EVERY GROUP IS A MIXED-ABILITY GROUP AND THIS IS POSITIVE

[CMagario]

I firmly believe that every group is a mixed-ability group. This is so simply because our students have very different backgrounds, come to class with different reasons to be there and they are completely different to one another in terms of personality. The implications of understanding and accepting that we will always have mixed-ability groups are many. For example, we can no longer prepare an activity for our students assuming that the level of difficulty will be exactly the same for all of them or that they all will like the topic or that they will cope with the tasks at the same speed. Thus, we will need to bear in mind our students' personalities, motivations, attitudes and aptitudes - among many other things - when designing tasks or preparing activities. I have been a teacher for ten years and at the beginning of my career I found it difficult to deal with so many differences in my classrooms but, as time went by, I discovered that those differences make our classes more special. Besides, we can take advantage of them to be more creative and, needless to say, our students feel happier when they realise that there are always activities which suit their needs and abilities. So in the end it pays the price to spend extra time and efforts to consider mixed-ability groups as something positive. In fact, there are many advantages to be considered. For instance, we can learn from those things which did not work for a particular student. In other words, we can always ask our students, especially at the beginning of the course, to tell us one activity that they have enjoyed enormously and one that they hated - asking them to justify their answers, of course. By comparing and commenting with our students their answers we might create a list of things that may work and things which might not work and use that list as a starting point for departure. I usually do this type of "starting feedback" with classes who have had another teacher so that I can compare and learn from my predecessor. Doing all this is time-consuming but it helps our students to accept themselves as language students and to benefit from their characteristics to improve and enjoy learning English.