The Thinking Classroom: Generate Random Groups

Are you an enthusiastic math teacher. 

And every day you come to work determined to help your students learn to collaborate and solve amazing math problems.

But every day you face dull eyes and a general lack of engagement from your class?

What do you do now? 

Use some tips from "Building a Thinking Classroom,"  by Peter Liljedahl of Simon Fraser University, Canada. 

The Thinking Classroom is based on an uber-engagement philosophy from both the students, and the instructor.

Create Random Groups: So, as it turns out then, one of the essential features of The Thinking Classroom philosophy is to have students work in teams. Because for many students, learning mathematics is a much more efficient process in a group setting. Generally speaking having people work out problems together encourages more interaction. And Peter has demonstrated that group work in math outperforms individual work close to 100% of the time.

The problem is though, you don't want social clusters of kids working together, who are best buds for example, because, well, there is a high probability that they will goof-off (for lack of a better phrase).

So, you need a random group generator so to speak to alleviate the above problem.

Try the tool out below. It is pretty straight forward to use.

1. Input the respective names of all students (you can even cut and paste if you like)
2. Put in the "Quantity"
3. Put in the number of "Groups"
4. Select "Refresh"

And Voila, your random grouping of students will be created at the top of the page as exemplified below.

https://www.randomlists.com/team-generator

So there you have it, an easy way to create random groups for your Thinking Classroom exercises.

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Comments welcome below.