HOW TO EFFECTIVELY MANAGE AND ASSIST LEARNERS OF DIFFERENT LEVELS WITHIN THE SAME CLASS.

One of the most common complaints from teachers is that their class has too wide a range of levels.

And if;

the facilitator goes at the speed of the faster students; she loses the weaker ones.
she/he goes at the speed of the weaker ones, then the stronger students get bored.

Although there are no easy solutions, this article offers a number of ideas to try.

When we learn that a learner is at the elementary, intermediate level, or second cycle or tertiary levels, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t tell us much about the individual.

Each learner has a number of levels, rather than one level, varying degrees of knowledge and skills over a range of systems or skills.

For instance, a learner might be very good at listening and speaking, while another might have a totally contrasting profile, being strong at writing and reading, but very poor at speaking and listening. Yet both are labelled intermediate and study in the same class.

We can’t assume that all learners in a class resemble one another in levels, beyond the fact that they average out somewhere in the same area.

Whatever the name of your coursebook, remember that it doesn’t give you any depth of insight into the real levels of learners in your class.

They are all at different places on their road of learning, each at a different level somewhere in the beginner’s point, middle point, or advanced point.

How to identify these differences;

Get a better insight into levels by assessing your students in separate areas: speaking, listening, reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
Help learners to understand their varied level profiles by plotting their data as a simple graph, and the resulting graph may well show a spiky profile (some distinct peaks and valleys).
Target work to support students in their weaker areas, e.g., set homework on an individual basis, rather than one task for everyone in class.
Don’t assume a student who is good in one area will automatically be good in another.
Use different levels as a chance to allow students who are weaker in one area to shine and show off a little in areas where they are strong.

Many of the possible solutions involve variations on two or more options:

Divide your learners

Make short-term pairs, threes, or fours for a single task, deliberately mixing stronger and weaker learners.
Make long-term pairs or groups (maybe for a month or half term), each including one stronger learner who is openly given the task of guiding and supporting the other learners in their groups.
Divide the class into two halves (or more subdivisions if useful) for some parts of each lesson.
Prepare tasks at two (or more) different levels. While one part is working independently on a task, you can work with the other half. Later, you can swap over, giving a task to students in that group while moving over to teach and work with the other.

Split-and-combine workflows

A split-and-combine workflow is one where the whole class begins working on something together, but later in the lesson, different subsections of the class separate to engage in different work (maybe the same tasks at a different pace, or tasks that have a similar focus, but with different challenge levels).
These groups then later come back together, and so on.

Use Differentiated worksheets

Prepare separate tasks, exercises, and worksheets for different levels:
Make unified worksheets that include a range of question types- easier and harder, perhaps divided by a horizontal line on the page.
Ask weaker learners to complete only questions above the line, and stronger learners to do the whole page.
Alternatively, you could have a core set of questions that everyone has to do, but add on follow-ups after each question for those who want to go deeper.
Set the same task in a choice of versions, thus offering an open writing task for stronger learners and a similar task for weaker learners, but with added support.
Or provide the same worksheet for everyone, but have add-on tasks ready for learners who finish early or need a greater challenge.

Practice Multilevel Tasks

Offer tasks that are the same for everyone, but which have different outcomes, depending on what students can do.

These include tasks that do not just have single correct answers, but instead offer a variety of more open-ended outcomes.

Here are some more examples:

A task that asks learners to make as many sentences as they can from a selection of words, prefixes, and suffixes. Stronger learners will push themselves to find longer, more challenging sentences, while weaker learners should still be able to make a reasonable number.
Learners can be asked to prepare a story on a particular topic or title. learners will naturally work at their own current level, and you can give feedback and guidance suitable for what they can do. You can offer different resources if it’s helpful,
Place posters around the room with different tasks or questions on them. Your class can wander around, adding comments, ideas, and answers in any places they want to. When everyone has finished, you can review the work together, perhaps gathering the class around each poster to discuss it.

