

-       It facilitates cooperative learning and heterogeneous grouping.

-       It increases social interaction between students.

-    Students view it as a fair system.

-        And it’s fun!

What is Cooperative Learning

Cooperative Learning is where students work in groups where they are engaged in face-to-face interaction and the performance of each student is dependent on the involvement of all members of the group.

There is positive research on cooperative learning which shows that learning in groups is usually more beneficial for the student than independent learning. link

What is Heterogeneous Grouping

Heterogeneous grouping is the process of placing students of varying performance levels into groups.  Alternatively, homogeneous (ability) grouping is where students are grouped based on their previous performance.

The research on heterogeneous grouping shows that learning with a variety of students is usually more beneficial than separating students based on performance. Regular regrouping maximises this variety. ref

The NMSA (National Middle School Association), with over 30,000 education professionals as members, released a report in February 2007 on Heterogeneous Grouping with the following recommendation: link

"It is recommended that schools work to replace ability grouping with heterogeneous grouping wherever possible."

Professor Roger T Johnstone from University of Minnesota says the following comment in support of regular regrouping of student in the classroom: link

Many teachers do not count off randomly to put together diverse groups. I have a great respect for teacher-made groups where the teachers put together the groups. Perhaps there are two students who should not meet yet, or just the person to be able to draw out a shy student? One thing is clear. The traditional "chose your own groups" usually turns out to have students who are very much like each other with the same strengths and the same weaknesses and they often finish the assignment as quickly as they can with as little thought as possible. They make no new friends and often can't name more than half the class after several weeks in the same classroom. We advocate variety and changing the groups often so that students realize that they will eventually work with everyone in the room. After all, they are all your classmates. We look forward to the time when someone who says they don't want to work with a boy, says, "Put me with anyone!".