It is the middle of the first semester in a detracked ninth-grade English class in a racially integrated urban high school with an equal mix of Asian American, African American, and White students. As the students file into the classroom, they look for their names, written in black marker on sheets of paper taped to each grouping of four desks. Christie, who is African American, finds her name posted in a group with two White boys and two empty desks. As she swings her backpack onto one of the empty desks and sits down, she exclaims loudly. "You trying to get all the Black kids away from each other, before we cause a nuclear holocaust!" She punctuates this statement with a loud handclap.
Group work is frequently advocated as a best practice for teaching in detracked classrooms. Detracking is a reform intended to counter the effects of separating students into different academic classes based on perceived ability, which in many integrated schools relegates low-income, African American, and Latino students to low-skill classes while their White peers enjoy high-skill environments. In detracked settings, educators intentionally group students heterogeneously, balancing groups in terms of race, gender, and academic ability. If the point of detracking is to break down social barriers and allow students to benefit from one another academically, then putting students in balanced groups seems a logical remedy.
The reality, however, is more complex. Detracking is a response to tracking, and in any detracked environment, tracking has already had serious consequences for students both socially and academically. Researchers argue that students in lower tracks, often low-income students and students of color, are denied welltaught, challenging college preparatory curricula, while students in the higher tracks, who often are mainly White and middle class, take part in a rigorous curriculum taught by more experienced and skilled teachers. When classes are detracked, diverse students are brought together in an attempt to remedy the inequalities caused by tracking. However, students can bring damaging ideas about one another from broader societal contexts, as well as differences in academic preparation resulting from years of difference in instructional quality. In this setting, group work, which puts students into intimate and interdependent relationships, can become a complicated endeavor fraught with race-related pitfalls.
When teachers construct balanced groups for cooperative learning activities, race is woven into the issues that arise. These difficulties can develop in any classroom in which teachers are attempting to racially balance students in group work activities. The problem is amplified in detracked classrooms in which previously separated students come together or in which teachers rely on balanced groups to assist instruction for formerly low-track students. While many teachers and researchers advocate detracking as an equity move, they are often uncomfortable with directly addressing the ways that prior tracking continues to affect detracked classrooms. I briefly examine three of these minefields, using real scenes I have observed in detracked classrooms as illustrations.
Notice students' interpretations of their placement in balanced groups. Christie interprets her placement in a group with two White boys as indicating that the teacher thought it was dangerous to group African American students together. While this was not the teacher's intention, Christie's passionate comment demonstrates how aware some students are of race and its implications. Group placement can bring these tensions to the fore.
Students of color can interpret teachers' group placement decisions as motivated by a desire to distribute students with lower academic abilities and feel negatively marked by this placement. Conversely, placements may compound the privileged position of their White peers, since White students are often subtly made to feel as though they possess higher academic abilities and are distributed among groups in order to help their peers of color. While students in any classroom may feel marked by group placement, in detracked settings balancing can mean both racial and skill balancing, putting some students in awkward positions. In this setting, the teacher's rationale for balancing students within small groups was sometimes obvious to students and led to situations in which students of color negatively interpreted their placement as an attempt to distribute "problem" students. Teachers can work to prevent this interpretation by making group placements flexible, so that no one feels repeatedly "distributed" in racial terms.
A few minutes after Christie took her seat in her assigned group, her friend Tiffany, who is also African American, entered the room. Tiffany found her name in a group of four high-achieving White students, but no seat was available. "There ain't no chair!" she complained angrily to the teacher who, in the middle of explaining the assignment, did not answer her right away. Then, pausing to help Tiffany get situated, the teacher moved a White boy out of Tiffany's assigned group and into an empty seat in Christie's group, saying "I see an imbalance. Dan, can you move over here?" As Dan moved, Christie commented, "I don't see why Tiffany can't sit here." The obvious interpretation was that Tiffany and Christie were put into separate groups because of their race and perhaps their ability levels: there was, after all, a free seat available in Christie's group. Again, teachers can work around this minefield by varying group composition and being flexible about it, so they do not falsely make it seem imperative that students of various racial groups are separated. They can avoid always placing higher-achieving students in groups with lower-achieving students, as if this were the only way to develop the skills of students who were underserved through tracking.
Avoid inhospitable learning environments for students of color. Cooperative group assignments require close collaboration. Students' preconceptions and stereotypes about each other's abilities, talents, and motivations can come into play in these situations. In Tiffany's group, for example, the group leader, a White boy, assumed that Tiffany had not done the homework assignment and had not brought her book to class. When he asked group members to lend him a book so they could complete their group quiz on the Lord of the Flies, he asked each of the other group members, all of whom were white, and did not ask Tiffany—who, as it turns out, did have the book. The group leader failed to assign Tiffany a role for the group assignment as recorder, artist, reporter, or researcher, and he did not include her in the conversation. The consequences for Tiffany's academic confidence became clear toward the end of class when she asked the teacher to go out into the hall with her where she told him: "They don't want me in their group. They don't think I'm smart." In schools where the low tracks have been populated by students of color and the high tracks have been the domain of White students. White students often stereotype students of color when they come together in a detracked setting. White students can create inhospitable and unproductive group work situations for their peers. Conversely, formerly lower-tracked students can assume that their higher-tracked peers are more academically competent and allow them to complete group tasks rather than engaging with the assignment themselves. Teachers can navigate this minefield by using smaller groups, a configuration in which interpersonal dynamics are usually less complex and in which each individual has a greater opportunity to participate. They can also take a more explicit approach to teaching group skills and organize group assignments.
