Opening the classroom to the community: Interactive groups

4.1. Classroom arrangement in Interactive Groups

In interactive groups, the class is divided into 4 or 5 groups, each organized around four or five students in an heterogeneous way regarding curricular competence, gender, language, ethnicity,... Each of these groups is supported by an adult (a professional or a volunteer in the school) who oversees a particular task (INCLUD-ED 2009).

Four or five activities are designed for each session, according to the number of groups. Activities in the groups are short (around 10-15 minutes) and normally centred in instrumental learning (majority language, foreign languages and maths) and connected to a specific Didactic Unit.

After completing one activity, all students in the group rotate and move to the next group in order to work on a different activity and with a different volunteer. As a result of this dynamics, in about one hour, all the students are able to work on four or five different curricular tasks and interact with four or five different adults apart from their group mates (Ibid.)

picture by Ruth García Carrasco