Flexible grouping is a data-driven teaching practice. A lot of data will come from formative assessments - two examples are highlighted in the sections below.

With this practice, you put students into temporary groups to work together for only as long as is needed for them to develop an identified skill or to complete a learning activity. The groups can be heterogeneous (made up of varying skill levels) or homogeneous (made up of the same skill level). The groups change often based on the learning objective and students’ needs or interests (Morin, n.d). 

In his ‘Principles of Instruction’, Barak Rosenshine emphasises the importance of reviewing in effective teaching and learning. 

Daily review: 'Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning: Daily review can strengthen previous learning and can lead to fluent recall’ (Rosenshine, 13).

Weekly and monthly review: ‘Engage students in weekly and monthly review: Students need to be involved in extensive practice in order to develop well-connected and automatic knowledge’ (Rosenshine, 19).

Daily, weekly and monthly reviews give students opportunities to generate versions of what they know and understand, helping to strengthen future retrieval of the knowledge involved, build fluency, and identify where they might have residual gaps or areas of uncertainty.

Consider using targeted, differentiated questions for reviews.

Exit tickets are a formative assessment tool that require students to respond to a few key questions or prompts at the end of a lesson. They:

• enable educators to quickly assess students' understanding of a concept

• help students reflect on what they have learned and review their performance

• can be easily differentiated by having a variety of exit tickets/questions available.

For example, at the end of a science lesson, you could ask each student to answer one of the following questions. 

Level 1: Identify the main components of a eukaryotic cell, and describe their primary functions

Level 2: Compare the structures of the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) and smooth endoplasmic reticulum (SER) in the cell

Level 3: Analyse how defects in the structure and function of lysosomes can affect cellular homeostasis. 

Providing student choice is essential for creating a differentiated classroom. 

Command terms should be aligned to the Achievement Standards.