Teachers’ Grouping Strategies: Implications for Equity

Abstract

In this article, we invite readers to reflect on their strategies for equitably organizing students for small-group work. We do so by sharing the results of an interview-based study of the ways in which a group of secondary mathematics teachers, working in an urban school district in which racial equity was an explicit focus, described equitable approaches to arranging students for small-group work. We share the grouping strategies that teachers described, and consider implications of those strategies for different dimensions of equity in the classroom.