When Jill Sears began teaching at America’s Woodman Elementary School in New Hampshire 17 years ago, the second graders in her class showed up on the first day with a bewildering mix of strengths and weaknesses. Some children coasted through math worksheets in a few minutes, she said; others struggled to finish half a page. The swifter students, bored, would make mischief, while the slowest would become frustrated, give up and become troublesome. 

“My instruction aimed at the middle of my class, and was leaving out approximately two-thirds of my learners,” says Ms. Sears, a fourth-grade teacher at Woodman Park Elementary in Dover, New Hampshire. “I didn’t like those odds.” 

So she completely reorganized her classroom. About a decade ago, instead of teaching all her students as one group, she split the class into groups of children with similar abilities and tailored activities and assignments to each one. 

“I just knew that for me to have any sanity at the end of the day, I need to make these changes,” she said.

Brooklyn fifth grade teacher Cathy Vail has a very similar approach. She teaches the same lesson, whether it is a math concept or a book, to the entire class, but gives each group a different assignment.

Working on each week’s set of new vocabulary words, all four groups draw illustrations and write captions using the assigned words, but she encourages team C, her highest-achieving group, to write more complex sentences, perhaps using two new vocabulary words in the same sentence. She also asks children in team C to peer- teach students in the other groups. 

“At the end of the day, they’re learning the same words, but just with different levels of complexity and nuance,” she says. 

When she moves students to new groups, she tells them it is because she can best help them there. 

“It has to be done properly — you can’t make a kid feel small because they’re in group A,” her lowest-achieving group, she says. “If you don’t have a stigma attached to the group, then I don’t see the problem.”