Beyond labels: A journey toward heterogeneous classrooms

Over the past 15 years Carmen Kenton has transitioned her practice from traditional approaches to dynamic, inclusive, strengths-based pedagogies where students are partners in their learning.

Carmen’s current Year 11 science class is highly diverse in language, culture, and learning needs. To support all students in the class to contribute, learn, and thrive, Carmen emphasises flexible grouping based on individual strengths.

What was the motivation to move away from streaming?

In 2008 Carmen attended professional learning on dyslexia and became unsettled by the awareness that many students labelled as “low ability” were being disadvantaged by grouping practices.

She saw that streaming created self-protective behaviours, low self-belief, and exclusion, and wanted to replace deficit thinking with a strength-based approach. This meant moving away from ability grouping and streaming towards heterogeneous, flexible groupings. “Heterogeneous grouping just creates this self-belief that I can learn.” Now, Carmen groups students for reasons other than test results; including social capital, language strengths, and inclusion needs.

What was the approach you took to making the shift?

Carmen recognised that teaching the whole class the same way at the same time was not working and she introduced flipped learning (students choose topics, pace, and format) while teacher-led workshops provide structure for students needing more guidance. For Carmen, inclusion demanded multiple pathways to access the same learning goals.  

“Broadly, I run two kinds of pedagogical systems, I guess. There’s flip learning and teacher-led learning … the teacher-led kids also choose their topic, but they have to do it in a democratic way.”

At the same time that Carmen realised that content overload was limiting deeper learning for her students, she discovered the set of science capabilities that helped her see she could teach fewer things more deeply. She began using transdisciplinary topics, teaching investigating, reasoning with evidence, communication, understanding science – rather than emphasising large amounts of content. “When I discovered the nature of science proper, and the science capabilities … it just became so much easier ... I’m teaching investigative skills, not just forces and cells and acids” This shift also created space for diverse learners to engage through multiple entry points and contexts.

Through experience, Carmen learned that students’ behaviour issues often masked self-protective responses to failure or exclusion. Instead of expecting students to sit quietly and comply, she began actively involving them in shaping learning.

“I’ve got these options, which one do you think would be better for you? or, I’m going to try something today … I’d really like your feedback.” She found that student honesty and feedback became key to refining strategies, and she saw how agency increased her students’ self-belief and motivation.

Previously Carmen let students choose groups or used seating plans, often unsuccessfully. She found that fixed groups reinforced social cliques and excluded some students. Having realised that cooperative grouping not only boosted science learning but also taught social and collaboration skills, Carmen now deliberately reshuffles groupings 2-3 times a week, using cooperative learning structures (e.g. roles, station systems, running dictations, “stay and stray”) and she has seen improved flexibility, confidence, and willingness to engage.

“…four articles around the room … the first article they paired up with someone they got to choose, but the next article they had to pair up with someone different. So, they had three different pairings and different people”

A key realisation for Carmen was that inclusion requires broader collaboration and resourcefulness, and she now works closely with teacher assistants and draws on their cross-class experience for valuable student-centred insights beyond her perspective, as well as suggestions for strategies. Time pressures led Carmen to utilising AI tools to adapt materials quickly and efficiently (e.g. re-writing texts, generating cooperative learning activities).

“Without fail, every day I use AI for something … even just ‘here’s is an article, please rewrite it for a reading age of 12’. Just so easy.”

Initially, Carmen abandoned grouping strategies when they “turned to custard”. Now she views failure as part of the process, retrying and adapting strategies instead of discarding them. Experience has shown her that context (time of day, social tensions, student wellbeing) often influenced outcomes more than the strategy itself.

Carmen has adopted a mindset of reflection, persistence, and iteration rather than perfection.

“Sometimes you just got to … stuff happens. And it’s not always your fault. You can plan things to the best of your ability and sometimes it just turns to custard … so give it another go”

What does success look like?

Carmen has seen increased self-belief and confidence, with students seeing themselves as capable learners.

“I think students are happier. I think they feel more confident in their learning.”

She sees that her students have become more articulate in advocating for their learning when groupings and activities were explained deliberately. “One of my neurospicies came up to me and said, ‘I do not like this grouping … I can’t learn it. I’m just going to go home and do it again by myself.”

Students frequently explain ideas to each other, reinforcing their own understanding and Carmen feels that this peer coaching culture has increased both comprehension and classroom belonging. “I often hear one student explaining [balancing chemical equations] to another … and the student who was being taught often says, ‘Yes, I get it now.’”

With heterogeneous grouping she has noticed more talk about learning instead of silence or distraction and even when they are “off task”, she hears students often discussing other academic subjects, showing a stronger learning culture.

“Often .. they ask a lot of questions … about their learning … usually it’s questions that connect their learning to something they have already known or might have picked up somewhere else.”

There is definitely improved engagement and participation, says Carmen, for example, her previously disengaged “barometer student” (silent in Term 1, resistant to interaction) is much more engaged in his learning. “… after about the end of term one, he started saying hello to me around the school grounds … he started submitting work … he started having conversations with me in class about his thinking.”

Carmen has also noted that the students in her Year 11 mixed science class report feeling happier and more confident compared with the students in her previously streamed ones. She thinks that the heterogeneous groupings have encouraged flexibility, with the students becoming more resilient to change because group reshuffling has been normalised.

“I think [my] students are more resilient and accepting of change … because they’re shuffled a lot more in class, they don’t mind … because it’s expected.”

A key outcome that Carmen is acutely aware of, is that all of her students in the class understand that she has high expectations of them all, and that by removing barriers to inclusion, all students have been able to access the curriculum, particularly her student who is blind - she participates in the same activities as her peers using adapted tools (e.g. tablets, enlarged images, resources in Braille).

“She [the student who is blind] has a go at everything, all of it … she’s sitting the same standards that everybody else is sitting … so she, it’s just the same expectations … she participates.”