I’m taking the first of four courses towards Harvard’s Instructional Leadership Certificate. It’s relatively affordable. Plus…it’s pretty good! Although my own interests have moved towards grading and working with educators, teaching a second language is my anchor. No doubt I’ll be working with second language teachers in the future as well, so here’s one managing routine from the Harvard course that somehow flew under my radar all these years…

1. Order students from least to most support needed (i.e., fastest to slowest language processor).
2. Literally cut paper in half, and place list side-by-side to create A/B pairs (i.e., #1 is with #10, and #11 is with #20)
3. Assign a higher level role to the As, and lower level role to the Bs.

The specific example from Harvard was reading, having the As summarize the text (on paper) while the Bs read aloud. I like this for two reasons: it’s a bit more structured than something like “A reads silently, while B reads aloud, then switch,” and the ability grouping has additional scaffolding built in. I never really assigned pairs or groups in that way, instead preferring the old “find someone to read with.” I value choice, voice, and ownership, but students also benefit from working with others outside of their cliques. In fact, I’ve observed how those cozy groups result in not-learning pretty quickly. In that sense, the leveled A/B routine gets students working with others of similar ability (i.e., not fastest #1 working with slowest #20). **WARNING** If you need an A/B routine all the time because half the class doesn’t understand the text, or could NOT do the higher level role, then you don’t have the right texts! That’s a sign you’re doing the old “edit the task not the text” practice, a symptom of the “authentic text” craze that has little support. This A/B routine just gives a little more structure at a more appropriate level. The difference in roles could be more about cognitive demand, not comprehension. In other words, expect that all students understand the text, and just assign a role that requires more brain space to the As.

So, what are other higher and lower roles you can think of to use with A/B? What activities can you see this working for?