Letting students choose what to do

Rather than imposing your plans and expectations, allow learners to make these decisions and choose their tasks, work speeds, outcomes, etc. This could be through discussion and planning, or by a simple, on-the-spot choice.
Organise ‘pass-it-on (suitable for individual, pair or group work); for example, learners start doing an exercise, when the teacher rings a bell or taps the desk, they pass their exercise on and receive a new paper from the student to their immediate left or right, which they now continue working with (correcting, amending, adding as appropriate).
In this way, a weaker learner may start a task, but then pass it on to a stronger one who can edit and correct things, while the weaker learner might receive a stronger student’s answers to the questions he was just trying to do, and learn from them.

General suggestions for mixed-level classes

Discuss and agree on personal learning plans with each learner. This includes discussing goals, materials, tasks, and the kind of support they will need. Once done, every individual in your class can work on their priorities at their own speed.
Ask for in-class learning support. Some schools appoint assistant teachers or invite parents or trainees in to help. An assistant teacher is supervised by the main teacher, but can work directly with learners who need particular help in class.
Target questions creatively in whole-class work-asking more difficult questions to stronger students and less challenging ones to weaker students.
Set different time requirements for different groups. Expect stronger students to work faster and do more tasks in the same time that it takes a slower group to do one or two.
Use techniques in whole-class teaching that ensure that it is not only the louder, faster learners who answer, techniques such as not putting up hands, nominating learners, not rubberstamping etc.
Create a self-study area in the classroom, which might be a table along one wall or a corner. Place some useful work materials and resources there, for example, photocopied exercises and worksheets, language games on a computer, and digital film clips to watch with viewing tasks. When learners have finished tasks set in class, they are encouraged to go over to the self-study area and choose something to explore on their own or with others.
Create differentiated homework. For weaker learners, set work that repeats and consolidates work done in class, but offer stronger learner’s tasks that extend and apply that work to challenge and move them forward. You could let learners self-select their level, e.g., prepare three different homework worksheets and place them in piles on a table by the door labelled ‘Easy’, ‘Medium’, ‘Hard’, and ask each student to choose one to take home.
Make sure that tests are fair to all. If not, everyone has done all the work, you may either need separate tests or tests that are general proficiency tests and not directly linked to what has been studied. Design progress tests to let students demonstrate what they can do as opposed to what they don’t know.

How to Handle Early and Late Finishers

You probably want to avoid having students who have finished early sitting around twiddling their thumbs for minutes while the slower ones finish their work.

Just because you gave a task instruction before they began doesn’t mean that you can’t alter the task while they are doing it.

For Early Finishers:

Adding to their tasks

A good tactic with early finishers is to give an extra task in addition to what they were originally asked to do.
Often this can be asking them to combine previous answers into some compromise or summary viewpoint.
For instance, I see you’ve nearly finished the task.
So, now see if you can write one extra answer summarising the key things the expedition leader must remember.’

Add them to other groups

Send learners to go and work with groups that are still working.
You could instruct them to help or just observe.
If they help, you may want to brief them on ‘helping like a facilitator, not just saying all the right answers straight away, but rather giving hints or suggestions to help the new group to find their own way.

For Slow Finishers: Ease their tasks

Just as you can add to some groups’ work, similarly, you can ease the load on those who are struggling.
For instance;
Just do questions one to six.
Leave the last four or don’t discuss the second question.
I only want you to agree on what you will do about the first.

Coping with extreme mixed-level classes

Schools sometimes allocate what seems to be an impossibly wide range of levels to a class,
This may happen because learners are placed in classes by age group or achievement level in different similar subjects, or because of some necessity, such as not having enough teachers or rooms.
If you face this problem, consider making a permanent division within the class so that you have two (or maybe three) classes running independently and separately in different parts of the room, perhaps only bringing all the students together for certain games or movement activities that all can do.
Share your time as fairly as you can between these sub-classes, though you are likely to find the lower-level students needing more.

Instead of trying to solve the apparent problem, might it be possible to ‘ dis-solve’ it? Can you turn your perception around so that you can start seeing these differences between individuals as a source of strength, as a resource, as a positive benefit, rather than as a deficit or weakness or a ‘problem’?

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