When you were in college, what did you do when you encountered a new concept that was particularly challenging? For many of us, the answer was to join or form a study group—a gathering of peers coming together to learn from each other, build knowledge together, and support one another.
While peer groups to support learning were originally a collegiate practice, they can also have a valuable place in elementary schools. After all, even our youngest learners deserve to be treated as scholars: respected, empowered, and challenged.
We took inspiration from these higher education practices when we developed two new instructional models for differentiation in K–5 classrooms, Study Groups and Focus Groups.
Study Groups and Focus Groups are effective supports for differentiating instruction that can also help build trusting relationships between students and teachers, foster self-efficacy, and send a message to students that they are capable of learning like college students—that they belong in a challenging, exciting learning environment.
What are Study Groups and Focus Groups?
A Study Group is an instructional model that helps teachers provide additional guided practice and instruction in flexible small groups. Some students work with the teacher, following the whole class lesson to receive additional guided practice. Meanwhile, students who are ready for independent practice can work alone or with an assigned study buddy. Groups are formed based on a blend of student choice and teacher direction, informed by data.
For a Focus Group, teachers meet with 3–5 students with a shared instructional need for 20 minutes of explicit instruction 1–5 times a week. Focus Groups are also based on student performance data and should change frequently based on students’ evolving needs. Instruction in a Focus Group reinforces, enriches, or extends learning, independent of where the class is in the scope and sequence.
Using Study Groups and Focus Groups sends a message to students that you trust them to take ownership of their learning.
Why Use Study Groups and Focus Groups?
Decades of research have formed a consensus that systematically designed, explicitly delivered instruction is essential to support new learning. But getting it right—deciding who gets additional support and how much, what the other students are doing at that time, and how to appropriately challenge each learner—is a perpetual challenge.
While the tried-and-true gradual release of responsibility model is a trusted and evidence-based approach to deliver explicit instruction, the guided instruction step is where we often find that our learners have widely different needs. Varying the amount of guided practice is at the heart of scaffolding instruction. Focus Group and Study Group options both offer additional guided practice to students who need it (or desire it) and support the ability of the teacher to provide essential supportive feedback.
How Do Study Groups and Focus Groups Foster Belonging?
Using Study Groups and Focus Groups sends a message to students that you trust them to take ownership of their learning, gives them an opportunity to work together, builds relationships between students and teachers, and, most importantly, makes differentiation effective and efficient. Here are a few ways these research-based practices can contribute to a sense of belonging in your classroom:
Build Trust with Choice
Providing the choice to participate in Study Groups—when possible—is an important way to convey to students that you trust them to exercise ownership over their learning and begin to build self-efficacy, or their belief in their ability to successfully perform and achieve their desired result on specific tasks or goals. In Study Groups, students learn to self-reflect about their learning and advocate for their own needs.
Foster Relationships with Supportive Feedback
We now have decades of research on the value of feedback. Study Groups and Focus Groups provide teachers with an opportunity to correct errors in real-time, differentiating feedback by error type and frequency. Regular, meaningful small-group time with their teachers will help our most fragile learners begin to believe that their teachers see them, understand them, and are here to help.
Create Community with Group Work
Study Groups and Focus Groups allow students to work together toward joint goals or individual goals through collaborative practice or cooperative learning. In an ELA classroom, paired partner and group work creates a community of learners who embrace their growth as readers and writers, together (much like a collegiate writing workshop).
Use Data to Boost Student Confidence
We encourage teachers to leverage student data from sources across programs and observational checklists to create flexible groups (in addition to student choice). Research has shown that by temporarily grouping students, heterogeneously or homogeneously, to complete a task or work on a skill, we can appropriately focus instruction and increase student confidence. When students are successful and appropriately challenged, we can also foster self-efficacy.
We’re pleased to announce that Study Groups and Focus Groups are cornerstone instructional models embedded in McGraw Hill’s new K–5 Literacy program. For more on how the program leverages research-based practices to ensure every student feels they belong in a reading and writing classroom, visit mheducation.com/explore-emerge.
Copyright © 2025 Jan Hasbrouck and Douglas Fisher
