Managing Flexible Groups

Flexible groups are actually quite simple. Each Friday I skim through student work to look for common weaknesses. This week I found:

1. a group that needed to improve understanding of the conventions for writing dialogue

2. a group that was having difficulty determining what a question was asking

3. a group that could determine what a higher level question was asking, that knew the answer, that could find suitable evidence to support the answer, that could discuss the validity of the evidence,  BUT was having difficulty putting all of this together in writing

4. a group that needed to further develop their discussion skills

I then planned based on their needs. Teaching is coordinated with the Learning Resource and Literacy Improvement teachers. While I'm working with small groups, the rest of the class is working on long-term activities: independent reading, reading logs, their current writing project, Social Studies or French or ...

Students record feedback and learning goals on sticky notes and then place them in their Next Steps folders.  They refer to them frequently to monitor their own learning. I am still refining this process, but for the most part it works well. Below is a slide show of how I co-ordinate the groups.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m64QvGKaqlE