Collaboration is what students do. Grouping is how we, as teachers, organize students to make that collaboration possible. It's a distinction that matters because while we spend a lot of time discussing collaborative learning, we spend surprisingly little time asking whether different grouping structures produce different outcomes.

Today, I want to share three simple structures that have made a difference in my classroom, especially my multilingual learners (MLs). I've spent most of my teaching career in schools with large ML populations. As a result, I am continually refining my craft to make my classroom more welcoming and accessible to ML students. My goal is to send a powerful message to my ML students (although these strategies benefit every student):