Make sure to address the academic needs of formerly low-tracked students. Educators may feel uncomfortable about taking on the skill deficiencies brought by students coming from the lower rungs of a racially tracked system. Reluctant to draw attention to these academic needs and fearful of stigmatizing students, teachers may find the notion of balanced groups an appealingly discreet way to scaffold instruction so that "high achieving" students teach their peers the skills they lack. This practice call allow students of color to continue to suffer unequal opportunities.
Students' opportunities to learn and practice skills in heterogeneous group settings vary depending on which tasks they are asked to engage in. In another group assignment Frankie, who is African American, was assigned the role of actor. While this was a key role within the group, his group mates, all of whom were white and doing better than Frankie in the class, took on the roles of researchers and writers, garnering more opportunity to build skills traditionally valued in academic settings. If, over the course of the year, the same formerly lowtracked students, who are disproportionately students of color, are consistently assigned roles that offer little opportunity to develop these valued skills, academic disparities can continue to increase. Teachers can steer a safe path through this minefield by organizing group work tasks thoroughly so that each student builds the skills he or she needs and by not leaving students with the sole responsibility for building the academic competencies of their peers.
To counter these difficulties, teachers should approach their grouping decisions with care, creating lesson plans that go beyond putting students in diverse groups. I offer these suggestions for how to implement group work practice.
First, go smaller. Overuse of the same group work format can create cynicism and frustration among students. Vary the size of the groups you use, and consider making groups smaller. Students working in pairs have an opportunity to build relationships outside of the peer dynamics of larger groups: it can be easier to exchange ideas and to divide the work load equitably. Pairs can also be an efficient structure for accomplishing difficult tasks.
Second, vary group composition. Do not assume that a well-balanced group is necessarily equivalent to a racially diverse group, or even that balance of any sort is a necessity. With the proper support, students can learn well in all sorts of groups. Varying the composition of groups over the course of an academic year will keep things interesting for students, help acquaint them with more of their classmates, and counter the sense that students are put in groups for particular racial or academic reasons. Students of color may find time spent in same-race groups to be a source of support and affirmation in a racially integrated setting.
Third, make group work skills an explicit part of your curriculum. Teach students the skills of facilitating, questioning, listening, organizing, and recording. Group tasks and expectations should be less complex and demanding at the beginning than at the end of the school year; create a plan for their gradual and logical development. Pressure on groups to accomplish difficult tasks without appropriate instruction can generate tension among group members. Planning for the development of group work competencies ensures that students build the skills that you hope they acquire through this practice, and that students will be able to do group tasks successfully no matter the composition of the group.
Finally, scaffold group work tasks thoroughly and make sure they build students' academic skills rather than rely on their previous proficiencies. Group work tasks need to be scaffolded through a supportive framework. While the best tasks for group work are complex enough to merit attention from more than one person, students need to be presented with such tasks in a way that allows them to be successful. Do not assume that high performing students will instruct their peers or carry them through the task; this assumption exacerbates tensions among students and reinforces assumptions about them. A carefully scaffolded approach that breaks down complex tasks and intentionally builds competencies in each student rather than drawing on skills that only some students have, benefits all students. As students become more proficient with complex tasks over time, this scaffolding can be reduced.
In a detracked classroom in which the teacher varies group size and composition over the course of the year, carefully plans for the development of group work skills, and makes sure that each group work task is thoroughly scaffolded to build academic skills for each student, students like Christie need not experience their group placement as a comment on the intersection of race and academic ability. In such a classroom, group work could be a tool for helping realize detracking's goal of providing better education for all.
Copyright © 2008 by Beth C. Rubin. This essay originally appeared in Everyday Antiracism edited by Mica Pollock (The New Press, 2008). Reprinted by permission of The New Press. www.thenewpress.com
May not be copied or reproduced in any form without prior permission of the publisher.
Resources
Michelle Fine et al. 1998. Off Track: Classroom Privilege for All. [Motion Picture]. New York: Teachers College Press. Beth Rubin. ed. 2006.
"Detracking and Heterogeneous Grouping." Theory into Practice 45(1).
M. Watanabe. 'Heterogenius' Classrooms: Universal Math and Science Acceleration for All. [Motion Picture]. Contact watanabe@sfsu.edu for details.
Discussion Questions
1. Principle: What should the criteria be for placing students in small groups? When, if ever, should the desire to balance students racially trump other concerns, like skill levels or personalities?
2. Strategy: What successes and problems have you experienced in attempts to "balance" students in small groups? Have you ever seen a group work assignment organized so that underskilled students gained skills without feeling like "problems”?
3. Try tomorrow: How might you react next time a student responds negatively to her placement in a small group? Try role-playing such a situation.
