6 Strategies to Make Setting Up Small Group Work More Sustainable

Small group instruction remains one of the most powerful ways to accelerate math learning through differentiation. Yet in many classrooms, teachers feel pressured to create multiple versions of a lesson, plan different station activities, and design individualized tasks for each student. This can be paralyzing and seem overwhelming. When differentiation becomes synonymous with more, it quickly seems unsustainable.

A lot of the work of differentiation happens before the instruction in front of students. It starts with the preparation based on student data. Below are six ways teachers can simplify small group work without adding a ton of extra planning for themselves.

A Sustainable Approach to Setting Up Small Group Work

1. Collect only the amount of data you can meaningfully act on. A short, rigorous assessment with a few targeted questions is enough. Even if an assessment includes multiple items, teachers may choose to respond to only one or two of them to generate fresh, actionable data quickly. “More” questions do not lead to better information, only to more grading and slower instructional response.

2. Build small groups into existing routines. Instead of treating groups as an additional planning task, integrate them into the grading process. As teachers review student work, they can use a simple sorting tool to categorize needs. Grading then naturally produces an instructional response plan, eliminating an extra prep step.

This action creates heterogeneous small groups by having students in groups based on skills they need to acquire instead of categorizing students by common questions missed or leveling students, which does not yield actionable focus for instruction.

3. Use thin-slicing to make data collection faster. “Thin-slicing” is a strategy in which a teacher reviews a small, targeted portion of student work to look for evidence of one specific skill or need. Rather than analyzing an entire assignment, the teacher focuses on one predetermined teaching point, allowing for fast, actionable data that immediately informs small group instruction. Then that process can be completed as many times as necessary to create as many groups as the teacher needs to plan for the upcoming week.

Example: If students are solving a multistep problem, the teacher might look solely for students who completed only the first step of the problem, but not the second step. Students who show this pattern can be grouped and taught how to set up a workspace that helps them track steps and return to the problem to determine what comes next.

Then the teacher can go through the work again to notice who struggled with regrouping for subtraction and write down those student names for another targeted group. These students might even be grouped by who needs to start with base 10 blocks, who needs to have the lesson on expanded form, or who needs standard algorithm.

This process continues until the teacher has collected the amount of data they will be able to respond to quickly, knowing that some students will need to have the lessons more than once.

4. When first attempting small group instruction, follow a predictable structure. Small group instruction doesn’t need to be an elaborate, time-consuming lesson plan. When teachers deeply understand their content, they can quickly identify what students are doing well and what the next step toward mastery should be. A predictable structure makes small groups attainable and sustainable, even on the busiest days.

A simple, repeatable flow works beautifully:

• Activate prior knowledge.
• Model the specific skill.
• Provide a guided try-it.
• Close with a quick reflection.

This predictable structure keeps lessons focused and efficient. Watching students work independently during the try-it phase gives teachers immediate insight into next steps for further differentiation, whether the student needs the same teach point again, can apply it independently, or needs a scaffold to transfer the skill to their own work.

After the teacher has mastered this lesson structure, they may want to branch out into some other structures.

5. Maintain a collection of word problems for each essential standard. A curated bank of word problems for every essential standard, especially those that often require reteaching, can save enormous planning time. This is also an excellent use of AI support: teachers can generate, organize, and store high-quality problems for future years and groups.

These problems can be reused across lessons and even with the same students. The same problem can target multiple skills, depending on the focus of instruction.

Example: A single addition or subtraction problem can be used for the following:

• Visualizing the situation
• Modeling with a specific representation
• Writing an equation
• Choosing an operation
• Justifying their thinking

Reusing familiar problems keeps attention on the skill being taught rather than on new, potentially distracting contexts.

6. Use previous assessment problems for students to try out the new skill. After modeling the new skill and creating an anchor chart using a problem from the teacher’s collection, students can immediately apply the skill to a previous assessment problem that revealed their learning need. Students can get back either their exact work or a new copy of a previous problem they have interacted with before, where they encountered an obstacle with which this new strategy will help them.

This approach has several advantages:

• Teachers don’t need to find additional practice problems.
• The students have background knowledge on the problem so they can truly spend the time focusing on the skill being targeted.
• Students experience immediate success and buy-in (“If I had known this strategy before, I could have solved it!”).

These steps can help teachers get started with meaningful instruction in a small group setting.