Session Information
04 SES 13 A, Interactive Groups. A Successful Action for Inclusive Education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper presents Interactive Groups as an inclusive classroom practice, where peer interactions among diverse students and support from community adults are key components of its inclusive character. The INCLUD-ED project differentiated inclusion from mixture and streaming. While mixture –the traditional classrooms– educated together diverse students and a single teacher hardly managed to respond to everyone particular needs, streaming adapted teaching to students’ diversity, mainly their previous levels of attainment and social and cultural characteristics, often creating homogeneous groups leading to unequal learning results (Braddock & Slavin, 1992). IG, as an inclusive practice, takes into account students’ diversity to organise learning by creating heterogeneous classrooms and groups that accelerate learning and build solidarity drawing on students’ different learning levels. While streaming often uses additional human resources to create segregated homogeneous remedial groups, IG uses the available resources to provide the necessary support to all students in heterogeneous groups. As IG open the classroom doors to community volunteers, the opportunities for learning support are expanded, resources are used more efficiently, the negative effects of segregation are avoided, and learning outcomes improve (Valls & Kyriakides, 2013). More than 120 schools are implementing IG in different educational levels, from pre-primary to adult education.
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